Get some tea and take a seat... it'll take a while

That's more or less the best way to avoid frustration in Bolivia due to timetables. Ah well, that's cultural idiosyncracies for ya. Every once in a while, I have to look in a mirror, just to make sure I’m still here. I read an article by F.W. Schumacher about te use of intermediate technologies… but it really digressed into a polemic and overview against the materialism and ridiculous over-consumerism and frivolous, foolish, and feckless needless over-exploitation of natural and human resources. It was awesome. Google F.W. Schumacher. He’s the man. So I talked to my good buddy Shea Quinn the other day. Ok, it was on facebook, but anyway. I think we’re similar in many ways. He wants to go to flight school and do 20 yrs in the Coast Guard and then be a heli-ski pilot. Which is sweet. I wrote about the same thing a bunch of times. But like I wrote recently in my journal, I’m afraid of being 42… and planning for anything when I’m 42 scares me. 40 yr old guys are slow and fat and boring and… well Andy Flanagan is 39, and he’s wicked gnarly. He’s like 4 std dev’s above being slow and fat and boring. And Steve is 30 and … well he’s a insano parachuting Green Beret of gnarliness. So maybe I just have to suck it p and stop being all wigged out about being 42 and just know that ME, being who I am, will do what I want and think is good despite the norm… like I always do. Like getting into tri’s and climbing and being a missionary. “Normal” people don’t do that kind of stuff, but I reach out for what I want and do it. Maybe I’m afraid of committing long term to things because it forces me to accept that there IS a long-term… to accept t reality of growing old and DYING. I’m afraid to think of my life as a whole because it is therefore finite… and I’m afraid to think of my life and judge it as not valuable. I’m afraid of knowing that I am mortal and finite. It’s like watching a tragedy and you already know how it ends. More or less. Why do I respect a soldier more than a doctor? Because the greatest gift, sacrifice, and love that can be given is one’s own life. Doctors’ lives are rarely at risk directly due to their treatment of patients… So what has happened since my last update? I don’t know… it was a while ago. Been doing lots of reading and have discovered contemplation, largely due to Thomas Merton’s “New Seeds of Contemplation”. As I told my buddy Noah the other day, I’m finding myself more politically liberal than conservative lately, probably due to the large volume of subversive literature I come across in Bolivia. That said, I still am neither Republican nor Democrat. I think both sides are largely comprised of ideologically inbred morons. Politicians are- almost without exception- timid, self-serving materialistic bastards. Nobody marches to the beat of their own drum. And why the fuck not? Well pragmatically speaking, it would probably be harder to get elected, and we all know that politicians abhor working hard almost as much as the idea of the middle class. Egad. Commoners. Working hard… how poor! )@_U*#_$*. Anyways, I guess that’s a bit of a rant. I just get really ticked off hearing all the bullshit that goes on behind the scenes… examples: The former chief lobbyist for the beef industry is now the head of the Dept of Agriculture. Former CEO’s of really *!&@#$ selfish and greedy agricultural super-farm-factories now occupy almost all of the FDA and DoA head positions. Damn that really makes me want to punch people. And for a while, we (USA) wouldn’t get involved in Honduras because… why? Because the #@<%-ing Clintons are really good buddies with some big industry honcho who happens to have a vested interest in Michelletti being president. Go eff yourself, Hillary. With a wad of cash, if you want, but go eff yourself! (another instance where the use of obscene language is rationally suited.) (Side note: Hooray for Honduras almost being back to normal!) I went on an adventure to climb Cerro Tunari. Somehow I was misdirected by at least 3 taxi drivers (curses) and ended up past Colcapirhua in somewhere north of Quillacollo, which is to say on a foothill of some mountain adjacent-ish to Tunari. Anyway, my goal wasn’t really to summit Tunari, although that would’ve been nice. I went out to search for God in the mountains. If somebody had asked me, I would’ve told ‘em that I was looking for the Apu’s, or Incan mountain gods… I guess I was searching for the presence of God… who I think is found most often in communing with others. Anyways, I ended up very hot, tired, and thirsty after about 7 hours of hiking up mountainside that was so steep I could stand up straight, reach out my arm, and touch the ground. Which is ridiculous btw. The hillsides occasionally slough off under their own weight and preposterous steepness. There was evidence of this in lots of loose terrain. So I very eventually found a farm, which is an incongruous location at best for farming and an adjoining road and thankfully started down. A farm girl came around the corner of the road and asked me (in Spanish) “What do you want here?” which I thought was a strangely biblical way of saying “What the heck are you doing way up here near our farm you crazy gringo?” … anyways, I thought it must’ve been fairly obvious that I was more or less lost given the way I had been meandering lackadaisically across the barren ground (significant lack of water begets lackadaisical walking/stumbling), so I told her I was hiking and got lost (barely refraining from suffixing a “DUH!” at the end of my sentence), and she said, “You’re lost” … which challenged my courtesy even more, but I simply said, “yeah, lost”. So then I asked here where this road went, (perhaps to a town?), to which she replied that she didn’t know. So I wisely said, “What? You don’t know where this road goes?!?” (she probably wanted to say DUH at this point too). No… she did not have any idea where the road went. Well that was enough. I started down the hill anxiously… who doesn’t know where the only freakin road to their nonsensically high and removed farm goes? Answer: Somebody who has never been down it. Yikes. [Cue “Deliverance” music]. So that gave me a lot to think about. I would have been much less surprised that she didn’t know where the road went if she spoke Quechua, but she was fluent in Spanish as far as I could tell. There are many places in the campo (read: “countryside” = not anywhere remotely close to a city or sizeable town) where the women speak almost exclusively Quechua because that’s the natural language in the area, and only the men speak Spanish because they need to be able to communicate with others when they go into the city to sell their goods. Hm… so that was a bit out of the ordinary. I went over to K’ara K’ara (Quechua for “A lot of trash”) last week. It’s the barrio across the street that’s built around the city trash dump. Which is an environmental nightmare. But people make their living pickin stuff out of it regardless. I met my friend from the Maryknoll language institute, Moises, there. I was gonna coach soccer or something, but I ended up refereeing games. Which worked out fine and I didn’t really mind, except that I got substantially sunburned. People of nearly every religious persuasion take some perverse pleasure in bombastically proselytizing about the nefarious delinquency of the human condition and all pleasure while dogmatically forgetting that God said the world and everything in it is good. They unknowingly- for they would be pharasaically appalled if they were aware- tell the almighty Lover that He is wrong… wine, women, and joy are primordially immoral. Well, Jesus decided that the first miracle He would use to assert His status as the Messiah God-Man was to have mercy on a party that ran out of wine and defy physics by transforming water into the best wine anybody ever had. And a long time before that, the Omnipotent Creator of the universe took time out of his significantly busy schedule to make living woman out of dust. First of all, I can’t even make a worm out of play-doh… and God makes beautiful, awesome, sexy, sensitive WOMAN out of dirt. And probably water too, cause girls have some squishy parts. Secondly, After making everything in the universe, God has all these mad stuff-makin stills and what does he make? Woman. Yahtzee! And having summarily addressed wine and women, for my third point, I shall simply inquire: how can joy and happiness be morally corrupt? That notion is just erroneous on all accounts. Go jump in a lake, Puritans. “There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of His become an obstacle to our union with Him. The obstacle is in our ‘self. … Those who try to escape from this situation by treating the good things of God as if they were evils are only confirming themselves in a terrible illusion. They are like Adam blaming Eve, and Eve blaming the serpent in Eden. Woman has tempted me. Wine has tempted me. Food has tempted me. Woman is pernicious, wine is poison, food is death. I must hate and revile them. By hating them I will please God… these are the thoughts and attitudes of a baby, of a savage, and of an idolater who seeks by magic incantations and spells to protect his egotistic self and placate the insatiable little self in his own heart. To take such an idol for God is the worst kind of self-deception. It turns a man into a fanatic no longer capable of sustained contact with the truth, no longer capable of genuine love. In trying to believe in their egos as something ‘holy,’ these fanatics look upon everything else as ‘unholy’.” – Thomas Merton “The saint judges no man’s sin because he does not know sin. He knows the mercy of God. He knows that his own mission on earth is to bring that mercy to all men.” [Those who believe in only the body suffer it as falsity and deception and the fault is of] “the person who consents to the illusion, who finds security in self-deception and will not answer the secret voice of God calling him to take a risk and venture by faith outside the reassuring and protective limits of his five senses.” “Being someone you are not…[is] saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man’s city?” “One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him. In fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy of only proud…” “It is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily; you yourself do not know what you want. Rather than admit this, you pretend that someone is keeping you from exercising your liberty. Who is this? It is yourself!” “So instead of loving what you think is peace, love others and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmakers, hate the appatites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed- but hate these things in yourself, not in another.” “For a humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God, before whom no other power has any meaning and for Whom there is no such thing as an obstacle. Humility is the surest sign of strength.” “Blinded by a desire for ceaseless motion, for a constant sense of achievement, famished with a crude hunger for results, for visible and tangible success, they work themselves into a state in which they cannot believe that they are pleasing God unless they are busy with a dozen jobs at the same time.” [Perhaps] “all that God asks of tem is to be quiet and keep themselves at peace, attentive to the secret work He is beginning in their souls.” “But there are others who, no matter how much they suffer perplexity and uneasiness in the wilderness where God begins to lead them, still feel drawn farther and farther into the wasteland. They cannot think, they cannot meditate; their imagination tortures them with everything they do not want to see; their prayer life is without light and without pleasure and without any feeling of devotion. On the other hand they sense, by a kind of instinct, that peace lies in the heart of this darkness. Something prompts them to keep still, to trust in God, to be quiet and listen for his voice; to be patient and not to get excited. Soon they discover that all useless attempts to meditate only upset and disturb them; but at the same time when they stay quiet in the muteness of naked truth, resting in a simple and open-eyed awareness, attentive to the darkness which baffles them, a subtle and indefinable peace begins to seep into their souls and occupies them with a deep and inexplicable satisfaction. This satisfaction is tenuous and dark, it cannot be grasped of identified. It slips out of focus and gets away. Yet it is there. What is it? It is hard to say: But one feels it is somehow summed up in ‘The will of God,’ or simply, ‘God.’” “Anyone who knows true joy is never afraid of pain because he knows that pain can serve him as another opportunity of asserting and tasting his liberty.” What of love? Love between a husband and wife… scientists say that love is a chemical imbalance in the brain. Most would believe that love is a feeling or emotion. Poets and lyricists speak of falling in love… like it is a hole that one can trip and plunge into. The depressed and heartbroken speak of love as a trap or a foolish imprudent mistake. Nearly everyone thinks of love as something that happens to you… you are passive to love. As if it were an apple falling out of a tree or a bird pooping on your head (depending on where you are on the heartbroken scale). Then there’s Disney Love™…boy that won’t really screw up a young person’s concept of love… especially little girls who are exhorted to be passive objects of conquest. The ridiculousness of the notion that being most able to kill the most things would make a man an instantly optimal spouse is just mind boggling. And almost malicious for that matter. FUCK! Then there’s Malibu-Barbie Love™…as long as you have complementarily awesome tans, bodies, and cars, you’ll be all set. Oh, and massive boobs. That’s obviously important for love too. And then there’s homosexual love… because somewhere along the line, people forgot that man and woman are incomplete without one another. (Plus rectal copulation does not yield procreation) (What’s more, it’s unsanitary). I hold that all of these notions are vacuous fallacies that can only lead to errant disillusionment and disaster, or at the very least, unfulfillment and dissatisfaction. So what is this romantic love? Is it a proverbial thought? And unattainable ideal? And ethereal shadow, vanished once viewed in the harsh light of reason? It is only for dreamers, the miraged, and the transcendent? Maybe it IS only for the chemically imbalanced! Or maybe it is a composite of consciously directed Truth. Maybe it’s a decision. Maybe love doesn’t happen to you… maybe You happen to Love. Maybe it can start with chemical imbalance that eventually balances out in the realm of maturity and true self-sacrifice. Maybe to love someone is to want what is good for them… maybe love isn’t merely a pleasurable feeling. Maybe you can love in great joy or in great pain. Maybe love is self-gift, pure and free. That’s what I think this wife-husband love is… it’s being selfish for the other. Love is being otherish. It’s laying the self down… not because the self is not valuable or worthwhile, but because picking up the ‘other’ is not possible when clinging to self and the interests of self. Well that’s enough Merton for now. Next question: Do I have emotions? I have feelings…I often chastise myself for feeling lazy. The best remedy for feeling lazy is to get stuf done. I miss my friends sometimes and my family from time to time. Is that an emotion or feeling…? What is the difference? Maybe an emotion is always involuntary while a feeling can be voluntary. I mainly rationalize unpleasant feelings/emotions, experience them momentarily, and then discard them. I guess due to their lack of value. What value does missing someone have? I guess it lets you know that they are important to you. Ok, check the box, and then move on. Emotions are almost always useless. The only useful ones I can think of are Fear, Shame, and Anger, only because they can be motivators. Hm. Maybe I’ve read too much Machiavelli… Glory through pain. If it hurts, it’s holy. If it’s early, it’s pure. If it’s cold, it’s sacred. When your body quits, your mind begins. When your body dies, your soul is born. Where your muscles fail, your spirit flexes. As your heart explodes, lungs scream, and body cries, there the living flame of transcendent humanity leaps into life, oxygenating your soul like a near-drowned wild animal. And once you know it, it’s like knowing the secret to the universe… it’s like you have entered the matrix and see the code for the first time. You feel like a monster truck in a demolition derby. You are aware for the first time that you are a sculptor standing in front of a virgin block of rock, sculpting already the curves of your life… whatever you want is in there… you just have to see it, seize it, and smash the hell out of solid stone to get at it… so you’d better be strong in body and mind.