"I'll Tell You a Secret: All the Best People Are"

I spent half the day today reading all of the writing I created on this web space since my journey began in India to when I was reading about presidents in Japan.

Having lived on memory lane, I can happily say that I am sane and in possession of a wide-eyed enthusiastic brain.

I also read over many photograph writings I have not published anywhere.  I mostly skimmed, as there are hundreds upon hundreds of thousand+ word pieces which I wrote in Japan.  I took a picture of the crescent moon in Hamamatsu when I was traveling from Osaka back to Tokyo, and found the following paragraphs:

All I can do is be alive, and everything on top of that is an extra prize.

 
I’ve had incomparable fun following the clues the past few years.  It hasn’t mattered if I was traveling from city to mountain to desert to village to city or staying stationary in the most boring place in the world.  I’ve found a way to notice poetry in the people, places and patterns around me.  The clues are always leading me forward to the next step, yet making me appreciate the value of the journey in the moment along the way.

All that really matters is to master imagination and creativity to manifest a romantic reality, which is top quality be, for her, whoever she is, and me.

Speaking of the word "quality," I wrote about a quality sign I photographed in New York City before I moved to San Francisco:

#16:  April 16, 2012 – New York, New York:  Top-Quality.  The Best Good Possible.  The Highest Level of Bliss Through Experience.  Maximum Value of Being.  Ultimate Essence.

I took this picture as I prepared to leave New York City after a week of visiting friends.  I used to live there for three years, and many people I knew happened to move there right after I left, so I had no shortage of people to see.  I did some writing, saw an awe-inspiring Hiromi concert, and spent a lot of time walking around New York and taking pictures of interesting messages and scenes as I went along, just like I had done all around the world.  As I passed the Empire State Building on my way to Penn Station, my ultimate destination essentially my relatives’ home out in East Islip, Long Island, I took a picture of this sign to remind me of the design of my journey, and why I bothered to go through all of the trouble.  I am seeking top quality experience.  I don’t know exactly what that is until I feel it, or what the alternatives are, and many physicists hypothesize that this is the best possible of all universes, which would make everything top quality.  Especially if you’re some some sort of pantheist mystic who claims everything is good.  If that's the case, then there can be no low quality, which doesn't make sense in this positive/negative world.  However, we live our reality as it comes, whether or not under the illusion of choice, and every choice is ultimately between levels of quality as they are deemed fit for the chooser’s experience within the greater experience, if ultimately that choice is made on the criterion of quality for the greater experience.   How do you define quality?  That’s like defining God or reality, right?

Robert Pirsig was a brilliant philosopher and English professor with a sky high IQ, which is good.  Unfortunately he drove himself completely insane trying to pin down quality and what it was, which is bad.  He lost all interest in life and eventually lost the will to even get up off the floor instead of wetting his pants, which is also bad.  He regained his sanity for the most part, took a motorcycle trip with his son across Montana and the rest of that part of the country, and wrote the highest selling American philosophy book of all time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  And the root of his whole discussion is quality, and how we know whether or not something is good.  Ultimately, it’s just something we can tell and not define.  It sounds a lot like spiritual feelings described by mystics, or romantic love, or a million other things that require intuition.  When we’re working on something good, we do it by getting a feel for the work, and this isn’t an instinct, but it comes after a lot of “basic contact with reality” as he puts it.  He also says that the roots for quality and the Buddha, “Good" and "God,” are essentially the same in old English.

He also talks a lot about romantic reality and classical reality, and how one is about enjoying the surface of experience and the other is about understanding the machinery, but since quality is the Buddha and the Buddha is everywhere, these are all manifestations of quality.  However, he does distinguish romantic reality as being the ultimate value of existence, since that’s the cutting edge of experience and where all of the action is.  And when you’re up front, standing on the shoulders of all other understanding, you move forward with an intuitive feel for where you’re supposed to be going.

Why do I care about quality?  First of all, I care about quality of my life.  I want to live the best life I can while existing within universal experience.  One part of that is to create quality by doing God’s work: art.  Pirsig says that “Art is the Godhead as revealed through the works of man.”  Ultimately, when I create something, the universe is creating itself through me, who is also the universe, to unfold the world the way it’s supposed to.  Just like I derive inspiration from the pyramids in a way that countless bored tourists do not, someone else might derive inspiration in their imagination from one of my creations.  That's why I want my creation to be of the highest quality possible.

This circles back to the first point, as Pirsig also notes that someone who cares about quality in the aspects of what they do likely has a lot of quality in their character as well.  If you work hard to put quality into your creations, then you are likely to be living a quality life.  This isn’t a fool-proof maxim: you can work too hard and miss out on more important parts of life, like enjoying yourself and loving others, and you can be a perfectionist with no people skills and make a lot of people miserable, or even the world worse, in pursuit of your own ego’s perception of the correct definition and manifestation of quality.  Every person feels quality in their own way.

My attempt at quality through art is to write and tell a story that I enjoy working with and the reader enjoys.  If they become enlightened and are then inspired to live their life to the highest quality making the overall quality of the universe that much higher--if universal quality increase is possible through time--so much the better.  I am telling a story about a boy becoming a man.  The boy is scared of life, inspired by a dead friend to travel abroad, gains confidence, graduates and moves to New York City to pursue his writing dream, but first travels to the magical circus at Bonnaroo, enters a whole new reality, faces many young trials in New York while perceiving strange coincidences and metaphors, falls in love and loses three times, and decides to go on a journey around the world.  This decision leads to many journeys filled with real-as-your-feet-on-the-floating-earth poetry.  Throughout these journeys there is quality abound, despite the necessary learning mistakes.

My attempt at quality through life is to feel the good love as much as possible, and inherently spread it to others by doing so.  It’s not that crazy a recipe for bliss, and I only had to go a little insane to figure it out. (4/16/12)

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During that same visit to New York City I paid tribute to the statue of Alice in Wonderland on the Upper East Side.  I discovered it by surprise for the first time when I did my first voyage west, camping and hitchhiking in the snow.  

What is it they say in Alice in Wonderland?

Mad Hatter:  Have I gone mad?

Alice:  I'm afraid so.  You're entirely bonkers.  But I'll tell you a secret.  All the best people are.

Why is that?

Mad Hatter: There is a place.  Like no place on Earth.  A land full of wonder, mystery, and danger!  Some say to survive it: You need to be as mad as a hatter. [picks up his hat].  Which luckily I am.

I would agree, except for one huge difference.  This "place" is the Earth.

Now I can move forward within this fun crazy story on the earth.  I hope we flow to such high quality that the world lights up like fireworks.

What else do they say in the movie?

Why, sometimes I believe in as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Music Moon Sun Water Waves

Today I woke up after lots of sleep for the first time in a long time, and then began reading many pieces of writing I had created to describe photographs.  I read this one from about a year ago, and changed it a little:

I am standing on top of Camel’s Hump Mountain near the holy waters of Lake Champlain in the American state of New York, focusing on the presence of a future manifesting itself before my eyes, a well-played game plan with enough room for genuine surprise, claiming this moment as my prize.  The choice of this mountain has nothing to do with size.  I have looked at it with my own eyes from the other side of Lake Champlain, where my grandparents used to reside.

I am using my... unique fashion sense to express my respect for several heroes of mine who laid the foundation for the pyramid presence I am about to experience:

-Hunter Thompson, who loved expanding his experience by any means possible on adventures around the United States, and engaging the world in his imagination’s adventures on the mind’s superhighway the super high way with words that have inspirational influence on humans and writers to this day

-Asian mystics with bamboo sticks who liked wandering around in nature and mountains and thinking about crazy things like the unity of the universe (hmm… makes sense), how to be selfless, and how to truly love and fill the world with the most exhilaration, love, peace, happiness, joy, exaltation, elation, sensation, imagination and creation on the universal television station in I Magi Nation

-Thai pants to remember to play while you work just as hard, and to be prepared because it can rain at any time

-Boots for climbing mountains and ladders and painting the world in harmonious colors with zen like musical dedication and infatuation for compensation to take more than just a vacation, but instead a bizarre cosmic journey through the sphere’s spinning imagination

-a raincoat to respect the elements' temperamental circumstance

-some hair because it’s there

&

-a bandana as a shout out to loving pirates who break the rules of the negative fools who treat others as mules when we all have access to the universe’s tools.

You are you and I am me.  That’s always who I have been and will be.  A universe within the universal symphony.  Up on a lifeless mountain, persisting against the wind... how does one stay genki?  You must be free and move to feel happy.  It’s inside of we.  The wind of the universe.  Proof that it is alive and always moving, always changing, rearranging, forever stranging up the range in the I Ching of be thing.

I have stared at this beautiful-shaped mountain my entire life, sometimes watching the sunrise or the sun’s light reflected off the moonrise, its existence through awareness in my I.

Earlier on that day I told my mother about my plans, and the night before I told my father.

I told them that I was going to travel across the United States one way or the other, even if it meant with my thumb in strangers’ cars, staying on strangers’ couches, camping in the forest and hiking in the desert during November and December.  I had to see the Grand Canyon and San Francisco, and then catch my free flight to Mexico City thanks to Jack.  All so I could go to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun and the pedestal of the Pyramid of the Moon.  The lesson of the day, learned from The Power of Now in a hotel after midnight was that love is always inside of me and everywhere and everyone.  Everywhere.  That means not just inside of us, but everything in the universe.  So love life freely however you need to be genki and spread it like electricity.  Simplicity.

I am a writer.  I write about strange journeys that have poetic significance for me and give me the strangest yet most exhilarating and beautiful experiences of my life.  It’s risky without guaranteed rewards, even when successful.  It’s a passage through majestic magisterial mystery.  Magic history.

My favorite writer is a fellow red beard named Tom Robbins.  His third book, Still Life With Woodpecker, is about being an outlaw in the name of “raising the exhilaration content of the universe”, connecting with the mystery, and making love stay in whatever way.  His two best metaphors are about pyramids and the camel’s hump.

The pyramids are there for “those of us who are truly alive and truly in love to stand upon and bark at the moon”--the moon being the “feminine principle of change, growth, and renewal”--and “choice." He says that people only limit themselves because they lack the character and the nerve of imagination to star in their own movie and live the life they love.  “Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life."  Shakespeare didn’t say stuff like that, and I wouldn’t want him to.  The universe revealed more of its beautiful self through Tom, a previous psychedelic pioneer of communication through the art of language and language of art, passion and poetry from his brain, pecker and heart.  Man is he smart.  But he had a head start.

The camel’s hump is the part of ourselves that we are ashamed of and society finds the most disagreeable, but actually “holds our sweet waters, our inner stores of strength” that allow us to survive in rough climates and thrive in any environment and circumstance through adaptation that flows from inner contentment of imagination, of being in creation.

I love whatever it is that raises my exhilaration on the universal be.

I saw this picture in my friend's guest room in the same city where I received my highest education.  I have paid and will continue to pay tens of thousands of dollars for that piece of paper, but all I had to really do was read the sticker:

“Be yourself"

Months after writing about that, I had an insight because that picture came up when I was about to stargaze:  I am better at stargazing than anyone else.  Especially in a canoe on the water on my back.  I’m really good at it.  I'll match a stargazing while floating on water playlist with you any day.

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After reading all of the above, I decided to take the canoe out for a spin for the first time all summer, which is really terrible now that I think of it.  I went kayaking in New York in August and used the canoe three times in the spring, but I've been very lazy about it during the summer.

All I had to do was a little online research to find a park along the East Bay twenty minutes away.

I scoped out the beach and not only was there plenty of open space to launch, but the waves were also calm enough to float and paddle without any real danger from big waves.

Moving the canoe is always fun, because it's usually a two person job, but when you pull it off alone you feel amazing.  There's this bar across the middle that you can balance on your shoulders, and then extend your arms to grab the seat in front, and then walk about 100 feet or so to the beach.  Of course, the first path I'd scoped out was kind of rocky and involved a few dips which weren't so easy with a canoe balanced on my neck.  Then there was a left hand turn on a path that took me to both water and the discovery that there was a faster more straightforward path there the entire time.  As usual.

Soon I was floating upon the waves and loving life thanks to the sun, the waves, a few songs from Hiromi and Ludovico Einaudi, some natural sounds of waves caressing the shore, and of course, "Prince Caspian" and "The Only Living Boy in New York".   The sun sparkled, then set, while the moon rose and the stars appeared.  At first it was easy to float without too much turning, but eventually the wind picked up and I really had to battle the waves to stay straight.  That part was the most fun.  I remembered back to my first canoe float of the move, where my friend and I were paddling right as a rain storm approached.  As the downpour began, the waves picked up and we began to paddle as hard as we could while the waves lifted us up and down.  He shouted, "This is what's it's all about, right?"  That's how I felt each time the waves attacked this evening.  You can let them push you around for a while, but it's much more fun to face them head on and crash into them to let them know you mean business too.

Eventually I realized I hadn't brought my headlamp, and it was very dark.  I carried the canoe back to the car, but then noticed my highway patrol glasses were no longer hooked into my belt loop, so I ran back to the beach.  After ten seconds I saw them sitting in the sand, reflecting the moonlight.

Now I'm back in Oakland, typing in a living room, listening to my roommate's radio choices.  The last song was just called "Leap of Faith, You Have to Make It" and involved a harmonica, which is always good.

Speaking of which, I was very excited to use the canoe tonight because I finally had an anchor.  I didn't have one the last time I took it out on the bay, which was when I lived in San Francisco.  Coincidentally, that was the same day I got hired at the English school.  Today I tried to drop anchor a few times, but the elements weren't having it.  The waves kept pushing my canoe slowly back to the eastern shore, regardless of how much I let my anchor drag on the bottom of the bay.

I think I'll spend the rest of the weekend going through all of the writing I've done the past year, both public and private. 

I don't think I can write better than everyone else, but I can definitely say what I have to say the way I say it better than anyone else.

Trust me.  I tell the truth about experience.  It's what I do best.

After all, I'm clearly not winning any fashion awards for my travels :)

Visual beauty is always enjoyed, whether it's the sunlight on the waves or a woman's face.

Who doesn't love to see beauty?

But we have a larger duty.

To be, see and free "Inner Truth"