A Fire With No Name

A Fire With No Name

Sitting here on this Saturday afternoon, I am thumbing through the latest edition of Adventure Cyclist magazine, which just arrived. This month’s cover story is about mountain biking in South Africa, and my mind soaks the imagery up like artisan bread on mushroom gravy. Then somehow immediately I click channels to the possibility of the Peace Corps. Getting sent somewhere like South Africa would be a fascinating thing, an adventure for sure, and I am sitting here hoping I would be able to bring my mountain bike. In fact, I am mentally pourng over my list of must-have items with some attachment; My mountain bike, my digital camera (with tripod,) my laptop with surround speakers, and my Seagull acoustic guitar. Maybe I would want my touring bike instead of my mountain bike, and maybe my ipod and good headphones would be more suitable than surround speakers…it sure would suck to be somewhere without electricity, but maybe that would be ok too. I could get a solar charger for my ipod! These items are among the short list of personal belongings that I did not let go of, so it makes sense that I would be squabbling over them, as I play with the idea of heading off to a developing country.




North Coast Tour, August 2010

And playing with the idea seems less like play now that I have my nomination letter in hand. It came this week! Being nominated to the Peace Corps is a preliminary hoop through which I have now jumped, and it basically keeps the conversation going. I now have to commence the legal and medical screening process, which from what I can tell is even more complicated than what I had to do to get into the military. I shutter to think, remembering that I had to take the hearing test 6 times to get into the Navy. I was only 18, but had already experienced too many rock concerts. The 1980’s were good to me I guess. No matter – I could use something challenging to focus on (I think in my more negative moments, and there are plenty of those,) something to pull this American life from the pit of atrophy that I could feel slowly setting in. Of course, I then shake myself awake with a bit of gratitudinal reflection. I recognize that I am not at risk of atrophy – that would be impossible, for the part of me that is on fire. So maybe there is more risk of burning to the ground. That’s it, there is a brush-fire closing in on the Temple of ME, and it is a fire with no name.


This week, in addition to receiving my nomination letter from the Peace Corps, I also had a job interview. The interview was with a small nonprofit, for a part-time position doing the kind of nonprofit administrative work that features heavily on my resume, but that has become less of a choice and more of a default position for me – a way to establish baseline income and survive in these times. I have finally accepted the fact that job descriptions containing the words “must be detail oriented” are words that I should avoid. That is fine – it’s great. At the age of 42, I love knowing my strengths and my weaknesses. I also would love to have a part-time job right now. Getting out of my mother’s house has become a priority for me. The idea would be to reach the beach, so to speak – get back under my own roof, and begin focusing on graduate school. It seems that I have been flinging handfuls of mud at the wall, and waiting for something to stick. I’m still waiting.


As I get closer to actually connecting with my target, I rediscover a deep truth, the beauty of this whole Freedom At Point Zero experience; It’s not that I have to decide on my next move, it’s that I’m free to decide. But, as the flames lap up the walls of the Temple of ME, I become privy to the other side of this coin; On some level, there is nothing for me to decide. My rebirth is already happening. I’ve been sitting on this emotional teeter totter for several months, and a little while back, in the afternoon of a very dark day, my good friend William encouraged me with the words…”When you find yourself in Hell, just keep walking.”


I’m actually having a pretty good time, but the keep walking part seems like a good fit. Say “thank you” and keep walking.

Thank you river!

The miners trapped underground in Chile had to “keep walking,” at least emotionally and psychologically. Waiting can be like walking across the desert when it’s something important we are waiting for. Those guys had to wait for 33 days for their rebirth, but they didn’t just wait. They were forced to face their mortality together for that entire time, a process that I can only imagine with slight accuracy. This group of men sat together ½ mile underground, praying, fearing, and grieving in limbo, uncertain about everything but the moment of their breath. The container created by that shared experience of profound desperation, is sure to have expanded their hearts and linked them together forever. In a triumphant turn away from death, they now can appreciate that container, and celebrate it. They will cherish it if they are wise. I watched transfixed, and trembling inside, as the miners emerged, one by one, from the little “specially designed” capsule. I was moved beyond words really, as I guess most people were. There were many reasons for this; the valiant integrity of the Chilean government in responding to the disaster, the dedication of families and friends at Camp Hope outside the mine, and the alchemy of engineering, expertise, and imagination that was applied to sustain these men and facilitate their rescue. But the deepest impact on me, was knowing that those guys were now all lifetime members in the ultimate men’s group, taking their greatest journey together.


I took a shorter journey with my men’s group last weekend. We went away to Lake Tahoe on retreat. We entered into community with new men, and offered our gifts to those outside of our circle. Those of us from the Sacramento clan, have traveled many miles together spiritually, and again we were witness to the rebirth of our humility, as we opened to the larger tribe of men - Men on the same journey. We spent a weekend connecting in ways that most men seldom connect. We gathered in a circle around an alter of our own creation, and we made our offerings. There were treasures and symbols of heart placed on the alter, and there were stories…stories of joy, of struggle and hope and pain. Mostly, there were stories of our father’s, the men from who we have inherited these hearts. The tears of suffering and gratitude cracked us all open with fierce intensity, and together we embraced the whole of ourselves, and each other, by the simple process of speaking our truths. We were not waiting to be rescued, and we were not facing death like the miners in Chile. But there were parts of us that died, and parts of us that were rescued. The bond of shared "salvation" warmed us like a bonfire.

The truth of my fire is upon me, as the Peace Corps becomes a real option. It’s the fire of adventure, of my expansion, of doing something different and great and inspiring. It’s the fire of letting my life be completely about service. Change is probably going to happen, and I’m probably ready for it. I know that I like being on fire, and some days, that’s all I know.


I went this morning to Yoga In The Park, a weekly gathering at McKinley Park in East Sacramento. I let the fire burn in my beautiful body, dancing the practice of Power Vinyassa with about 60 other beautiful bodies. I imagined saying goodbye to my home, and doing yoga in a strange place, far from home, with strange sounds and sights, and customs to embrace. I did my sun salutations, with the Fall-fresh morning air and the blue-skied sun in my face, and for a few moments, I was ready to leave.

Lake Tahoe in the morning

Famine Follows the Feast

I would have to say that the summer is definitely over. I can tell this because of the distinct feeling that it’s time to get working on something. This is the same feeling that I think most of us growing up have had deeply engrained by years of going “back to school” at the end of August or beginning of September. It makes perfect sense, and I am reminded that I have not completed blog entries on my two big adventures of the summer – those are really stand alone stories, and they will be coming shortly. It has been an amazing summer, and this year for me, that “party is over” kind of feeling is really amplified. After months of Freedom at Point Zero, there is an ache to expand outward and make something happen – it is a combination of latent potentiality, and a sickly kind of discontent. It’s like a guilty hangover, mixed with that feeling you get in dreams when you are trying to run away from the axe murderer, but cannot seem to move your feet fast enough. For the longest time, I have been able to fend off the deadly bite of this economy, but I am here to say that on this day, the jaws of a crippled livelihood are crushing down upon me.


I’ll be the first one to point out that, while I have plenty to be thankful for, and while I have been living rather large throughout the past three months, there is a fine line between feast and famine. I am recalling with nostalgia, my departure into “freedom at point zero,” that luxurious unfettered feeling that swept me up in the springtime, when the loss of my part-time job launched me into an adventurous frenzy of exploring the possibilities of my life, as I squeezed the juice from my sputtering business with carefree abandon, and funneled all available income into life-changing activities. At the beginning of the summer, I had savings, and my phone was ringing with just the right amount of opportunity to keep me working, and playing, in a delicate harmonic balance. I dove deep into my spiritual wellspring during 10 days of silent meditation, and pushed myself to my physical limits with a multi-week bicycle trek from Ashland Oregon, down the North coast of California. I gave the summer a grand finish by collaborating to build an incredible camp for Burning Man, enjoying a week of frolic and amazement, going up against the elements and my own stuff, on a dry lake bed somewhere North of Reno.


But the assumption that my handyman business would continue it’s slow but steady grind after Labor Day seems to have been quite flawed, for in fact, I am witness to a sudden death. This moment, I am contemplating the reckoning – the experience of returning home to an empty bank account, and a silent phone. I keep hearing on NPR that the recession is over, but I think that my clients are listening to a different station or something, because I have worked about two hours post-Burning Man. As my business imitates a crash test vehicle that has been driven into a brick wall, life is crumpling in all the right places, as my sense of self-efficacy vanishes into itself with sudden impact. I am holed up at my mom’s house, frantically doing the measurements and calculations, trying to determine my next move. I’m feeling at once, pretty lucky that I have so few expenses, and again, pretty desperate to get out of the house I grew up in. If the summer that ensued was the action-footage of a wild and gnarly Grand Prix, engine screaming through the hair-pin turns of a curvy race course, then my fall is shaping up to be the “agony of defeat” scene, the disintegration wipe out shot in slow-motion, with flames and smoke, and chunks of race-car flying at the camera. For some reason, I keep thinking about my first car.


I have bought and sold 25 automobiles in my short life, but I could never forget my first car. It was a 1976 Dodge Colt wagon – with fake wood paneling on the sides, rear wheel drive, and an AM radio in the dash. I was not yet 16, when my father and I stumbled onto the rotting corps in an overgrown front yard on a Rio Linda country road. The car was stuffed full of rubbish, and had been left for dead, with four flat tires, and the words “FOR SALE – AS IS” scrawled out in the dust across the front windshield. We paid the old man $75 and towed the heap home after putting air in the tires with a portable compressor. The “AS IS” part meant, besides the fact that it did not run, that it would take half a day to excavate the cardboard and metal refuse, broken toys, old boots, beer-cans, and household plumbing parts from the interior. Indeed, it took the rest of the day to remove the thick layer of sun-baked bird-shit and dirt from the body and windows. Over the next several weeks, we proceeded to remove, rebuild, and replace the engine and transmission, applying my father’s expert mechanical skills, and my paper route earnings to finance the project. The resurrected car was running by the time I had my driver’s license, and I quickly set forth to drive the living crap out of it.


By the end of summer, my neighborhood friends had figured out their own system for determining who would ride shotgun on the way to school in the morning, and I had discovered that I could make the car lay down some pretty cool rubber by yanking up hard on the emergency brake at about thirty miles per hour. We were starting to get light rains, and I quickly made a sport of zipping around the neighborhood after a drizzle, Starsky and Hutch style - hanging fishtails around corners and practicing my countersteer technique. It was not that I was irresponsibly abusing some car that had been given to me or something. Oh no - I had skin in the game, and a certain level of intimacy with my machine. I was practicing defensive driving, indulging a sophisticated delight in “seeing what she could do,” and probably had been infused with some of my dad’s fascination with automobiles.


It was late September when the first big rain came. Back then, Sacramento got real rain starting in September, just before a brief “Indian Summer” came and went. This weekend, it had rained all weekend, and by Sunday evening, I was itching to go out for a drive around the neighborhood. When you’re 16, a wreckless drive around the neighborhood is such a fresh, exciting experience, full of possibility. I headed up to my High School, and drove my little danger-wagon around back and onto the soccer field, to work on my hydroplaning skills. I could feel the saturated soil and grass compact beneath the wheels of my car, as I tentatively crawled out to the middle of the field. I cranked the steering wheel to the left, mashed down on the gas, and tingled with pleasure as the first chunks of sod splattered the underbelly of the car. Adrenaline surged as I spun a tight series of doughnuts, gliding across the wet surface like a hard-boiled egg on a wet plate. I gathered a few more G’s with each revolution, and I could see the lights of the gymnasium whiz past my windshield, as I struggled to hold a reference point and watch my tachometer. I was just becoming concerned about my limited visibility, when one of my rear wheels grabbed onto a chunk of dry ground, shot the car out of it’s arc, over some deep humps, and sliding down the hill at the edge of the soccer field. I bottomed out on the concrete as the little car careened across the sidewalk and onto the street.


When the vehicle finally came to a stop, I had busted two lines off of the radiator – one spewing tranny fluid, and the other steaming coolant. I nursed the wounded car closer to the curb so that it might appear intentionally parked, shut ‘er down, and tried frantically to smudge out with my tennis shoes, the thick tracks of mud leading from the edge of the grass, to the wheels of my car. The effort went over like shit-flavored bubble gum, and so I grabbed some change and high-tailed it over to the campus payphone to call my dad. I had a long, wet walk, rapidly contemplating my poor judgment, and which would be the worse of two fates; what if the school cop rolls up on my obvious folly, while I am on the phone begging a rainy-night rescue from my irate father? Hmmmm.


Sometimes it’s not easy to believe that things are going to turn out ok. Sometimes it is hard to tell what the best action to take really is. I believe that there is a refractory period that follows the kind of peak experiences that I created for myself this summer – a kind of coming down experience. I am also pretty clear that the difference between Freedom at Point Zero and Unemployed and Broke at Age 42, is my ability to be self-supporting through my own contributions. Right now, I feel like a faith-based organization with no members. I’m ok with that. It is what I signed up for when I decided that this was going to be one hell of a summer, one way or another. I sold my beloved truck and most of my belongings, moved back to my mom’s, and put the pedal to the metal.


Nearly three months later, I am learning that it is always wise to sift through the wreckage - there is bound to be something worth pulling out. The blessing is that, rather than panicking to keep a roof over my head, mostly I’m scrambling to re-establish some momentum toward the next stage in my life’s evolution. There is a process unfolding here, and a nugget beneath the surface. I am currently undertaking a yoga studio tour, and it is probably something I would not have thought to do if not for my financial challenges. To stretch my dollars, I am going around to all of the yoga studios here in town, and doing their introductory specials – typically ten days for ten dollars! There are a lot of yoga studios in Sacramento, and they all seem to have this intro special. What I’m doing is fun, educational, and a journey deeper into a practice. Also, it’s probably at least partly responsible for my sanity at this moment.

Catch & Release

I really love sushi. I especially love sushi when I am not paying full price. My favorite sushi place in Sacramento has happy hour sushi from 2:30-5:30pm, at which time all the best rolls are five bucks each. It’s a sweet deal, and I’ll tell you how much I love sushi. The other day, I was doing a handyman job, and my car battery started crapping out on me – I don’t have a truck, like most handypeople, because I’m the “Hatchback Handyman.” The guys at the jiffy lube place had tested the battery last week as part of my 25-point inspection or whatever, and they told me there might be a problem. Well, on this day, there was a problem. I was able to quickly assess the situation and get my priorities straight. It was coming up on 4pm, and I had about a half an hour of work left to do, and I was going to need to call AAA to get a jump, because my car was currently disabled. So, I call AAA and get the tow-truck on his way, scramble to finish my work and clean up, the AAA guy comes and gives me a crank, I jump in the car and I zoom to the auto parts store, but it’s 5pm – too close for comfort. Sushi happy hour ends at 5:30, and the place is about 10 minutes drive from the auto parts store. I pull up to the Autozone, leave my car running, run inside and quickly orchestrate a new battery transaction, carry the battery to my car and stash it behind the seat, and proceed on to happy hour sushi. Like I said, it’s all about priorities. I park the car in a shady spot, cut the engine, and exhale deeply, thinking I change the battery after I have some sushi and cold beer.

Earlier in the week, I had invited the woman I am dating to join me for happy hour sushi. Of course, I did not know that we were no longer dating. It took me a couple of days to find that out. And, I didn’t find it out, so much as deduce it…surmise it based upon the evidence at hand. This seems to be the way online dating works. At this point I have racked up a handful of varied online dating experiences, and I think it kind of sucks. I think the whole process sucks. Sure, you can meet a lot of people quickly, but it becomes like scrolling through people, occasionally stopping for brief connections, and then moving on, holding true to the dream of finding that perfect fantasy person with the profile that fits all the criteria. I think I am a hypocrite as I write this, since I am guilty of exactly the behaviors that make online dating suck in the first place. My theory is that it really is the medium that brings out the worse in us. When we meet people through friends or work, we are more likely to slow the process down, grant more acceptance, or even try and forge a friendship where the romantic compatibility is not there. There is a lot to be said for dating the old fashioned way, but what the hell is that? The only reason my parent’s met is because my dad’s brother was dating my mom’s sister. Eventually, there were three marriages between the two families, but with 22 siblings between them, you might have expected a few more.

I’m thinking about dating, as I am sipping my beer at the sushi bar. One of the waitresses comes walking in for her shift, and another waitress greets her with “hey, how are you?” they are just a few feet from me, and I am amazed by the first girls response to that question. “Oh my God, I can’t stop obsessing about my ex-boyfriend (insert name) because I know he is hanging out with (that bitch) right now, and it sucks – totally sucks the way he dumped me. I don’t know what I’m going to do – I just keep thinking about it.” This disclosure continues, and I am trying not to listen – glancing up at the television, which thankfully has a different channel than it normally does, because normally the food channel is on at this time of the day, and there is this jack-ass with a really dysfunctional show called “Man VS Food” in which he features huge, gigantic, cheeseburgers being served with buckets of fries and consumed by morbidly obese people. It’s just not right to have this show in sight while enjoying an elegant sushi roll. I am glad someone finally got the good sense to click over to the travel channel, and  am glad I can no longer hear the waitress sharing about her fatal attraction – but now I am wondering what she is going to do to stop obsessing, and why her boyfriend left her in the first place. It’s young love, so who knows. Maybe she spilled soda on his Ipod or something. Maybe they just grew apart.

 

I am back to pondering my own dating experience. The anonymous “She” should be here having sushi with me, but in fact, never replied to the voicemail that I left inviting her to do so – a few days ago. Clearly our connection has fizzled after a couple of meetings, and that is the way of nature, except that there is often one person more interested than the other, and this time that person is you –know-who. I am getting the blind kiss-off, and on the surface that’s just the way it has to be. After all, with the online dating, there is an economy of scale, meaning that a couple of meetings into it, with a stranger, the blind-kiss-off feels appropriate. But, that is what sucks, that human interaction gets reduced to an economy of scale. Is it just me, or is that kind of hurting all of us?

I have handled the dump scenario, as dumper, a few different ways myself, with the blind kiss-off at times, and more evolved moments featuring a sincere, heartfelt phone call or face to face meeting, to let the person know that it’s not them, really – it’s me…I’ve got “allot going on right now.” I realize that this is so George Costanza, so Seinfeldian in nature that it has become something beyond a cliché - A kind of standard operating procedure for Generation X. I’m not even sure if I’m young enough for Generation X, but the label seems to fit well.

The thing is, I have personally built a pretty strong case against the blind kiss-off. It is particularly angst-provoking for me, because of an experience I had several years ago, while living in Fresno. I had broken up with a woman - Jessie – after several months of relationship. I am using Jessie’s name to honor her, and it will be clear why at the end of the story. Our time together was a mixed bag, but we were still somehow connected, in a warm and civil way. We were still seeing each other regularly – still spending nights together and then parting in the morning with that “well, sorry it didn’t work out” kind of look on our faces. We had a date scheduled for the weekend upcoming, and it was now Wednesday. I had called Jessie earlier in the week but had still not heard back from her, which was unusual. I did what any ex-boyfriend looking forward to break-up sex would do – I called her to follow up. I was half-expecting a kiss-off of some kind to come sooner or later, but also kind of knew that we had a bit more invested than that.

When I called Jessie’s house, a man answered the phone. I was not expecting that at all. The man that answered the phone began to speak and asked “is this Michael” in a deep southern accent. OK- I was NOT expecting this even more. It took me a second to answer, and to drop back into my body so that I could listen to this character from Hee Haw or wherever – I had no idea what was going on. He turned out to be from Arkansas – and Jessie’s long-lost older brother, in town because there had been a terrible car accident, and Jessie was hospitalized. She was in ICU, and possibly not going to live. I had become quite attached to Jessie’s 5 year-old daughter Michaela, and my first impulse was to ask about her. She was ok…not involved in the accident. I was not ok, thinking about this woman, and instantly forgiving all the things that made me break up with her.

I went straight to the hospital to see Jessie – her mom had put me on the visitor’s list before I ever called. There she was, all bunched up with tubes everywhere, and on a ventilator. No one was allowed inside the room yet, and I could only see her through the window. There is a feeling of helplessness and disconnection that happens in moments like that – it’s kind of like being held under water, and it is one of the ugliest feelings that I know of. The relief of knowing why she hadn’t called, was no relief at all.

And there was no relief for several months. Jessie remained in a coma – actually with a detached brain stem like that guy in the movie Diving Bell and The Butterfly. I would sit and talk to her and imagine I could see her lips move or smile, and then sometimes they would. I would pick up her daughter and let her climb up in the bed, where she would curl up next to Jessie and sleep, and I would feed her glycerin swabs and watch her eyes follow me as I got close to her. People would visit and I would play never-ending songs with my guitar. It is hard to imagine what she was experiencing in there, and I never got to find out.

After about 18 months, I had to detach myself from the situation. I was in a new relationship, and my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I was compelled to relocate back to Sacramento, to be with my dad in his final months. I tried to keep in touch with Jessie’s family, but they were all in flux, and with no improvements in Jessie’s condition, a weary kind of numbness had set in and the whole thing was yucky and awkward.

Mixed energy can be hard to manage. It’s the kind of thing that makes us humans struggle to be skillful in our relationships and our decisions. It’s like catch and release fishing. The lowest common denominator, is that we really want the fish. Sometimes we have to hit the reset button, but the good thing is, we never ever have to fake it. I’ve gotten pretty good at survival. I don’t mean your lost in the outback, eating bugs and berries and building a short-wave radio out of coconuts survival – I mean the kind of survival that people have to do when big machinery around us is not running smoothly. Seems like I can rub two sticks together and make a decent living, but I cannot go for very long without knowing which way my little life is pointed.

   

Right now C is for cookie and that’s good enough for me. I’ve got a bicycle journey to take, and I just hope that my ass can take 9 days on the road. I am dating, while simultaneously applying for the Peace Corps. Symbolically (or energetically,) these could be seen as contradictory actions. However, taken at face value, they are the actions of casting a wide net. It’s like my legs are running and my arms are doing jumping jacks. But hey, it sure is nice to have arms and legs that move.

No Deposit, No Return.

This morning I am standing in the kitchen I grew up in – in the house I grew up in, with my mom – She lives here too. Or, as she reminded me this morning, it’s her house. I’m making lunch as she grinds me down to a nub about some dishes I left in the sink. I’m not sure exactly what she’s upset about because you see, I’m not listening. When she starts talking this way, I do the same thing I did when I was in High School, which is that I play heavy metal “tapes” in my head. That strategy worked wonders back then, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t still work pretty good. I would like to be present for my mom, because that would be productive and enlightened…the way I like to do relationships these days. The truth is that we get along well most of the time, but we reach some tipping point, some critical mass about every four days, where she needs to vent about something other than what is really bothering her. She picks a target, spews a few hurtful words, and then retreats back into her calm malaise. I feel that surge of energy shooting up my center, bite back my harsh response, and crank up the tunes in my head, which is the equivalent of plugging my ears and yelling LALALALALALA! That was what we did before heavy metal came along, right?


It is not easy for any two adults to live together, but it is even harder for us to live with our parents after being, you know, out in the world. I’m 42 and I live with my mother – this is not something I list on my dating website profile. It doesn’t matter that NPR reports that lots of people my age are doing it. It doesn’t matter that having been self-employed for the last 5 years, and battered by a shitty economy – the worse recession since the great depression - for the last two, has forced this kind of personal retreat of mine. This is not something that a man wants to lead with in any kind of public way. Granted, it’s only been a couple of weeks this time. Last year, I stayed for a year and a half. Last year, I had a plan, and it almost worked. This year, I’ve got jack. I’ve got ZERO. It’s a good ZERO, but my mom hasn’t quite mastered this concept yet.

The truth is, I do have a plan. But, right now, I’m standing in the kitchen, trying to make my food, and her toxic goo is splashing all over me. She’s just starting to bash through my invisible force-field, when I begin to realize what is really happening. You see, she won’t say that she heard me booking my train-ride to Ashland, where I will be commencing a nine-day bike tour back down to Sacramento. She won’t say that she has heard me planning and scheming about this trip, and about Burning Man, and about my trip to Washington DC in the fall to ride the C&O / GAP trail. She won’t say it, but hearing all this activity in the FUN department strikes her as something other than a 42 year-old man getting his shit together and getting "back on his feet," which is what any responsible 42 year-old man is supposed to be doing, right? Is she doubting my focus and resiliency? Is she resenting all of my hootenanny? Maybe she is just in a bad space this mornng. That’s the way family works sometimes…you just have to guess what the problem is.

When I was a kid, we took a trip across the country in a little foreign car that my dad bought just for the trip, because it was 1979 and gas had surged to 68 cents per gallon or something outrageous like that. It was the oil crisis, and this small car was a new thing for us. It was an Opel, which is French for FIAT I believe. We traveled to New York City to visit family – all the aunts and uncles who used to pinch the crap out of my cheeks when I was a 4 year-old fat and adorable little tyke. On this trip, I was twelve, and driving across the continent was a great adventure. On the return trip, my parent’s decided to take us to Mount Rushmore, so we shot up through Wisconsin and over to South Dakota.

About the time we entered the Badlands, something went wrong with the clutch, and the car would not shift out of 1st gear. It was the thick of summer – probably 105 degrees out, and this was pre-global-warming weather. Did I mention that this little car had no air conditioning. There is something very special about rolling down the highway in 1st gear, in blistering hot conditions, trapped in a car with your family. Actually, it was a kind of shared misery that bonded us pretty well. We stumbled into Rapid City, and my dad, being an experienced auto mechanic, and having had plenty of time driving at 25 miles per hour to diagnose the issue, decided that we needed a pilot bearing. Whatever it was, it became quickly clear that only an Opel dealer would have the part. We pulled up to the Buick-Opel dealer at 3:30pm on a Saturday afternoon, and were stunned and moved to gratitudinal wonder, when the sales department called the parts manager in from his weekend at home, to sell us the part.

But what happened next is something that has helped shape me as a man forever more – has formed the core of my work ethic, the basis of my resourceful nature, and a fundamental sense that I can do just about fucking anything. I watched and often helped my dad, as he jacked up the little car, laid on the near-molten pavement in the parking lot of this dealership, and dropped the tranny out onto his chest, to complete the required clutch repairs. Over the next two days, I passed him tools, held the flashlight, and drank with pride, the free sodas brought to us by the guys in the sales department of that dealership. They knew my dad didn’t have the money to pay for the clutch repairs, and they were kind enough to allow him the space in the parking lot. Roundabout Monday, when the car was all back together and we were packing up to go, the service manager, a guy named Conrad Knudsen, right there on the spot, offered my dad a job as journeyman mechanic.

If my mom doesn’t understand what the hell I am doing right now, I am confident she would at least know a bit about who I am in this world - maybe have some respect for the man she helped raise. And, the truth is that she does. She knows I am a hard worker. She watched me build my business with a honda civic hatchback, a few Craftsman tools and a Craigslist ad, to a point where I was working fifty to sixty hours per week, and living pretty large, when there was time for living. She has witnessed my resourcefulness in the months when I was so broke I couldn't buy a bag of farts, and my carefully settling all of my debts, at a time when many are defaulting. I wish that I could say she is fully aware of my various other pursuits, achievements, and passions, but the blue-collar sense of limitation in which she has lived provides limited context for such understanding. This blue-collar sense of limitation (that I have had to unlearn) dictates that one does what is necessary to survive - You climb up there and lower yourself into the open jaws of Capitalism, and as you are slowly digested, you toss out the dreams and passions that you mistakenly brought with you - they are not digestable. Actually, I believe she does understand this, after loosing my father to cancer at the age of 58. She knows the stock from which I come, and she has been very supportive most of the time. I don’t think I need to defend my motives to her as she observes my current excursions into hedonistic weightlessness. But if I were going to bother with that, I know what I would tell her.

I would tell her that this is a time of great opportunity. We don’t get to be zeroed out many times in our lives, and when we are, the best thing we can do is invest in ourselves – not materially, but in our souls, in heart-expanding experiences that are going to help us take our lives to the next level. I would explain that this process needs to be nurtured and supported, and it is different for everyone. I could even explain that, in spiritual terms, to zero out means to assume a Wu Chi posture. Wu Chi posture is a foundational posture of Tai Chi, and it’s a kind of zero point; reflective, receptive, open, and energetically neutral. In yoga, they call it Savasana. It’s a restorative posture, not just of rest, but of return to self. From this posture, we are free to move in any direction, and our senses are most available to the intuitive offerings of the universe.

It’s kind of unnerving, the way these existential frictions transcend the who, what, where, and why, and tend to focus on the “how” of living. When it comes to HOW I am living, it is clear that I have a hard time not being invested in something positive and productive. This gets back to my previous point about being nervous with so much freedom. I have a hard time running in neutral. Some of this comes back to the old-fashioned work ethic that I received from my father. “If there’s time to lean, then there’s time to clean.” How many times have I heard that?

There seems to be a sense of identity that naturally develops with being invested in something, as we grind away, cultivate and vision the terms. There is also clearly a sense of escapism - escaping of the present moment, as one leans into the future. I personally don’t have much use for identities at this moment, but some weak part of me can dig the escape part. I have always been drawn to escaping. I keep catching myself tilling the soil compulsively, making sure that I am making sure that something…anything will break loose and begin flowing in the direction that I want my life to be flowing. This character trait has served me well in the past, but it has been revised of late, like some kind of software program called BE HERE NOW has been installed on my hard-drive. An identity to hang my hat upon, like “graduate student” or “Peace Corps volunteer” would be comforting, but it would also narrow my field, and right now, I am all about wide. I'm about wide field, and I'm about forward trajectory.

The important distinction that I now make is that a forward trajectory is not about earning and consumption, not even about career development per se…a forward trajectory for me is about fulfillment, spiritual evolution, testing myself, and fully expressing the gifts that I have been given. It's about loving more, and more deeply. I don’t know exactly when that idea finally clicked into place for me, but it has, in a big way. It's a new spin on that old-school, blue-collar work-ethic that my father gave me. Thanks Dad.

Zero The Hero

It seems like a lot of my friends would like to have some zero in their lives. The tricky thing about zero is that it feels like it’s all or nothing. Like you can’t be partially committed to zero – it’s zero or it’s something else. It’s empty, or it contains something. I am not sure this is the case, but it's a premise that is being tested in my life. I have had 5 conversations in the last couple of weeks with dear friends who would like some of my zero. They probably are not ready for the Total Zero experience, but a taste of zero seems to be what they are seeking. some vacations offer a taste of zero, except when folks bring along their blackberries and laptops, and then zero is never really tasted – it's a mere sniff. Friends ask me questions as if I am a guest speaker at some kind of Total Zero workshop. They ask “what is it like to sell all of your stuff?” They say “it must be cool to not have to be anywhere.” They are coveting the freedom that comes with zero, and I understand their fascination. Many people have zero-envy, and I used to have it also. It’s a little ironic then, that several weeks into my ZERO experience, I am faced with the ominous responsibility of freedom. That's right, the looming choices, and the limitless possibilities - this wide open field of dreams is producing a distilled sense of responsibility…to myself and to the universe. It's a bit more than simply the pressure of  "Gee-Whiz Wally, I don’t want to blow this." I’m beginning to believe that I can balance on the high side of zero – you know, have my cake and eat it too. I guess we'll find out.

It is 10am on a Wednesday morning, and I am pedaling my new touring bike – my Surly Long Haul Trucker, out along North Levee Road, somewhere between Elverta and Garden Highway. This baby rides like a Cadillac, and on this beautiful summer morning, it feels like I am moving backwards down the number line - to reference a Phish song. I rescheduled a handyman job today, to clear space for this bike ride, because I am preparing to take the train up to Ashland, Oregon in a couple weeks, and bicycle back down to Sacramento. Actually, we’ll catch some Shakespeare first, and shoot out to the coast, sweeping South on Highway 1 for a couple days, and then back inland over to the Russian River and down through Napa Valley, before returning to Sacramento. It’s going to be a great trip, and it’s just the beginning I hope. I am trying to craft my life around trips like this - Trying to bottle my freedom, and take big swigs of it each morning, like I’m drinking from a jug of moonshine, slapping the cork back on the jug with a chunky gulp and a hearty grimace.

Right now, I can do whatever the bleep I want to do with my time. I don’t have to earn very much money, and it is my business – I am the boss. It’s a blessing – a mixed blessing, but a blessing. With each spin of the crank, I am hit with a new impulse to grab onto these little pieces of identity that are breaking off and floating away from me. I struggle to resist. That’s right, my identity is breaking up, and this is good news, but it doesn’t come easy. I’m not really complaining, but I didn’t expect to be back in Sacramento, living at my mom’s house, deep in the Suckburbs, running my lame-duck business again. I was so done with being a handyman when I left for Spirit Rock. I was so done being self-employed. I wake up every morning with a great big What the Fuck? It’s a good What the fuck, but it is a burly, greasy, groany What the Fuck.

I completed my Peace Corps application last week – it took me over 6 hours. This is the problem with anything to do with the government. Paperwork. One would think that I had learned my lesson with four years in the military. One would think. I relish the idea of traveling abroad right now, and being of service. I know it will be an adventure, but I am also a bit reluctant to commit myself to 24 months away from the people and places I love right now. I am hesitant to sign up for anything, at a time when I am completely weightless – unfettered by the common debts and obligations. Of course, I have deep commitments to my community of family and friends, to my spiritual practice, and to my dog – but on paper, my biggest commitment is my Netflix account. I know that many folks my age might wonder if this represents a simple character flaw of irresponsibility. Am I some kind of Metro-hobo? Pedaling my bike in the quiet country on this warm summer morning, I ponder the fact that my biggest responsibility is actually my dog – my wonderful little buddy. The way  was raised, dogs are family, and it occurs to me how much he feels like an honored guest, more a trusted friend, and less like a responsibility. I feel my feet on the pedals, look out over the levee road, across the rice fields and I can see the Sutter Buttes on the horizon. I can see the jet-liners circling the airport, slow and small and peaceful in the distance – I swerve to miss a pothole, and shutter to think that up close those planes are full of busy people moving and shaking and getting their various grooves on. My bike is inviting me to shift to the next gear, and pedal on to the next county before turning back for dinner. And then I remember the mouse that I set free at Spirit Rock. That sure felt great.

It was my last day there, and I was asked to check the mouse traps again – the tin cats as they are called – these are traps that don’t hurt the mice, but simply trap them so that they can be removed from the premises. There are tin cats (which strikes me as a great name for a band – the tin cats,) placed at strategic locations, and they frequently catch mice that would otherwise invade the dining hall or one of the residence halls. I zip around on the golf-cart and check each location and sure enough, there is a little fella in one of the traps. I jump in the golf-cart with the tin cat containing my prisoner, and drive out to the far end of the property. All the way there, I am looking into the trap, catching glimpses of the little mouse as he peeks out at me, and then hides again. I’ve never dealt with a mouse this way. It feels very Buddhist, very enlightened to practice non-harming. I get to the liberation spot, and place the trap on the ground, carefully opening the lid to allow Mr. mouse to exit at his leisure. I have to coax him out, by shaking the trap. It’s an incredibly poignant moment. He pokes his head out a bit at me, with an expression of waryness…is this a trick? I calmly savor the moment of watching the mouse reclaim his freedom. My heart is open. He is clearly shaken by the experience. He climbs out and scurries away into the tall brush, probably mouse-miles from his home. But he is free, and very alive.

So am I – and just like that mouse finds himself in strange uncharted territory out on the far end of the land beyond his little mouse-village, where he probably has never ventured before, I am getting out past the edge of town…lost but making good time as they say. There is nothing that even remotely resembles a crisis in my life. There is a fire, but it’s something akin to what the forestry service does to clear the forest floor of dead wood and stuff, to facilitate new growth and keep the elders healthy. I am getting empty, getting still and formulating a plan. This goes against the grain of my high-achiever self that has always pushed to be saddled with various indiscriminant commitments. I think this is some of what my friends are recognizing about themselves – seeing the yoke for what it is. There is a beauty in that. I can’t speak for anyone else, but clearly this is the work I need to be doing. The collapse of identities associated with my old life can be seen as making room for new identities, or it can be seen as an all-together liberation from the trappings of identity. Identities are cheap, but the care and feeding of them weighs on us like debts and obligations – this gets very expensive. Voluntary simplicity requires the retirement of these debts and obligations, and in our culture, it’s like learning a new language. I feel like such a novice.

After my bike trip from Ashland, I will be house-sitting for a couple weeks, and then going to Burning Man. When I return from that, I will depart to go stay at a monastery for two weeks, sitting and working with the monks in silence, and sleeping in a tiny hut in the woods. Maybe others live like this all the time, but I am not used to having such rich texture of variety in my life, such meaningful flirtations with freedom as this. Like Franky Says, the World is my oyster. I am investigating the idea of being a traveling caretaker for awhile, and WOOFing is definitely on the menu. The World Organization of Organic Farms has member farms all across the planet. I could combine bicycle-travel with periodic stays volunteering on organic farms (in exchange for room and board) across the country, and then across Europe – that is the big vision. “It’s good to have a plan,” he says with a crooked smile.

The possibilities are endless, and therein lies the stress. That’s what I am experiencing right now – a bit of freedom-related stress. More than anything, I am nervous about back-sliding and simply getting myself yoked – yoked once again. I want to be completely immersed in zero before ramping back up to whatever lies beyond. In that sense, danger lurks around every corner. Can I transcend mere survival? Can I get my ass out of this crappy neighborhood that feels like dead society with lipstick on? It’s clear that I am longing for something other than zero…but What? What do I replace zero with? This is the honest-to-God dilemma– there may be nothing beyond zero, or at least nothing that I desire. Is there a balance I can strike? Can I craft a life that combines a forward trajectory in career and material prosperity with an extraordinarily high quotient of time-autonomy, deep job satisfaction and personal well-being, freedom for adventure - to roam when I want to, and the financial resources to make it all happen? Can I craft a life that uses my biggest gifts, and strengths, and cultivates the highest wellness? I’m pretty sure I can.

The Real Dharma

Jumping from my meditation retreat with John Travis to my weeklong stay at Spirit Rock Meditation Center should have been a simple matter of getting from Nevada City to Marin County...via Sacramento. I had only scheduled one day of transition time back home, because I knew in a day, I was headed back into a calm, meditative environment – the opposite of how re-entry is usually experienced. Usually we drop ourselves back into the craziness of our lives at home, and stay there, to watch as the unfolding days and weeks quickly wash away any mindfulness we developed while on retreat. After my first-ever silent retreat (1 week long ) I arrived home on Sunday afternoon, and was back at work on Monday morning , gripping the desk with white knuckles, bulging eyes and smoking ears. I’ll never do that again. Coming out of retreat is a delicate process, ideally with one gradually ramping the stimulation back up. Simple objectives like piloting one’s car onto the freeway or checking all of the accumulated emails and voicemails pack a high-intensity jolt to the senses…senses which have been reopened and recalibrated with what we might call “sensory deprivation” but is really just the experience of more deeply sensing less.

I had decided to use my transition day to repack, run some errands and take my car in for some minor repairs. Yes, minor repairs. 3 days and several hundred dollars later, I was finally departing for Spirit Rock, to begin my weeklong “trial” stay as a residential caretaker…or caretaker candidate, as it were. The residential caretaker position is basically part handyman work, and part logistics - A perfect fit for me. My initial interview was filled with all of the positive energy and words that essentially indicated my trial week would be simply a formality. It’s always fun going into an experience that one has been lead to believe is “simply a formality.” It’s a lot more fun than say, taking a college entrance exam, or auditioning for a part in Hamlet.

Driving out over the Yolo Bypass, I finally got to taste the sense of departure that had me salivating while on retreat, and was so elusive for the last few days in limbo. It was easy to connect with my sense of purpose and focus, and to release the chaos of late. Breathing in unison with the rhythmic highway noises, I set my cruise control and reflected on the awkward feeling of entering into this deeper relationship with Spirit Rock after having to stall for time while my car repairs spun out of control. The truth is that they were compassionate in the extreme, and I never really felt compromised by my situation.

On the other hand, it’s always interesting with Spirit Rock. I had experienced in earlier times, a pervasive sense that "the Dharma" was out of my price range. I carry a few too many old stories of worthiness, and my lack thereof. It was clearly a shadow theme for me, and one difficult to fully flush from my system, even after sitting 4 retreats there - two of them covered by scholarships based solely and generously upon my ethnicity. There is something to this history of ambivalent feelings - it has always infused my connection to this place in the land of milk and honey. Spirit Rock, in my more cynical moments, seems more like a resort than a Buddhist retreat center. Indeed, it has been hard to avoid scoffing at the pricey-ness of the Dharma at Spirit Rock, the clichéd exclusivity of Marin culture that looms over, and more recently, the unfolding, behind-the-scenes dialog between two generations of Dharma teachers there.

Over time, I have been granted some access to that dialog, which revolves around the viability of continuing the 2500 year-old tradition of Dana (the Pail word for generosity, referring to the principle that there is no price placed on the Dharma) as the sustaining support for the teachings and teachers. Undeniably, there is a solid sincerity of practice that remains the norm there, and it has been easy enough to keep returning for that alone. But as my intimacy with Spirit Rock deepened, I could feel a foreboding sense that I might confront with some intensity, my more subtle feelings about this place - This coupled with the fact that I had already been gently warned about the staff discord afflicting the Spirit Rock community over the past couple of years. Arriving and pondering my commitment to service, I bid to hunker down and follow the advice of my teacher John Travis. He had provided a key personal reference for me, and at the retreat, had warned me to fly above all the rankor, and treat my time as personal and work retreat, for my precious time in this state of repose would be short.

Good advice. Truth is, this opportunity is exactly what I was looking for at the moment. First-off, I needed to buy some time while I completed my application process with the Peace Corps. I had already made up my mind to dedicate my life to service for the next few years, and this opportunity landed in my lap just when my life was morphing into this wild, creative commando mission to transcend mere survival. The evening of the day I lost my job at the church, I got an email from a long-time Buddhist friend, who, without knowledge of the day’s events, had forwarded me the caretaker posting for Spirit Rock. It synched perfectly with my kamikaze brainstorm of selling my belongings and going weightless – eventually traveling abroad. I clicked into action toot-sweet, to update my resume and hammer out a cover letter. I sent the application items off in a midnight email, and to my delight, had a call back from Spirit Rock management by 9:30 am the next morning. Based on my skill-set and history with meditation practice, I was not entirely surprised. But yea, I was surprised.

And so here I was, ready to give ‘er a whirl. The trial work period was necessary because this was a residential situation, featuring full room and board - a bedroom in the community house among the caretakers and other residential staff. The free access to three vegetarian meals a day, nightly Dharma talks, and full medical and dental benefits, along with the small cash stipend, was shaping this up to be a pretty sweet arrangement or someone in my shoes, and I was very motivated to make it work well for me – for everyone involved.

I was finally arriving. For weeks I had been preparing, imagining the joy of being back in Marin, and committing to extended personal retreat. As I piled my week’s provisions on the bedroom floor, I peeked out the window to dig the view and the little family of deer grazing just inches from the wall. Later, down in the shop, I bonded instantly with the other caretakers, all of whom were coming from very similar backgrounds to mine – having run various contractor businesses, and having been battered by a comotose economy. It was clear that the collective level of skill, coupled with the obvious depth of Dharma practice, would constitute a nice tight team. That was comforting. I was received warmly everywhere I went, and my heart was expanding to meet the bigness of it all.

But from the very beginning, there were also symbols of warning. The first day, at lunch, I sat at the table with the venerable Jack Kornfield and listened as he defended the Dana tradition to a younger teacher. He pulled his medicare card from his wallet and waved it around with a big noble smile – “this is how you make it work.” The young teacher scoffed, insisting that his various associations around Marin are always surprised when he told them how little he makes leading retreats at Spirit Rock. Another of the younger Dharma teachers chimed in that “so many people that come here think Dana is a tip…Dana is not a tip.” I resolved to be fascinated and compassionate, rather than put off by an early peek behind the curtain. At almost every mealtime, I was privy to the controversy – the calm but obvious discord about how lucrative and how pure the Dharma should be. After my 4th day, I sat next to one pretty well-known teacher, who declared upon hearing of someone’s being hired as retreat registrar, that “she’ll probably make more money than I do here.” He continued on to explain with some sarcasm, that since he is responsible for generating a significant amount of revenue for Spirit Rock, it would be nice to see more of that money coming his way. I thought of the Audi’s and BMW’s parked in the parking lot. This was a tough thing to hear, and I reflected back to my time early in my practice, when I was still very star-struck by these Dharma teachers – bedazzled by their books, and the Marin vibe permeating the practice. As someone coming here to Spirit Rock to work for less than minimum wage, and live a life of renunciation to help support the practice of others, I was slightly saddened by what I was hearing.

In Thailand, everyone grows up with the experience of the forest monks coming through the village on Alms rounds, taking only what is offered as sustenance, and with deep humility. The monks are a symbol of the practice, and the villagers give gladly – hold them in reverence and a kind of symbiotic gratitude. The Buddha himself made the teachings available free of charge, to everyone who desired to end suffering in his life. It was really that simple, and those teachings have been passed forward for 2500 years in this very way. It is challenging in our Western culture to carry on the tradition of Dana. We have the forces of capitalism to reconcile, and no monks coming to call each morning to remind us and humble us. Considering the other religious orders in the US, and the sordid relationship that many churches have had with capitalism, the idea of Dana is comparatively a nice respite – it seems like a return to the wellspring…A debunking of the myth. It is kind of a shame to see this 2nd generation of American teachers attempting to turn the Dharma into a product.

By my 2nd day at Spirit Rock, I was coming down with some kind of stomach flu, and had to use one of my scheduled days off to recover. I began to speculate that I had accidentally eaten some expired leftovers from the community fridge. Who knows. I had a few days to stew with my latent ambition of cycling the fire-roads and winding hills of Marin again, and in fact spending the lion’s share of my off-time hours doing this. I had logged so many hours daydreaming of this on retreat, that in my ill, bedridden state, I could run the movies in my head and almost feel the pedals under my feet. Certainly, this was not shaping up the way I had daydreamed – the two days of illness, the teachers and their money woes. I was really enjoying everyone in the “double-wide” as they call the modular house for residential staff – loving the daily group meditation at 8am. My determination to stay above the judgments and see the highest truth was still strong. After recovering a few days later, several of us staff met up at a Dharma talk down in Fairfax, presented by the Tibetan monk, Anam Thubten Rinpoche, visiting from his Dharma center in Pt. Richmond. He has been a monk since the age of 5, and owned no possessions. He was speaking from his most current book called No Self, No Problem, and as always, was extremely soothing and funny to listen to. He was talking about “the real Dharma.” The real Dharma, he said in his English through Tibetan accent, “does not come from a book, or from a fancy temple, or even from some smart, funny guru. The real Dharma comes from the heart," said Rinpoche. Makes sense to me.

It’s not that I want those Dharma teachers at Spirit Rock to be impoverished – they are hard-working people. Maybe some of them are having difficulty with the demands of their chosen profession. Maybe Marin is too expensive a place for them to reside. Maybe they have consumer-conditioning to grapple with like the rest of us. Surely they are not expected to go without healthcare, as I currently do. Maybe the royalties from a few more books would help make the payments on the brand new Beamer a bit less heavy. I don’t mean to be sarcastic…I don’t want to go there, really. I just couldn’t help but think that I came here to work, meditate, connect with great folks, and ride my bike. I shared with someone in the house that I really did not want all this moaning by the teachers to ruin my attitude. She looked at me kind of funny - kind of concerned.

The day before the end of my trial stay, I had finally gotten out on a fire road with my cross-bike. After obsessing for days about feeling the gravel under my tires, I hit the White Hill Fire Road with gusto. About 30 minutes down the trail, I came upon a dropoff that I didn’t remember where the trail shrinks to single-track. I took a wrong line down the overly steep section of trail and plunged myself through a near-death experience, losing control of my bike. To bring the rolling chaos to a halt, I drove the bike into a tree stump protruding from the side of a hill. I spiraled over the bars and landed on my back in soft brush. I did a quick body-scan…not a bruise, ache or even a scratch. My bike was totaled, but I was overcome with gratitude, for the completely unharmed state of my body. The universe seemed to be letting me know that I would not be staying in Marin this time – I caught that loud and clear.

Back home in Sacramento, I got the call the evening of my return. I had been voted off the island. The facilities manager, who would have been my supervisor, was beside himself with disappointment. He had no control over the final decision, which really seemed odd to me. There were two pieces to this equation – the work piece and the residential house piece. I was baffled myself, having not collided with anyone, nor had anything less than positive, joyful interactions. It was turning out to be a dicey experience having my work tied to my residence in this way, and I could only speculate on the cause of my rejection. The residents needed full consensus for my selection to be final, and it did not happen. Maybe there were reservations about what I had expressed regarding the teachers. Maybe I should have been even more friendly – talked more about my love of cleaning. My mind was filled with speculation, but I would probably never know any more than I knew in that moment.

The Big Bang

I am having a pristine moment, slowly rambling my feet through the grass, rolling, lifting, moving, placing, as I walk in meditation. It is day 7 of a nine-day silent retreat and here in the hills of Northern California, my only job is to meditate – to mindfully sit, walk, eat, and sleep – and of course to listen. There is endless listening, to the reels and reels of mental footage from the archive of my life. It is probably more accurate to say that I am watching a movie, because all of the pictures are there also – it is a visible internal dialog, and it has been incessant since I arrived here. Now, on day 7, my senses are crisp with a clarity akin to the way they might have been at birth…unfettered by the filters of my various identities and absent the copious scratches and dents that now adorn my 42 year-old ego. Right now, I am here, rolling, lifting, moving and placing each foot. It is clear that a step is a marvelous achievement, as I study each of them, count them and revel in both their masterful complexity, and their beautiful simple elegance.

My gaze is set softly dead ahead, on the rolling landscape of this foothill retreat center. This place is soaked in a silence that is empty up front, but gently textured with a symphony of birds and other wildlife off in the distance. The weather is so perfect that it is hard to describe – sun shining a bright blue sky decorated with puffy cartoon clouds, a slight breeze cooling the air to 78 degrees or so…that figure a guess of course since there is no media available, no weather reports, news paper or even a thermometer on the wall – a guess will suffice on a day this perfect. On this seventh day, the colors are brighter, the sounds crisper, and the thoughts more vivid than any that happen back home.

After all, this is the 7th day of the rest of my life. I place my feet and feel the grass smush down, and contemplate what possible forces of the universe, what incredible alchemic twist of karma and my own skillful action have conspired to deliver me on such a clean slate. I turned 42 a couple of days ago, and I am standing on a cliff, preparing to jump off into a sweet unknown. At this moment, I have no bills, no residence, no job, and only one day marked on my calendar. I am off of the treadmill, and it feels like an enlightened state to have seized for myself so much freedom. That’s it! I am liberated. It is indeed, freedom at point zero, and in my joyful stillness I savor each detail, trying to reconstruct the story of exactly how I arrived here at this place - Slightly nervous that I could slip backward if I don’t remember.

Just a few days ago I was selling off the pieces of my household on Craigslist. My phone rang off the hook with obsessive looky-loos, sleazy lowballers offering less than half the posted price…sight unseen, and then finally nice folks arriving to take my groovy stuff away. When the big stuff was gone, I prepared for two days for a bonanza yard sale, upon which I watched with quiet amazement and only faint attachment, as the traffic clustered in front of my house. Strangers, friends and neighbors picked through the big chunks and even the finest particles of my life, swiftly repurposing those particles into their lives. For a brief time, cash seemed to fly at me, and my pockets became overwhelmed with one, five, ten dollar bills stacked and folded, forcing me repeatedly to run inside and stash the booty for safety’s sake.

My sense of struggle was being replaced with a sense of abundance. My sense of identity tied to those chunks and particles evaporated with the re-discovery that I was not them. The part of my heart that was not ready to let go of my beautiful things, and my beautiful home, was left standing on the curb like a smelly hobo, as my life roared on up the road, double-clutching and revving hard into the sunset. I kept trying to slow the experience down, to be sure and feel some of the loss that I expected myself to feel, but I had unleashed a synergy of aw-inspiring positive energy that quickly snuffed those impulses, and tipped the scales, in favor of leaving town with a nice bit of savings, and a sense of purpose.

Just a few weeks ago, I was tilling up the largest part of my backyard to plant a garden. I worked the soil, sifting in organic fertilizer and carefully shaping my beds to be ready for seeds. I was scrambling to get planting before the hot weather of June, and the joy of laying down roots – both figuratively and literally – was intoxicating, as I finished the beautiful spring afternoon with my dog and cold beer in the yard, looking out over my new garden. At this moment, the sweet smell of summer was in my nose, and moving was the furthest thing from my mind.
Just a few months ago, I was operating a handyman business, or rather, performing CPR on my once lucrative handyman business. After grinding two tough years away in a ressession-drenched economy, grieving the slow grief that never gets to fully happen, I clung to a trickle of work that kept me believing in the viability of my business. This business that started as a fluke and behaved like a fluke for the entire time, as I discovered strengths and skills I didn’t know I had, and continuously attained new levels of personal satisfaction – as I walked with faith through each day and each week, trusting that the phone would always continue to ring. This business that busted my knuckles and lined my pockets, kept me working into the evenings and eating drive-thru hamburgers. After five years, this business that held my identity hostage for better and for worse was finally being scuttled. My loyal truck had sold just a few days earlier and only narrowly escaping repossession. Mo more Happy House Handyman Service.

Several months ago, I had taken a part-time job managing the office of a new-age “church,” cobbling together a living with my sprinkling of handyman gigs, marshalling every dollar to keep a rented roof over my head, and finally finish paying off the lingering credit-card debt that had been shadowing me for an ugly number of years. Yes, now - this triumphant moment after two years of recession, I was the tortoise inching across the debtor’s finish line just a few serendipitous days before being informed that hard times would force the elimination of my position at the church. Alas, no time for celebration. This startling but obvious news was made heavier by the punchline; I was not eligible for unemployment benefits, because spiritual organizations are exempt from paying into that system. A moment of shock bled into an hour or two of contemplation, and by the end of the day, the full reality had jammed my frequency.

But it was a good frequency jam! It was not the reality that I might have embraced a few years previous – this was a new kind of response to adversity. Somehow, my heart had scroIled past the desperation channel and landed on the opportunity channel. I found myself feeling an explosive resolve to sidestep the experience of struggle, and instead to let go into something new – something life-affirming…”not sure what, but something exciting,” I thought. My mind was saturated with the jolting realization “I am fucking free, to do whatever I want to do, right now, and straight away.” It took me awhile to fully comprehend this. It took me awhile longer to compose myself and focus my energy. This magical afternoon that I lost my job, I spent the day researching ways to travel abroad…like teaching English, or joining the peace corps. At first it felt like a simple coping mechanism. But I knew for certain that I wanted to do service work. It was clear that I needed to re-establish my fundamental connection to work as service, as an expression of love coming from the core of my being. A pretty lofty goal, but clearly the path I was being called to. I had met a friend for Chinese food after being terminated just before lunch. After the meal, I cracked open my fortune cookie, and read that “A sudden change would broaden my horizons.” That’s what I’m sayin’.

And so here I am on retreat – taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha – sinking deep into each still quiet moment. The world is my oyster, and I feel like a swashbuckling pirate with a sharp sword and a fast ship. Freedom at Point Zero. No mouths to feed, no mortgage to pay, no where to be on the proverbial Monday – well, that’s not entirely true. Remember that one day marked on my calendar? More on that coming up. Let's just say it’s good to have to be somewhere.

Burden of Proof, Gift of Forgiveness

I just got home from the health club. I had gone with the singular purpose of sitting in the steam room in alternating periods with the hot-tub, in an effort to purge myself of the every last trace of this flu that has been working me over for a few days. I got there at 7pm, and the club closes at 8pm on Sundays, so I’m thinking I have a solid hour to soak and steam, rinse and repeat! I get in there, the steam is nice and thick, and life is good. About three minutes into my bliss, this guy comes walking in with a spray bottle in his hand – for anyone not accustomed to steam-rooms, there is typically available, a spray bottle of eucalyptus oil that gets sprayed into the steam emitter to vapor the air with a pleasant and soothing menthol.

This guy thinks it is eucalyptus in the spray bottle, and I can see by the bright yellow color that is probably Zep commercial cleaning solution (I’m a handyman…I know this kind of stuff.) Before I can say anything, he unscrews the spray-top, and dumps the entire bottle of stuff into the steam emitter, which would be a bit of an overdose of eucalyptus, even if it was in fact. Within about a minute, the place is gagging me with the smell of cleaner. He is sitting silent and still, apparently comfortable, with his eyes closed and oblivious to what peril he has just unleashed. I’m like, “Dude, that is cleaning solution – we gotta get outta here and let this place air out!” The guy tells me he got it from the “cabinet where they keep the stuff,” as I am exiting with my towel over my mouth.

It sucks when we press the wrong button, and the shit hits the fan - When we as men, “drop the ball,” or “miss the mark,” or “fail to deliver the goods.” Shall I continue? There are plenty of tired metaphors to describe the many ways that we can botch things up.  You know the cliché – “everybody makes mistakes.” It is a tough row to hoe, to feel that feeling in our gut that says “I don’t want anyone to know what I just did” and to deal with it in a healthy way. Yikes. I have a particular defensiveness that I have had to work and practice with my entire life, a specific sensitivity around accusation and blame.

I mentioned in my first installment of this blog that I was accused of murder when I was 6 years old. That is the kind of statement that begs a bit of explanation is it not? I’m more than happy to blow the suspense and reveal that obviously I was not guilty. I was in 1^st grade, and there was a girl in my class named Harriet Riley – a chubby, funny, vivacious black girl that I used to play tetherball with during recess. She used to kick my ass in tetherball. She lived around the block from me, and I had a couple of friends up the street – two brothers named Jerry & Kevin – and we used to play sometimes after school. They were kind of toughies, and it was clear that, while we could have a nice time, I never felt like getting too deeply chummy with them, because their home was not at all warm and welcoming. It is funny how we know this stuff even when we are young. I clearly remember knowing that.

See, I clearly remember feeling different from the kids that did not have moms waiting for them at home. I did, and it felt like home, and I felt a bit less like a “toughie,” and a bit more like just a goofy kid. I think that Kevin & Jerry were already loosing their ability to feel like goofy kids. They were becoming toughies.  

Well, one day Harriet disappeared. She simply never made it home from school. Of course, after a couple of days, it was all over the school, it was on the news, and so on. I was not really into watching the news much at that age, but my mom called me to the TV when that story came on, and it scared me to see Harriet’s mom on the screen crying. It was not more than a day or so more before they found her body in a dumpster in the neighborhood. She had been found with a plastic bag over her head and signs of trauma around wrists and ankles. Everyone in my class was pretty freaked out. I was in the same 1^st grade class as Harriett. I was especially freaked out the next day, when a couple of guys from the FBI came and fetched me out of an assembly that we were having for Abraham Lincoln’s approaching birthday. I didn’t know what the FBI was when I was 6, but I knew it was bad that two tall guys in black suits & ties wanted to talk to me behind closed doors – I started crying immediately, and didn’t stop the entire time I was in their presence. Even once my mom and dad arrived at the school to provide my alibi and be at my side, I did not stop crying. I think I even peed’ my pants.

The agents had received a hot tip from my pals Jerry & Kevin that placed me as the last person seen with Harriet Riley. These kids told the cops that they had watched from their front yard after school, as Harriet and I strolled across Watt Avenue (a busy four-lane thoroughfare) to grab a burger at Lou’s Burgers one day after school. Now, I was pretty independent in 1^st grade; I used to dress myself in the morning, tie my shoes, make my own bed – heck, I could even fix a pretty mean PB&J. But, even though you could see Lou’s Burgers from my front yard – it was right over yonder, just across the street – energetically it was like going to the mall or something.

The FBI had decided to interview me a 2^nd time – which is a good thing when you are trying to get a job, but doesn’t feel very good at all when you are being asked about a kid’s body in a dumpster.  They set up big spotlights and a white dropscreen in our livingroom, so that they could take a few mugshots for my file. They didn’t ask me to smile. Thankfully, it only took the one more encounter with me and my parents, and a few more of my tears to convince them that I didn’t really have it in me to wander on over to Lou’s Burgers with a friend for dinner, and then you know…kill said friend and leave them in a dumpster.

Actually, by then Jerry and Kevin had caved in and confessed the truth of what had taken place. Harriet had been over at their house playing after school, as she often was. They were playing cops and robbers – and Jerry & Kevin were the cops. They had tied Harriet up to the tree in the front yard, and then placed a bag over her head. When she suffocated, the kids went and got their dad, who was home most of the time because he had recently been released from prison. Do you see where this is going? Well, he decided that the best solution was to dispose of the body. In a dumpster. Around the block from his house. I know. It’s hard to imagine.

When it was all said and done, the father went back to prison, the mother of Jerry & Kevin had come unhinged and Child Protective Services was racking up visits to the house. Before long, the kids were placed into foster-care.

Now those guys – Jerry & Kevin – they really made a mistake. The bag over Harriet’s head – that was a mistake. For whatever reason, they didn’t know the potential consequences of their game. That is what I was told, and I believe it. Back in 1973, there were no warning labels on plastic bags, just like there were no warning labels on hot cups of coffee, or cigarette packs, or commercial cleaning solution. We just kind of needed to know that stuff was dangerous. I can say this; my mom pretty much hammered into my head the potentially fatal hazard of any plastic bag that entered our household. Not that I needed any reminders.

I have learned that it is my shadow of accountability to feel and act defensive, and likewise, it is also my shadow of forgiveness, to harbor blame and hatred. This applies to the plentiful ways that I can turn blame outward, and it also applies to the way I carry the message within. Usually, if we are quick to blame, it is because we have some self-forgiveness that we need to do.

I have wondered if Jerry & Kevin have ever felt sensitive to accusation themselves, defensive or secretive about their mistakes like me. It is clear that I have remained connected to them on some subtle energetic level, as a result of the experience I had with the FBI, and that of being wrongly fingered by Jerry & Kevin. Their father told them to lie, and to falsely implicate me in the scenario involving Harriett. How would that feel to be 6 years old, and have my father to force me into that?   

It was such a tragic rippling outward from a fairly innocent center; three kids playing in the front yard. I have often wondered what life has been like for those two, having set into motion with a thoughtless mistake born of play, a whole series of events including the death of someone and the devastation of a family, and of course the destruction of their own home life and family. Maybe their play was modeling some hostile things they had been exposed to. Maybe their home life was not that great to begin with, and this whole situation was caused by crappy parenting anyway – it doesn’t matter – it probably still felt like home. Maybe the two brothers got placed in a home that was more nurturing and loving than that which they been born into. It I wonder if they have understood how their childhood ignorance offsets their burden of guilt.

Has any of this weighed on them, or have they completed blocked the experience out of consciousness? I won’t ever know, but I do hope they have embraced themselves with some form of self-forgiveness.

A Bigger Cage - Part Two

One thing I am discovering as I step out onto this path (blogging,) is that my intention to "set up" my premise for the reader, is potentially over-intellectual. It is at least indulgent, possibly born of insecurity, but also possibly very helpful to the reader ( He laughs out loud.) Either way, I aspire to speak from the heart, about what I know and what I feel, as I am making lists in my head like a diligent Buddhist. In terms of validating the premise of this blog…They say the chase is better than the catch, right?

This first installment - A Bigger Cage - is really feeling like this is all about identities. In preparing to expand that as an idea, what quickly comes forward for me is a three-pronged set of questions, and possibly dilemmas; that of gender roles, that of soulful living, and that of legitimacy.

Clearly the last four decades have ushered in a period of deep revision for gender roles, coupling a changing career landscape for both men and women. With new demands, as well as new possibilities at home, in relationship with lover, family, and community, this new cultural dynamic is a combination of unfamiliar freedoms and responsibilities – Forcing some changes in our understanding of basic ideas like success and legitimacy, fulfillment, and self-expression. The degree to which we choose to engage these dilemmas, and allow our truest expression of self, is the extent to which we are living soulfully.

With regard to identities, it is just so damn easy to bump into them. They are inescapable, and on some level, necessary it seems like. They surround us and demand our emotional energy - box us in, and then require constant revision like some kind of pugnacious imaginary friend. But they also allow us to formulate a coherent response to our circumstances and experiences, without reinventing the wheel every time. But alas, subscription to these identities can be cumbersome, because then the identity we take on is potentially inaccurate or inadequate. For example, a creative barrier for me in terms of writing this blog, is the fact that I have no "credentials." I am not a Reverend, or a psychologist, or even a movie star that has been through rehab.

However, I do know myself well, and I know what a cage looks like. Right now, that is good enough for me.

Maybe we all feel like we are living in a cage? Men and women – like that couple in the film “Revolutionary Road.” Some in my current social circle exist in that realm, and some do not. It's so subtle that it creeps up on even the most awakened of us, and subtlety invites an ongoing practice of gradual awakening. The image of a bigger cage is really an invitation and a manifesto. We can ask our lives for a bigger cage. Maybe we need to demand a bigger cage, or even build it without asking. Don't take out any permits, or call your wives for permission. We have to start somewhere.

I credit Men's work with helping me to make the cage bigger, by teaching me that I am responsible for the condition of my cage, and that my cage is a reflection of what is going on side of me. My cage can be exactly what I want it to be. I also credit men's work with teaching me how to nurture sincere, substantial, and satisfying friendships with other men.

I have been a practicing Buddhist for some years. It's safe to say I'm something of a feminist, and by extension, a pacifist really. Where the quest for legitimacy is concerned, pacifism definitely qualifies as nonconformist, and in fact, true pacifism is a pretty radical proposition. The truth is that values like pacifism are regularly challenged in American culture, and set aside rather quickly as the situation warrants.

I had a Christian friend back when I was one myself – and he used to say that Jesus was a pretty radical fellow for his time. Clearly that is the case, and it gets back to what I mentioned in part one about how the true visionaries historically have bucked the system and dispensed with their need for legitimacy. Especially since our culture does not widely endorse the idea of pacifism. If one is seeking legitimacy in that realm, well then brother, one has got some work cut out. Survival is a form of seeking legitimacy, I would argue. And survival, in all of it’s many forms, is hard-wired.

When I was a kid, some friends and I were bored on a Friday night - it was springtime, and there were bugs everywhere. We had found a black widow in the garage, and then a praying mantis earlier out in the yard. We decided to have our own version of UFC cage fighting with these critters. We placed them both in the same jar, and began ferociously cheering and yelling in anticipation of a nice juicy brawl, insect-style. But the little fellers didn't fight right off - they just sat there looking at each other. finally one of us began to shake the jar in frustration, and poke them each with a stick. What a strange experience for a bug to have? To be placed into this desperate and surreal situation. Do bugs experience surreal?

Anyway, they finally had no choice but to defend themselves and their "honor" or something. Maybe they just became so agitated that their biological fear-responses kicked in. Survival is hard-wired. Well, it was not long before the praying mantis was tearing those little black legs out of the black widow's body like they were little strips of bacon. It was a crushing victory, and awesome to watch, like something on PBS. But it was short-lived. One of my friends - whose garage we were standing in - had grown rather partial to the black widow, and decided that the grand prize for mantis winning this match was going to be DEATH. He grabbed his dad's little propane torch, fired it up, and submerged the blue orange flame into the jar, live-roasting the praying mantis in just a few seconds, but continuing for a minute or two, just to be sure. There was cheering and yelling by all of us boys - none older than 12 at that time. The seeds of our crude masculinity had taken purchase in fertile soil.

There is a difference between the masculine that feels compelled to defend his honor, and the masculine that recognizes the power of functioning from a higher place - By nurturing a solution, offering a strong repose in the face of confrontation, and choosing to diffuse that confrontation with the love of true presence. Bugs would probably call that bullshit, although those bugs were trying in the beginning - not that they were both men - who knows? I recall that the black widow was probably female, because the males usually have yellow and red bands and spots on their backs, and there were none. Who knows about the praying mantis. How could I remember?

And who knows about honor? What a strong projection that is, to imagine that there would be some vulnerable ego for a spider or beautiful insect, to retain one's sense of legitimate self. The John Wayne spider meets the Clint Eastwood praying mantis. Maybe so. This primitive impulse downloaded into our software via both nature and nurture, but mostly nurture - which really means our socialization. Just a footnote that I don't think honor is the same thing as integrity - Honor is an archetype.

The scary part is that we boys made them fight, because we wanted to see a fight. Sure, in nature's wild kingdom, they probably would eat each other for lunch anyway...toot sweet. The point is that we injected confrontation into the situation, and indeed, reveled in it. We embraced the competition, and screamed for the gooey insect blood to be shed.

I am convinced that this experience for me was part of an unconscious conflict, born of rejecting the masculine model that I was given by my culture, and at the same time hanging onto it for lack of something more genuine. There is no pointing fingers here - I bought into the impulse. I took the bait and swam with the hook in my mouth.

Some of us grow up knowing what a hook smells like, and the truth of who we are. Some of us don't.

At some point, 20 years later, I was walking the earth with my crooked-headed, softened gaze, trying so hard to be Mr. New-Age Nice Guy, and wondering why all the women wanted from me was friendship. I had over-corrected, and the quest for legitimacy was well under way. I had embraced the reluctant masculinity...not the feminine, but this kind of half-baked trojan-horse masculinity, trying to "sneak inside the compound" by seducing the women in my life with sweet, poetic sensitivity. I espoused the evils of football and my love of pretty things, and would have claimed that my farts smelled like daffodils in order to get laid, if not for the contrary evidence.

In my folly, I advocated against the masculine – against the classic masculine that was given to me. I don’t feel like I was wrong to reject the “John Wayne” version of manhood, but I understand now that it was kind of silly to create an identity out my opposition to it. But that is what we do sometimes.

And it’s kind of like the fear of creating. It's always about something else.

What is most important is that all of our experiences shape who we are today, and that is powerful shit if we are willing to own it. My intention is to shine my light, and brighten the corners with some inquiry and exploration.