WHY ENTER A CONVENT?

Why do anything? Why go on a three year, three month, three day Buddhist retreat and end up dead as Ian Thorson just did? Why do we think that some choices are better than others? If Ian had sat at home eating Fritos and drinking gin he might have lived a lot longer.

OK, that's stupid.

I do believe in Karma. Everything has a cause and everything has an effect. This concept can not work if we make any exceptions. It is either true or it is not true. No grey areas. I like that.

One difficulty is that many karmic events take many lifetimes to unfold, or work themselves out. This makes life today a bit more complicated. Or not. Because, if by examining, or meditating on the effect of old karma (what we are experiencing right now) we can find the cure and start the remedy, then we can have a huge effect on our karma. And in doing so we will probably look a little nuts, but that is nothing new.

Gandhi looked a little nuts when he sat on the ground spinning cloth in India where there were hundreds of millions of people who would have done it for him- for pennies. The British mocked that "naked nigger" in the dust. But, he got the result he was looking for. His nutty actions precipitated the  throwing off of the yoke of hundreds of years of brutal British colonialism.

If we are hungry, we should feed others. If we have no money, we should get money to others. The karmic concept of giving away what you need is elegant. If 'what goes around, comes around' has truth to it, then, let's start now. If there is anything wrong with your life, then activate the antidote.

If this is true, and you can test it in ways small and huge, then joining a convent would just bring me right up against exactly the same things I would encounter on the streets of New York. Life's little ironies.

An Odd Lull

As I prepare to depart from Nicaragua after 6 months, I feel perfectly suspended. My hammock is a good image of my life. I am giving it tomorrow morning to the young man who guards the empty building next door. He is very happy to get it I am happy to give it. It is grey now instead of white, but it is one of the big elegant hammocks made by the collective of street kids turned craftsmen by some project.

He came by this morning to ask if I had been frightened by the bandits running across our tile roofs last night. I wasn't frightened because I had slept through it. I asked him whether he had called the police. He said he didn't because he didn't have a gun and he might have been shot if he was seen. So, this kind handsome young man, stationed to protect us was hiding when danger came. He saw these thoughts flash across my face, and said if there had been an attempt to break into my house, he would have acted. I think he would have. And, I think no gun is most often safer for everyone than gun. And we have had such an easy and respectful relationship.

About the suspended part. I don't know where I am going and what I am going to do. As I have mentioned before, this is not a new experience in my life, Just happen to be hitting the peak of the parabola.

A year ago I was packing to walk the Camino. Today, instead of 2nd skin,  water bottles and sleeping bag, I am putting a few nice pieces of Nicaraguan pottery in the same backpack. Everyone is asking me the same question. "Am I going to live here in the future?"

I just don't know. As with everywhere I have lived for years, I didn't put down any roots. My friends here are as mobile as I am. Both Nica friends and expats are coming and going with dizzying frequency.

I love this place. The weather has been beyond perfect. Two nights I had to cover myself with a sheet because of the chill, a few times I have turned on the bedroom air conditioner for an hour or so. Sunny, soft, easy, affordable, nice, improving communications, hopeful, clean, intelligent.... I just don't know what holds me back from committing. It is the same with relationships. Oops, I didn't mean to go there.

I am the same old Julie wherever I am. But it is certainly more cool to be the same old Julie where I am warm, and there is fabulous beauty, and I'm not worried about paying the rent, and I like the music. These words bring to mind a retirement plan I conceived 40 years ago. I would find a small convent in Guatemala and join as a penitent. Oh ya, did I mention that flowers have to be part of the package, also? Then, I think about why a convent rather than a Buddhist monastery. I have some more thinking to do.

Helping the destitute, are we upside down?

There is being poor and being poor. A friend who gave out food in Haiti years ago said that a lot of the people coming to get a meal were stark naked and couldn't even come up with a can to receive their food in. They held out their hands for the soup.

On a medical project in the mountains of Guatemala, we were leaving some medicine for a Mayan woman. She was to take a teaspoon full each morning. No one could find a spoon in the little village. We had discovered that a cap from a coke bottle was 1/2 teaspoon. We gave her that coke top and they thanked us profusely. All over the world we can see examples like this.

I will use the example from Guatemala to get to my point. Wherever there has been a colonial power (everywhere?) you can follow the same pattern, with different players.

So, the Spanish conquest. We know about that. Bad for the Mayans, but they survived and rebounded over 400 years and remained the second or third largest indigenous population on the planet. Then  came the friendly neighbor from the north. As with the First People in the continental US, they did not own property. Land was for everyone. That made our take over mostly, at first, by United Fruit Company, relatively simple.

The Mayans were driven to worse and worse land, higher and higher on the volcanoes. They quickly adapted and grew their food and made their villages. The Company (which was connected by blood to our 'The Company' via the Dulles brothers) used most of the land to grow food which was shipped out of the country along with all profits. They used pesticides, did no crop rotation, built huge fences, had their own police force .

When the situation became untenable for the Mayans because they were starving to death at an awful rate, they voted in a reform president. The US CIA overthrew him and supported a military regime which was hell bent on a genocide. They carried this out with a lot of resistance from the locals. According to the UN over 250,000 Mayans were killed. But we didn't stop there, we used the divinely conceived Tierra Raza policy that was perfected in Vietnam.

You kill all the people, you burn all the land, you kill all the animals, you poison the wells. So, many Mayans fled to surrounding countries, mainly Mexico to survive, barely.

Then, they returned to new villages where they were mixed up with other Mayan languages and cultures and made to have tin roofs, so they could be targeted by planes if the need should arise, and then good, kind, well-meaning people come to teach them better farming techniques, not to cut the trees, sanitation ideas, recycling, pollution control, forms of governance, women's rights and all the things we have perfected in the USA.

And that if they love Jesus, they will be saved. Now, at some point don't we think that the Mayans might be muttering a kind of prayer, in complete befuddlement, hoping that the neighbors from the north are actually teaching them to save themselves from the neighbors to the north. It must be confusing for several reasons. First the Mayans don't forget. Given enough time, they can tell you their whole history. Perfectly memorized, word by word. The other thing is - they know that things aren't so very perfect up north.

They do know that we have a lot of cancer from the chemicals on our food, our industry, our life-style. They know that we do extrajudicial acts of violence with impunity (killing 'terrorists' without trial). They know about our dangerous agricultural techniques, our murder rate, our rates of imprisonment, our aggressive foreign policy, our hate crimes, our deforestation, our mining and how fat we are. They aren't stupid.

So, my idea is that it might be better if our aid was actually reversed. If we asked the poor how to survive on a dollar a day, if we learned to do everything for ourselves, if we came to learn how to share, how to take care of the old folks, to spend time together as families.

And maybe give them a fair shake at starting over.

How, in God's name, can we tell someone else how to handle garbage? We are drowning in it, much of it nuclear. How can we ask that someone in another country, find alternative ways to make fuel and keep lights on when we don't? I think we should preach and practice only the things that work exquisitely in our country first. And then, when we have heated our houses for years on cow dung, and used plastic bottles with chlorine to light our rooms, and can manufacture iphones without killing people in China, and have found everlasting joy from our religions, should we go and 'help' those whom we have put in 'untenable' situations. After all, we know our life style is 'untenable'.

I have no judgement on the kind intentions of people trying to help others. I can't see a better road to wellness. But, I would hope it would be a visible two way street. Respect, Rasta

"ENAMOURED OF INTENSITY"

I resonate with this phrase"enamoured of intensity" from George Eliot's female character in Middlemarch. When I was a student, I equated intensity and angst with intelligence and being alive. It was certainly an East Coast thing. I suspect it had some of its roots in the Beat Generation. It was also partly from the Existentialists.

Walking around in black turtlenecks and tights, sitting in dark coffee houses or bars, talking about horribly depressing things was the high as I was starting college. And New York and Paris were the only places to really be alive.

When psychedelics hit the scene in the mid-sixties, we pretty much collectively turned to the West Coast. Boy, did they do the scene better out there. The difference between Timothy Leary's scene in Cambridge and New York and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters in California, then Oregon, was an archetypical difference between California and New York. In Woody Allen's Manhattan and recently in The Social Network, the difference was captured.

I remember reading some Rudolf Steiner description of the roots of the East Coast of the USA as stemming from the time of Atlantis and the Pacific Coast from Lemurian times.

My recollections from descriptions of the lost continent of Atlantis are of a society that was so very advanced in science and technology and so detached from warmth and humanity that it self-destructed. It would have been the land mass where now is the Atlanic Ocean.

The Lemurian world was the Pacific rim, all the way to Asia. What I remember are descriptions of a dreamy world, with the spiritual as alive as the material.

I guess I am really going back to far to say that I was 'enamoured with intensity'. What I wonder now is whether it was more about neurosis. Whether, we equated being fucked up somehow with being alive. Because my generation did spend considerable time and money and energy trying to get ourselves un-fucked-up.

Recalling all the self-help and spiritual trips that have paraded through our society is almost a nightmare, but, it has its humorous side. The young among my readers don't know the half of it. Some of the impulses had some good effect, some had disastrous results. You have probably heard of the bad stuff..James Jones, Rajneesh, and other cults hurt so many. But, we tried and tried.

I remember one night when we were living in Sussex, England when we made a plan to go to London to see Guru Maharaji. He was called the "Boy Guru'. At that time he was a teenager who was supposed to be enlightened. Maybe he was. We had to get a babysitter for my daughter, and take the train and tube through a terribly dreary freezing cold London night. (For the best description in the world read the 20 page first paragraph of Dicken's Bleak House.) When we got to the door of the auditorium they told us that Boy Wonder loved fruit and the price of admission was a donation of fruit. We left on a bizarre quest around the City to find a water melon and succeeded against all odds. (England at that time was not part of the Common Market and had shortages of everything). We came back and entered and sat for several hours staring at a beautiful throne they had made for Boy. Some strange people chanted some fluffy chants. The someone came into the room and announced that Boy had fallen asleep in his limo bringing him to the auditorium and that he needed his rest so come again another night.

We had lots of time to wonder whether this was a great spiritual lesson as we reversed our trek.

Obviously, tremendous materialism and scientific innovation are now a West Coast deal. It is also obvious, but worth mentioning that the angst has migrated and magnified. I want to start a movement to revive the fine art of hanging out. It could be the most healing thing to come down the pike.

Give me more..a bit more of your insight

"I've thought about your question for a while. It's really about a much bigger and ubiquitous issue - It's not really about money."

This is a comment that came to my Blog relating to my trying to figure out my money relationship. I hope the writer will give me some more insight.

My initial reaction to this comment was "of course". But then that leads me to where? If my question was about my relationship to money, does that mean that I am having a relationship problem? That concept is certainly not beyond the pale.

Or, it could be a trust issue. Or, a faith issue. Or, a testing the universe issue. Or, a why did the greater 'I' decide to incarnate in this time and place kind of issue. Or, am I lazy? Am I afraid? Am I getting close here?

And really, this blog is called 'Ask Julie' and I am doing a lot of the asking of questions, if you really think about it. I may have to reconsider and call it "Julie Asking".

Right now in my life, Julie Pierce, Act 111, I am trying to be a little more present, a little more accountable, a little more Buddhist. So, I guess this soul searching is part of that. Some things keep bringing me back to the 'get over yourself' concept. It ain't that easy, but I'm working on it.

IS TV OVER LIKE NEWSPAPERS?

The first TV I ever set eyes on what at my Caffrey Grandparents house. I was there for a summer visit of a week or two. Those grandparents had a beautiful home with lots of fun places to explore. There was a kind of no longer used apartment area over the garage where, according to me mater, some Irish working families lived as they built the house during the depression. If my memory serves , they did the beautiful tile work.

My Grandmother, Nellie, had an upstairs enclosed sun room where she did her sewing. She decorated her own hats with fabulous imagination. Bird cages, beads, lots of ribbons, fake jewels, feathers all adorned her lovely hats. I was enchanted. There also was an enormous cellar with washing and drying rooms, huge coal bins, and wooden doors that I never opened.

But, that particular summer, in the downstairs sun porch, was the new TV. It was a huge box, of very polished wood with a seven inch screen. All those tubes it took to make the magic must have needed a lot of space.

There was not much programing in the early days of TV. But there was something on that I couldn't stop watching. All my usual patterns of entertainment were eroded by the highly compelling McCarthy Hearings. Joe Mc. Was perhaps the first fucked up person I had gotten to see in action. The pain and the anger and the feeling that this was BIG trapped my attention.For those who don't know about this horror, it was the House investigation on Un-American activities. It was a giant witch hunt for communists that destroyed the lives of countless Americans. In later years, I had the same reaction to the Watergate Hearings and the Iran Contra Hearings.

Other high points in my limited childhood viewing were The first time Elvis was on the Ed Sullivan Show.  We had a TV by then. It was in the fifties and out TV was in the living room and my parents had company for dinner. I was forbidden to have the TV on but kept creeping in and checking whether Elvis had made his debut yet. When he at last came on, at the very end of the show. I turned it up full blast and started screaming. Weird, he just had that effect on us. Same deal with the Beatles except I was in college by then.

Our viewing was very limited. I think at one point we got two shows a week, and our parents were a lot more liberal than some of our friends who's parents still wouldn't allow any TV. Hard to picture.
You all know how the scene played out over the next forty years, until families had TVs in every room and there were hundreds of channels. Have you ever watched Soldier of Fortune's 'new weapons' channel? Or one of our favorite's: the surgery channel? We quit that after watching varicose veins being stripped while eating a chicken dinner.

But now, I have been in homes where on a very social occasion everyone is in the den, each with their handheld widget, maybe watching a show or maybe talking to friends or maybe writing what they think of someone on spillit while checking the weather, ordering shoes, doing homework and watching reruns of Big Love at the same time.

I assume that the idea of people gathering together at a certain time to watch a show together and sitting through the ads is nearing prehistoric. I, for one, don't really see any loss. No one ever sat with me during those Congressional hearings, anyways.

WHY DID ERNEST HEMINGWAY KILL HIMSELF

So, many years ago, perhaps 25 years ago, I was visiting my friend Carol Garner and her husband John. Carol wanted my help planting thyme between the flagstones on her front steps. We were out working together for quite a while. We were planting little seedlings in the sandy soil.

Our conversations always first covered our families and friends. That day she had something else on her mind. She said she was going to tell me something that I had to keep under wraps while her sister Sonny was alive and it would probably be best if I waited until she was dead.

She was serious. I told her I wasn't that good at secrets and that I didn't want to know anything too weird. She shrugged off my concerns and went on to say that someone should know.

We had shared many intimate conversations. Carol was my mother's age, but always said she felt like we were sisters. Her revelation was about her brother, Ernest Hemingway. She jumped right into the subject. There was a reason the Ernest had committed suicide and it wasn't just depression and alcoholism. She said he had contracted syphilis in Africa a long time ago and was being treated for it at the Mayo Clinic, but that it had advanced too far before proper treatment was available. He was in the advanced stages and couldn't stand to lose his mind.

"What's the big deal?" I thought. She went on to say that her sister Sonny was embarrassed by this. After all, she came from a generation for whom a sexually transmitted disease was shocking.

I asked Carol "Why? Why was she telling me this?" She said that with all the books written on the subject of her family, someone should stop all the speculation and say the truth. That was characteristic of Carol.

Over the years, I sometimes thought about this, and then forgot. Writing this Blog is bringing up a lots of memories. This is one.

I am messed up about money. Unconfuse me.

I have done a strange dance in the money world. I have had strong influences. The end result is that whether or not I have money, I am uneasy. My ideals are pretty emotional. I am pretty judgmental.I need to get this straightened out in this incarnation. It is getting boring not 'getting' it

I guess I'll start at the first thoughts I remember. I remember the nuns telling us about St. Francis who, like Siddhartha, gave up enormous wealth to purely follow  his spiritual path of renunciation and being 'one' with the poor. But, I was also very taken by the story of Joan of Arc who led an idealistic war. St. Francis won out because I was named for him in my middle name, and because my Mother was so very devoted to him.

But, there was a problem. We did not have great wealth for me to depart from. We were middle class in almost all ways except for the fact that my Mother's family had had plenty to send her to prep school and college and buy her a car during the depression. (A Packard Roadster convertible with running boards). I was born in 1944 during the war. We lived with my Mother's family while my Dad was serving.

Extremely influential in my early life was a recurrent dream I had about being a gypsy girl with curly dark hair hiding outside a barracks in a Nazi concentration camp. I was tortured by this dream long before I knew what it was about. Remember there was  no TV in those days. I saw my first movie when I was eleven. Several things that must have influenced my feelings about money were the result of that dream. I love to have few or no possessions. I love packing my backpack and walking down the road. (the gypsy thing?). As long as I can remember I have hated any form of oppression and repression and had great solidarity with the poor. Was this a carry over from a recent past life?

But on the other side: in spite of or because of the middle class thing and Mother's history, I went to boarding school, great summer camps, lived with nothing lacking. I was very entrepreneurial in my teenage years. Several businesses kept me in luxuries (selling candy during study halls, delivering the New York Times), a great summer job on Nantucket kept me in travel funds.

I hung out with both very rich and very poor friends.Then along came the hippie era. We wore peasant clothes from third world countries, We traveled like Gypsies, we played Robin Hood a few times. We had utter disdain for anything or anyone connected to corporate profits. Yet, ironically, most of my friend's hippie lifestyle was supported by trust funds. Or parents who bailed us out. And being communitarian, we were all pretty much supported by trust funds.

It was also an era when the almighty dollar went a long way. AND earned interest in the bank! So, we were really poor, some of us dumpster diving, and completely taken care of.

Then came Vietnam and the political days, followed by the spiritual renewal times. All glamorizing the fate of the poor. And we had kids. And we were finally poor. And I read and saw how the richest nation on earth exploited the land and the people all over the world, with ideals like democracy as an excuse.

I got very good at living on little or nothing. I was very bad at earning money. To date, my best paying job of my life payed $26,000 with no benefits. The Waldorf School. By now my kids and friends and relatives were suffering for my choices.

I worked hard. I took care of the refugee foster kids, I did aid work in Latin America, I fought for equality and justice. How many times did we storm into Senator Kennedy's (may he finally rest in Peace) office with a new issue? But I never 'monetized' anything.

I now have a deeper darker attitude toward the US domination of the world. I am more alarmed at the rape of the earth and her women. I know money can be put to good use. I have seen that in action. I like living a simple life. I still flail at injustice and ugliness and propaganda, and I still worry my friends and family because, finally, they take care of the gaps.

I know somewhere inside me that if I had had the passion, I could have made good money. I have many great ideas. I just need to get over myself. I suppose that is the answer to most of our hangups. Get over yourself.

What's with the dollar bill?

The back side of the dollar bill has that pyramid with thirteen steps and the eye above it. I think this is very esoteric symbolism, probably dating from ancient times, or as recently as the Knights Templar and the Masonic Order. I don't know when those hidden societies started, perhaps five hundred A.D.

What I am wondering is whether we the people have been bamboozled all this time into thinking that money and 'spirituality' are not related. I would consider the possibility that esoteric societies have always run the money game, especially here in Europe and the USA. If this is so, then maybe we would have more chance of winning the game if we wore robes and had secret handshakes than if we work hard. I don't necessarily look upon the possibility of this as benevolent. It is more like stacking the deck.

How many of our forefathers with their pictures on bills knew that secret handshake?  Are clubs like Skull and Bones at Yale where one learns the secrets?  Are personal disclaimers like "I'm not very spiritual.", or "I'm not into politics." the reason we are so easily taken in?

Is this all related to our policies toward Muslim nations? Are we still fighting the Crusades as little Bush suggested...out loud! For Christ sake!
Lots of questions tonight. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

THE PAIN SWEEPSTAKES STARTS YOUNG

When my Waldorf class returned for third grade, I asked them to write a little bit about something great they did on their summer vacation. They all sat down and wrote dull unenthusiastic essays.

After looking over their work with no excitement on my side, I half jokingly suggested that they write about the worst thing that happened to them over the summer. Suddenly they were writing away, deep in concentration, going on and on. When I finally said "enough", the kids were reluctant to stop writing.

I collected the essays and decided that they were so great that we would read them aloud. I still remember several of the stories twenty years later.

N. was a very energetic, athletic boy. He was a switch hitter in baseball and good in every sport. His story was that he went to a big sports store with his mother. She had just a few minutes to pick up something for his sister. He wanted to look at baseball bats. She was reluctant to leave him, but he promised on his life that he wouldn't touch anything, wouldn't move a foot, would just look.

When his mother returned she found an old lady crumbled on top of N. He had 'sort of' picked up a bat. Somehow he had taken a little practice swing to feel that bat. The swing had somehow clipped a lady behind her knees and she had fallen on top of him. Great story.

A.'s story got the most sympathy from the class. She used all their favorite adjectives; 'Disgusting, gross, sick, mortified'. She had had to spend a few weeks with her grandmother which she was happy about. But, apparently the bathroom in her grandmother's summer camp was pretty bad. A. vividly described the mold, the old soap, the dead bugs, the live bugs, the smell of the wash cloths and towels, the science experiments growing in the drains. It was bad enough that it made everyone happy.

Years ago I was in Baltimore visiting a friend. We went to the Museum of War and Peace. I am not sure if that is the right name, but the paintings and sculptures were exclusively those themes. The war art was vivid, dramatic, fabulous, moving in the manner of Picasso's "Guernica". The peace art was blue ponds, white doves, yellow flowers. Nada. Zip. How can we make something we can't imagine? How can we find a way to describe the good, the happy, the beautiful in such a way that it grips us more that the ugly, the painful?

Until that day comes, we can entertain each other with our miseries. Today, comparing notes with my daughter about our trips home from our Costa Rican vacation she actually exclaimed "You win! Your trip was worse than mine." I hadn't realized that we were in a competition. But, of course we were. The  Pain Sweepstakes. And, of course I won. I was on a bus for eleven hours. Mas manana.

LETTING GO AND LETTING GOD.. I DON'T GET IT

Lama Marut offers a picture of us suffering individuals running around holding a hot coal in our hands, crying "ouch" endlessly and again. His suggestion is that we drop the hot coal. Easier said than done. For one thing we identify with our suffering, define ourselves by it. If the suffering is bad enough, we simply can't get out from under it. So, my guess is that we should practice letting go of little, kind of hot coals all the time so that when we get the big mother lode of fire in our hands we will have had some practice. I, for one, have a few resentments that are so precious to me that I actually grin when they pop up. How perverse is that? 

When Richard Nixon died, my mother asked me if I forgave him. I was outraged at the idea. "No". Resenting him had become part of my identity. Recently I spoke with a 30 something Menonite woman who was astounded that when she mentioned Nixon all the people of my generation jumped in with their favorite Nixon nightmares. But what came up in the ensuing conversation was that Nixon had empowered us. He had been so outrageous that a whole generation had risen up to oppose his war. So maybe we owe him a debt of gratitude. Hear that, Mom?


But this thing about 'Letting go and Letting God". I get it sometimes. I have a lot of control freaks in my little universe. I can see that when thing spiral out of control, holding on harder often doesn't work. The bending reed thing comes to mind. But I also have people in my universe who set something in motion and then say "It is in God's hands." and walk away. What exactly does this mean? Or on a larger scale, we build, buy, launch weapons of mass destruction (agent orange comes to mind) on poor people in the jungles of Vietnam. We kill millions of First Peoples, we enslave millions of Africans. Who's hands hold these actions?

I need some clarity on this concept of "Letting go and letting God." Anyone have any great experiences on this front?

LETTING GO AND LETTING GOD

Some days I wish I had a plan for my life. Most days I am pretty glad to just bumble along. I do get stuck in these non-action phases. You see, if I am not sure about something, if I am pressured, or out of touch with my intuition, I tend to plunk. Right now, I am happily plunked. But I see the big What's next?" coming up when I return to the US.

There are some obvious things that need to be done. I do need to look at my six months of mail, and pay my taxes, and call some dear friends. I feel a great need to attend Philippa's wedding and see the Grand Canyon. I would like to get to Asia and Southeast Asia. I need a haircut, Georgene? In my 'plunked' phases, actions big and small have the same weight. That's just not right.


I often find that when I make a plan, I can sense somewhere inside (my gut?) that it will never happen. So I make the plan and then wait for whatever is coming that will throw a monkey wrench into it. Getting sick. Terrorist attack. My father and I had a great plan to go together on a tour of his ancestral homeland. It was the Palatine region of France, Germany, and Switzerland. The magical corner where they meet.


We got him a passport and made the arrangements with  Pennsylvania Dutch group. I had never traveled with Dad. We were both very excited. Somewhere along the way I realized that his ancestors were also mine. But when I tried to see the daily movement of the tour, I couldn't get it in focus. The tour was cancelled when we invaded Iraq or when the Spanish subway was bombed or when we went into Afghanistan. I can't remember what disaster made the group feel unsafe to go. I was disappointed, but somewhere inside myself, I had felt that it was a long shot.


I told Dad we could do it ourselves, the tour be damned, but he wanted the intellectual and historical wisdom that the tour offered.

Everyone's life has a thousand examples of such moments. My friend John used to say that if you had good intentions then God would set you on the right path. His example was that if you came to a crossroad, going some where  that you felt guided to go, and you chose the wrong path, God wouldn't say "Oh, that stupid idiot!" but would find a way to get you back on track.


But, then comes the questions of 'intention'. Are our intentions coming from the highest place in us? Let's think about that before we make the next plan. Meanwhile...happily plunked.

POINTERS FROM KIDS ON HOW TO LEARN

I got my contact lenses in January. Today I finally got both lenses in. There were many, many days that I didn't try because I couldn't find them or because I was going swimming or because I couldn't face the prospect of failure.

The thing is that for the last weeks I watched my grand kids and lots of other kids at the beach at Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica learn to surf, to swim, to bogey board, to spot monkeys, to see sloths, and recognize geckos and more. What the kids showed me (how long did it take me to see this? 68 years?) is that you just do it over and over again until you get the feel for it. So, I sat down this morning, put all my thoughts and emotions aside (I am a failure, I need more lessons, I had better order regular glasses) and tried again and again until I got the feel for it and it worked.

Perhaps for you, this is a dumb example, but I am sort of intellectual and used to learning things by 'learning' them. Learning by braille, so to speak, is rather alien to me. I could not see my eye ball without my reading glasses and I couldn't put in the contact with the reading glasses on. So, I took a deep breath, reminded myself that a lot of people with below average intelligence can put on contacts, and imitated those brave kids who tried and failed over and over until they succeeded. Amazing.

Why do we think we can teach kids anything? My guess is that we USAers have some left over Puritan thing going on, that kids are fallen from grace and need to be hammered with morality and teachings until they take the shape we want. I sometimes think that we need to set a fine example and let them figure it out. Rose Kennedy said she put all her effort into parenting her oldest child, Joe, and figured rightly that there would be an excellent trickle down especially in terms of manners, and responsibility.

I overheard conversations among my kids about the bullying problem in schools. I heard them talking about all the programs that were in place to stop bullying. I asked "How is it working out?" They replied that it would probably be much worse without the  attention. I have my doubts. My feeling is that if it was working after the time and money that has been spent, there would be no problem now. 


It might be naive but I think kids watch adults very closely and they also suck up more from the TV and videos than we would believe. As a nation we are THE world-class bully. On news hours we hear over and over what we should do to anyone who looks at us cross eyed, or ever who looks different. On cartoons, we laugh at the bullies. One president claims "Wanted dead or alive" about Bin Laden. Another, orders him assassinated and them brags about it repeatedly. No apparent problem that this cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. What exactly are we modeling about bullying?


Thick Naht Hahn says There is no path to peace, peace is the path." Watch the modeling closely and then try again and again. That is my lesson for today, dear readers.

GOOD FRIDAY

Why is Good Friday called "Good Friday"? Seems like a misnomer, but perhaps we need to look again at our personal crucifixions. What about Christ's forty days of agony in the desert? It might be possible that these times of soul searching agony and our little deaths on the crosses of our lives are the important times of our lives. I don't want to sound like a Pollyanna, but maybe we have created a wrong world view. Perhaps these are the real thing that leads us to be truly human. Is it possible that we deny ourselves the Resurrection and the Light by masking or drugging or counseling our way out of life's agonies?


I am a fan of the wounded healer. I never wanted a midwife who had never had a baby to attend my birth. I don't want a therapist who has never had an issue. I look for the person to guide me who has triumphed over his/her challenge.


In this light perhaps the Easter story is a perfect archetypal road map for healing. The myth, the story, tells of betrayal (could be the body, the mind, the spirit, the will), totally alone dark night of the soul, the dying on the cross, (who doesn't have a cross to bear?) and the resurrection. Born anew. Rise from the dead. Rise from the ashes. Pure light. Kind of cool.

AM I A LUDDITE?

When my friend A.N. chose a law school, she picked one that had a famous civil rights faculty. She had been out of school for a few years. As a returning student, not that many years out, she experienced a profound change in the lecture halls. In law school, each and every student was sitting facing the lecturer but engrossed in his/her laptop. When the professor asked a question, the student often acted like it was an intrusion. Discussion and human interface were significantly absent. So, the question became why bother to have a good professor if you aren't mining her uniqueness and experience? Why have a teacher at all? Why don't you just get the notes and study guides and pass the tests?

When I remember my favorite teachers, I don't remember information, I remember how they inspired me. I wanted to be able to think like they did.  Yes, I have been very inspired by books, like Vicktor Frankle's Man's Search for Meaning. Like so many books.. but the inspiring teachers, they took my heart as well as my mind.


Joan P., my tenth grade Latin teacher, had been badly burned in a fire saving a child's life. She had sold her house to buy a Matisse painting she couldn't live without. She inspired me and learning Latin was a byproduct. When I think like this, I feel like a Luddite, I wonder what you all are experiencing in this realm. Let me know. I need input.



 

I Haven't Forgotten You

Just happen to be in Costa Rica with much of my family and my trusty little ACER computer has a grave aversion to the heat and humidity here. Last October it didn't work when I was at the beach here in CR and again this time no sirve. I know I need no excuse for not writing when the waves are calling me, but I do miss our conversations. Mostly I have been thinking how beautiful life is. And how brave we all are.

Today a gecko was on our car window and clung all the way to a restaurant and then moved an inch or so while we ate and clung for dear life all the way back to our house. When we got home he took off. Now how does that work?

How do the monkeys know to walk on the special monkey wires over the road and not on the electric wires? Because the monkey wires are blue?

I remember the day my 9th grade biology told us that "ontology tends to recapitulate phylogeny" and I never got over the word "tends". either something works or it doesn't. Is it possible to conclude that geckos "tend" to take the round trip? I don't know.