myth of idle hands

These are my hands, sometimes of stone and sometimes of sand, fastidious in the sweet earth making room for trees to run deep and grow high, knuckle deep in bike grease as I explore these simple and wondrous metal machines of efficient transportation, lightly grasping the pen to jot notes of love and redemption from the aimless effervescence of my heart, curving smooth wet clay up into usable vessels reminiscent of craftsmen roots long forgotten, typing plastic keys here to shift photons electrons across through and around assembled polymers and bits of metal to convey an incessant theme to you that I cannot let go of, bleeding as I cut myself with misdirected misaligned force while trying to do well, fingers on my forehead with my eyes closed to the patterns I repeat and wish I could transcend, cupping warm water to propel myself slowly across the pool and back in the warm luxurious open night of northern California paradise, turning knobs and making gestures and stirring batter, trying to embrace and grasp it all while my mind quietly works to let go.

If I do enough with my hands, will I be able to create a better world? Can I fix, smooth, patch, massage, sprinkle, and trace my way through the years of my life? Can I create the meaning I'm always searching for? Perhaps I can learn to find the calm of mind that comes with purposeful action, and the calm actions that come with a purposeful mind.

nature of contact

beautiful cold
wraps my Californization,
frosty to freeze pipes
unusual here in Paradise
I layer thick under wool sweaters
because I'm skinny and new to myself,
staying warm is outside
my routine,
a new visitor from an east coast past
of childhood snowbanks
and red-faced frozen
sled adventures

pale florescent light
fills the cool room,
the cluttered desk
a still life
of stationery and
a few plastic bottles,
sticky notes with sleepy numbers
crusted bike gloves
small dusty vitamin bottle
a cut-out drawing of two purple flowers

a place,
a window on disparate lives of friends
threaded through mine
in tension of four dimensions
but cradled in the rough palms
of old longshoremen
and grandmothers crocheting
(these are the keepers of our lives
the pillars of hope,
those who carry us in tired
uncertain times)

how can my heart move out
through these streaming bits of colored light
and be touched from afar?
overcome by connections,
the warmth is wave after wave
of us doing what's important to us -
we can dig deep and share the treasures
anthracite in times of bituminous glut
gold in times of pyrite glitter
oak in times of soft pine
keeping on sharing the truth of what we find

so that's what she looks like

so this is me and a girl named Emily. she lives in a town/city called Guelph, in a province called Ontario. Just wanted to share the photo for those who might be curious. i think she's special, and generally fantastic...

boiled down haiku extract

My father was a surgeon, specializing somewhat in hand surgery but also doing plenty of general surgery. For many years, he worked once or twice a month doing long, overnight shifts in hosptitals throughout northeastern Pennsylvania where there were not nearly enough doctors to go around. These towns are post-industry towns, with names like Coaldale and Slatington, where mining or manufacturing ruled the towns since they first appeared on any map. Now they are often tired towns, run down after the closing of the major industry there or simply winding down with the knowledge that the world has moved on to cheaper coal elsewhere, replaced slate with asphalt shingles and pressboard, or outsourced manufacturing to China.

One main side effect of the these towns burning out was widespread use and abuse of alcohol by the locals there. My father used to recount stories every now and then about superhuman feats of stupidity and self-destruction due to the intoxication of some local fellas on a Saturday night. One common incident that he mentioned was accidents while driving drunk. Patients would be brought in to the emergency room of the hospital in the late hourse of the night, all torn up from a collision with a building, large animal, or other vehicle. I always thought the saddest aspect of the story was when my father told me that the person who was driving drunk was often in much better shape than the person that they hit with their car, because the alcohol acts as a depressant and the drunk doesn't brace up their body upon impact. They bounce around more like a rag doll, and are consequently less damaged than a sober person who reacts with fear and adrenaline and tenses up muscles only to get injured by being rigid and running into parts of their car or worse. It's an ugly truth which is not always the case but often enough that I feel a sense of anger at the irony and injustice of it all.

To turn a sad example into a positive one, I sometimes think of myself as a person who is trying not to brace up before impact. I feel like our whole global culture is crashing, with more speed and intensity all the time, and we don't know how it will continue to unfold. Will we turn to nuclear energy when cheap oil runs out? Will we dovote lots of energy to sustaining the lifestyles of the wealthy, with exotic foods, cheap air travel, and lots of home appliances and cars? Will epidemic disease play a big role (I see more and more in newspapers and scientific journals about the looming resurgence of a global flu or worse)? Will we fight wars over access to water? Who will be left without food, water, and energy when there are not enough of these to go around? There are so many questions, and so many more that we haven't even imagined yet. The future is so unknown, with billions of us all over the planet making purposeful or random contributions to the growing ecological crisis. There are so many people who have made big splashes which I can live without, and so many people making little splashes each day that add up to a situation too big and complex to ever fully fathom.

I feel that in the face of all this craziness, perhaps my best plan is to not brace up. I want to stay flexible and adaptive in my outlook on life. I want to be thinking about how I can live well now and into the near future. I feel like it is more important to live well and take care of myself than aim to make a big splash in the world. Is it enough to aim to get a good nights sleep, get some exercise, eat some healthy food, take regular quiet time to read and write, make myself available to friends in need, write my blog, learn to grow vegetables, bike around town, work when I need to, take lots of rest time? I think so. We didn't evolve for a 45 hour work week. I'm not sure what we evolved for, but I feel like I'm closer to it when I'm well-rested and mentally balanced.

What is the highest and best use of my life? Trick question :-) The sun will burn out in perhaps 5 billion more years. If we colonize even the most distant reaches of the universe, their suns will burn out too. Knowing that in the end it's all a big entropic disk getting ready for the next big bang, what's a wandering, wondering soul to do? Follow what feels good. I've come to the radical notion that if I don't ever engage in the rat race and feel good about that choice, then my life is still great. If I keep giving my life away to throw dinner parties and help friends build houses, and feel good about it, that's great too. I feel like this is the lesson of "you can't take it with you." I also feel a strong identification with "First do no harm." The synthesis of these for me is to lead a chill, slow-paced life full of fun and laughter. Once again, for the record, I identify with the values of the hippies - sharing the love, not working to amass private wealth for myself or others, working towards social equality, being in touch with the world around me and my fellow humans. I really like these ideas, and think that they are a valuable guide for my life.

What's my take-home message for today? Love life! Do your best to drop out of aspects of culture that you don't enjoy, that you feel in your heart are detrimental to your physical and emotional well-being. Find others with similar questions and recognize that there you have the beginnings of community. Dare to be different than those engaged in the rat race - try to remember that it's a race that can't be won. Take time now, you can't take it later. Be with friends and just be with them. The next product roll-out, software package launch, promotion, new car, bigger condo, where are all these things going? What are these things in our lives that are not an end in themeselves? How much are we willing to feel like we're sacrificing to get to some point in the imagined future? Here comes the big cliche - the journey is the destination. If we slow down, we can taste it softly in the air, see it in the corners of our vision, smell it in the passing breeze.

Much love to you all - may you all find peace and fulfillment in your work and play. May harmony and integration be the words of the day every day...

geomancer of my own fertile ground

Back in California, the sun shines in through the winter sky and warms me through the days and abandons me at night. The stars shine clear in the sky and fill the midnight blue with points of illumination, dreams to follow through the infinite of time and space to an unforeseen end. Fruit dangles low on branches taxed by the new, fleshy weights - shiny wax of oranges and thin-skinned pale green apples. Damp bricks of deep red lie in their sandy bed and grow their mossy surface through patient weeks and months on end. Ansel Adams' black and white Yosemite now lies between me and where I was, buried deep in mountains that many died while trying to cross to get here. Me? I took the train, and watched the rolling hills of Iowa pass by, strolled around the Omaha station where it was 65 degrees in late November, read the labels of rail cars full of corn syrup (5000 gallons of corn syrup... say it with me, 5000 gallons of corn syrup), saw the cloudy fractured ice forming on the banks of Utah desert creeks, and at no time feared for my life. I didn't have to haul my cart, family, and oxen up a cliff to continue westward. I didn't have to eat my companions (all or in part) to survive. I didn't have to bring 100 lbs. of bacon with me from Missouri, but if I had that wouldn't have been all that bad... I just moved around the train from time to time, conversed with my fellow travelers, and felt like I was on a long journey to discover my home. I left behind love and snow wherever I went, hoping they would both remain white and pure in my absence but smiling at the unstoppable grey entropy of winters in the developed world. Upon my return, white will yeield to green then to red, brown, and eventually nothing before the white comes back upon it all. Who am I to challenge the seasons? Who am I to ask for a moment in time to be held aside for me, plucked gently from the incessant sweet stream of everything and cradled in my hand while everything else continues turning, spinning, spreading, cooling, and dimming? Who am I? I'm my evolving sense of self, shaped forever by all the places I go and by the very idea that I am shaped forever. I'm a preparer of warm feasts in houses defiant to these seasons, I'm a valence electron that wants to jump to your shell so we can be a great molecule, I'm a tired son, I'm a cancer scare survivor, I'm a comet at it's closest point to earth wondering when I can get away again from all these primates and their nuclear weapons, I'm a dancer for myself only when I'm not dancing for others, I'm a friend who's slowly understanding, I'm a proponent of peace even as I feel our electronic paper theoretical walls cracking inwards, I'm a lover of many things looking to see if one sweet love is enough, I'm in need of a bit of salvation but I'm still trying to save myself. Thanks to all the friends out there, may you keep on keepin' on with your own struggles and joys...

I know I'm not alone

People say I'm crazy,
doing what I'm doing
Well they give me all kinds of warnings
to save me from ruin.
When I say that I'm okay,
well they look at me kind of strange,
"Surely you're not happy now, you no longer play the games?"

People say I'm lazy,
dreaming my life away,
Well they give me all kinds of advice
designed to enlighten me,
When I tell them that I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall,
"Don't you miss the bigtime boy, you're no longer on the ball?"

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll,
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go.

People ask me questions
lost in confusion,
Well I tell them there's no problem
only solutions.
Well they shake their heads and look at me as if I've lost my mind,
I tell them there's no hurry,
I'm just sitting here doing time.

I'm just sitting here watching the wheel go round and round
I really love to watch to them roll,
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go...

- Watchin' the Wheels, by John Lennon

summer peeks through split autumn

tumble-down redecorations, grass springing between
marble columns etched tired
boy girl enter space sacred, naive
laugh hand-holding, peace blankets place
nature sounds mix in sunshine
forming memories stretched past to future

real or fantastic less important now moment
encompass, path labyrinthine marked by
large oaks
disc flies unusual warmth drops from sky
October momentarily gracious,
hope feeds richly
on waterfalls shared music
their coexistence separate and together
forever

no choreograph helps bloom
four part cycle of annual crush to reinvent
is prime mover,
nestled in bed later
earth spinning unstoppable
while their hearts flood arteries with
fresh damp oxygen, in same room
rain room
sane room has drips rolling down panes
strolling down lanes their robust dreams
are fed, smiles crest silent on their lips
crash as benign waves
eroding and replacing beaches subconscious,
tender black sand reveals creation myth
touch volcano leftovers
underfoot soft encouragement
to travel onwards in cover
of luminescent night

(they hold hands in the dark, one taking the other before she falls asleep as well and they lie still in familiar, taken-for-granted sheets)

tangible hope

The low clouds today hold in a bit of warmth, keeping the day a few degrees above freezing. The grass remains a faint green with the rain, and a few leaves still decay along dusty curbs and lend the last remnants of autumn scent to the air. The shift is on towards winter, no turning back this year. Bicyclists bundle up, mittens make more appearances, large pots of soup become the choice for dinner, steaming things are appealing and comforting...

I felt the revolution today, within reach at the edge of my fingertips. It's a revolution of kindness, of sweetness - the smile of a girl selling organic apples at the market, the Turkish baker with a thick moustache who loves what he creates, the crowd of strangers in the densely used bookstore who are ready to offer suggestions and critical reviews, the offer of tea which stands open at all houses you visit, the pleasant durability and familiarity of red brick homes with raked yards, sunlight passing gently through large cold windows onto fleece blankets draped over our legs. It's a revolution not of the season, but of how we want to be.

It's scary yet liberating when we remember that we are the ones we're waiting for. We are responsible for our own happiness. We choose each day how to be, what to do, how to live, how much to work, how much to play, what to eat, how much to love and how much to fear. It's up to us to create a society that is not over-worked, drug-addicted, or sleep deprived. We need to practice kindness everyday - being kind to ourselves and each other. So often I forget, and I blame others for problems or hope for others to be our salvation. The world is only what we make of it, and each of our kind acts moves across the world like ripples on a lake or a beautiful figure skater on a frozen pond. We can be beautiful people with rich lives - sometimes we just need to take back the portions of our lives that we don't feel control over or move beyond the fear that keeps us from stepping up and doing things today that we were afraid of yesterday. We are acorns in the frozen loam waiting for spring, clippings of grapevines waiting to fill vats with crimson life, children learning to laugh and hug, old men whittling on the porch and keeping the neighborhood covered, lentils waiting to sprout in shallow loving water, the limitless echo of smiles that can move throughout all our lives if we all remember just a little more...

karma of empire, and our own (unrelated?) paths

Celebrity dance shows with glitter and rouge, serious-looking scientists talking about the eminent collapse of most of the world's fish stocks, and advertisements smearing and blaming political candidates fill the screens of three adjacent TVs at my gym. The images alight there like butterflies for me, curious and almost beautiful because of their sadness. I watch them while listening to music or the sound of my own heartbeat, as I'm not plugged in to the audio system that goes with them. Frivolity beyond the pale, an impending cultural and ecological crash, and chatter at a volume so negative it is hard to hear or even think about clearly. I guess you could call them choices of what to watch while you're exercising - I'm not sure what I would call them.

Some days I really feel like we're missing the point. I don't know quite what the point is, but my blind hands groping through life tell me that for the most part, we haven't found it yet. Sometimes, with my cold hands in the warm pits under a dog's legs, outside on a rainy November day, I can make out faint contours on the map that can lead us to joy and satisfaction. Often that's the best I can do, the best I have to offer. Moments, slices, cross-sections, whispers and smells, peripheral visions, a pointalist life of nuances and fleeting moments...

What do you see when the talking heads fade away? What do you want on a highway with no billboards? What do you eat in a farmer's market full of fresh foods? How do you travel to get beyond here and there? How do you live life without waiting for joy to come to you, while cultivating infinite patience?

Thanks for reading all my wonderings-out-loud. A few new folks recently said they've enjoyed reading my thoughts and that's always nice to hear. I'll keep on ruminating like a cow moving that grass down inside and back up again, and scribbling it on this electronic paper like an already fading jetstream in the sky.

reading the leaves

Hot wisps of roiling tea carry on up past my nose, headed for dissipation while I steal a sniff along the way. Jasmine-scented green tea - the smell always takes me back to my few months in China in 1998.

My friend Kim took me and a few other friends to various tea shops while she shopped for tea and teapots throughout Beijing and Nanjing. We would sit in the air-conditioned interiors, resting on thin cushions that adorned the dark, smoky wood interior of shops that were more comfortable than ancient, more timeless than archetypical. Little old women would serve us tea while Kim browsed and we engaged in small talk that was muffled by blending scents from giant glass jars on the shelves. We never spoke that much, as it was an odd adventure of the pleasant variety which proved entertaining enough in it's own right. Kim had the knowledge and the gusto to seek tea and pots, and it was amusing to sip hot teas all afternoon in the steamy, exotic funk of Chinese cities in the summer. The cold dry tea parlors always had an initial bite when you stepped in, but the tiny wrinkled smiles of the women and the nostalgic feeling we all get around Oriental carved wood designs were always enough to fight off the chill.

Today I sipped the tea, reminiscent of my past olfactory escapades, and perhaps for the first time fully realized that I'm living my life right now. Beyond my heartbeat, pulse, and brain functions, I'm choosing things all the time and these choices make up my life. Why is this thought significant?

I think we are told that so much of our lives is the time leading up to our lives - that after some point it will actually begin. Is it the B.A., the B.S., the Ph.D., the MBA, the J.D., the Salinger, the MSW, the MFA, the diploma of any kind? Is it moving away from home? Is it finding the person you are going to get hitched with? Is it when we make real money? Is it when we carry debt and prove that we can pay interest on it regularly? Is it when we suffer and therefore discover some of the Facts of Life?

I have no answers to these posited possibilities of lines in the sand. I do know, however, that it felt different today to think of my life. Liberating, scary, warm, introspective, and many other things as complex and simple as the tea I sipped. It's not going to start in the future. It's starting at every moment, and carrying forward into the future like ripples on the surface that are consonant or dissonant with the ripples of everyone else in my life and in the world. Today I took life with no cream or sugar, just hot and clear and full of the aromas of the journey across the Pacific and North America to my teacup. Tonight I hold it warm in my hands against the cold stars in the sky, and look at them both a little differently.

learn one, teach one, do one, transcend your own angst

Circling hands like clouds, I step slowly across the gazebo in the cold afternoon wind. One hand circles in front of my abdomen, the other passing in front of my face. I can hear my teacher's voice in my head, though I haven't seen him in five months. His tone of voice and manner of speaking help me focus in on the details of my tai chi practice. In an ironic twist, he is from Guelph where I practice now, though he lives in Palo Alto where I learned the form in the first place. In the irony of history, neither of us are little old Chinese men but we both have dreams...

In all that I do, when I'm mindful, I try to honor my teachers that have lived and attempted to share their life lessons with me. I think of my tai chi teachers as I relax my shoulders, retreat my lower back, and iniate movements with my waist. I think of my 12th grade English teacher when I see grammatical mistakes in books or websites and wince, wishing I could correct the work that isn't even mine. I think of my former partner from Dallas, who told me that I was sometimes too judgemental. I think of my friends at Magic who showed me that the majority of our culture is not what it seems. I think of Chuang Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher who said that small turtles and giant eagles don't see the world the same way (?...). I think of my mom who showed me over the years how to host an entertaining party. I think of my dad who aimed to not sweat the small stuff. I think of my friends who have encouraged me not to be so black-and-white but look for the sweet, velvety grays of life.

Though I aim to honor my teachers, sometimes I still wish I had a guru. Some dred-locked Indian mystic on a cushion on a mountaintop, or a small Japanese monk in a wooden templeat the foot of Mt. Fuji, or a kitchen goddess with a big flour-dusted apron in a farmhouse on a soft June morning. Someone who tells you what to do, someone who you give yourself over to wholly because you so trust their sagacity. Sometimes I wish for this because free will can be a pisser - what if I don't want to choose? Ha - choose. What if I get stuck like Hamlet and inable to act? Ha! - act. I'd follow the footsteps in the snow in front of me, except that they run every which way and seem to go in all directions. How to choose? How to evolve? How to change?

I've been told that keeping love in my heart will be enough. I hope so. I hope I can keep it in my heart, and I hope it will be enough. Where I'm at, the food is good, laughter is not uncommon, and new friends share good life with me.

Soft amber leaves twirl
down to rest on my feet, while
I ponder swift clouds.


Pear Sauce Recipe

Pick 30 kilos of pears from your friend's tree. Load them in the car, bring them into Canada (nothing to declare, carry on, carry on :-) Let 'em ripen for 10 days. Peel and quarter them into a big 'ol pot (maybe a quarter of the total at once). Steam/boil them in that same big 'ol pot with brown spices reminiscent of warm stone hearths, and a cup or two of water at the bottom. Mash 'em. Boil some more. Follow your bliss with a spoon :-)

Doing dishes after the long, dark tea time of the soul

We hosed down beets and carrots, loaded them in 10 lb. bundles in plastic bags, and tossed them into my sweetie's car with Ontario plates. Frost cold in the morning, pancakes digesting warm slowly my belly, we plan to drive them to Ipswich to deliver to a friend's farm. Twisting through Massachusetts countryside, car wants to fishtail with 700 lbs of root vegetables in the trunk, look at the imperial yellow and fading crimson leaves. Sun shines bright and almost defeats the cold, I sip fresh pressed apple cider and chat in a cross-section of time with dear friend in California, a lifetime away, pacing the grass under tall settled pines. We walk trails amongst trees and crops, dust crunching under stroller sleeping baby full of vigor. I imagine life among the fields, stone walls marking things ancient to me, roads twisting and not crowded. People gather and smile in the thick wooden barn, chilly and warmed by potluck, speak of farm seasons past and the baby eats a solitary pinto bean off my spoon, pacified.

It's passing my hand over something well-made from solid wood, it's a pondering vegetarian petting a vacant-eyed cow over a fence, it's hot cream of potato soup when you arrive cold and hungry, it's a bulky wool sweater pulled on first thing in the morning, it's your eyes telling me you'll be there, it's Occam's razor telling me to look again close to home, it's all these sentiments piled up in a picnic basket under a tree with us chillin' on the blanket

only living boy in Ontario

cold weather is creeping back in, without fanfare or being too pushy because it is eminent and inevitable. the trees bend gently in the colder winds, while the leaves twist lightly and twitch in the late morning sunshine. there is no resisting it, just like last and next winter. cold, dry, and bright for now, headed for cold and wet in a month or so.

I remember it, and feel strange at needing to remember it. It has been years since I've been around the bright, simple reds, yellows, ochres, oranges, rusts, and golds. The smells of dead plants and cold earth are sweet to me, perhaps because I've glossed over my childhood memories and carefully removed the bits about cold hands and feet, the flu, and shorter days...

For now, I'm basking in the sun coming through the window, not dozing but wide awake and dreaming of nothing in particular. I know the other side of the glass is cold - I don't need to go outside and prove it. Many cups of tea keep me warm inside, and I wear my scarf indoors to the amusement of my Canadian friends.

Where am I headed? Inwards, tunneling and burrowing in search of roots. I eat pumpkins, beets, apples, carrots, and other earthy vegetables. Brown spices color the soup that steams in front of me, giving me strength to wonder where my life is headed. I find it takes strength to wonder, to let go of my preconceived options, to recognize the fears that steer me, to see where my attachments really lie and why, to see what visions of the future I cling to with or without reason, to find out where my heart longs to go or stay...

May you be finding autumn warmth, wrapping the blankets closer to you as you reflect on the last year and where the next one will take you

10 days that shook my world

Frankly, I'm amazed at my own mind. As I sat on the cushion, hour after hour, day after day, I never failed to come up with bizarre, spontaneous, and sometimes even enlightening things to think about rather than calm my mind and just be in the stillness.

I'm a person with a mild addiction to music, my drug of choice for enhancing or steering the mood that I'm in or the one that I want to create. That's fine and dandy, until I'm resting on my gluteals on that little meditation cushion, in a dimly lit mediation hall on a converted farm in rural western Massachusetts, trying to just chill. Then, my own music comes back to haunt me. I'm sitting there, legs crossed, imagining myself to be looking as cool and serene as the Buddha, the ripples on my mental lake have finally settled, and I can smell the enlightenment cooking in just the next room. What happens next? Like someone put a quarter in the jukebox in a quiet central Pennsylvania roadhouse, the little arm of my tiny primate brain slides over, pulls one record from the many possible selections (curse my iPod, curse it for expanding my musical boundaries!) and drops it on the turntable. Next thing I know, clear as day, I'm nodding my head slightly to Fool in the Rain (Led Zeppelin classic), and wondering where my serenity went.

Throughout the 10 days, many songs came and went in my head. Perhaps the most frustrating ones are the ones that play over and over, or even worse just snippets of them on repeat. Some of Chris' Top Ten Neurotic Hits?

1) Fat Bottom Girls by Queen - hello?! where did that come from? I barely recognized it myself
2) Hard Candy by Counting Crows -not bad, wouldn't have minded it if not meditating
3) Guava Jelly by Bob Marley - classic, one of his original recordings, underproduced sound of just him and a guitar, great anytime you're hanging with friends in a chill setting, just not good for meditating in Massachusetts
4) Going Back to Georgia by Nancy Griffith w/the Counting Crows - another great one, good little ballad with harmonizing, boy I wished that would have gone away by day 5
5) Such Great Heights by the Postal Service - love that song! just not at 4:30 in the morning at the first mediation session
6) Here We Go - This is embarrassing, it's the unofficial/official rallying song for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Souvenir in my hippocampus from watching the Superbowl with 'Burgh friends in San Francisco. Thanks to Jeremy for stopping me from reaching nirvana...

Outside of the times that I wasn't too focused on wishing I was not in pain, or wishing that I had been deaf my whole life so I didn't have to hear the music, or trying to not go crazy, I think it was a wonderful experience to be there. 10 days of silence is very intense. It wasn't actually 10 days of silence for me. On day 2, I whispered to the teacher in answer to a question, "Sometimes." On Day 4, I said, "I think so, but sometimes my back hurts a lot." On Day 6 I said, "I'm feeling tingling sensations all over my body." Other than those moments I was totally silent. My roommate confirmed at the end of the course that I did not talk in my sleep.

10 days of silence is powerful. It really enables you to create a break in your life from all your ordinary routines, allowing you to make space for reflection and calm. Noble silence in the Vipassana meditation tradition means avoiding eye contact or physical contact with anyone else as well as vocal silence. You feel very much like you are on your own to cultivate a practice of inner work. There are past students of the technique there who help run the course so that you don't have to do much besides eat, sleep, brush your teeth, and meditate. They cook tasty vegetarian meals, set them out, do dishes after you, stock the bathrooms with necessities, and take care of any other material issues that arise. They do this because they feel that they got benefit from a Vipassana retreat for themselves, and want to facilitate that for others as well.

What did I discover? Hard to say in exact terms, but I ruminated on certain ideas again and again. I revisited the idea I've had before that I feel a strong need for security, and usually seek it by working to have other people like me and affirm me a lot. Out of this is growing a new dedication to work on develop a sense of security and meaning in my own self-worth - a path that I'm glad to be focusing on again. I had that moment where I realized that in general, I only really love myself, but I also had good moments where I felt like I could move beyond that at least temporarily and see a world greater than myself. I have taken home a good grounding in the recognition that everything in the world arises and passes away, and we can end so much suffering in our lives by remembering that and reacting less to the ups and downs of our lives. By reacting I mean aversion to unpleasant feelings and cravings for the pleasant ones, and the addiction cycles that begin with these aversions and cravings. I find it to be a powerful insight into the human condition, one which I had studied academically before but had yet to integrate into my life in a thoughtful way.

That's the basic rundown of my 10-day Vipassana experience. I highly recommend it, especially if you have at least a little bit of curiousity about self-examination through meditation. I can't say much more, except that in some ways, you had to be there. Oh, and I had the greatest roommate ever. Never kept me up at night, very accomodating, I hardly noticed he was there most of the time. Not very talkative, either, but seemed like a really nice guy.

sometimes a metaphor

Jazz is the music of our lives. Rich and complex, even in it's simplicity, gifted interpreters weave the message from slim black scribble to unpredictable tapestries that express countless faces if you just change the lighting a bit. It's music that is at times easy to approach, and at others complex and inscrutable. If the solo is slow and we want it fast, it's still going to be slow coming, and we can resist or trust and enjoy the flow, trying to tune in to the mind behind the thoughtful hands meandering down the piano. If it's sweet and warm, then we are blessed and it carries us through our own avenues of memories and hopes like a friend guiding us through a sun-ripened afternoon field. When it's dark, rough, and dissonant, we can dig deep for the experiences in our lives to understand, process, and grow into appreciation of this change of tune. After a good session, we've been taken everywhere and have come back to the silence that was there when it all began.

Pop music is what we wish the world was but can never be. Repetative, forced up tempo, catchy but with so little variation that we can't grow and mature. It's addictive in it's simplicity, glossing over or skipping completely the subtler complexities and sadness that we find throughout our lives. It starts warm, carries us high, and wraps up without having addressed anything bigger than our desire to avoid pain. We cannot grow with this being the rhythm of life - there is no challenge and no way to revisit it while renewing ourselves at the same time.

To grow we have to acknowledge the sadness without wallowing in it, feel the pain and let it pass. We must also avoid addiction to the joys, for they will pass as well. Everything changes, nothing lasting forever, least of all ourselves. In this process of letting go of our attachment to both the sweet and the bitter, we begin to transcend and recognize the process that carries all of us onwards in the rushing stream of the beautiful mysteries of life. I think there is joy to be found in this process of letting go and beginning to watch the intensities of life from at least a little distance away. Lessons aren't lost, and it's not a life devoid of feeling and meaning. Rather we avoid losing ourselves in the attchment to the ups and downs. The beauty of life beyond our narrow sense of self is tangible all around us, in the eyes of friends, family, and strangers who are all the same. We can feel it laying in the sunshine and green grass, when a cloud passes over and we feel the faintest chill for the first time each September. It's the same as the buds pushing out in April, tender and destined for a luscious summer before falling and decaying in the street. It's the feeling of being made of the same basic elements as the stars in the night sky, just arranged a little differently in space and time.

May you find a little detachment, a little peace, a little quiet space on the side of the river to pull ashore and eat peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat while your kids play in the warm afternoon.

at a loss for words

So I've reached the sunset on my summer travels, the last planned event of my meandering. Today I'm headed into a 10-day silent retreat in Massachusetts, from which I will return on the 17th of September. I'm a bit nervous, but very excited for self-discovery and doing something that is so new to me. I don't even have a regular meditation routine in my daily life, let alone for any length of time. Thanks to the friends who recommended it and steered me towards it - may I come out as sane and thoughtful as you.

Also thanks to all my friends who I've been spending good life with here on the east coast. It's been wonderful and heartwarming to be amongst loved ones so much. I'm already looking forward to the next time around...

how now free-range cows

Not the greatest picture of me, I know - I'm just trying to get a bit more visual with my blog every once in a while. If it looks like I'm trying to take a picture of myself while squinting into the sun at the highest point east of the Mississippi (6650-ish feet, in the Blue Ridge Mountains in western N. Carolina) after just running two miles up the steep trail to get there, well, there's a reason for that.

It's beautiful there, full of lush, green forests with lots of moisture in the air and on the ground in the form of countless springs and creeks running every which way. To the east the Blue Ridge mountains roll down into the piedmont area of N. Carlina, and to the west is the Tennessee border, with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park stradding both sides of that border. Life is old here, older than the trees...

I came to North Carolina to visit Earthaven - an ecovillage with about 50 members situated perhaps 40 miles east of Asheville (Asheville being the westernmost center of civilization in the state -Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, and all the others are central and eastern). I spent a three day weekend there, talking with the good folks who are tending the earth and their lives on the 325 acre sight. That site is arranged into small neighborhoods with names like the Hut Hamlet and Village Terrace, where clusters of houses share things such as composting toilets, electrical infrastructure, and water sources.

They focus their lives and work on the principle that they and many others refer to as sustainability - living with an aim to keep our demands on the ecosystems low in terms of energy and resource. Their manifestations of this work include keeping the whole ecovillage off the grid for power. They produce their own electricity from photovoltaic solar panels and a small hydrolectric turbine that is spring fed and produces about 1 kilowatt consistently, 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. They are just beginning to clear some small areas for farmland so that they can grow more of their food and be more self-reliant than they are now.

So that's the physical description of the place. What is the feel of it? Really bright, technologically capable hippies tinkering with everything from experimental building to wood gas engines. When I first arrived I was greeted by two naked children heading to the sauna and then the bath, who politely informed of the location where I could find someone to help me register as a guest. The houses are stuck right in amongst trees and gardens. I bathed all three days sans soap in the creek there (so cold, butt pastoral nonetheless...). On a given evening some folks might gather to watch movies about the Dalai Llama or media coverage of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They require that all new houses built there are very energy efficient with passive solar situating. There is a natural medicine/herb business that is just beginning to flourish on site. They have composting toilets. I think you get the picture. It's a great place, worth a visit and certainly some thought. If you're nearby, call ahead and then check it out. www.earthaven.org

I took the train home from North Carolina up to Philadelhia on Tuesday. I spent that evening at my friend Sam's house, recovering from the long trip up from Durham where I sat next to the skinniest woman I have seen in a long time, from Long Island (don't forget to pronounce the 'g'), who was a very nice grandmother complete with a large ziploc full of sugar-free candies left over from her visit with the grandkids. She was peddling them like a pusher in the ghetto, forcing them on me as I glanced peripherally a the Indian gentleman in a suit who was visibly tense, apparently from being seated amongst mostly black folks headed north on the train. In case you're missing it in life, Amtrak always keeps it real... anyhow, back to the journey.

I decided to bike up from Philly to my hometown of Bethlehem, and it was a fine day for it. I cruised along through a mix of farm country, tract homes, and giant corporate parks housing drug companies and defense contractors. The weather was sweet - after a hot, humid time in Durham, the high was less than 80 degrees with overcast skies. A cool mist would fall from the sky every twenty minutes for so, keeping me just damp enough that I swear I felt an autumn chill in the air. Next thing I know, I've landed in meat-packing land somehow. It's not gritty urban industrial, but rather large slaughterhouses and packing mills placed right along the rural roads among the green fields. On one stretch of road, I'm suddenly right next to a beef packing plant. I mean I can reach out and touch the hedges which abut the pens where the animals are kept while they're still pets, not yet patties. There are juniper bushes to block drivers from being able to see in, but you can see the top of the screens above them and hear the cows mooing and shuffling around. And the smell - I can't tell you exactly what it was like, but it was bizarre and thick in the morning air. It was something probably like a paving crew working next to a McDonalds while someone fixed a gas leak across the street. To boot, there are these three Mexican guys trimming the hedge to keep it neat and boxed, working slowly down the building. The look at me like I just stepped off the train or something, as I'm decked out in spandex, all wet with the misty rain, and straining my neck a bit out of morbid curiosity to look into the animal pens for a glimpse of the action. I smiled, they gaped, the juniper bushes gave off a delightful scent that battled with the mystery meat, and I rode off into the gathering clouds. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, full of factory farmed meat, people making weapons of mass destruction, little bottles of soma, migrants thousands of miles from their home, and lots of other crazy things. But it faded in the back of my mind as I headed onwards, thinking of lunch and friends and getting the wet spandex off me as soon as possible.

Take some time this week, especially on the east coast, and take a walk in the rain, help out a local recently arrived immigrant, and consider vegetarianism. Share all these with a loved one, live a little more lightly on the earth together. I could hear the cows telling me across the hedge that these were their last requests...

Deep South trance

I finally made it to the South, more specifically to eastern North Carolina, town of Durham. It's a beautiful place, full of the feeling of the South as well as Duke University. Went to a minor league baseball game, featuring the Durham Bulls, and had a great time eating french fries and shouting encouragement to some players who looked like they were trying hard even though few people in the crowd knew their names or anything about them. I felt very at peace, caught up in the slower pace of life here and enjoying a hometown sport as a Yankee visitor.

I wandered around the Duke University campus while my host did a few tasks at her new graduate student office. It's a nice place, with big stone buildings built from old tobacco money in the 1930's. They have a huge collection of gardens, very manicured and expansive by my standards. I wandered past magnolias, pines, hyacinths, beech trees, some pin oaks, and flowers whose name I'll never know.

I moseyed into the "Asiatic Aboretum" which was an odd and pretty mix of Asian trees and shrubs as well as some palm trees and native North Carolinian plants. The feel of Asia was greatly enhanced by the simple gates with the Chinese style roofs that you pass under as you enter. I thought it was a nice gesture that they have this corner of the gardens. But I found a moment of true serenity when I came across a secluded peace garden, with a small Japanese style hut at the edge of a pond with a bamboo-edged bridge crossing it. I sat on the minimalist wooden benches and took it all in - the pale green water, the soft gray gravel path, the sparse bushes along the banks, the delicate fingers of a few Japanese maples.

The plaque there said that it was a Garden for Peace, so that the world may find peace through the beauty of such places. I certainly found peace - the serenity of this place in the middle of my summer journeys touched me deeply. I felt the possibility for peace if people can come together in beautiful places and share quiet moments together, where we cease some of endless chatter (like blogging :-) and rationalizations about our lives, where we can reflect in the stillness, where we don't have to fear the abyss that Nietzsche said would stare back, where we can ponder our possible situation in the universe, where we can be grateful to be together with friends and loved ones, where we can hold hands and appreciate the simple beauty of each other. Keeping it simple, keeping it simple...

that old journey of a thousand miles

Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong time, or the wrong place, or some combination of those two. I just feel out of sync with the culture I see around me. Why do I think that?

I feel like in our modern American culture, we rarely value leading life at a slower, less frenetic pace in order to reflect on what we really want in life. Sometimes I think I'm crazy because I like the idea of a 34 hour work week like in Italy or Norway, with 4 or more weeks of vacation every year. If you read The Economist each week (don't worry, I just browse it every once in a while so I can throw stones), you'd think that any group of people or culture that isn't willing to work more hours at more unpleasant tasks to outcompete others is going straight to hell in a handbasket. What would we do without constant competition? We'd lose innovation and efficiency, and some other than the fittest will survive. Can you believe it? I think I'll be okay with a little less innovation and efficiency if we also don't make poor people work more jobs and more hours while they get fewer real dollars, increasingly inadequate healthcare, and a huge debt burden facilitated by a consumer-driven culture and extractive (predatory) lending. Whew! Had to get that off my chest - it seems to bubble to the surface in me every few months, and I don't like the anger any more than you do. So...

I'm looking to create a life where I value time, a relaxed pace, plenty of activity that allows me to reflect, loving freely (different than free love :-), inner peace, and significant amounts of built-in free time in my life ('cause you all know that it fills up even if you create it, and if you don't you end up really behind). If you a lot of these things in your neighborhood, let me know and I'll come buy property there with you. If not, how can we create them? I know that they exist in all of us, and I know that we are all trying. I'm less interested in bashing the world than I am in saying that I've been watching more TV and print media in the past week, and honestly it's freaking me out a bit :-) I think I need to cut back.

I'll offer up a secret dream of mine - to be a reference librarian in a small town somewhere in quiet state or province. Who knows what the reality will be, but I imagine it to be very satisfying - really set hours (no overtime self-sacrifice), helping people find information they want, quiet work environment, I could read whenever work was slow, and probably keep my blood pressure down my whole life. In reality it might be dull, but maybe some day I'll give it a try. Oh, and I really want pleasant coworkers for lively, intelligent conversation throughout the day.

I don't know what to do with this desire for a quiet, slow-paced life. Where can I find it? Who else wants it? Sometimes I'm afraid that I'll never get it, or I'll get it at the cost of being close to friends who are leading more fast-paced, very full lives. Perhaps I should stop yakking about it and try it out. That seems to work well for most things that I sit around being neurotic about - so if I can muster up the courage, it'll be a great experiment of my life.

Signing off on a cloudy day, warm and humid and full of possibilities. Thinking of you all...

"All actual life is encounter." - Martin Buber

finally a picture

So what's it all about? Steel? Wood? Glass? Stone? Screws or nails? These are the big questions. This is me and my steel house in early June. Loved it!

robust august loosened and tousled

The Blue Dress for Weddings

feel me crumble
disheveled, poised to reinvent
just like yesterday,
can you forgive my previous
failed attempts?

I'll always keep coming back
to you
and all the swirling overload,
I'll plow in spite of rocks
and plant in spite of drought
laugh in spite of pain
and dance in spite
of silence -
eventually if we
(that's you and I)
press forward
but remembering to
sometimes not press,

well then
we'll get back to harmony.
It'll be nice
to discover it in our lives

rather than expire
this present form
without a sense
and then return to it anyway
like we always will

Build us of strong brick
laid by thoughtful hands,

spice us with blind
loving, dextrous
kitchen goddesses

slake us with hurricanes
humid mornings
and the first raindrops
in a hot afternoon garden

move our spirits
like a feverish dervish
and a child playing
by the river
singing to herself as she
perches
on the rocks

illuminate our paths
like sparkling all-knowing satellites
and divining rods
and tattered salty familiar maps
and tea leaves,
thoughtfully read before
dumped on the ancient garden

bass and treble
comingle and fade,
no more yin and yang
as the child has smoothed the
colors
with his tiny finger
and created
something bigger than us

pulling the curtains
wide, sunset pours in as I
rub your tired, warm feet

love's recovery

I saw it in bits and pieces, felt it in the breeze on a surprisingly cool August evening, saw it in the stars that came out to speckle the rural sky, tasted it in the sweet bites of mild chocolate cookies, heard it in the creak of the stairs in a loved and lived-in old house, felt it in the spaces in-between. I felt moments of faith, uncritical and unfiltered, allowing my own senses to quiet and to get gently washed away like rocks etched and loved by the surf. I felt faith in everyone around me doing the best that we can - I felt love between two dear friends getting married in the sunshine of a sweet grassy field and garden, I could almost taste the connection with the earth in the farms of the countryside, I felt the warmth of a life spent caring for each other as I danced with a great love in the fading evening.

So often I see something happening in the world around me, and my mind fills right away with too much criticism. I see a wedding and think of the statistics of failed marriages. I see a homestead out in the country and I think of all the resources it takes to live out there. I see city blocks aglow in the charge of an impending thunderstorm, but think of the ecological footprint of the city. It's been nice to let go of those immediate reactions and instead embrace the moment first, let myself be carried away. Listening to the ferries clanging on the Hudson river as I walk the Manhattan shoreline, smelling the pesto and sizzling cayenne on fresh vegetables at the sidewalk cafe, savoring the ice cream from a tiny parlor at a crossroads town, wrestling with a friend 'til we collapse in laughter and sweat and crumbled angst washed away in the draft from the window. The judgement is still there if I want it, right behind the door waiting to come in. And it is still quite useful in discerning many things about myself and this crazy world. But it feels so good to let it go a bit...

Sometimes this summer I've felt like I'm meeting life again in a new way, changing my filters and shaking up my own prejudices, judgements, and defenses. It feels beautiful! I haven't yet discovered a strong sense of direction from these experiences, but they are sweet and lull me to sleep through the August nights as we roll on towards autumn.


"And did you get what
you wanted from this life even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth."

- Raymond Carver



Whoever is reading this, I miss you and wish you well.

Old Mrs. Worthington in the red brick house

I see lists on posters and bookmarks in the houses of some of my more sweet, granola friends up here in Toronto: How to Create Community. The lists are long and full of good things-

Turn off the T.V.
Go outside
Volunteer at the local library
Throw a block party
Vote
Listen to your elders
Ride your bike
Take back the night
Barter for your food
Start a compost pile

I like all these things and many more. What are we trying to get at? There are so many things that seem to go hand-in-hand with a vibrant, local community. Small stores run by people we know, access to local foods, bakeries that we like to sit in while sharing coffee with friends, bike paths that get us all around town, not needing to lock our doors at night, spending less money to meet our needs...

What do we feel less good about? What is slowly or quickly moving across America and the world and replacing these things? Divided highways that our children can't cross safely, Wal-mart, homogenized big-box stores, fast food from far away places, drug addiction on the streets and in our homes, car-dependent lifestyles, more noise and fewer quiet nights with crickets, subdivisions without sidewalks...

I'm sitting in a small-town library, full of books and wam indirect lighting. There is a bank of computers with high-speed internet access, but there is a pleasant librarian who seems to know many of the patrons by name. There is a wooden floor that creaks a bit. There is a quilt on the wall made locally. There are flyers for the big Ontario fiddling festival in town next weekend. There are plaques that give credit to Shelburne Rotary Club or the Royal Canadian Legion for their sponsorship of renovations. There is a feeling of integration.

I'm not sure what I'm looking for, but I like these feelings of local communities. I want to create them in my own life and share them with everyone else. I want to sit on the porch when I'm 87, sipping lemonade and smiling at the families headed down to the park. I want to take care of others and be taken of, too. I want to fish in the creek and maybe even drink the water. I want to be able to compare this year's string bean crop with last year's, and the year before that, and the year before that, and...

Somedays I'm just dreaming, not knowing where I'm going but glad for the hundreds of hands and hearts of my friends who keep me from going too far astray. I carry a collection of pictures in mind of the place I'm headed, even though I've never been there before. They vanish as I approach, too, but I can grind up the clay and make new pots, or sew new clothes from the remnants of old cloth. It's enough to keep me going. Where is your future headed? Your life is a beautiful painting (mine happens to be an impressionist, pointalist view of the river like a 19th century French countryside). What will you paint next?

keeping the peace

Hot, humid weather broke this morning. I woke up to a sweet breeze coming in the windows of the cabin and the sound of the rushing, cold creek at the back edge of the property. The rain fell solidly for an hour, keeping the heat from being able to get a hold on today. Ate a fresh, local peach from Ontario for breakfast, thinking about sweet summer foods and feeling connected to the land. Sweet corn, peaches, lettuce, wild blueberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchinis of unusual size. Later on they'll be apples and pears and pumpkins, too. It's a nice feeling to be close to the fruits of the earth.

Yesterday I had a great day, remembering that I am only 28 years old. So young, and so priveleged to have done so many things with my life already. I sat with my feet in the water and listened to the sounds of rich life all around me. I've got good friends, good experiences, a loving family, and I finally got a compass (for $4.99 before heading out to the wilderness in a canoe). It's a good start - I hope I will remember this feeling of calm in the years and decades ahead...

smell of tomatoes on the vine, in the sun, can you stand it?

Swimming naked in lakes... watching sunsets fade slowly over cornfields... music festivals filling my head with what will be deep fond memories... running along the river, racing it to sea but losing each time that I have to turn back home.

I rediscovered some of my own soul, listening to the sweet sound of gospel knock on the door of my own ideas about what I like and don't like, then kicking it down like a blast of cool wind and rain that just tore across a desert. Guitars and drums thumping, compelling beyond strumming and inviting the gently rowdy crowd to their feet. I clap and sway, the old man with the beard wailing on the mandolin, the deep voice ringing cosmically true from the black man in small black glasses, the country girl on guitar closed her eyes so she can't rightly open them but she sways with something, you can see the hand of someone moving inside them, fingers wiggling behind the eyes and pushing lightly on their backs in time with the unstoppable maple sap they just tapped...

I got to drive a tractor across some farm fields. A big one, hard to shift but with surprisingly responsive steering. So much fun! Then I ground some spelt (similar to wheat, but with less gluten so wheat-sensitive people can more often eat it) berries into flour by hand which was great. Planning to bake with it soon. Banana bread...

I made some pottery on a wheel with a great teacher who let me screw up only a bit but left me feeling like I did it all myself. That was divine, feeling the soft clay turn in my hands, feeling the centrifugal and centripetal forces, getting in touch with the rotation that makes up all of us down to our atoms and apples, watching evolution unfold as my stationary fingers meet the smooth rotating surface to etch new possibilities and ancient patters to old to be trite. Creating useful things...hmmm... that's certainly part of my calling... tangible objects crafted with only patience and an unimagined future that will last as long as people love well-made things.

Loving the place, loving the people, working on loving myself and learning to wait...

so that's where I left it...

With much regret I must announce that after spending two weeks in the wilderness of mid-northern Ontario, I was neither transformed into Henry David Thoreau (as I had previously hoped I might be) nor did I fully let go of existence and discover my true Buddha nature (which would have been a decent showing on my part, I think, as well). I did however get to stand about 30 feet from a truly wild moose and her calf, watching them watch me while they nibbled on some tender lily stalks in a marshy offshoot of a lake. We shared a moment together, accompanied by the occasional slap of a beaver tail in the smooth dark water nearby. It was a lovely few minutes before dinner, as the sun was setting behind the mountains and water dribbled off both their long, stringy beards into the lake.

I came to the lakes to hear myself and the sounds of nature. Perhaps I came to live deliberately, to taste the marrow of life and see if I know it already.

I heard much silence, and I saw much beauty. I saw patience, and felt the cradling of water. I heard myself slowly letting go of some attachment. I heard the loons' hollow, serene and haunting cries in the evening. I saw sunsets that couldn't be anything but beautiful. I felt a world that is fine without people, and mildly tolerant of us during our species' sojourn searching for meaning.

Again I feel a common thread that runs through us and our ecosystems, the air we breathe and the living water we drink, the views we cherish out our windows and the homeless sleeping on tired, dirty pavement, chainsaws and beavers' teeth, love and frenetic action, wood and plastic, electric lights and teakettles on cast-iron stoves. The thread is elusive yet perceptible, fleeting if we stare too hard and too long but always tangible at the periphery while we smile on sunny afternoons with friends. It's feng shui de-mystified and Freud when he wasn't neurotic. It's so much that of course we can't grok it all at once, but it's always there in the brushstrokes that make up our memories.

What can we do to cultivate it, shelter it, draw on it, grow it, spread it? Get out, love life - go to Fairmount Park, Prospect Park, Central Park, Golden Gate Park, People's Park, Hanover Park, Exhibition Park, The Mall, Peers Park, or even better the park of your choice. Walk barefoot in the grass, offer a stranger some home-made food, hold hands with friends, do whatever... The whole universe probably started with a giant, homogeneous explosion, is now divided up into usable elements that make up us, and will likely eventually cool to about 4 degrees Kelvin and slowly pull itself back together in a giant, shrinking disk of energy. Remember where we came from in this tiny slice of cosmic time - we evolved over tens and hundreds of thousands of years of just us and the forests, rivers, lakes, and plains. If we feel down in the earth to explore our roots, there are useful things there to remember, if only vague impressions of a time gone by that we may want to feel again sometime in the future.

Have I gone totally granola hippie-dippie? For a little while :-) but I recommend it every now and then - I always feel like I'm onto something bigger than myself...

wilderness reflection from the lakeshore

far from highways
sweet chunks of granite and quartz
split sheer along hillsides and jagged ridges,
cluttering the forest with loose interglacial sparkling love,
beautiful in the patience
of nature.

thundercloud mist
rolls mountaintops savvy,
grays broad-leaf maples
lush raindrops collect

wind bending treetops
birds arise in sudden silent
flock turning in the dark
afternoon wind
the smells of deep pine crowded lakes
are so foreign to city pavement smog,
incomprehensible while
I'm adrift in this golden twilight
burning towards purple.

We must save this, wild
part of ourselves with
ancient roots,
the memory of bone tools
in our rough hands,
the crackle of firewood
and patience of a rhythm
so slow we can hurry nothing.
How can we reverse trends
curve straight lines
let the freeze and thaw
and sensual spring work
on our ossified, cancerous
ideas of controlling
the universe?

How can we return to simple lives,
the patterns that
never went silent but
were drowned by steel mills, internal combustion, photons from screens,
mass-produced drugs, the silencing effect of
lipstick, the hum of chest
freezers?

Paddle me to shore,
steer me in the rich sounds of a bustling lake,
for we're tired and full of love
in our hearts-
some simple food and
emerging stars will tide
me 'til tomorrow
when we both wake
to create our world.

crossroading

Reporting from the country with universal healthcare, a state-protected dairy industry, and lots of thoughtful, kind people...

I'm off to Killarney Provincial Park in about an hour, to canoe with an old friend for two weeks in something resembling wilderness (occasional other campers, hopefully lots of bear and moose, and definitely some silence). I'll be out of touch and out of tech completely until July 24th, so look for more white-knuckle blogging action soon thereafter.

To all those who I hoped to talk with in person before leaving, know that I'm thinking of you, palms together and face raised to the sky in thanks. Life is so good, and you have all been good to me. I'm just working to let it all in, flowing through me while I try to create a good life.

Peace from the east...

home on the range

So I sit and ponder life, munching on some free-range buffalo summer sausage that a wonderful couple down the valley gave us when we stopped by this afternoon. Their ranch is small, about 330 acres, and straddles the river/creek that flows with a ribbon of green down both banks in between desert rock bluffs. It's a sweet little spot amidst high winds and snowy peaks, a little haven for meat and love in the high country.

I'm off on the train tonight, watchin' the wheels all the way to Buffalo NY, from where I will head on two wheels to Guelph, Ontario for my next adventure in the wilderness above the Great Lakes. It's been great here in Jefferson, Colorado, building with friends and learning new things. I will miss it. Some peopel have mentioned the lack of pictures, so I promise to post some as soon as I can.

Life is so good, full of options and produce and hope and green grass and more. If you're following, I'll try to write once more on Friday or Saturday before heading out of contact for two weeks. Until we meet again, on this screen or in person, may you find peace, contentment, and all that you're looking for.

starlight through a working dawn

Small keystrokes softly fill my
dark room,
screen below and spread of
Milky Way above
bending thick and pale across
deepening black sky -
satellites wander to fill it,
beaming our lives full of
distant radio waves
echoing our needs and
wants

But tonight it's windy silence,
sweeping through aspen
silver leaves,
new and delightful like
snow in alpine fields
of green.

Sleepy morning sunrise,
red against distant rainclouds
so close as our mountains
scrape the sky,
I smile rumbling over
dirt roads down to
our house in progress.

Dust clouds float up,
our faithful dog jumps
out of the car,
I slip on my sunglasses
and stretch tired shoulders,
deltoids twitching in
cold bright dawn.

I don't plan to die with a hammer in my hand,
but I know a bit about what John Henry was trying to say.

Sometimes the world is so beautiful it just wells up inside me, and I am overwhelmed by it all. Those days are nice, a counterpoint to the darker ones filled with more doubt and confusion. We can make our lives so good, and create so much satisfaction for ourselves.

don't just peel the onion, get a new cookbook

It was a beautiful day in Jefferson, Colorado today. We arrived down in the valley to continue working on the strawbale house at about 7:15 am, about our usual time. The sun was up and warming the cold night air, and eventually it was warm enough to take off my outer-layer sweatshirt and just work away in my brown, familiar wool sweater. By noon some clouds had filled the sky, and a large black one eventually came to hang over our worksite. The wind picked up, but it never rained fully on us. Beautiful layers of storm clouds passed just south, and we could see them blow across the open plains and over the Continental Divide, dumping rain and obscuring the snow-topped peaks in a steely mist. Lightning bolts sporadically came down on the horizon, cutting cool white lines against the gray and leaving no audible thunder behind. It was a great day to stand on the edge of the roof and look out at intense, dynamic nature and wonder what my place is in the world. It got cold again, so I wrapped up in my sweatshirt and kept on swinging my hammer.

These past few weeks I've really felt like I'm beginning to let layers of my "self" or identity fall away slowly. It's fun to let go of aspects of ourselves that we so strongly identify with - a career, a routine, a habit, an addiction, a worldview, whatever. In doing so, we can listen to ourselves better and hear more in the world around us. We can move beyond thinking that we know, or that we have it all figured out, and approach life with more questions and an open mind.

I think of my stepmother who left a long and developed career as a surgeon to develop a new life performing music, first just on flute and now on a variety of instruments. How scary it must have been to leave an established path (even ones which we don't like) and strike out in a new direction! It is tough to give up a feeling of security that comes with routine, and try brave new things.

This is the same as when we let go of old ideas about who we are. What if we are not an athlete, funny, pleasing, easy-going, or a know-it-all? It's scary to think that we might be ignorant about much of the world around us, or that we really do care about our ecosystem enough to make our footprint on the world lighter. What if we're musically talented and like performing? What if we don't like our job but love teaching? What if our passion is to open an alpaca ranch and apiary in rural Montana? That's some scary stuff :-)

It's fun and terrifying to roll with what emerges in ourselves. I'm trying to roll with not knowing about the future, with not knowing what continues to cause pain in my knee, with really wanting to learn to play guitar, with seriously considering becoming a tai chi teacher, with wondering if I want to live in Palo Alto, or anywhere in the Bay Area, or in California at all. I'm trying to smile as often as I can, and let go of taking myself and my life so seriously.

What are you going to explore today? What do you really want to do before you die, or before you go to bed? Sign up for the pottery class, dig out the sketchbook, dust off the chess set, stay home on a Friday night to read, tell the barrista at your local independent coffee shop that she's cute, cook something you've never tried, give up refined sugar for a week, buy a bike. Tell that person you love them, go ahead... now that's scary, but so good.

Futures in big meadows

Walked the Continental Divide this morning, wrapped in the cold flowing clouds that blew in from the eastern side. Damp, white, and swirling, they obscured the peak we were aspiring to climb, so we rambled up and down the trail at 11,500 feet instead, crossing rocky meadows and playing in the snow. Small flowers like forget-me-nots, Indian paintbrush, and miniature daisies are sprinkled among the scruffy pines. We had our Labrador retriever with us for companionship, and breathed the thin air with delight at being alive.

These days I'm hearing the laughter of children - specifically the sounds of Tan, the son of my friend Peggy, and Kai, Peggy's nephew. Full of robust, knockabout energy, they tumble through life bouncing off things and living large, laughing and crying easily. It's nice to be around them, thinking about where they are and where they're headed. What can we do to make the world a better place for them when they are our age? How can we take care of ourselves and our world so that it is a cleaner, safer, more accessible, more reliable, and more sound place than it is now? How can we take more positive action in our lives and rely less on our own rationalizations for why we do the things we do now?

Right now I'm enjoying the clean air and sunshine, honest work and honest play. Looking forward to more living and learning with friends as my journey continues eastward. Thinking about how to settle down, how to be more patient with myself, what to focus on, what to let go of... Looking forward to seeing you soon.

"I won't be asked to do my share when I'm gone, so I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here..." Ani DiFranco

hearing the wheels

Sat under a large umbrella along an outdoor pedestrian mall in Boulder today, sipping a smoothie and watching life go by. It was relaxing and sweet to see the dark clouds slowly come over the Front Range of the Rockies, rain for perhaps twenty minutes, and then yield to the sun and leave the fresh rain scent behind. Heard the raindrops, the playful chatter of idle teenagers on summer vacation, the sound of cars nearby, bits of conversations, soft thunder, and running water smoothing over the brick. Humid and familiar...

Had a thought last night that perhaps there is no best purpose or use of my life. Perhaps I can just follow what feels good, keep good intentions at heart, and let go of some of my arbitrary standards that I use to judge my life and the lives of others. Judgement is a tough thing to work on for me. We make small judgements and discriminations all the time in our basic preferences of existence, but then we don't want to be judgemental with other people. It's a fun, long learning process of letting go for me. I once dated a girl, who informed me months after we were no longer dating that I was a much better fit for her than past boyfriends except that I was much more judgemental. Whoa! I've been chewing on that one ever since...

I'm off to hear what is offered to me by the world, as suggested by a few friends. May you be having a good day, and doing a thing or two that challenges your usual routines and comfort zones.

swiftly flowing dream of water

Sometimes it's hard to be patient. I'm waiting and listening, listening as hard as I know how to the world around me. I'm listening for answers to all my questions, but mostly what I hear is the wind in the aspen trees whispering in a language I can't understand in words. I want to know so many things - how much is enough, where to take a stand in my life, what work is worth doing. I like the idea of doing what I love, but I love so many simple things that I can rarely piece it together into a complete life in my mind.

I listen to the crunch of packed gravel trails under my feet - I ruminate as I walk the uneven brick sidewalks in Philadelphia - I try to clear my mind as I hit the hot pavement in New York Augusts - I try to open my mind biking through the old, tired black neighborhoods of north Oakland. Can you strain the muscles in your ears? It's hard when you don't know what you are listening for. I keep telling myself I'll know it when I hear it. Is it the laughter of the children I miss in Palo Alto? Is it the touch of a lover's hand on my face? Is the scent of trees as I ride through early morning cool air? The patterns are there, repeated in endless ways and in countless themes. I know some things that feel good. Where is my internal compass so that I can navigate all these wonderful things in life and arrive somewhere?

I'm trying to be patient. I feel the rush of the currents around me, swirling over rocks and splashing over weirs and full of salmon hurrying the other way. I feel it when my friends get married, go to grad school, buy houses, and many other things. I love them all dearly - it's just hard when I have yet to feel sure enough about one path to take these steps.

tiny blue flowers
fill alpine meadows, bright clouds
roll over my thoughts.

silver dollar leaves
flutter dark before midnight,
blue sky sinking slow.

Dessicated but grateful

Our silver boxes slid across the landscape with little fanfare, chugging along through mountain passes and valleys from Oakland all the way to Denver. We followed the rivers inland from the sea, until we reached the mountains where the water switches sides and flows to the Atlantic Ocean instead. The train is very quiet inside, so the scenic views do resemble paintings on display in a museum with recycled air.

As we crossed Nevada, I enjoyed looking at the harsh landscape of high desert and mountains. The soil is often white with salt and cracked from the absence of moisture. The hills are covered with loose gravel, sand, and occasional boulders popping up out of the earth. There is almost no shade, as there are no trees either. Occasional remnants of towns lie close to the railroad, marked usually by abandoned piles of scrap metal, forgotten to everyone and viewed only by travelers who will never know their history.

I find Nevada beautiful because it resists us. With no water and no arable soil, we can take root there no better than the basin sage brush which barely holds to the sandy soil and eventually dries up and blows away. Perhaps every 50 miles or so there will be a creek or small river winding through the landscape, and along its banks there may stand a few alder or cottonwoods with pale green leaves looking tired in the sun. The greenery fades to some low grass as you move away from the banks, and within perhaps twenty yards there is only sand again. It gives a nice view to break the stark brown monotony, but there is no hope there under the Nevada sun.

During most of our time passing through Utah, I was pondering the inside of my eyelids. Not much to report there, for sure.

Now I’m in a high valley in Colorado, in a town called Jefferson. Jefferson is a small collection of buildings along a state highway, with thousands of acres of land spread around them. The land is divided into large parcels of 40 acres or more, divided by uninspiring barbed wire strung along small metal posts. Signs prohibit trespassing, but I’m surprised that anyone bothers to walk the fence to put them up. For those of you familiar with the high plains of the west, this is probably a sight you’ve seen before.

Jefferson is nestled right against the Continental Divide, so you can look up from the valley floor at 10,000 ft. and see the surrounding mountains with smears of remaining pure white snow at nearly 14,000 ft. The slopes are covered with aspen, various types of pine, or nothing at all. The sky is large and open (almost as big as Montana), and the clouds are in beautiful, intricate patterns as they blow over the Rockies from the west. The grass waves in the wind, and small creeks cut across the land with bright green reeds all around them. It seems to me a wild, hostile, and often beautiful place, high and dry and far away from the rest of the world.

I reflect on all this scenery as the wind makes another attempt to blow me off the wall I’m working on. I’m trying to attach big 10 inch rafters from the beam of the strawbale house I’m helping construct to the top of the outside wall. If you turn perpendicular to the wind holding one of these 14 foot boards, look out below ‘cause either you or the board is likely to go down. A small saving grace is that the wall is 18 inches wide, exactly the width of the strawbales which we will soon stuff into it. Walking along it is not so bad, and in fact when I’m not carrying something that functions as a sail to lift me off the house, I often pause and gaze out over the valley and mountains and smile out from under my hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses.

As I swing my hammer and help this house to materialize, I find some peace of mind and reflect on life. I’m really enjoying giving my life away in helping a friend to build a high-quality house. I’ve got a comfortable bed to sleep in at night, good food and conversation with some other friends who have come to build, and a dog named Gave that is the Platonic essence of warm canine companionship for all of us who are working. I’m glad that I am here, bundled up to fight the wind and the bright sun, chopping wood and occasionally carrying water. It’s honest work, and I feel honest at the end of the day.

How can we be more grateful more often? If you’re reading this, you’re probably a friend of mine or a friend of a friend (the same thing in my book). This probably means that you’ve gone to college, and perhaps are headed back for more. There’s a decent chance you eat organic food sometimes. You probably try with mixed success like me to get a good night’s sleep. You’ve probably got friends far and near who like to be with you. You live in places like Philadelphia, Berkeley, Austin, Portland, Washington DC, or other cities where the action is at. We all lead full lives, and certainly have plenty of opportunities to enrich them even more.

So what’s life all about? I don’t know at all, but I’m liking the idea of keeping it simple. I’m enjoying building things, helping people talk about difficult questions, volunteering, cooking for friends and new acquaintances, leaving places better than I found them, riding on trains, reading thoughtful books, and plenty of other stuff that I always seem to babble about in these writings (or worse yet when you let me ramble on in person :-). I’m grateful for you, my friends. I’m grateful that I’ve had a chance in life and that I’m trying to make the best of it. Money, security, career, marriage, what movie to rent on Friday night, these are all big questions that are coming, I know. But I’m always glad to be able to focus on the simple, the real, the tangible in front of me, and if it’s not going great today, then I want to make it better tomorrow.

Quote from R.E.M. – “We’re dug in deep, the price is steep, the auctioneer is such a creep…” You can feel that, can’t you? It’s in the world around us. But, we can be different and better. Let’s give our lives away and be loved for it.

Gathering for travels

I'm taking off on my journey tomorrow, eastward bound on the Amtrak train headed for Denver, then Buffalo, then to Guelph, Ontario by bike. I'm looking forward to listening - to the sound of the big diesel engine, the sound of silence in the wilderness above the Great Lakes, the sounds inside my mind as I sit in 10 days of meditation, the sound of the smile of an old friend. I'm not at all sure what I'm listening for, but I'm hoping that I'll know it when I hear it.

Sometimes I just need to take a step back, 'cause I'm too wrapped up in my own life to see straight. I get too invested in an idea, a vision, a visionary, my own worldview, or whatever. Sometimes I'm too ready to divide the world into black and white, all or none, the perfect or the fallen, the Right Path or some Other Path. This summer I'm looking to chill, and remember that it really is only life after all. I want to develop a clearer sense of what I want, and look at my life as a large selection of choices. They are all possibilities, all with infinitely different possible outcomes, all full of love and sadness and learning and failing and succeeding.

The world is a crazy place, rich and swirling and blending and dissolving with climate change, genocide, meditation retreats, fresh fruits in the summer, really fast computers, alienation, blind faith, innocent children, hopeful lovers, technofixes, silent snowy nights, self-help workshops, digital music, dancing, and everything else... What are we meant to do? I just want to be good to other people, good to myself, and good to the next generation of children growing up. How can we help each other?

weld metal, carry water

I flip the big switch on the arc welder and it hums to life, generating 65 amps of current for all my welding needs. One cable comes out of the unit and clamps onto the piece - a 4 by 6 gate that is my first welding project. This cable is the ground wire, ready to carry the electrical current away from the piece. The other cable ends in a big insulated spring clip that holds the rod I use to weld. I have a long steel rod clamped and ready to go, about 12 inches long with a green coating to keep the weld from oxidizing as I go along. I flip my super dark visor down to protect my eyes from the intense UV light generated while welding, and pull on a large pair of heavy leather gloves.

I strike an arc - touching the rod to the workpiece to start the electricity flowing through - and begin to form a small puddle of molten steel about the size of a dime. Moving along the seam I continue to slowly swirl the pool as I advance forward, melting the next eighth of an inch while the tail end of the pool solidifies behind me. It's a bit of a trick to keep the rod from sticking to the piece, not burn a hole all the way through my steel tubing, and to really melt both sides of the seam I'm trying to join so as to get a strong connection. I'm certainly an amateur, but this weld is going to come out fine.

My hands are shaking a bit, and I wonder if that is from too much concentration and tightening of my muscles. I think about carrying five gallon buckets of water last night to irrigate some young oak trees on the Stanford campus - maybe my arms are just tired. Maybe I have the same shakes that my grandfather had for most of the time I can remember. He had mild shakes that come with hands anxious to do work - fidgeting, rubbing together, tapping, playing with whatever is at hand while looking for the next useful task to do. Practictioners of medicine sometimes call them "essential tremors" if you shake and there is no particular cause that they can pinpoint (Parkinsons, some kind of epilepsy or palsy, etc.). I think my grandfather had essential tremors of a different kind. He had the kind that came with the inertia to stay in motion his whole life, and define himself as being useful. Perhaps when he came all the way to rest is when he gave up on living.

I think I understand his identification with being useful - it's certainly a significant motivator in my own life. I like to stay in motion, doing and building and dancing and running around and cleaning and secretly taking care of little things that make life wonderful. I like to plant and water trees, weld gates, dig big holes, bike up mountains, watch bamboo grow, clean my room, remind my friends that they are great, and cook spicy food. I want to go through my life taking care of other people. I think it's a worthy cause. In world where everything in our culture seems to be going faster and with less direction all the time, I enjoy slowing down to appreciate the view and help out my fellow travelers on this journey.

Security and the Good Life

I think a lot about security. I'm 28 years old, and graduated from college with a degree in East Asian Studies froma big university. The feeling I got from my teachers, parents, and peers is that I would inevitably "go on" in life to do something great and exciting - start my own business, make lots of money, write a book that sold lots of copies, do some exciting research in a field like medicine, or some other equally notable life path. I have the background that is supposedly the top of the global pyramid of inequality in which we all live. I'm a college-educated, white male in early 21st century America. I'm supposed to make use of the gifts that I have been given in my genes and upbringing to make some mark in the world.

How does this relate to security? I think most of us college-educated young white Americans are aiming to convert our priveleged backgrounds into security for our lives and those of our children. We get higher paying jobs and save up money for big houses, vacations, college costs for our kids, cars, and many other things. In living this lifestyle, we compete with others to advance our self-interests, leaving others behind who can't (for many reasons) achieve the same level of success in these endeavors. We take our money and build large homes with lots of space for each member of our family. We drive as nice a car as we can afford. We do what needs to be done at work to prove that we are worth the money we get paid and hopefully more in the future. We worry about whether we're getting paid enough, or how we might get paid more, or how we can get the best deals with our money to get more while paying less. Sometimes we give a small amount of money at church, or donate some to a charity whose work we respect. We try to save up for retirement in our IRA, pension accounts, or investing in real property. We buy insurance for our cars, our houses, and our lives. We save what we can now so that we have cushions for the rougher times that may lie ahead (two kids in college at once, unforeseen illness, or sudden loss of our job). I feel like these are the terms of our lives in modern American culture.

What does this have to do with security? It's one way of approaching security in our lives. If we save up money, then we can take care of ourselves in the future. We spend so much time, however, working at our jobs and trying to get as much as we can while paying as little as possible that we become involved in a cycle of life where we distance ourselves from the people and environment that surrounds us. If we work 9 to 10 hours a day, we don't get to see our families very much. We rarely ask to cut back to part-time work just to hang out with our kids in the afternoons during their summer vacation. If there is one promotion available at work, we compete to get it with friends. We don't generally share the extra wealth with the woman in the next office just because she's really nice and works as hard as we do. We book vacations at places that are prohibitively expensive to people who make less money than us, showing that we can afford the good things in life. We rarely take the poor family down the street to Cabo San Lucas even though they're nice folks we've known a long time.

The themes are about competition and scarce resources. We're competing more and more with a greater number of people for nearly everything in the world. It is difficult at best to feel connected to the people around us when so much of our lives is steeped in competition and saving up money. We're aiming to achieve a high degree of security by out-competing those around us, but I think the cost in social and emotional well-being is tremendously high, for ourselves and our society.

I've really enjoyed exploring the idea of building social capital in my life rather than financial capital. I like volunteering (as I think most people do) because I get to give my life away to help out other people. I like working with people where the bottom line is not how much we earn but how much satisfaction we get in our work. I like the idea of taking the huge resource that is my life and giving it back to my friends and family in the form of making myself available to them. I can help one friend build a house, help another through a crisis, talk with another about how to build a community, help a stranger fix his bike on the roadside, or give someone I meet at a party tips on swimming even though I've just met them. I love giving my life away.

I think that as we give our lives to each other, we build a sense of connection that is more satisfying, longer-lasting, and deeper than relationships based on money. We want to help other people because we know their lives are like ours. Other people want to help us for the same reasons. By sharing, teaching, and being kind to each other, we create good feelings that turn into more ways to help each other have good lives.

watching the bamboo

I was walking through the redwoods today with some friends, thinking about all our different life paths. I have friends who are big-time consultants in Washington D.C., friends who travel all over the world often and easily, friends who bike everywhere, friends who walk everywhere barefoot, friends who get arrested at big protests in big cities, friends who (like me) don't know what they want at all, and friends who seem to have all the answers and not so many questions in life. I think about all these differences, and all the infinite facets of each of our lives that makes us each unique. How can I bridge them to help myself and others to grow and change? Where is our common ground? I know it and feel it, though it sometimes seems elusive.

I was practicing tai chi in the street this evening, near my place in Palo Alto. The street is blocked to traffic at one end of the block, so there are no cars passing through. Children often gather in the evening to play basketball at some backboards that the neighbors have put out. It is a vibrant scene, full of warm energy and calm easing of the tensions of the day.

I have been practicing there sporadically in the evenings for the past four years, with some shamefully long periods in recent months with no practice. The regulars who walk the neighborhood know my figure with slowly circling hands and twisting torso. The children were shy and kept their distance at first, but now feel comfortable being within 20 or 30 feet of me while I practice my 30-minute form. This evening I delighted in seeing the children play tag and cooperate to establish good rules and an inclusive atmosphere. I felt in harmony with my surroundings, and enjoyed hearing the wind rustle through the bamboo and ash tree leaves that overhang the street near my spot.

As I was walking back to my house, a woman named Linda stopped me and inquired about my practice. She turned out to be a student of the same school as I, and has seen me a few times before in the street. She commended me on my courage to practice in front of the children, with all their noise and distractions. I told her that I enjoy being a part of the regular routine of life, not being an anomaly but rather an integrated part of a dynamic scene. She smiled and told me that at one point the children's play consisted of doing pretty accurate imitations of my movements while I was facing away from them. I thought that was pretty amazing on their part, having never spoken with them at any length about the hows and whys of tai chi. I told Linda that in the past in China, tai chi had traditionally been handed down not by explicit teaching but rather by imitation and persistance. Practitioners would do their forms in a regular place, and those who came regularly for many years to imitate them would eventually be graced with tutoring in how to improve their own practice from the master. I smiled at the thought of representing such a cultural tradition on a tiny scale in Palo Alto, even if only in some children's play.

I'm working on being patient in my life, looking for opportunities to teach and learn. I'm learning to be flexible like the bamboo that sways deeply in the wind but is strong enough to make tools, cutting boards, houses, and roofs. I'm wondering how to reach the children in the street and nurture their curiosity. I'm learning how to keep courage to maintain all the good practices in my life. I'm learning slowly how to lead a satisfying life.