conditioned existence

Going outside to talk on the phone, visiting with katie at Nathaniel's wedding

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

well check this shit out

[Christopher Anonymous]
10:16am
[i am] burning up with desire and passion and need get out
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:19am
yeah i feel SO restless lol
i feel like...hmmm...I'm not a normal person like
you do A then B and move to C and everything is ordered and arranged according to how it "should" be
i don't even think I could do that if i tried haha
[Court Anonymous]
10:23am
me either, bro
and, i think you do try.
or you have tried, in the not-too-distant past
so you know what works and what doesn't
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:27am
i THINK i'm best at music idk lol
[Court Anonymous]
10:28am
sure you know
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:29am
yeah
i believe i tell myself i think
and prevent myself from pursuing it cuz i'm scared
and want to try and be normal
[Court Anonymous]
10:30am
well it's good to not keep your views cemented, to always question them
i hear ya
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:31am
i'm not against taking the time to consider what is and isn;t
i just seem to be my biggest enemy in the arena of my passion and goals
[Christopher Anonymous]
10:36am
I seem to have trouble doing this all on my own...I'm not a follower, and I couldn't lead many people anywhere lol...but I need to find something in the middle and make it work

time on fire

Two weeks ago this time yesterday, I was just sitting in a train station in Seattle. Two weeks!

In the weeks preceding that, I was stressing about how to get "everything I could not do without" into my pack. I bought a pack more than double the size of my original pack, and still didn't fit it all in.
I've been shedding things since then, and am pretty sure it won't be long before this pack is far more than I need. Keep this up long enough, and I'll become the monk I set out to be three and a half years ago. (Only three and a half years?!)

Since I've arrived at my mom's house we've watched three movies (probably eight hours), and three and a half hours of TV. I haven't been here for forty-eight hours, and I've slept for twenty of those. I remember Geshe Michael Roach talking about returning from a three-year retreat and spending days watching movies. So I don't feel too bad. But I've only been "gone" two weeks! Am I just throwing myself into comfort? When I hit the road again in a month, will it be as painful as these past two weeks have been?

Yes. That's the point.
It's like being on fire.

testing

Trying out a new phone app that will, hopefully, make blogging from the phone suck less.

I just got into Hollywood. Already I prefer the previous hostel. Those people were all Travelers who happened to have parties. First impression here, these are mostly Partiers who happen to be traveling.
As a guy from the shuttle said, "eh, LA. The movie stars can have it."

Checked in with my father. He asked, "what are we meeting for?" Meeting? "I thought we were meeting each night with a cop." We're not meeting tonight. I'm in LA. Why would we meet a cop? "I was waiting for a cop, for the pill." What pill? What's going on? "Oh, I've gotta go, Court. I'll call you back in five minutes."
Rinse/repeat x 3.
Can't tell if he's on drugs or if his brain's gone wrong due to some blood sugar issue. He said his blood sugar is fine. Guess I just have to trust him for now.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

like a band of gypsies we go down the highway

So here's the plan at this point:
at the end of november, take a train from seattle to berkeley
after x days in berkeley, start making my way down the west coast, stopping in at as many communes as possible
try to make it to mom's house for xmas
january 22 is nathaniel's wedding in casa grande, az
spend a few days in tucson
my march, make it to east tennessee
- hopefully visit linnaea and her ex
- hopefully scott, leslie, charles, adrienne & valerie will be able to come along

other than that, it is just a matter of moving from collective to collective, learning and contributing as possible

update:
December: California, Texas
--Berkeley for a few days
--SP meetup in SF on 12/10
--meet up with kim & visit alcatraz
--get to texas, visit aunt jo & my father, xmas with mom & jenny
--visit plum blossom sangha with robin
--lunch with daniel quinn
January: Texas, Arizona
--visit Jessie in El Paso
--spend a few days with the Samberg family in Casa Grande (Nathaniel's wedding)
--visit with leslie, chip, age, val, dawna, corbin as much as possible
--visit stone curves
February/March: Hawaii
--WWOOF on Maui
--meet up with Lisha, maybe attend Decompression
March/April: Arizona - Tennessee
--meet up with Leslie & Chip
--spend time with Nashville peeps
--put up Private Property signs around the farm, give hunters fair notice
--visit Linnaea
May: New York, Vermont
--visit (kidnap) Chris
--visit Katie, Charissa, Andrew
--visit Twelve Tribes / Back Home Again
June - July: Virginia
--volunteer at Innisfree Village (innisfreevillage.org)
August: Tennessee, Nevada
--work on the farm (cutting down overgrowth in fields, mending fences, etc)
--collect my sister & whomever else, go to Burning Man: Rites of Passage

these being, of course, tentative and merely highlights along a path of couchsurfing, WWOOFing, and visiting intentional communities.

find your own dream

In his 1931 The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams coined the phrase "American Dream." He says: "It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

When I came across this, I expected to find a statement that I disagreed with. But I think it's a pretty good statement, really. But even as he defines it, he admits, "too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it." Why? What's the problem?

I've been kicking it around for a few days now, and finally, I think I put my finger on it. Social order.

[...]

"There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live. Surely these should never be confused in the mind of any man who has the slightest inkling of what culture is. For most of us it is essential that we should make a living...In the complications of modern life and with our increased accumulation of knowledge, it doubtless helps greatly to compress some years of experience into far fewer years by studying for a particular trade or profession in an institution; but that fact should not blind us to another—namely, that in so doing we are learning a trade or a profession, but are not getting a liberal education as human beings." The quote is part of an essay by Adams entitled ‘To “Be” or to “Do”: A Note on American Education’ which appeared in the June, 1929 issue of Forum. The essay is very critical of American education, both in school and at the university level, and explores the role of American culture and class-consciousness in forming that system of education.

[...]

The Element, by Sir Ken Robinson

[...]

Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

food

In 1995, I started my first real job and, around 2PM, I had my first real lunch break. I went down to the food court, to Sbarro, and ordered a slice of pepperoni pizza. For every working day of the following year, I went to Sbarro, and had a slice of pepperoni pizza. After a year of that, I switched to Chik-Fil-A's chicken strips. After that, I switched to a bacon cheeseburger from Frank 'N Stein. After a year of that, I went back to Sbarro. I don't put a lot of thought into eating. I enjoy food that tastes good, but generally I feel like eating is an unfortunately necessary waste of time.

This year, I've thought more about food than I ever have before. Earlier this year, Leslie started a new blog: Call Me Vegan. Having devoted such a large amount of time to studying Buddhism, I've long considered vegetarianism to be a noble decision. However, I have always thought that veganism was just showing off ("Oh, you think you're a better person for not eating meat? Well watch this!"). This idea was aided by the fact that the majority of vegans I've encountered are assholes.
Reading Leslie's blog (Les not being an asshole at all) opened my eyes a bit, and staying with her and Charles earlier this year really did. I'm a meat eater, big time. In my mind, food that is not meat only exists to accompany meat, and I have a hard time imagining enjoying more than one meal a day that does not contain meat. So three or so days living with vegans was a trip. Meal after meal, I was surprised that I was enjoying it. Even when the two of them didn't think it was very good, I did.
So that's what got me thinking originally.

The next thing was a book called Food Rules by Michael Pollan. It was recommended by a co-worker and sounded interesting. At $11 and 140 pages, I thought it was overpriced, but I also thought there are worse things to overspend on.
Meanwhile, Jenny and Lisha had been gardening the hell out of our back yard. We'd been eating salad out of it for a while, and by the time I started the book, we were eating spinach, broccoli, and potatoes out of it as well. Completely by chance, I found myself practicing what I was reading.
One of the things that really gripped me about Food Rules was the mention of evolution. When I think of evolution, I think of this lineage, this chain from single-cell life to today's fish and monkeys and humans. Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. Except that's not the truth of it. Some Homo erectus became Homo sapiens, and others became lots of other things that died. Evolution does not mean we, as a species, eventually graduate to the next level; it means that we all change, most of us die. Some things work, some don't, and the things that don't, kill us. That's the point Pollan makes in his introduction: the current Western diet kills us, whereas in his research he has noticed some things about other diets that don't.
He makes it simple (no chapter is longer than two pages; many are a single sentence) and amusing (e.g., #18, "Don't ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap," or #36, "Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk"). At the end, I decided that this little book was well worth more than $11. I recommend it.

The next food-thought-inspiring thing was Jamie Oliver's TED Talk. Take the twenty minutes now to watch it. It sounds like a good chunk of time, but after I watched it, I watched it again. Plus, if you're reading my blog, you probably have the time to spare.
In his talk, Jamie Oliver is compelling and he demands a revolution in the best way. A new favorite quote of mine: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I think Jamie Oliver accomplishes this in those twenty minutes.

...killing & cooking...