Epiphany

v.
To create a hothouse seems to be the answer. I do not need to be a builder so much as an instructor. I do not need to teach data sec or language instructions but the means of success. Between the Lady and another old friend, one that we might call The Builder of Things, there is a critical mass. There is a nucleus of design and hope. My ideas are a fine thing. My plans are even achievable in some cases but if a …mind space of achievement and enlightenment can be made, then the meager ideas that The Builder and I have cobbled together can be a lesson plan. The first one or two need o make money. They need to also make an enlightened difference. A kind of green design of the soul, we must build in a way that is sustainable development for the enabling of personal moral evolution.
It strikes me sitting in a frozen desolate corner of North America that is digging itself out that I do not need to be atlas who bears the world on is shoulders, or Prometheus who bears eternal punishment for his theft of fire from the gods. I need to be Arthur Deming, The man who went to a broken and dispirited Japan after WWII and showed them a way to embrace the larger world. He taught them to use the dregs of what they once were with the understanding that had eluded them as the world changed around them.
Goddamn. If I wasn’t a changed man with delusions of grandeur before now I surely must be.

priorties

iv.
So much seems to be about priorities. About making them, about admitting to ourselves what they are. And about being able to be happy with what we have decided is important. It is a complicated dance.
I cannot decipher these points in order, as they are all hopelessly intertwined. I attempt to look at their interlocking selves. The easiest should be the making of priorities. We decide what we want and place it as the most important thing in our lives…. But think about that. Who can say one week to the next what they REALLY want? Instead we push forward our goals for things we think we should want. The things that TV, our parents or the collective sense of right says we should. I question whether any but a tiny few of us ever put our greatest efforts foreword on the things we want the most.
Many of us live the lives that are easiest for us, not the most fulfilling. It is easier to live with unfulfilled dreams that to face failing. I have listened to so many friends, acquaintances and lovers espouse desire s to be the things they want the most, but somehow never work to achieve. Instead they perpetuate their comfortable day to day life. It is easier to charge up the Visa card then to really get out of debt. It is easier to date the girls who are around you than to search for your soul mate. I wonder how many of us set false idols foe what is most important in our lives than just find it too much work.
As far as being happy…. Maybe that is the crux. How many of us even know how?

What is wealth? what is happyness?

iii.
I am back on North America time. It has been a few days since the laconic travels through the jungle and the cultures that are so different from my world. So far the foreign sense of time stays with me. It is not that I am moving at the slow pace of a tourist traveling through the country side on my way to see the volcano. I am not unaware of the time and date. The changed world makes the entire of North America seems claustrophobic.
I do not mean the absurdity that the Rockies, the Smokies, the Ozarks and the White Mountains together are not enough space for me to feel like the walls are not closing in. Denver, Dallas, Boston, and Birmingham together are enough interaction for anyone, no matter what experience they seek or how starved for it they are. It is more that I feel that we, as a society, missed an important turn off on the road we travel. Are we on a good road and just gone too far?
It seems to me that we have been saying the ends justify the means for so long that we have become those means. My foreign travels showed me people who would love to have big flat screens, four dollar lattes’ and the newest coolest shoes. In the jungle, the markets, and the Capital they all worked long days and long weeks. The make crap money and cram into tiny houses with their relatives. But in a way that seems to elude most of us North Americans they are living their lives in real time; they are happy in the now. When did building our secure future become so constantly and obsessively redefined that we lost the ability to enjoy in the now?
I realize that the ways that we work have made us wealthy as a culture and inflated our bank accounts. Our western fetish with total quality management and maximized time over resource curves has made us great and achieved in scale beyond measure. But what have we lost?
I am sitting here on my jet plane in my business casual attire, missing my pretty friend. I am seeking a way to bring the timelessness of my foreign travel and the enjoyment of now to the unbridled efficiency and power of the great North American machine. If I can manage this trick I can truly change the world.

waitingrooms

ii.
I sit in the waiting room between places. Eventually a plane will come. It will take me to a city to wait for another plane. Eventually this will take me home.
I travel back to the place that for near a decade has been my life. My things (endless things!) felt cumbersome even before my journey. I felt owned not only by my possessions but by conceptions and commitments. Travel has long been my norm. When did I stop being changed by it and start bringing my expertise to the place I go?
I think of the Buddhist stories of masters and their begging bowls. They would preach for their supper if speaking their wisdom was asked of them. By traveling in poverty these teachers were like me at the market with bad language skills. They could not isolate themselves in their comfort. Not of language, or of softness and warmth. I must learn this balance. I must learn the way to be humbled by the things I see and still be able to reach the world with the things that I need to do.
The Waiting Room is a timelessness that is like impatience stretched. It is not at all like the timelessness of the places we visited. I do not feel relieved of my need to adhere to time. It is not like I felt in the jungles and on the endless afternoons with my pretty friend sleeping against my leg. Here in the waiting room it is the reverse; it is the feeling that time is passing and that nothing I can do will affect the events that will happen. Time has become the measure of impotence instead of freedom. Does this make sense? The jungle makes you free from time in the way that the waiting room makes you captive of it.

Soon the endlessness will end. Soon I will be back in my seat of strength. My narcotic comforts of the soul will surround me. My amazing travel companion will be nearby. She, although changed differently, is as altered by our travels as I am. The Jungle and the Lady will both stay with me and in my head if I have any luck (or grace) at all.
It feels in some way that the Lady and I are bound in a more primal way that romance. In truth if I knew this feeling had existed in previous decades I would have eschewed romance for a travel companion of this merit. If neither the Lady nor I fall from the path the next few decades will be a lot of climbing of rocks and deciphering of languages together.

i.

It is not that I have been transformed but that the world has changed. The things I have always known are accurate still but in ways that mean different things. It is not my intension to be oblique. I simply am trying to reframe myself to the world.

I am, without question, a high intensity, highly adept man at dealing with the world. But what that means…And what I mean by the world is the question. There are those that would describe me as a Machiavellian bastard. I would not fight this definition although it feels course. I have suggested many times that I never do anything for only one reason. This is of course untrue as much of the time I am playing things by ear. This does not seem to preclude me finding multiple USES for everything I say. I am highly adept it seems at maintaining the illusion that is my mystique.

I seek to make the world better. Poet Warrior talks endlessly about how all motivations are either selfish or are intended to make the world better. Most actions are combinations of both. I seek to make the word better in ways that will make me very rich and be the most interesting things I can spend my time doing. This is both selfish and altruistic If I do it right.

I set my sights on changing foreign places I have not (until recently) been. I travel with a woman I love madly but to whom I am an old friend. I seek to find the best way to teach what I have learned. Instead I find that I finally understand some of the quiet bits of Buddhism that have always eluded me. I am a stranger in a strange land in a relationship I cannot control. I have a tiny command of the language and do not have my normal colossal resources. Strangely enough I could not be happier.

These places are showing me that the world is not what I always thought it was. I have lived in a narcissistic fragment of it. The fact that my companion cannot be controlled or manipulated is an absolute joy. The simple idea that I need work to make myself understood to a street vendor means that I must pay attention to my surroundings. This is also a joy. I find instead of the teacher I was contemplating as my next transformation I want to come a place such as this and know utterly nothing again. I have become handicapped by my knowledge. I seek the emptiness of discovery.

Both the Woman and the land are places where I can make my desires known but not enforce them. It is a kind of joy to be the supplicant…. Not the Machiavellian bastard.

I do not know where I go from here. I know it will bear little resemblance to what I would have planned scant weeks ago.