The Move

One year ago I was putting the finishing touches on packing for my cross-country move from New York to California.  The next day I said good bye to my parents and drove west into the sunset, literally, which was annoying because the sun was in my eyes.

Tonight I'm putting the much easier finishing touches on packing for my flight to Mexico tomorrow.  I'm going to see my beloved cousins Mike and Dan, who I've known forever.  The first time I ever went camping was with them.  They will be the first family I've seen in exactly one year.

The only other time I went to Mexico was on 12/15/10, flying from San Francisco, so I could stand on top of the Pyramid of the Sun.  This time I'm going to the Dreams Inn.

This weekend I thought a lot about everything that happened in between.  I thought about all of the amazing experiences I was fortunate to pursue, all of the dangerous situations I escaped from, and all of the unexpected tests and rewards.  Looking back, I can't really think of anything I would change except I would have found a way to spend less money and start making more money earlier, so that things would be easier for me now.  That being said, I have all of the physical and mental equipment I need to keep improving the quality of life that I live and my ability to improve the lives of others, so I can't really complain.  I'm currently ambivalent about staying in California, but I do have a job that I kind of like for now and feeds me income, so unless something miraculously more enticing comes along, I'm staying put for now.

I think the main reason I did this American journey beyond the actual experiences of this country's beauty was to develop myself and become as adaptable as possible.  I think I've done the best I could in that sense.  I gained plenty of material for stories that can provide inspiration, pleasure and direction, and I lived life as much as I could.  That's the most I could ask for on my path.

In class today we discussed the things we take for granted in life.  I think the first thing I take for granted is being alive.  I also take for granted many of my material possessions, and my friends and family.  I've been doing my best lately not to take them for granted, but it's a process that continues as long as you live.

What do you take for granted?

If you think about it, you just might find yourself loving what you have even more than you already do, and feeling happier as a result.  If there's something you desire with your heart and have not received yet, perhaps this approach will help speed things along.

Right now I have a place to be, and friends and family, and I am free.  I also have imagination, poetry and an appreciation of mystery.

Thank you to everyone and everything that has made this possible for me.

Camp

You Are Loved

I get by with a little help from my friends

Spontaneous Destiny

On Friday I wanted to go somewhere new, but wasn't sure where.  I thought about visiting Golden Gate Recreational Area, but I missed the turn and found myself crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.  I decided to take in the vista from the other side for the first time and get a spectacular view of San Francisco from across the bay.

After that I kept going, and happened to see the sign for Mt. Tamalpais just in time.  Mt. Tamalpais is one of the highest points in the bay area, and is renowned for providing the best view of the entire bay and its surrounding metropolitan area, all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

My interest in this spot piqued a few weeks ago when I started reading Alan Watts, a British meditative philosopher from the 50s-70s who made his home on a houseboat in Sausalito and then eventually a cabin on Mt. Tamalpais, which is where he died.

When I finished the circuit of requisite windy mountain roads to get to the top, I got out to take pictures.  Soon I heard a British voice asking me if I'd like my picture taken.  The ghost of Alan Watts, perhaps?

No, but it was a middle-aged British man.  He'd lived in the area for about forty years.  He took a great picture of me and then introduced me to his wife, a Bay Area native.  They moved around a lot, and were actually on their way up to Washington, but they currently lived in Sebastopol, which is the same town where I worked the wine harvest last autumn.  When I asked what they did for a living, they laughed and said lots of things.  Eventually his wife got specific and said she was a mythologist.  I'd never met a mythologist before!

Four years ago I read a mythologist named Joseph Campbell, and he's pretty much the only one most people know, if that.  It changed my life forever, and convinced me to give up the familiar for something new.  I decided to seek my own mystery within the world's mystery, to find the right symbols for me to meditate on and help me read the signs as to what to do and where to go, and to use this path as a way to pursue and live my highest "bliss".  If you're a cynical guy and the word "bliss" makes you weary of the course and makes it sound a little too flowery for you, just think of it as your highest joy, or excitement, or enthusiasm.

I'd already been pondering the significance of this event before I met the mythologist.  I left home in New York a year ago this Wednesday, and I haven't seen any family members since.  I have seen a few close friends who visited me on the way or happened to be in the bay area very briefly, but for the most part I've been on my own in the unknown, even if it is my home country.  I thought about everything I'd gone through to get to that point.  Most of all, I was thinking about my "system" of thinking, and how unconventional and strange it appeared to the uninitiated.  If I wanted to bring the treasure back from my journey and share it with the world in a way that improved the world and continued to propel my life into joy, I was going to have to find a way to communicate it to a wide audience.  I'd been working on it for ages, but the example of Alan Watts was very inspiring to me.  This man found a way to say intelligent, humorous and comforting words to people to get them to enjoy life more, even if they were the types of things you didn't hear talked about on TV or often in normal group conversation.  But he did it.  Times were different back then, but there's always got to be an audience for the big questions.

You can imagine my excitement at the synchronicity of meeting my first credentialed mythologist at that moment.  It was amazing to meet someone who understood the poetic connectivity of the cosmos as played out in human life stories.

After a long chat we parted ways, and I saw the full moon rise over San Francisco Bay.

 

 

 Then I drove home to the city lights across the Golden Gate Bridge at night, always an excellent feeling, and wondered where my myth would take me next.

Happy Birthday, Wagon Wheel Writer

Living

Thursday I woke up with less sleep than I would have liked, but I’m used to it by now.  Someone rang the doorbell at 2 am, and I couldn’t believe it.  After all, the roommate who always did that had just moved out.  How could it be?  After refusing to give in for ages, I finally got up and saw that it was my other roommate, who for the first time had forgotten his keys.  I lost my keys a few weeks ago, but it was in the afternoon.  Even so, I was just relieved it was him and not my crazy ex-housemate or her boyfriend.  Anyway, because of that, I was very tired this morning.  But it’s a Thursday, which is always good.

                Well, mostly.  We began the day with a team assignment related to the week’s themes of morality and World War II.  The mission was that they had to come up with an advisory proposal to the president before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.  I gave them the basic choice before them:  we can potentially end the war now by killing almost two hundred thousand civilians with one move, or we can do a land invasion which will take much longer to end the war and cost tens of thousands of American lives.  I had them work with partners to write a ten sentence proposal using vocabulary words from the Morality section of the book and give me a moral argument for their decision, as opposed to a strategic argument.  Either way, a lot of people were going to die in a horrible way, since it was the end of the worst and largest war ever, with war being widely acknowledged as the worst activity there is.

                After they thought about it, wrote it down and presented their statements to the class, I explained to them what happened: the US dropped the bomb, it achieved its purpose of instant destruction, but Japan did not surrender.  So they dropped another bomb, and finally the war was over.  Then I explained that as horrible the bomb had been, history did proceed the way it did afterward, and we haven’t had any atomic bombs or nuclear weapons dropped on anybody since.  We’ve come up with all sorts of terrible ways to erase each other from the imagination, but it hasn’t come to that again.  Hindsight bias is a powerful thing.

                To lighten the mood but stay on topic we played a quick vocabulary game with the morality words, and then I played a song on my iPod for them and had them fill in the blanks on a lyrics sheet to practice listening.  Someone told me the previous teacher used to do that, and there was already an iPod stereo in the class.  Beautiful.

                We listened to “Dig a Pony” from the Beatles:

                Well you can celebrate anything you want

                After the half hour break we returned to yesterday afternoon’s survey about often-discussed moral “issues” in American society.  Today I had them approach their judgments differently.  Instead of hearing each issue as it came and deciding based on that, I had them rank their top three “bad actions” and top three “good/least bad actions”.

                After I collected the anonymous surveys, I read the class a few quotes about morality from my wisdom packet that I’ve always got with me.  I don’t read it every day, but it’s always there if I get the idea.  I began with All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum.  Find it somewhere and read the first couple pages.  It’s hard to disagree with him.  I then followed it up with a sample from Carl Jung, a German psychologist.  He explained how Hindu and Chinese philosophies explained good and evil.  From there I touched on Taoism, which says that life is balanced out by opposing forces that are necessary for the cycle of life to continue.  These forces are represented in the Tao symbol of the yin and yang.  After that I read one from Einstein, a German who lived in America during World War II, and whose e=mc squared theory enabled the atomic bomb.  He also wrote the president a letter saying we had to start a program to build it before Germany did.  Twenty years earlier he’d gone to Japan and told his step daughters that “striving for morality in our actions” is the most important thing in life.  Everything, including our basic existence, depends on it.  He didn’t believe in free will though.  He said there were physical rules and you couldn’t break them, so everything has to happen the way it does.  His religion, Judaism, doesn’t believe that.  Jews believe that we can change the world and improve it.  Conversely, Hindus say that it’s all an illusion and you need to transcend it through meditation.  According to the German Carl Jung, the Chinese say that good and evil are in nature and are “merely varying degrees of the same thing”.  Good and evil then become “my good” and “my evil”.  Fulghum says that we shouldn’t hit people, and we should share everything, and that warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

From there we discussed the different ways each of the listed survey issues could be perceived as “morally wrong” because they hurt the world.  Keep in mind that that is different from avoiding an action because you don’t find it attractive or it doesn’t serve you strategically in your life game.

                I did my best to balance the discussion, and try to give voice to all of the points of view.  Every once in a while someone would respond to an issue by saying “you shouldn’t do that” and when asked why they said, “because."  Overall I found the discussion amusing, although I was aware that it might not be for some of the students, so I treated it that way.  But I thought it was fair game because that was the text book topic and most of the resources the school provides that I use to balance out my original approaches tend to have disturbing representations of the world in them.  Whether it's the recent newsletter, reading explorer, History of US videos or grammar book, we always seem to be discussing something deep, which at least keeps me interested too.

                The reason I found all of the issues humorous were that I knew I'd been guilty of most of them, and would again be soon, if not that same day.  I knew most of the students did too.  And my friends.  And all sorts of people, American or not.  Even better, at one point, I'd taken a different side of the issues and thought that I would never do them, and judged other people who did.  A lot of my experiences around the world have helped me to be less judgmental because there's just so much going on in the world all the time.  Note I said "less judgmental" and not "judgmentless."  After all, nobody's perfect.  You can't use that excuse for everything though...

                After our discussion of the most pressing individual moral dilemmas facing our society today, beyond the obvious old news ten commandments type stuff where you're clearly hurting someone else directly, we had an experience that made all of the “issues” of the day appear pretty trivial.

                The mother of an older teacher came in to give a 45 minute talk about her experience as a Jewish refugee from Austria during World War II, entitled "My Journey Through World War II".  It was strangely fitting to hear her Holocaust story as we entered Memorial Day weekend.  A German man named Hitler had tried to erase all of the Jewish people from the earth.  He didn’t erase her though.  With help from the Jewish community and later other communities, she (age 7) and her sister (age 10) escaped to and survived in France after the Nazis occupied Austria, were reunited seven years later with their mother in England, adjusted to a new life in the United States and eventually California.  She spoke eloquently about dealing with all of the anger, resentment, confusion and hurt from the experience.  She was a confident speaker, humorous, kind and radiant.  Often she used the words “yin and yang” to describe anywhere you could be in life.  “Wherever you are, there’s the yin and the yang.  There are good people and there are bad people.  Wherever you are.”  

She began the talk by saying that her sister “exists” but does not “live” because of her pain, and then proudly stated that she herself used to merely “exist” but now she “lives”.  Her remedy was facing her pain head on and expressing it and dealing with it, instead of hiding from it.  She feels very positive about life now.  She lives in Santa Cruz, which is about as beautiful, relaxing and laid back as it gets in northern California.

                At the end of the talk she took questions, and I was lucky to get to ask her about her purpose.  During her talk she had mentioned that during such a hard situation, you have to have a purpose to inspire yourself to do what you have to do in order to make it through.  I asked her what she thought her purpose was after all of these years (she’s 81 now).  She said that it was about telling the story to everyone and letting them know that it really happened.  She said she had to share her voice with people while she still could because she was still here when she easily couldn’t have been.  After class she asked why I spoke such great English, and where I was from.  I said New York, and she laughed and hugged me because she didn’t realize I was a teacher.  We had squeezed three classes into my classroom for the talk, and we hadn’t been formally introduced yet.

               After all of the intensity of atomic bombs and human holocaust and playing counterpoint to every opinion in the room, I was able to tally up the morality survey votes from my wise international peers.  This time around, students ranked supporting companies that use sweatshop child labor and abortion as the biggest sins.  Speeding in a car was still near the top at third.  They still thought it was bad to eat too much.  And although many people ranked them as “okay” on the previous survey, this time several more people ranked viewing sexually explicit material, abortion and smoking marijuana in their “top three bad actions.”  To be fair, there were several students missing today, and several ones who weren't here the other day, and there were only about seven guys out of the twenty students.  Also, out of those seven, three were Muslim, and had already openly stated that their religion prevented them from doing those things.

                With “morality week” complete, I had time to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles again.  I’d been there just two days before and stood in line for 90 minutes only to find I’d misplaced one of my three documents to get registered.  I was reading a book in line, so it wasn’t a complete waste, and the walk there was great exercise, but still.  

When I was a kid I remember watching one of my favorite comedians, Jerry Seinfeld, complain about the DMV as just about the worst experience in America.  He’s Jewish and has a good life.  He made a lot of money making fun of all the little things in life that really annoy you but aren’t really that important.

I didn’t get any new material myself this time, because I had barely any wait in line.  I got my car examined and registered.  I didn't even bring my car last time, so I would have had to come back anyway.  Then I put new California plates on it.  Don’t worry, New York.  You still have my heart.  But I need new plates to keep driving here.  Plus there’s one section of my new plate that says “BGO3”, which isn’t exactly this web address, but close enough.

                I celebrated having all of that taken care of by strolling through the park and enjoying the fact that life was very peaceful and calm and sunny.  Then I went home and cleaned out my car to get it ready for some kind of adventure this weekend.  I'm very tired now, and very ready for a vacation and seeing some of my favorite familiar faces of all time in Cabo San Lucas at my cousin's wedding Wednesday through Sunday.  We're all staying at the Dreams Los Cabos Resort & Inn, so I imagine it's going to be more comfort than I'm used to, which is what a vacation should be.  Before then, I'm thirsting for some camping on this long weekend, but my body isn't agreeing today.  We'll see what tomorrow brings.  It's always revealing new ways of experiencing things.

                Whatever I do, I'll try to be “alive” as opposed to simply “existing" in this thing.

The Good, the Bad and the Confusing

We're learning about "Morality" vocabulary in class.  I've got this vocabulary text book, and it tells me what words I'm supposed to teach them.  I always end up teaching them more than they asked for, but as my wise friend once said, "You've got to spend your time somehow."

So we discussed our religions or lack thereof and how they affect our "moral choices" in life.  Most people identified themselves as Christian, Buddhist or Muslim, with only four people saying they had no religion.  When questioned further, the vast majority of them admitted they weren't technically "practicing" their religion carefully.  Some even contradicted their supposed religion when they stated their actual beliefs about how to act in life.

When someone stated their religion, I asked them if there was anything they could think of that their religion has guided them to, as in some choice they've had to make in life.  Most people brought up something that most religions and societies teach, such as loving other people, or not drinking too much, and things like that.  Several Japanese students who said they weren't associated with any religion said that they learned it all in a special "ethics" class from the public school, or in one case, a Buddhist school and then a Christian school, although neither stuck. 

Near the completion of class I brought up 10 "ethical" issues that I hear about in the chatter of American society.  I did not choose them based on whether or not I thought they should be moral issues, but more based on what I frequently hear argued about during political campaigns, as complaints from religions, or by friends who support various popular causes to improve the world in the best way they see fit. 

I took an anonymous survey where I brought up the question and then had them write on a numbered sheet of paper if they thought it was "good", "bad" or "Okay/I don't care".

My class of 20-30 something year old's from various cultures ranked these "ethical questions" from worst to not so bad as follows:

From Worst to Best:

1.  Eating so much that you become obese

2.  Driving over the speed limit

3.  Buying clothing from companies that use sweatshop child labor

4.  Abortion

5.  Drinking to excess

6.  Smoking marijuana

7.  Tie:  Gay marriage and Watching pornography

9.  Tie (with zero "Bad" votes):  Eating Meat and Masturbating


The top 3 in the list were the only ones that received significant amounts of "bad" votes.  I wonder if I had done a sufficient job clarifying the "moral" nature of the issue ("Is it morally wrong to do this?") versus the personal health/best interest side of the issue ("Well yeah, of course it's not good to eat so much you become obese").

Barely anyone thought gay marriage or watching pornography was wrong, although a few of the 20 votes cast did think so.  Most votes on all issues tended to be "okay/don't care".

The most "good" votes came for eating meat (and no "bad" votes, interestingly), with gay marriage second.

Once again, it was an anonymous survey, and they were given the issues one at a time, as opposed to ranking them.  Also, they were all international students, and none of them Americans, as clearly evidenced by their selections of "eating too much" and "speeding" as the gravest of sins.

Remember the woman who lived upstairs from me and had the bipolar boyfriend I wrote about in "Shine Your Light"?  Well, now I am convinced that she can be equally bipolar and manipulative and nasty.  Also, when I got home from class, I found out she moved out today after being evicted. 

I feel a little bad, because I don't like to see anyone down on their luck, and I remember how long I was without a place to be and how much that can bear on your psyche.  That being said, she really stressed out most of the people in the house, and especially me since I lived the floor below and could hear the stomping and yelling very clearly.  Even so, I never made a formal complaint to the manager or landlord, so I know that it was the house's will, not mine, that decided her fate.

I remember when I first moved in I had no furniture, not even a bed.  All I had was my camping mat, sleeping bag and small camping pillow.  My roommate, who had also recently moved in, had so many things that she spread them all over the common space in the house, and you had to be very careful when walking through the hallway not to bump into her framed paintings and such.  Many of them were there for over a month.

Among them were two golden Buddha faces.  After a few weeks I decided that the Buddha looked lonely, and I wasn't even sure if they were hers or someone else who had moved out and left them there, so I put one in my room to remind me that the "Buddha" was everywhere.  I am not a Buddhist, but I mostly understand the core ideas as they could be applied to my experience with life.  I liked the idea that even though I had very little materially at the time, I still had worlds inside me, and even though I lived in an ugly apartment near the freeway, the future contained all the possibilities I wanted it to if I was willing to see the Buddha beauty all around me.

I had it in my room for weeks, and then one day I decided to take an Egyptian hieroglyphic one which I kept bumping into and appreciate it in my room since it wasn't getting any attention in the hallway.  Within five minutes I got a knock on my door from my roommate, hysterically complaining that she'd been robbed.  When I asked what it was about and found out, I opened the door to show her, and explained the misunderstanding.  She was relieved instead of angry.  I really did think they had been left behind by some other tenant at that point, because who would be so audacious as to fill the hallways of a house with ten people with a stream of their belongings for over a month?  I gave both back quickly, and even made a smiling little speech/comment about not needing to own the Buddha because it was everywhere, but she kept going on and on about how valuable it was and wanting to sell it.  Her friend was with her at the time.  She was a nice woman I talked to in the kitchen from time to time, and when she saw how I had basically nothing in my room, she tried to convince my roommate to let it go, but she was very hung up on the issue.  She wasn't angry at me, but she wanted her Buddha back.

Today, after they moved out her stuff, I walked into her room.  There were still several paintings hanging on the wall.  I immediately noticed the golden Buddha, amongst many other fancy possessions.  Just last week I'd had to break up a fight between her and her boyfriend over him supposedly breaking her TV, and had to stop her from screaming "it doesn't get ANY worse than this!"  To be fair, it was exclaimed in the same rant about getting evicted.  But she was really mad about that TV.

10 days ago I found a huge TV on the street with a "free" sign and carried it down the hill to my room.  It must have weighed 70 or 80 lbs., with barely any grips.  I don't have a TV hook-up, but I thought I might connect it to my laptop.  Unfortunately the inputs were inoperative, so I'd done all of that work for nothing.  I still have the TV, but I use it as the back rest for my chair.  I also found the chair on the street.  It reclines too far though, so it's good to have the TV on my coffee table behind it so I can lean on it and sit up straight.

Yesterday my laptop touch pad for navigation froze up, and I thought I was going to have to send it back to get it fixed and wait for weeks and use library computers until then.  I called my computer techie cousin to get the run down, and he said to start it in safe mode, which I knew how to do, but that didn't work.  I still couldn't move the arrow or click on anything.  So I just let it go and did something else.  Then this morning I tried the old "take the battery out and put it back in again" trick and started it in safe mode with networking as opposed to just safe mode, and one of the two fixed the problem.  If my laptop died I'd be mad, but I've already had one burglarized, back in Brooklyn, so I know that what really matters is I'm okay.

A few weeks ago I found out from one mechanic in the city that my car needed repairs totalling $2500, and the inspection was expiring.  I couldn't afford that, so it looked like I was going to have to give up my car and, therefore, my canoe.  I was patient and eventually found a mechanic out of town who charged me $575 for everything, and now I have a car again.

I wouldn't want to get evicted, because it's hard without a home.  And I wouldn't want certain of my possessions to be gone forever either.  But what's truly important in this world is what you have inside of you and how that connects you to the world around you.

I've learned how to live without close family or friends around me for almost a year, but without the excitement of knowing I'm in a foreign country.  I'm just another American with a job and an apartment.  When I see my family again, it will mean a lot more to me than anything I could possess materially.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no ascetic.  I'll always love the taste of food, assured quick access to information technology, and a vehicle that can move me to a beautiful place to be.  But that's only one of many paths to being happy.

What really matters to me is to be happy and feel free.

I keep no balance sheet as to whether this happiness and freedom is made possible by something materially or spiritually.

It's something I sense inside of me

Peace Time

Dear Whoever Reads This,


Life is good.  How is yours?

Class is going well.  We've been on three field trips in two weeks: The Modern Art Museum, the San Francisco Zoo, and a pot luck BBQ atop one of my students' downtown apartment buildings.  I can't say I don't enjoy the executive powers available to me.  Today we watched a movie about World War II, and how America got rescued from the Great Depression by being drawn into the greatest fight of its life.  It won due to all of the detailed divine destinies of all the diminutive deities who were merely represented by figures in lists of captured and casualties.  Or because it just is, if you're into that sort of explanation.  But on a higher level of perspective, with slightly more detail, one could say that America's quick productivity and ingenuity helped it jump into a fight that had been going on long before it woke up to it.  The fact it had stayed out of it for so long owed to its advantageous position and strength when it did begin.  Ultimately, it won because of the worst weapon in the world being created by a man who once tried to poison his college professor and then quoted the Hindu Bhagavad Gita after the first successful test of the bomb.  This bomb was enabled by the brilliant equations of one of its smartest citizens, and it strangely prevented any kind of third full-scale world war from ever being consummated.  The only country it was used on, Japan, although initially devastated, would go on to become one of most advanced and rich societies on earth, and never go to war again.

After the video I told a plain language story/quick summary of the causes of World War I and World War II.  It was interesting to note how little people knew about it even though it was the biggest war on earth that involved just about every country, whether or not they wanted it.

Now we're in San Francisco, and there is no unified world war, although life is a battle every day.  The people here mostly appear to be well, if you were at all curious about how people on the west coast of the United States are doing.  After a slow period of selectively choosing my hangout's and balancing it out with solitary readjustment to America/living indoors/new city/new coast/western society/being stationary while writing a book, organizing my pictures and continuing to learn, I've finally found myself spending more time with people than not.  Last weekend I didn't get home from parties/group hangout's until after 10 pm three nights in a row starting Thursday, and then I used the rest of my time to write.

I also got my car fixed recently, which is always good.  I'm going on a great adventure soon.  Whether or not it's before I go to Mexico for my cousin's wedding has yet to be decided.

The only time I went to Mexico before this, I took dozens of long bus rides and a dozen hitchhiked rides south and then west across America in the winter, up to San Francisco, all so I could "fly down to Mexico-o-o" and "catch my plane right on time and let my honesty shine" or whatever it was that Simon & Garfunkel were singing in "The Only Living Boy in New York".

Speaking of which, I am flying to Mexico one year to the day that I left my home state, New York.  I think the first night is my younger cousin's bachelor party.  I spent my first full day in America in April 2012 at my older cousin's bachelor party.  All I had to do after that to get back to Mexico was drive all over the northern US in the summer and find a way to live in San Francisco.  Although this time, I had no idea I was going to Mexico.

My first day in California, when I crossed the northern border from Oregon so I could camp in Redwood National Park, I went to the cloudy Pacific Ocean and either called or got a call from my cousin Dan.  He asked me if I would be in his wedding party in May, and I said that was a great way of telling me he was getting married, which I think he actually had forgotten to officially mention since it had been rumored for a while.

Besides that, I stood in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles today for ninety minutes, and when I got to the counter I found that the important document in my bag was somewhere other than there.  At least I got info about everything I need to do.

Also, my laptop touch pad mouse stopped working, which is annoying, but fixable.

But it's not World War II, so what can I do?

Joy

            I am so happy and amazed to be alive during the entire experience.  It’s almost as if the entire world as I knew it not only transformed forever into something completely new with infinite possibilities, but that it was actually realer and made more sense than ever before, despite the fact that I’d just been confronted with more mystery and insanity than ever before.  It all just naturally flowed and connected and made sense somehow.  Life, transformation, evolution, being on a planet in space with a history of human love and connection and learning and understanding and kindness and bravery and hunger and lust and thirst and imagination and creativity and compassion and effort and expression and complex reasoning and arrangement on levels both human and above human, arranging humans in mysterious and magical ways very similar to ways humans arrange their artistic plays at poetry, and the relationship of words to the world in the most pressing and imminent and obvious sense, and that (11:11) these new emotions come perfectly timed with such glorious, outstanding, awesome, intense and beautiful powerful music only further sheds light on my mind that I am experiencing the best of time.  I am the world.  I (10,000) am able to imagine and play anything my heart desires today.

            I am a human.  I am evolved from other humans, who are evolved from life, which is here in the first place and is the most mind-boggling fact of all existence.  I am no longer a student in a system at a university.  I am a human in a system in a universe.  The rules are all new and better now.  This is beyond the word "transformation".  Enjoy creation.  Love your world and your imagination and your ears and your nose and your tongue and your toes and your fingers and heart and your privates, especially when they grow, and enjoy life as it flows, wherever it goes.   Where?  Who knows?

Spirit Adapting

 "Something tells me it's all happening at the zoo...

According to Wikipedia: 

Lemurs have evolved to cope with an extremely seasonal environment and their adaptations give them a level of diversity that rivals that of all other primate groups.

 The word "lemur" can be translated as "spirits"

 

"I do believe it

I do believe it's true..."

 

-"At the Zoo"

Simon & Garfunkel

I Learned Something Today

I went to school on South Park Street.

One of the only shows I used to keep up with on TV (or the internet) was South Park, but they haven't had an episode for ages, and won't until September for some reason, which is unprecedented.  They must be very busy or very tired from being so busy.

When they started out, they ended almost every episode by saying, "I learned something today" and then giving a speech.

I learned something today:

If you want to live a really long time, you should move to Okinawa, Sardinia or Loma Linda, California.  Or, at the least, you should follow some of their healthy habits:

-have lasting relationships with a network of people you care about
-have some sort of purposeful existence that drives you
-eat vegetables and fruits
-drink plenty of water
-exercise and work hard
-living in a place with nice weather can help
-consuming fewer calories means a longer life

If this were South Park, they'd make that funny somehow, but that's not my specialty.  Instead, for now, I can do my best to live a long life, instead of laugh about it all the time.

Then again, laughing a lot is very healthy for you.  Thank you, laugh makers.

I learned something else today too.

Tomorrow we're going to the zoo.

Today I learned they have a Lemur Cafe there!

I laughed when I heard that.

You Can Do It

Three years ago I went on the most incredible adventure of my life, and in a way it has continued until this day.

It began with a flight from New York City to India.

My mother, sister, and soon to be brother went to the airport with me.  My father had to work, but he'd already given me a great gift for my journey, the Iroquois nation's Words Before All Else: Thanksgiving Address.  He said it summarized his beliefs better than any other group had stated before.  It thanks the people, the waters, the sun, the moon, the creator, the enlightened teachers, the animals, the plants, and everything they believe deserves thanking for the giving they've done before we do the taking from them.  It says this about where we live, the Earth:

The Earth Mother

We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life.

She supports our feet as we walk about upon her.

It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time.

To our Mother, we send greetings and thanks.

Now our minds are one.

Before my mother said good bye to me, she gave me two envelopes.  She said, "Open one of them when you get on the plane, and the other one at Christmas."  It was December 3, and I was going to miss my first Christmas ever.  I planned to be in India for two months of unplanned exploring before flying to Thailand and not coming back until my sister's wedding July 3.  I didn't know that I was going to travel through ten countries for seven straight months.  I didn't know I was going to do two long journeys across the United States and live in Japan for a year after that either.  I had no idea just how much individual development and how many challenges were ahead of me.

When I got on the plane, I had about three hours to wait on the tarmac because of delays.  During the suspense I opened the first envelope.

There was a card with a quote from Winnie the Pooh, everyone's favorite bear from childhood:

Always remember:

"You're braver than you believe, 

and stronger than you seem,

and smarter than you think."

If your birth mom hasn't told you that lately

your Earth mom is telling you now

The Universe Smiles

I wrote the following in mid-February

and many others the same day

Here's one:

            Please imagine that the word "religion" means nothing to you right now, and you're starting with a clean slate of knowledge and imagination, openly perceptive and possibly receptive to a new clue for you.

 

            Religion means “rebinding”.  Think of it as connecting to something larger than yourself.  You become one with the universe.  That’s all that religion is about, no matter which religion you’re talking about or which different words they seem to be using to convey that, or, sadly, distort that.

            The problem with most religious statues is that they are always so serious and stern, or even miserable and sad.  Thus, if they are rebinding to the universe, then that is what the universe is about.  Mostly you see that in the west.  In the east you tend to see this neutral look of contentment on most statues, usually of the Buddha, indicating that he’s totally got it but he can’t be bothered to get excited about it because then he might be sad later and ruin his balance.  His eyes are rarely open.

            That brings us to the Laughing Buddha, the best religious statue in the world.  The reason is easy: he’s smiling!  And not just smiling, he’s really smiling.  He is one happy camper.  He smiles wide with a dot to indicate his third eye, and it radiates from him centrifugally out into the universe with which he is united.

            If there is an arc to the universe, it is a smile.  We start happy, get dragged down, and then raise ourselves back up again.

            Share in the one smile.