Missing the Camino

A year ago today Ron and I were walking the Camino de Santiago de Campostella in northern Spain. I have a blog entry (My Camino) detailing the triumphs and terrors of this pilgrimage. When we were coming to the end, I was throwing away my clothes and gear with my usual reckless abandon. I never wanted to walk again. I never wanted to put those boots on, that damned pack on, carry the walking sticks. I thought people who walked it more than once were insane, or unimaginative.

Now, not only am I suffering from nostalgia, but I am looking around for the next big walk. I still don't fully 'get' the distinction between hike, walk, and pilgrimage.  But there is something about well-trodden pilgrimages that remind me that there is some kind of holy reason that millions of people picked that particular route. Ley Lines, Earth Energy, Sanctified Spaces are part of it.

Some portions of the Camino have suffered route changes because of highways and bridges and modern innovations. I swear that I could tell when I was on a deviation because my energy dropped. I felt like I couldn't do it, couldn't walk another step. My sense is that the exchange was temporarily broken. I wasn't getting the juice that sustained me from the earth.

Mentally shopping for the next act, I am simultaneously waiting for the pilgrimage to call me. Right near where I live in Southern Oregon, Mt. Shasta, has an ancient reputation for being very special. I am not thinking of climbing the mountain, but rather walking the Pacific Crest Trail through the area. That presents a huge problem for me. I would have to carry water, tent, food, sleeping bag, snake bite kit. I am thinking of buying a donkey. But they present other challenges.

If you have had a brilliant pilgrimage experience, I would like to hear about it. My legs are twitching and my spirit is yearning.

Friends

My friend Karen, who was born in England and then moved to Germany where her father was involved in reconstruction (?) after WW11, then lived in Southeast Asia and now lives in the USA, once laughed at my unconscious categories of friends. She said that in England you had a 'friend'. I have 'dear friends', 'old friends', 'occasional friends', 'best friends', 'high school friends', neighborhood friends', 'aunties' who aren't really aunts, 'college friends', 'Waldorf friends', 'ex-friends', 'former friends', 'lost or misplaced friends', 'travel friends', 'ship board romance types', 'lovers'... I could go on forever.

I guess when talking about my friends, I like to give them a place in my universe. I never thought of it as grading them, or evaluating them. The adjectives just naturally flowed in my speech. She said it was an odd American thing.

In Nicaragua, I kind of took notice when a taxi driver or someone I had bought tooth paste from would subsequently greet me with a big warm "my friend, Julia". It seems as though the Nicas have one slot for friend and that is someone who has entered their life. I kind of like this. I think face book is bringing this to my world at home. I have been 'friended' by people I don't know, but they are friends of friends and now they are my face book friends.

I see it as a possibility for expansion in my mind. But I also see the chance of the concept of friend becoming so watered down that it is meaningless. To anyone who is really my friend: You are, of course, my best friend.

The Simple Life - Back to the Future

When we lived in the woods of New Hampshire, in a funny little neighborhood ( P. called it "New Jerusalem") populated by pioneer Waldorf School families, mostly teachers' families who had built their own houses into sides of hills, we pretty much all had funky V.W. vans. Getting the kids and teachers to school in our not so very dependable cars, on hilly dirt roads, through the snow and ice, especially the winter of  1977 (is that the one, the one with the back to back blizzards?) was a daily challenge, a daily struggle.

A bunch of the neighbors had horses. I had the fantasy that if we found an old sledge, and an old cart, we could get the kids to school with horses creating much  less hassle and expense than using the cars. It never worked out.

We had created a life that was pretty idyllic for our children. We had gardens, animals, old fashioned toys and games for the children. But we were not living a simple life. Much of the time we were racing around trying to do everything ourselves.

I have already talked about some of the problems encountered previous to this time when many of us tried to live collectively. Not such great outcomes. Those communes which did survive a few winters tended to have either a really nice trust fund behind them or some guy (mostly) who grabbed the 'boss' role and undermined the idea of collective decision making.

Now, in 2012, a lot of my friends have realized that they are racing around from appointment to appointment and are once again yearning for a more simple life. But we also check our iphones a lot. We are racking up many miles in the air visiting the grandchildren, and life, if anything, feels more pressured.

I don't have a car right now. I am in Oregon in the middle of nowhere. I get a tired and heavy feeling when I think of getting a car. Here it goes with the price of gas, the insurance, the upkeep, the guilt about pollution. But without a car, I have to shop at a more expensive food store because I can't walk and carry all the stuff I want. Or, I have to depend on friends for a ride. When I get going on this I wish I lived in a city where there was good public transportation. Very few in the USA qualify. and cities are expensive and I love being in nature. Moan, groan, agony, pain.

What I am trying to figure out is a simple life, but not an old-fashioned one. I want to move into the future without trying to go back to the past. Building on our past we have created this stew we live in. And it seems to me that the USA is a very hard place to change. Leaving the Country might turn out to be my best option. I love the slow pace and human compatibility of life in Nicaragua. I loved seeing the ox cart deliver the 60 inch flat screen TV to the house next door. But, again with the grandchildren and the constant airplanes.

I have done a lot to drastically reduce my consumerism, and in fact, I always hated shopping so this isn't so hard for me. But I am not a homesteader. I am looking for the right mix. Perhaps global warming and the expense of all our wars all over the planet will force some changes. And maybe my generation will man up and get off our own treadmills and use our collective intelligence and resources and change the world. We did it in the sixties. Why not now?

Do We Really Believe in Freedom?

I think Oregon is the straightest place I have ever lived. Strangers actually yell at you for walking outside of the cross walk. There are so many traffic signs that I find it distracting to my driving. Going north on I 5 into Medford, Oregon there is a road sign about every five feet. People are orderly in lines.  They are gung-ho about high school sports. Recycling is a religion.

The first time I landed in Oregon, in 1969, I had moved from Long Island, from Point Lookout, Long Island, next to Long Beach. ( you saw many scenes from Long Beach in the Godfather Part 1) Brown's Lobster House was across the street from our little rental beach house. On certain Sundays, limo after limo would come up to the door of Browns, tinted window and chauffeurs, and dislodge men in dark suits with their hat brims pulled down covering their faces. Three Fingers Brown was supposedly shot during one of these meets. But the neighborhood was very peaceful. The cops were all on the payroll of the Mafia and they protected the neighborhood in their quiet way.

One Sunday, we were hanging around the yard having a beer when these huge heavily armed cops pounded on the door. We looked around frantically wondering what we had done wrong. I opened the door. "Are you Julie Pierce?" one cop growled. I hung my head and muttered "yes."  He reached out his hand and put it on my shoulder, "Well, call your mudder will ya, she's worried about you."

We didn't have a phone, and I guess my mudder really wanted to talk with me. At one point we were going away and I told the guy in the cruiser that we were taking off, thinking we were not that far from New York City, maybe an empty house would seem like an invitation... That cop looked me in the eye and told me, "You don't even have to lock up. Nuttin's going to happen to youse.

So, that neighborhood was pretty strait, with a twist. But the freeways and the stores and anything else around New York were kill or be killed aggression back then. My first day in Drain, Oregon (pop. 600) I walked into the 'supermarket', found a few items and the girl behind the counter looked a bit cross eyed at me and shouted "Hi, honey, how're yooo today." I, with my New York instincts, glanced quickly behind me and grabbed my purse tighter, thinking it was set up for a robbery. She had to be trying to distract me while someone behind was going to mug me. Not so. This was Oregon friendly. Where even today, even if you are in a deep heavy conversation, your waitperson will come up and tell you her name and ask all about your life. Now I just feel like shooting myself and getting it over with.

In Oregon we have very strict rules about dog poop. And we watch our neighbors a lot to make sure they follow these rules. But I am often bothered here by the wildest hypocrisy. These are the same people who cut down all the trees here and don't replant. Fly low over this state someday and your heart will bleed. Some of these fine citizens burned a cross on a friend's lawn a few years back when she married a Jamaican man. Our town of Ashland had a very well attended and very heated City Council meeting discussing the brilliant idea of having an Exclusionary Zone downtown so the tourists wouldn't have to see the poor and homeless. I don't necessarily think it would be a better freedom for your dog to be able to poop everywhere, but I do think that if the logging companies have the freedom to cut your country down to nothing, they should have to pay for their crime as much as a jay-walker, at least.

We need freedom from exploitation of the people and the earth. Freedom is an illusion if it doesn't carry responsibilities. And it is stupid if it only applies to ordinary people and not to corporations.  And if we had democracy, even our strange 'representative democracy' then our elected representatives like George the Second Bush could not, would not, last a day as president, after making his infamous statement "I don't care what the people want, I am the decider."

It is not a simple subject, this freedom stuff.

DISCIPLINE

Not I. No way. Remember, I am the rebel. I march to my own tune. I am, actually an anarchist, but even so, I march to my own tune. I don't like much of what goes on in the name of anarchy, because I am an active pacifist as well. But discipline?

I have been, at times, extremely disciplined. And the cause of the discipline was love. In the course of my life I have become a disciple...under a teacher. Real discipline can not come from fear or threats or anger. Watch the many movies wherein a teacher becomes great by expecting greatness from her students, respecting them with all their foibles, and raising them up to levels of accomplishment no one thought could be attained.

This course of action might start off shakily. Initially both teacher and student are give each other the once over. This is true also with priests, ministers, gurus, trainers. We check them out. Does the tone they sound ring true? Will they stay the course? Who's interest do they have at heart? Do they have something to teach us?

I am talking about 'relationship'. I am talking about 'love' in very wide terms.

One winter in Temple, New Hampshire, pop. 641, between Christmas and Town Meeting (two of the best entertainments in the woods of NH)  my friend S. and I were looking for a big activity. She remembered that there used to be a drama club in town. I had found an original play written by Fritz Day (one of the founders of the Province Town Playhouse in New York) his play was called "Temple is Our Town".

We read the script and couldn't believe that it used to be produced. It had a band, a chorus, horses and stage coach, tons of costumes, cast of hundreds, people suspended by wires falling out of the sky. Our Town had had a huge burst of popularity in the 1800's when lithium springs were found and people came in droves from Boston to take the waters. No matter that the farmer who prospered from this tourism put the lithium salts in his pond. All in good fun.

We decided that Fritz's play was too ambitious. We went to the bank and discovered that the long dormant drama club had some substantial funds that had been sitting for years. Also upstairs in the church attic we found costumes and props. We decided we had to do a play. We chose "You Can't Take it With You" because it was funny and had a huge number of parts. Actually S. chose it.

I decided that I would be the producer and the director. I had never done either, but it was a long dark winter. I needed the challenge. S. took her favorite part. We "rented' the Town Hall. This meant that we hired the guy who came five hours before a rehearsal to start the wood stove. -20 degrees was pretty much average for that time of year, so this was crucial.  Then we set about casting. This mainly consisted of drinking coffee at the Temple Inn and handing out scripts to whomever would take one.

We had the lawyers, the judge, the farmers, the gardeners, the moms, the fire and rescue people, some kids. As the director, I quickly figured out that they all had more experience than I did. I told them to take the part they thought they would do the best at. It quickly sorted itself out. I couldn't believe the choices! How people pictured themselves.

So, as we began to rehearse, I was swept away by how they all figured things out and kind of competed to make the most of their roles. And then others drifted in and started on the sets and costumes, and I just mostly enjoyed myself and told them how great they were and they just kept doing better.

When the show finally went on, we had not just overflowing standing room, but people out in the snow and down the walk way and we had to do extra shows. I was greatly acclaimed as a fabulous director. I learned a lot that winter. I learned how when people are given freedom and recognition, they reach much further than they might have. I learned that many good minds can do so much more than one.

I suppose that sounds different from a teacher facing a hostile class or a new employee starting under a new boss. But I think there is a principle that works for anyone in authority: Expect the best, give your best, respect and utilize that talents each has and then you have a loving relationship. You get your disciples and 'discipline' ceases to be an issue.

Does Your Birth Foretell Your Life?

Year after year, birthday after birthday, I told my kids their birth story. I told the stories in painstaking detail. I described the weather, who was around, the day before, the birth , and the day after. Even when they were in college, I called them and offered the story. I tried to make the telling exactly the same. I wanted them to know.

I had asked my mother about my birth so many times. I was born in 1944, during WW11. My father was in Virginia or Georgia or one of those places, not Asia and not Europe. My mother was living with her parents in Lawrence, MA, USA. Dr. Uniac, who lived across the street delivered me. I came so fast that they never had time to do all the horrible things that were required in those days. Shave the mom, administer an enema, use stirrups, give Scopolomine, otherwise known as Twilight Sleep.

I was born in the caul. That means that the amniotic sack had not been broken. Mummy always said that it must have been so easy on me with all that nice fluid to protect my head. Because in those days they did like to yank the babies out with high forceps.

The story had a twist that always pissed off my mother. Because all those medieval tortures were in the 'standing orders', and because I came so fast, they gave her the drugs after I was born. She said twilight sleep did nothing to ease the pain, it just put your head into nightmare mode.

But it wasn't until I was attending births with Carole Leonard, training to become a midwife, that I saw the expressions and the mood of the different babies as they were born. We were attending home births, almost universally in optimal situations. The clients were educated parents who were happy to be having a baby. They were pretty universally healthy, well fed moms in quiet, softly lit, natural settings. Yet some babies emerged screaming, some with looks of terror on their faces. Others seemed to be smiling, or were so not bothered by the big event that they pretty much slept through it.

I think it is possible that the incarnating being has knowledge of what he/she is about to face in life. Some seem so happy to be born and others, well, it can't be easy. Other explanations don't make much sense to me.

I never did get into the new age thing of re-birthing, maybe because I really had no birth trauma to recollect. Maybe, one birth in this lifetime is good enough.

THEY WILL LAUGH SO HARD AT US SOMEDAY

We think we are so dialed in about our technology, especially cars. I think that it won't be long before our automobile age is the laughing stock of the world. Think about it. To make these huge clunky machines we need natural resources from all over the planet. We mostly use a hundred year- old idea, the internal combustion engine, and materials from all over the planet, and boring repetitive man hours to make ugly, stupid, polluting cars. Then we pave the ground, cut huge monster roadways through wherever, sit for hours at a time, kill each other in accidents, spend shitloads of money on insurance and the cars themselves. When they no longer function, we have mountains of old steel, plastic, batteries, wires, tires, and computer parts to get rid of.

Not to mention the elephant in the room - the fuel needed to accomplish this. So, we go half way around the world to drill deep into the earth, to suck up oil, then pipe it to ports, then use more fuel to ship it around the globe, then pipe it into refineries, then make horrible chemical smog and smut to make it into gasoline, then put it into tankers and take them by rail or truck to gas stations all over the place and then pump it into tanks, and then pump it out of tanks into cars which then burn it to drive the big expensive piece of-soon to be-trash on often busy, overcrowded, ugly roads.

Not to mention my personal worry that if we vacate a layer of ancient earth by removing the oil, don't we leave a vacuum, a gap, a space that will want to settle down - like by an earthquake? Nature abhors a vacuum.

I don't get this. It seems to me that we are using Cro-Magnon thinking to solve the problem of getting around. And the new, energy efficient cars are still going to be a heap of trash soon. I think even the idea of renew, re-use, recycle, is a concept that allows us not to solve problems. There is still the pile of plastic, wires, and batteries at the end of use. Why can't we imagine a world where there is a more elegant, light-filled, healthy, eco-friendly  way to get around? Like psychic projection. You get me. Real, down to earth, practical, conservative, ideas are needed. Conserving the planet and our health: that would be a good idea.

I might have smoked marijuana, but I didn't inhale.

"In this age, anything pretending to be even faintly original (or derivative with any sort of twist), should be considered art."

Thus spoke a reader of this Blog.

I probably agree. I certainly don't disagree.  I was writing about my internal test that I put to works that I might consider art. This comment makes wonder if the reader has another standard for other ages. It also reminded me of an idyllic summer interlude around 1966.

I was married even though P. got out of going to Vietnam because of his injuries from a car accident. Previous to 1965, if you were in college, married or had kids, you didn't get drafted. So among our friends, there was a huge rush to the altar the day after college graduation. Gaps were dangerous.  After that things got complicated. P. was having a rough go. His draft board was in New Haven, CT. The Yale students had scored big on avoiding the draft. Suddenly it wasn't so easy.

The war was already shameful. We already knew about napalm and agent orange and the Big Lies. Earlier on in the war, you could give pretty mild excuses and be given a deferment. It was no longer the case.

For his first appearance at the Draft Board, P. had taken a rather huge amount of amphetamines and gotten his heartbeat so whacked out that they recommended that he go straight to the hospital. He got six months until his next appearance and didn't get to sleep for days.

I might sound flippant when I speak of this. Some of the stories from the time seem like comedy. That was not the case.

There were two room mates from Yale who made a pact at graduation that they would hurt themselves to avoid the war. They went out in their car and picked up a little speed, and one shoved the other out of the car. He broke his shoulder and his arm. No Vietnam. His friend chickened out and got drafted and was killed his third day in SE Asia. Everyday we heard more such stories.

During the six month reprieve, we ended up hitch hiking from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco to join in the Summer of Love in Haight Ashbury. That's a long story for another day. We were in a terrible smash up right outside of San Francisco. P.'s head was smashed, his hip crushed, and more.

His father came to bring him home to Oregon and had to charter a plane to take him because no public transportation would let him on board. The draft from Connecticut arranged to have someone check him out in the hospital in Oregon because they didn't believe his story. He got out of the draft for good.

We got married anyway. And the summer after we were married we were in a rented farm in Pennsylvania having a bit of fun. There was a little bit of acid around and a tiny bit of hashish, and maybe a little bit of wine and certainly our room mate, Peter Fish, had a few martinis that summer.

We each had an art project going. Mine was my sun tan. I got a perfection never before and never since matched.

Peter was a handsome guy who looked like a cross between Jason Robarts and Franklin Roosevelt. He wore his Brooks Brothers striped shirt and bow tie. He had a huge old typewriter on a little wooden table under an apple tree in the orchard. He was working on The Great American Novel. He wrote like a maniac and laughed and read it aloud, and as each page was finished, he threw it up in the air and let it be carried off in the wind.

P. was making a huge sculpture. He had erected a mind boggling substructure of wood and chicken wire. He had deliveries made of copies of the Congressional Record. (there was some profound significance...you can guess) and was making a papier mache form over the chicken wire with flour, water and the paper. Every time it rained, his work was washed out.

I am pretty sure all three of us were making 'art'. None of our creations even began to withstand the test of time. Is it 'art' if the creator calls it such?

IS IT REALLY ART?

I love this discussion. It can get almost as heated as a good political discussion. No, I can almost rate it as better than a good political discussion because these days, a good political discussion is hard to find - in my world that is. Either people are too afraid, too ignorant or too entrenched in their righteousness to discuss politics. (I, for one, have never been guilty of this!)

But the question of whether something is really 'art' can be a lot of fun. I am going to use painting as my example. We all know that most art was religious for almost forever. Scan backwards mentally from cave paintings to 'primitive' masks, to pyramid paintings to Greek gods, to Renaissance Catholic paintings..the whole shooting match. I tend to think the greatest art came before the masses caught up with what was going on. I think the art was leading the way to changes in consciousness.

Now in the US we don't have a standard measure, a pope, or pharaoh to cast his approval and demands. We have the marketplace. Somehow appropriate to this time in history. That being said, I think that art should add something to what is already mine. If a painter makes a painting, it needs to give me a new or deeper way of perceiving. For me to call it 'art' it has to have a add on. It has to lead me to more than I have already. And it has to be something I could see anew. Inspiration. Breath of the Gods.

The rest of the stuff I see and certainly the stuff I have painted, falls into the category of crafts or decorative stuff or art school project. No problem with that. My theory is that you know real art when you meet it. It makes sense that the marketplace is the judge today. Perfect sense. And some people are ahead of the rest of us in the department of recognizing what is coming and what is enduring. And I suppose "I hate that work" is as good a measure as "I love that work."

I get very uncomfortable viewing "Guernica". I dislike that painting. But, I can not mistake the power in it. What do you consider art? Is seeing new stuff uncomfortable for you? Do you trust the marketplace? Can you read the history of consciousness through art? Can you feel the presence of genius in some work, even a truly disturbed genius? Is the disturbed, messed up hand necessary to break from convention and point us to the future? A lot of artist friends think my thinking is immature on this subject. It could be. Quien sabe?

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

This is one of my rants. I would love for my theory to be proven wrong, but so far, I am pretty much dead on right. (good for my ego, bad for all of us)

"Love is blind". I think a little of blindness is necessary at the falling in love stage. In this theory I am mostly talking about second chance romances and not so young people looking for the right partner. This is a huge population in US society now. My theory is that many people are evaluating the 'relationship' from the moment of the first meeting. They are looking for and evaluating everything. The expectations in a partner are humongous. Too huge for mortals to fulfill.

The 'other' seems to need to be; best friend, soul mate, lawyer, shrink, spiritual adviser, support in whatever I want, care taker, income generator, teacher, lover, playmate, coach, fashion consultant, dreamer, financial consultant, 'there for me', loyal, 'mine', minister, all of the above and more I can't fathom.

I think of my parents. By the time sixty something years had passed in their marriage, they were all of these things for each other, but they still had others who filled these roles. When they first encountered, they fell for each other across the room in a first class at grad school. Their backgrounds were entirely different. Different religion, different heritage, big family vs small family, but the blindness of love brought them together. They grew together. They had five kids, careers, good times and bad times.

My mother was entirely a beach person. My father didn't know how to swim. They sorted it out. They didn't start with the check list for a perfect partnership and eliminate each other because of the of short comings they would have perceived.

I know a lot of mistakes were made in the good old days and there were plenty of miserable marriages, but there were also  lot of good solid families. God, I sound so old fashioned. I am trying to get to the notion that without the early fabulous falling in love, if they had used the relationship check list it never would have had a chance. The big love, the blind love, the goofy infatuation, gives people a lot to fall back on when times get hard.

You develop lenses that see the good in each other. They are the same lenses that we develop when we have a baby. No matter how that baby looks or acts, we find it all adorable, perfect, exciting, the one and only on the whole planet in all history, and thank goodness for that because we have to see with those eyes no matter what comes.

I think this is a pretty romantic viewpoint. I think it is filled with flaws and loopholes. I also see so many young people waiting, looking, being critical of themselves and others, getting hungry for a partner and knowing what they want, but not being willing to take a chance. Getting that "If I only had the right woman, man " vibe going. Bad vibe that.

In our society we don't like risk. We don't like to fail. Parents go through contortions to keep their kids for failing. Everyone on the team gets a ribbon, everyone in the parade gets a 'best costume', everyone at Harvard gets an 'A' in every course.

Some of the best romances in all history failed. But, what passion, what excitement!

There is also something to be said about the energetic interchange. If we look at anyone and see the best in them, they act and react with their best. If we look critically, seeing all their flaws, we somehow activate the negative in the other.

In the Buddhist teachings (I have talked about this in other contexts) we say that if you want something, give away what you want. If you want support, be supportive. Don't demand support. It doesn't work that way. If you want love, be loving. If you want peace, be peaceful. I am trying. I have not mastered anything. That is why I can be such a wonderful "wounded healer".

I wonder how this resonates with you, dear reader. I wonder whether you have had the big love and whether it has turned into a real partnership. I wonder if there was a moment when that commitment became for real through thick and thin, for better or for worse. Let us hear your story.

What is Real?

"THE VICTOR: Man is spirit--this is all man needs to know; and spirit is triumphant over matter."
White Eagle, The Quiet Mind

Another past life flashback: The details of this story are a little fuzzy around the edges, but the gist is clear.

Some of my favorite books as a young girl were the Louisa May Alcott classics. I read and re-read Little Woman, Jo's Boys, All of them. I was all of the characters. I knew all of the characters in real life. I guess that is one thing that makes a classic.

Later I got politically excited by Thoreau, but never warmed to his as a person. Emerson's poetry wasn't for me (I loved Whitman), but Emerson's essays had that perfect blend of intellectual, rebellion and something different.

The 'different' was the idea of the direct connection to the spirit. I encountered Emerson at the same time I was meeting Eastern Religions and philosophies. I couldn't get enough. And even in those days of the early sixties, ante-internet, all the original sources were readily available to me. When Emerson and Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller and Channing, and the original members of the Concord School of Philosophy met in the barn behind the Alcott house, the meeting of East and West was rather profoundly revolutionary, and Transcendentalism was born.

Meeting the work of Rudolf Steiner and having the opportunity to know John Gardner and Francis Edmunds and even walk Walden Pond with them and my father, brought me closer and closer to understanding that I was a Transcendentalist.

Louisa' story, Sewing our Transcendental Wild Oats, was the story of the disaster at Fruitlands. The transcendentalists, joined by some utopian Europeans, decided to make a self-sustaining community, with perfect lofty communal ideals, growing all their own food, bringing together thee best minds and so on. Certainly a precurser to the communes of the sixties.

Emerson abstained. He couldn't see it working. They did it without him. A whole group of families and single men made their utopian farm and were it not for the generosity of  Emerson, they would have starved to death the very first winter. It sounds like instead of harvesting the grain on the right days, they were involved in deep discussions about philosophy.

Emerson's brilliant comment which I remembered many times in the sixties was 'If one man can't get his practical life in order, then how could it possibly work better to have ten or a hundred of such men doing the same together?' (that is a paraphrase)

So, one day I was living in southern New Hampshire and a friend from Emerson College was coming to his Groton School reunion. I was picking him up at his mother-in-law's house and then bringing him to NH for a visit. I got lost in the woodsy suburbs. Finally finding her house, near Concord, I arrived earlier than my friend. I went out for a walk and had a total strange out of body experience. I was seeing the history of the land that I was walking on.

Returning to the house, I asked the woman, "Where am I?' she kept telling me the address and saying it was the right house. "No, Where is this?"  I persisted. Finally she gave me a look, and said "This whole suburb was once, for a short time, a community called Fruitlands and they chose this land because it had been sacred to the Indians who previously inhabited it. I almost started to cry. I had certainly been there before.

Sometimes I meet new people and have the flash "Transcendentalist. Happy to see you again after all this time."

I would suppose this is a fairly common experience. You?

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.

I'm a bit of a political junkie

That being a given, it is still hard to figure out this religion and politics deal. For instance, in Cuba, Nicaragua and El Salvador, once deeply Catholic countries, things got pretty mixed up during and after the revolutions. Not that they weren't always pretty bewildering.

Many of those men, high up in the hierarchies, were heavily intrenched in the money and power game. They were very conservative and deeply aligned with the repressive dictatorships. The devout parishioners had a bit of a mind-fuck to sort out. How to be believers and at the same time how to stand up for the words of Christ. "Love your neighbor as yourself", for example. 

And that darn Karl Marx, with his "religion is the opiate of the masses". Then to Nica and Salvador came Liberation Theology, and some brilliant heroic martyrs  to it. And simultaneously the CIA got to many priests and bishops and the people's priests and bishops started being assassinated, thus causing governments like Cuba to ban much activity of the church and of course then justifying all the threats of the communist monster.

So. The very people who were the public champions of religious freedom were, through covert operations, assuring the failure of freedom.

How are we to understand these layers and our role in them except by seeing with our own eyes.

We met with Samuel Ruiz, my kids and I, when we brought aid to the hidden Guatemalan refugee camp in Chiapas. He was an outcast by those in power, giving huge aid to the oppressed. (look him up). I went with tens of thousands of the 'faithful' on the march to commemorate the 10the anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Romero in Salvador. Courage, hope, defiance, glowed from the faces of the religious.

I can never hope to sort it all out. But, I suspect we could substitute many religions and many historical moments in time and see some very familiar patterns. Carl Jung is said to have said, "I rejoice in the infinite variety of human experience."

ADORATION

Wonder, adoration, love, honor, joy, peace, stillness, hope...

I just watched the close-ups of face after face during Pope Benedict XV1's Mass in Santiago, Cuba. Each face they showed, from the 100,000 people there, offered some variation on these wonderful feelings.The Pope's did also, to my astonishment.


All my understandings and grand standings about the pitfalls and horrors perpetrated by organized religions were momentarily forgotten. And for a moment, I got really sad that I had somewhat neglected the religious education of my children.


We certainly did have some awe inspiring moments with friends, with teachers, with nature, but I never did pass on that 'belief', that 'faith', that 'knowing' that believers get from their path. They never saw us sacrifice to get to Mecca, or connect with our history while lighting the Hanuka candles, or got to walk  in a May Day procession bringing flowers to the Virgin Mary.

Many of the 60'sgeneration thought we were too smart for that, too modern, too individual, too enlightened. But what I saw tonight looked pretty 'enlightened' in the true sense of the word. I have been lucky enough to see it before, but only lately have I begun to experience it. When I met the Dalai Lama, my face probably had that look. When I saw babies born as a midwife, I had that experience. I saw that look on the faces of devotees when Ajaib Singh came to New Hampshire. I saw lines of light from his heart to the hearts of those who adored him. Tonight, through the TV, I felt the wonder of it all.


I have felt the 'one world' experience before through TV, as when Princess Diana died. Perhaps I am more open. I have, after all, been practicing forgiveness. I have heard that one person who most needs forgiveness might be me.

Getting Rid of Old Bad Karma

If, as Lama Marut says, old bad karma is stored in the always shifting, impossible to capture, present mind, then being a fiction writer is the only way to change things. Wow. So, if what we think of as fact - "I had a bum deal in this life." is what is making us suffer, then why not change the story to "I have had a fantastic life."?

I am trying this on many levels. The old "fake it 'til you make it" thing is the name of the game. Do you notice that when someone asks you "How are you?" and you answer "great!" the whole scene brightens? It just does. The other thing you might notice is that the person asking really doesn't want to hear all the miserable details of your suffering and will work very hard to top you with their own suffering. Do you really want to go there?

Then you are in what I used to call 'The Pain Sweepstakes'. There used to be a show on TV called 'Queen for a Day'. On this show women would come on and tell their misery, like a bad country-western song; "I lost the house, my husband is sick, the cat has worms, I had my wallet stolen, my mother lives with us and won't eat" and so on. Then when all the contestants had told their stories, they would line up and the audience would cheer and the applausometer would register who got the most applause. Then, the host would put a red cape and a crown on that woman and give her red roses and she would beam and be given her prize. The grand prize was often a new washing machine or mix-master!

We are a little like that. Why do we think it is better to win the 'The Pain Sweepstakes' than to talk about the endless miracles that we experience everyday? I am thinking about this and experimenting with it. Does this square with your experience?