I know a lot of people who are in joyful loving relationships, and many of them are very old. Some of them have had the same relationship going for decades, and they report that it took lots of love and work to keep it going. Lots of adaptation and understanding and communication and reinvention. Others realized they were either with the wrong person or had simply grown in a different way, and they went their own way and then either found other people or one new person who began a new journey with them and filled their life in a new way. I don't know much about that from personal experience, especially when it comes to serious commitment. I know the feeling I get when I meet someone special, and I've often really thought I've wanted it, and then the different path unfolds. Whatever it is, it's supposed to light up your life and overall be fun. But it can be really bad if you don't take it seriously.
Whether you're single or in a relationship, everyday life is the most intense adventure you could ever experience, with plenty of potential for beauty and blood-pumping passion. You just need a special mind set and attitude that works for you.
"What one needs in this universe is not certainty but the courage and nerve of the gambler; not fixed convictions but adaptability; not firm ground whereon to stand but skill in swimming." - Alan Watts
A few years ago I was on my way from Austin, Texas to New Mexico, but first I had to stop in El Paso. I had arranged to stay with one couchsurfing.org host and meet another for two nights in the city. I had to ride a bus seventeen hours overnight with a 3 am layover in the middle of nowhere. The next morning I was greeted at the bus station by my host, a Mexican who loved Back to the Future. We got along very well. He was making a new start in his life after marrying young. He met this girl from North Carolina in college, and they fell in love and got married, and then realized they didn't know each other that well, and they eventually got a divorce without any hard feelings. He was still friends with her parents, and about to get dinner with them too. In the meantime he had slightly fewer possessions, but he had floor space for me to stay for free, and he showed me around town. We invited another couchsurfing host, a student who had once been somewhere seemingly very mysterious in central Asia, and we all went out to White Sands desert and ran around at dusk, surfing down the dunes as the moon and stars came out. The next day my host and I walked across the border into Juarez at his insistence. He'd been in the US for ten years after growing up in Mexico City, but he had a lot of family in Juarez. It had been in the news a lot for drug violence, but he said it was a big city with normal lives going on. We only walked about an hour along the highway before turning around, but I was the only American in line trying to get back into America. The border guard was surprised to see me and made a big deal about how dangerous it was, which I thought was strange because I was obviously in line with all of these people who went there every day or lived there.
Anyway, my host really liked this movie because it inspired him to start a new life after leaving the person he had built his life around, and he had this quote on his wall. I liked that because I always had quotes on my walls back in Queens:
Whether you're single or in a relationship, everyday life is the most intense adventure you could ever experience, with plenty of potential for beauty and blood-pumping passion. You just need a special mind set and attitude that works for you.
"What one needs in this universe is not certainty but the courage and nerve of the gambler; not fixed convictions but adaptability; not firm ground whereon to stand but skill in swimming." - Alan Watts
A few years ago I was on my way from Austin, Texas to New Mexico, but first I had to stop in El Paso. I had arranged to stay with one couchsurfing.org host and meet another for two nights in the city. I had to ride a bus seventeen hours overnight with a 3 am layover in the middle of nowhere. The next morning I was greeted at the bus station by my host, a Mexican who loved Back to the Future. We got along very well. He was making a new start in his life after marrying young. He met this girl from North Carolina in college, and they fell in love and got married, and then realized they didn't know each other that well, and they eventually got a divorce without any hard feelings. He was still friends with her parents, and about to get dinner with them too. In the meantime he had slightly fewer possessions, but he had floor space for me to stay for free, and he showed me around town. We invited another couchsurfing host, a student who had once been somewhere seemingly very mysterious in central Asia, and we all went out to White Sands desert and ran around at dusk, surfing down the dunes as the moon and stars came out. The next day my host and I walked across the border into Juarez at his insistence. He'd been in the US for ten years after growing up in Mexico City, but he had a lot of family in Juarez. It had been in the news a lot for drug violence, but he said it was a big city with normal lives going on. We only walked about an hour along the highway before turning around, but I was the only American in line trying to get back into America. The border guard was surprised to see me and made a big deal about how dangerous it was, which I thought was strange because I was obviously in line with all of these people who went there every day or lived there.
My host was really interesting because he'd just been through a major life change and found inspiration in many places. One place was ironically the movie Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I admit my mom made me read it a few years earlier when I was visiting home in between temp jobs in New York City and complaining that I needed something good to read. I'd just been very certain about a relationship back then, and then realized the world was uncertain, so the theme of a successful woman realizing there was more to life than whatever world she was living at the time, getting a divorce and exploring the world through food, meditation and compassion seemed worth a few hours of focus and imagination. Even though every human being is different and unique regardless of any overlapping patterned behaviors resulting from gender, race, nationality, religion and so on, the fact remains that I had seen all of these women on the subway reading it the past year or two, so I figured it couldn't hurt to check out what the story was saying to them. Learn about your world from every source, because it might affect you somehow someday. I also thought I should be aware of how a successful independent woman thought and expressed herself through the craft I had chosen. I can't say it was the greatest book I ever read, but I it did open up my point of view and understanding of issues and challenges faced by others in different situations that I had never given much thought to before, so I think it made me better somehow. Plus she traveled to a lot of awesome places. She did the three I's: Italy, India and Indonesia.... Oh yeah? Well, once I was in India with an Irishman, Italian and Israeli. Top that, Gilbert!
"The rule of Quest Physics goes something like this: If
you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which
can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a
truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing
to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you
accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared,
most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself,
then the truth will not be withheld from you."
This morning I woke up, ate breakfast, and realized I had one more chapter to proofread in my book. Somewhere in there I checked my e-mail and saw that the student evaluations of my teaching had been scanned and sent to me.
They filled out evaluations a month ago. I found out that overall I'm an Excellent/Good teacher, although a fifth thought I was Average and one dissenter thought I was slightly below. But they only offered feedback on one day, when I was missing several students, and since then many students have come and gone. Plus some students only come every few weeks anyway, so anything they could say about how the class is done on a daily basis isn't really fair.
Even so, I had to read over all of the comments of my students after four months of teaching them based on a loose curriculum and whatever my own imagination and experience could conjure up. As a whole, it was positive and rewarding to know that I had made people happy and that my approach generally worked. The smartest students loved it and advanced to the higher class, and some of the nervous students appreciated my patience and willingness to answer their questions and correct their mistakes. I was wondering about my success at times because I leave a lot of room for improvisation. I work better that way, and the results seem to be better. I can plan a class down to the minute and it will work, but it's just not as great overall.
I don't like to have everything planned out. I can commit to inner truths that consistently guide me and help me to help others, but beyond that I try to respect the world's capacity for re-arranging itself. That being said, you still have to steer the wheel as best you can.
I don't like to have everything planned out. I can commit to inner truths that consistently guide me and help me to help others, but beyond that I try to respect the world's capacity for re-arranging itself. That being said, you still have to steer the wheel as best you can.
After class the people in my house had a group dinner. One roommate suggested it earlier this week, and I learned today that they'd never done it before. The guy who suggested it cooked steak and potatoes, I stir fried broccoli, carrots, bell peppers, mushrooms and onions, a girl made salad, and another girl made chicken soup. She's a chef, so that was extra delicious. We all ate in the small yard near their garden while they discussed long term house stuff that doesn't affect me because I'll be in New York State in August.
I don't know what to expect from my visit in New York, other than to see people I really love, laugh very very hard, and walk around and pause a lot to take in all the familiar holy sights as memories of the journey fly through my mind and join the same map of love as New York, where I come from.
I realized today that everyone in this house is from northern California. That's perfect. It means I'm getting to know real people from California very well, just like in the last two houses. Sometimes you go to a city (ahem, New York) where everyone is actually from somewhere else. That's also awesome. I deal with that in my class every day. But as far as me living in California, I really think it's been about trying new places and having experiences with people that shed new light on the world and give me some energy to carry whatever I am further. As for long-term settling, we'll see how I feel after I see home again. That can always go either way. You might love seeing all the people and places again, but it's different from living there. I'll just continue to accept everything that comes my way as a clue and then I'll know what to do.
When we were cooking dinner my roommate put on this great soul mix, and "Everyday People" and "I Want to Take You Higher" by Sly & the Family Stone came on, and I was very happy. Then my roommate made cookies. She has a cousin who lives on Spring Street in Cambridge, NY, where my friends Sam, Pete and Joe grew up. We all climbed a mountain together four years ago when I decided to go to India. Then I painted houses on Spring Street for several months to save money for the journey. Every day I climbed ladders and painted. As lucky as I was to be earning money doing such a relaxing peaceful task on such a charming road in small town America, it was still kind of a dull place for a 25 year old returning from New York City to be living. So I had to use my imagination a lot to remember why I was going through the repetitive steps to build for the higher goal which was on the horizon but required the drudge work.
I left everything I knew in New York because I wanted to live life as intensely, deeply and poetically as possible. Eventually I might be able to show others that life wasn't just a cynical show to comment on, but an awesome adventure fueled by poetry and magic. That's no guarantee that it's always happy or pain-free. It just means it's willing to provide you with the lens of experiencing the world as a cosmic symphony in place of more standard "reality" shown on TV. Or even lazier, a snarky tweet.
"This reductionist, nothing-but-ist view of the universe with its muscular claims to realism and facing-factuality is at root a proletarian and servile resentment against quality, genius, imagination, poetry, fantasy, inventiveness and gaiety. Within twenty or thirty years it will seem as superstitious as flat-earthism."
"Still more dreary is the sensible materialism of the practical and provident, who will scrounge all their lives to provide themselves with leisure when they can no longer enjoy it. Or the academic materialist who is, perhaps, a scientific empiricist or a logical positivist or a “sound” statistical psychologist, whose real aim is to demonstrate that all nature is perfectly banal and dull. The trouble with this fellow is that no one ever mixed raven’s blood with his mother’s milk. He is marvelously and uncannily bereft of any sense that existence is odd.
At the other extreme, the pure mystic is like pure alcohol, or like a wine without body. Intense, strongly principled, quiet-mannered and unobtrusive, devastatingly simple in his needs and colorless in his tastes—no belly-laugh, no good roll with a girl in the hay, no gentle grin of understanding as between man and man—this one, with his terrifying sincerity, is more of a Euclidean proposition than a human being. Spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp, just as sensuality needs a bed on the hard ground, a rough blanket, and a long look at the utterly improbable stars. - Al Watts, The Art of Godmanship
I left everything I knew in New York because I wanted to live life as intensely, deeply and poetically as possible. Eventually I might be able to show others that life wasn't just a cynical show to comment on, but an awesome adventure fueled by poetry and magic. That's no guarantee that it's always happy or pain-free. It just means it's willing to provide you with the lens of experiencing the world as a cosmic symphony in place of more standard "reality" shown on TV. Or even lazier, a snarky tweet.
"This reductionist, nothing-but-ist view of the universe with its muscular claims to realism and facing-factuality is at root a proletarian and servile resentment against quality, genius, imagination, poetry, fantasy, inventiveness and gaiety. Within twenty or thirty years it will seem as superstitious as flat-earthism."
"Still more dreary is the sensible materialism of the practical and provident, who will scrounge all their lives to provide themselves with leisure when they can no longer enjoy it. Or the academic materialist who is, perhaps, a scientific empiricist or a logical positivist or a “sound” statistical psychologist, whose real aim is to demonstrate that all nature is perfectly banal and dull. The trouble with this fellow is that no one ever mixed raven’s blood with his mother’s milk. He is marvelously and uncannily bereft of any sense that existence is odd.
At the other extreme, the pure mystic is like pure alcohol, or like a wine without body. Intense, strongly principled, quiet-mannered and unobtrusive, devastatingly simple in his needs and colorless in his tastes—no belly-laugh, no good roll with a girl in the hay, no gentle grin of understanding as between man and man—this one, with his terrifying sincerity, is more of a Euclidean proposition than a human being. Spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp, just as sensuality needs a bed on the hard ground, a rough blanket, and a long look at the utterly improbable stars. - Al Watts, The Art of Godmanship
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