Paradigm Shift

Well, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again…”I don’t need to get kicked in the nuts twice to know that once is too many times.” Yea, that’s right, I said that. I was in the Navy the first time I said it, but it’s become one of my little credo’s – I think everyone ought to have a credo. Something odd but cool like “I don’t take any wooden nickels, dawg.” I think my dad’s secret credo was “don’t stop fighting until you can’t get up again.” My dad wasn’t a fighter like in the violent sense, but he was pretty fucking tough, in the “keep on keepin’ on” department. I think getting kicked in the nuts once is a real attention-getter – you know, painful and all. But getting kicked in the nuts twice is a paradigm shift. At the very least, it’s cause for wanting a paradigm shift.



I just found out today that my unemployment benefits will be awarded in the sum of $57 per week. This will continue until I have received $720. And then I could qualify for extensions. Extensions? Guess in two years I could be a homeless, broke ninety-niner, spending my $228 per month on malt liquor and hanging out down by the river, with all the other motivational speakers. I’m trying to count the amount of times I have been kicked in the nuts over the course of this recession, but just taking a wild swing at it, I’d say it doesn’t really matter after the first handful of times. What followed was a paradigm shift, and the beginning of my Freedom at Point Zero” phase. Today, the news I have received certainly qualifies as “kick in the nuts 3.0” but I am kind of at a loss for what a paradigm shift would look like this time.


How proud I am to find that I have indeed fallen through the cracks in this recession. I don’t qualify for anything that looks like public assistance, unemployment insurance, or whatever, because I’m a man, I’m not crazy and I don’t have any kids. I did apply today for food-stamps, because hey, a man’s gotta eat. It was kind of cool to talk to my mom today, and receive her admonishment that I keep buying good quality food, no matter how bad things get. I’ll have to drag her to the Co-op one of these days, and see what she says. My new business cards came in the mail the other day, and little postcards that I can use to canvas around my neighborhood, promoting “the human-powered handyman.” But truthfully, this human is feeling a bit less powerful in the face of diminishing options and bleak prospects. My postcard says “Finally, a neighborhood-based, eco-friendly way to take care of your precious home.” Finally! I hope my neighbors here in Curtis Park get my irreverent, tongue-in-cheek greenie-ism, and don’t take my slogan too seriously.


There is this whole Judgment Day thing that the Christian fundamentalists are screaming about, and I have been posting a lot sarcastic comments about on my Facebook page. I’m probably going to hell for taking the end of the world so lightly. I think it is fascinating to see a group of people wishing so deeply for an end to their painful existence in the human realm – I understand them on some level – and yet, I think it is a kind of mental illness to have such faith in something like THE END OF THE WORLD, or even going to heaven. What they could be praying and hoping for is a paradigm shift. I suppose that Jesus coming down for the last roundup is a kind of paradigm shift, but I don’t know if it’s all that realistic a vision. I have seen God work many times, and (s)he is more subtle than that – more clever, and certainly a lot less interested in making a scene. But a paradigm shift I could see – I could get behind that. Maybe, all the money that all the countries spend on military weapons could instead be spent to get folks fed and off the street, and into drug treatment programs – that would be a paradigm shift. Maybe the money that’s left over (because you know there would be money left over) could be used to insure that the disabled and mentally ill, and all the broken down veterans received their fair shake and a way to build productive, satisfying lives for themselves. You see where I’m going with this.

They just killed Osama Bin Laden for being a terrorist, and for hating America, or as George W. Bush said, for “hating freedom,” but I think someone hating freedom is about as likely as someone hating chili dogs, or donuts. They might hate the results, but…I don’t think Osama Bin Laden was a good man, but I think he would taste a chili dog and dig it just like everyone else does. Nobody hates those things. We could have been building schools and hospitals in the same countries that we have been bombing and killing in for the last ten years. Probably it would have been cheaper, and somehow, the world would be a safer place than it is now with Osama Bin Laden dead. That’s all I’m saying.


When I was a freshman in high school, I started smoking weed. I was pretty into smoking pot, because it was such a new experience. Intoxication, mind-expansion…these were new things, and they felt good. Talk about a fucking paradigm shift. It was kind of hard to hide what I was into, and my parent’s did not like the fact that their son was “on drugs.” I don’t think my dad ever really believed that I would be a good man once he caught me smoking weed – once he found my bamboo bong and smashed it into a hundred little pieces. Well, I got over weed, got tired of the anxiety, the hiding and the nagging voice in my heart telling me I was destined for better, greater things, if I could only get my shit together. I have never sworn off marijuana as evil, but have certainly acknowledged that people can get addicted to it, just like we can get addicted to anything else. There is little room for it in my life, as I’ve moved out into the world, and so it’s shocking to me now to pick up the Sacramento News & Review and see that 50% of the content is pot-related advertising. I think it’s surreal - Quite the paradigm shift from the days of my youth.


I would have never guessed when I was 14 years old, that I would ever see magazine ads for weed, and coupons for “one free joint when you buy an eighth.” Look, I’m 42 and I still hide my stash even though it’s one doctor’s note away from being legal. I have weed in my bedroom closet that is three years old, and I often forget where it’s hidden. I get high like less than once per month, and it still feels like a big deal to me. That is a good thing, and I cannot imagine walking into a store to buy a bag of weed. And yet, that moment is upon us.


A defining moment happened for me back in the year 2000. My dad was diagnosed with cancer in 2000, and cascaded headlong through a relatively brief cycle of surgery, disease, and chemo that had him circling the drain inside of two years. At some point, he called me and asked me if I would get him some “grass” and show him how to smoke it – he needed something to help manage his pain, and I had to explain that it wasn’t called “grass” anymore. By that time, pot was widely regarded as effective for this purpose, and so it came to pass. This, the man that almost kicked me out of his house for smoking pot as a teenager, straight as an arrow, and I’m showing him how to hit the bong I bought him for his last birthday, just a few months before he died. “Here dad, you see that little hole, it’s a carb – you gotta cover the carb with your finger, and then suck real hard…Ya gotta hold yer breath in there. Hold it, hold it…ok now exhale”


That’s a paradigm shift, ok - A mighty, mighty paradigm shift. When things that used to be rotten and bad, aren’t seen as quite so bad, and maybe some things that used to be ok are no longer tolerable, like judging folks about who they want to love. I’m looking for another paradigm shift right now – a big fat one that will make it so that a man with three college degrees, and a thousand different skills can find some way to stop having to claw and scrape for his basic sense of economic safety. That’s the kind of paradigm shift I’m waiting for, but I think it’s going to take awhile. The evidence, by all indications, is that even more education might not help substantially. But I know one thing…I can take another few kicks in the nuts and I’ll just keep getting up, because I know how to have a good time, and because life is rich and sweet. I’ve got a groovy new girlfriend, and there are a lot of people around that really care about me. I’ve also got chickens now, and they are laying some pretty big eggs.

Shooting the Pier

When faced with the question of whether to create or not to create something…that is to say, whether or not to do something creative, it is quite easy for us to fall back on a default position of unavailability, where either the time, money, or other resources are not available to us. Maybe we are simply not emotionally available to create – this is actually the most common problem that I encounter when inviting myself to create. Sometimes the various obstacles that I have internalized around creativity are accessible far more easily it seems, than all of the gifts, talents, intuitive impulses and energies are. This can be quite crippling, and yet, I remain in those moments, quite aware of the ache that I have inside – I must create something. I am learning that I am most creative when drawing on, or at least synthesizing my angst – that fight or flight response to the stressors around me.


I could make the argument that it is hard to be creative when our world is in flux – when our sense of safety is challenged, or our heart is broken, or the struggle to survive financially is bearing down upon us. By that logic, the obstacles preventing creativity have been plentiful in this time of economic scarcity and transition. Interesting then, that the most renowned artists in history seemed to inhabit lives of incredible adversity and emotional chaos, addiction, and personal tragedy.


It’s true that creativity is a process of decision-making – of drawing the most from a thousand possible choices at each turn. There are certain circles that believe we have too many choices in this country. I’m leaning in the direction of that belief, as I continue the sometimes painful process of reinventing myself. This process has been unfolding over the last few years, and of course, coincides with the economic recession, which most would agree, is redefining almost everything about the way we hold not only vocation, but such common priorities as family, leisure, health, and material success.


Personally, I have had the experience of almost completely abandoning my material world, in preparation for travel abroad. While this travel has not yet materialized, a deep sense of openness has. The experience of moving often, not knowing what my income for a given month or week will actually be – this over the last few years has had an effect on my state of being, and my creative impulses. As if I were some kind of ascetic, some California ninja-monk, what I have noticed is that, on the good days, I am more spontaneous, much more alert, and receptive to the blessings that can arrive in any given moment. On the bad days, I take a nap. This cannot be a bad thing as it relates to creativity - and to life - I am thinking as I write this. The question of how one can create and be creative arises, and I think my response to the question has been to create on the fly – with no attachment to having something tangible, or to any sense of completion. Of course, this does not apply when I am “handymanning” – in those times, I need to be attached to completion, and good results. I believe that there is a liberation that arises, in having one’s impulses squeezed, filtered through the membrane of life’s great challenges.


Creating on the fly takes many forms. When I was in the last semester of finishing my art degree, I told all of my instructors that I was not going to purchase any more art supplies, but rather, would complete the next several weeks with only what I could forage from around the art building there at Sacramento State. I dug through the dumpster, the scrap piles, and even the backsides of other department buildings, for materials with which to make my art. I carried with me, things that I found on my bike-ride to campus. The results were quite compelling. For my assemblage / collage class, I could scatter about broken plates and wood shavings, balance on edge two ripped umbrellas, or paste discarded chunks of paper mache together into a bold abstract sculpture. In a painting class, I would walk outside and gather sticks and rocks, with which to scrape some lost and found canvas into submission…removing old paint in fragments, and then splashing new paint like a wicked vomit-launch. For my final project, to be displayed in the graduate’s exhibit, I welded three rusty pieces of scrap metal together, capped with a sheet of mesh – then installed the motor from a vibrating sex toy, into the mesh like an insect caught in a spider’s web. This made the entire structure rattle and hum, as visitors walked through the gallery, gravitating towards the curious disturbance. 

The semester-long process of foraging was like a purification - a blazing fire of freedom, with the wind of new discovery fanning my flames. Sometimes I could not sleep at night from the adrenaline coursing through my veins after finding some really serendipitous rubbish, from which I would compose my next day’s assignment! It was approaching orgasmic at times.


My life had been coagulating back into normal size chunks until this morning, when I lost my job. My chest was full of bravado and clean air after climbing 3000 feet on a multi-day bicycle trek to Mt. Diablo and back, up through the Delta this weekend. My friends and I made some memories to be sure. I made my way to work like a triumphant swashbuckler, swaggering up the dock upon his return from the high seas, only to be met with my final paycheck, a limp handshake, and some pity thrown in for good measure. The State Council of Whatever, that manages this nonprofit’s grant, decided that my newly created position was just as well to be newly eliminated. By all indications, my life is still coagulating into chunks, albeit different sized chunks.


I have three new jobs scheduled for the “Human-Powered Handyman” this week, and there is an amazing, delightful new woman in my life. Oddly, as the news reports of economic recovery pile up, I am finally eligible for unemployment benefits! God plays a mean banjo, that’s all I can say. I don’t have the sense of implosion that I had last year at this time. William, my friend, statistician and trusty fact-checker, pointed that out to me this morning, that it was exactly last year, within two days of a year it turns out, that I was laid off from my previous little job. This year, Life is good and rich and full, and I am riding the edge of my board - poised to shoot the pier, as it were. I am going to crouch down and point my little surf-board at that mutha, and if I loose a few teeth crashing through the pylons, then so be it – I am gonna aim for the tightest gap I can see.


It's an interesting experience to re-habitate a house that one has left previously. I already knew where I would put what little stuff I had left, and I already knew the sounds of the neighborhood, when I moved back in last November. I have no plans of leaving this Spring, even after this morning. I plan to stay, and create something magical. I'm getting chickens, and I'm going to plant my fuckin garden. There is a good reason why I feel such resolve, aside from the fact that I get to collect unemployment this time. It conjures up a warm fuzzy feeling in my body, when I think about the cathartic moment that pushed my decision to stay in Sacramento rather than go into the Peace Corps. It was a sunny Saturday morning last Spring, and I was preparing for my move to Marin County, where I was to secure a yearlong job as caretaker of a Buddhist retreat center, pending my departure into the Peace Corps. I was running some errands on my bicycle, traversing the neighborhood with multiple stops. That morning, I ran into a continuous stream of friends – some simply pleasant acquaintances, and some friends from my meditation community…I think a total of 7 people in all. There were a couple of encounters just in the form of waves as I rode by on my bicycle, and a couple of people at the Co-op that I had to stop and chat with for 20 minutes each. This string of visits and connections chewed up the clock, and left me both glowing inside and deeply conflicted, by a clear sense that this place – this village…is indeed my home.


That day stuck with me. It kept churning, the way a man gets an incessant voice of his father’s stern warning on some practical matter, stuck in his head for days on end. It simply began to haunt me that I might choose to move across the planet for two years, while I could be here feeling a sense of BELONGING – something I had waited so long to feel, and worked so hard to cultivate. What I have learned over the last several months is that I gained much more than I let go of, when I sold all my stuff last Spring. In letting go of my material existence, and also the expectation of legitimacy around those possessions, I also found myself boiling the content of my life down to it’s essential ingredients. Thinking about leaving my dog with my mother for two years could flood my eyes in just a few seconds – choking back a full on sob.


And so here I stand, ready to create something new. I am still in survival mode, still hunting and gathering – called now to forage in an even more intense way than I was at the beginning of last Summer, when things fell apart. Ready to forage the way I did when I was finishing my art degree. These uncertain times can suck the wind right out of a man’s sails, give him a swift kick in the groin, and leave him doubled over on the sidewalk like he’s been drinking whiskey on an empty stomach. Or they can inspire a man to the edge of his board, and expose what’s real and true…cut loose the tethers of mediocrity and burst the sleepy bubble of daily living. The gravy train never comes down this track, but if it ever does, I should like to lift my eyes from my toil, hear the whistle blow, maybe wave at the conductor as he rolls on past.  

Hunting and Gathering

(From late March)

I was talking with someone last night, and out of my mouth came this theory about how we are evolving as a species, back into hunters and gatherers. More specifically, the elements that are hard wired in us to make us good hunters and gatherers – those elements are being called upon again in a time of rapid change, constantly shifting circumstances around home, work, and basic survival. It occurred to me that there really is something primeval and animal-like about the way I, and anyone else who has been touched by this great recession, has been living. Of course it looks different, but the basic impulses being employed, I think, are the same as those that made our ancestors successful at hunting and gathering.

I may have a skewed perspective. I mean, not everyone - in fact, few - of the people in my circle of friends, have experienced the kind of continuous change that I’m often engaged in. Back in 2005, I moved to Marin County for a job working for a nonprofit organization. I had been unemployed for several months, after serving briefly as Deputy Director for a rather dysfunctional Statewide nonprofit in the midst of a leadership meltdown. I was laid off after the new Executive Director squandered our precious last dollars and drove our account balance to ZERO. A few weeks earlier, I had managed to stop this gent from paying a consultant $3000 to create an employee handbook for us, noting that “we’ve got two employees, you and me…We can make our own fucking handbook, dude.” Now I was doing some freelance writing and nude modeling for artists, to supplement my unemployment checks. I had very little cash on hand for the move, and I found a woman on Craigslist that was offering a room, in exchange for handyman work around her home. That got me on the ground in Marin, and within a couple of weeks, I had arranged to rent a room from a friend. As it turns out, over the course of the next year, I lived in three different places. That kind of change is not ideal, but it taught me some things about being able to travel light, and execute change. At some point, feeling quite the nomad, I acquired a cohort of plastic bins, labeled them according to their contents, and on subsequent moves, simply reloaded the bins with their appropriate contents. It was highly efficient, but what’s more, I think I was utilizing my inherited gathering instincts.

The earliest theory is that indigenous humans did more scavenging than actual hunting. Updated theories say that in fact, early tribal man was quite skilled at cultivation of land and livestock. I know one thing, I have found my scavenging instincts to be quite sharp in recent months. Indeed, I have gotten really good at finding free stuff, and I think doing so is a great antidote to American culture. It’s something of a blessing to be forcefully disengaged from the treadmill, and so it is that some of us out here have gotten pretty damn resourceful in ways that we might not have imagined five or ten years ago. I have become an avid user of an online group called FreeCycle, where people give stuff away. Several months ago, I found myself a toaster oven by posting a request with my friends on Facebook. Within just a few hours, I was able to “repurpose” a toaster oven that had been in a friend’s closet gathering dust. It’s really amazing how much free entertainment is out there - I have been to three free movie screenings in the last month or so. As well, I can testify that there are all manner of completely dignified ways to happen into cheap yoga, free food, and discarded household items.


Now, hunting on the other hand, is significantly more taxing than gathering, a bit more dangerous, and I dare say, without guarantee of success. I went on a job interview a few weeks ago for a position with a small nonprofit nature center. Dare I say that it’s high time I moved myself into the “for-profit” sector? They were in leadership transition of course, and yes, funding transition as well. I sensed a fairly high level of anxiety present in the Executive Director, and the Development Director, who were both interviewing me. At some point, I expressed reservation about the fact that the position featured no minimum hours per week, making it not quite an on-call position but pretty stinkin’ close. What I got back from my prospective supervisors was a 15 minute spew of subtle complaining about the way that their jobs were in flux, and the unclear road ahead for the nature center as a whole. While this did inspire my compassion, it did not inspire my confidence, or interest level, and I passed on the position.

Obviously, this generation of professionals sees the world very different than my father’s generation did, in terms of job security, loyalty to The Man, and one’s ability to settle into a situation. My dad worked the same job for 29 years, and would have worked another 5 if cancer had not killed him. It is well documented that most people my age have gotten used to changing jobs, and careers, and a great many have embraced the freelancer’s life, out of necessity.

I personally have had a resume at the ready for the last several years, continuously updated, locked and loaded...like a tactical missile, poised to fire off at the first indication of trouble. This is, according to my theory, my little caveman hunting gene kicking in. I have certainly become a networking hound, unabashedly contacting old friends, former colleagues, and even women I have dated, to gather professional leads. It is hard not to see myself traveling the professional landscape in warrior pose, spear drawn back, ready to take down a caribou. Of course, this time around, I’m trying to avoid striking on the slowest caribou in the herd.

New And Improved (lost and found retro-post - written January 2011)

New And Improved



Back to the question about Freedom at Point Zero. Do I have it, and did I ever achieve it…or was I just waxing poetic about the process of rebuilding a life wrecked by collective American greed? Would I simply wait here for the next bus to economic recoveryville, and jump on with gay amnesia, licking my chops at the prospect of achieving legitimacy, and resuming a life of “normal” American pursuits?


In fact, on paper, things have gotten worse over the last several months, but another truth is that the process of becoming free has gradually deepened, as I let go into possibility. It is incredible that I have made it through this entire recession having never been eligible for social aid of any kind, but it is also a spiritual lesson to recognize that I have never truly been at the edge of my capability to survive. My basic wellbeing has never been threatened the way an average man’s wellbeing might be threatened daily in say, Calcutta. This fact provides for me, a basic space in which freedom can reside.


Coming into the new year, I have a part-time job that is only barely meeting my financial overhead, and still I feel quite fortunate. I have applied to two graduate school paths, and have committed to continue here in Sacramento, building my life from the inside out. I am focusing my energy, reinventing myself, and reimagining my next career. This is not the first time I have undertaken this process…but it’s the first time that everything is on the table.


So, the freedom is all in my head. That’s what I told my friend Lary, when he asked me how the FAPZ was hangin’. Being debt free is a kind of liberation that cannot be fully described, and in the refractory period, one can get a great deal of mileage out of being a scavenger and a miser. Really, after years of sheepish consumerism, keeping life materially simple is a reward unto itself, and I have become quite clear that I would like to keep my monthly living expenses as low as humanly possible, like, forever. My vision for doing this even includes going carless, and utilizing my fleet of bicycles to get me everywhere, and accomplish everything. I have embraced this life before, and in fact, it is something that I have been eagerly anticipating for months.


I have been doing Kundalini yoga since last June, and have found myself opening up new heart space - A space of simple contentment. It’s a raw awareness of passion that arises, and an embracing of renunciation. It’s so ironic to be feeling contentment amidst what can accurately be described as an unraveling, but in fact, the unraveling is a catalyst for letting go. It feels like love. I have reached a kind of contentment with being single, without kids and all the trappings of middle class existence, contentment with being in flux in my career-life, facing intense uncertainty in my immediate future, and for extended periods…I have achieved contentment with the moment, just the way it is, unencumbered by my desires.


Not that I don’t have any desires…I have been really desiring bike gear lately – really into my bicycles, building my stable as I prepare to divorce my car (and use the cash to buttress my bank account.) I’ve generally been gathering my outdoor gear for a Spring and Summer full of cycling and backpacking adventures. I have been obsessed it’s true, with preparing, and pursuing adventure, and I think it’s a symbolic recoil, a bursting forth into new freedom consciousness. I feel passionately committed to a continued life of adventure, in a way that I don’t think could have happened before.


A big part of cutting myself loose has been renunciation of the subtle dependencies that I think have colored my life for most of my adulthood. In the last several months, I have quit consuming any kind of fast-food, which had remained an odd self-soothing habit of mine, incongruent with my core values for quite some time. I have severely restricted my intake of refined sugar, and I also quit drinking coffee, or any other form of caffeine, which helped me to quit the off-and-on one-cigarette-per-day habit that accompanied my coffee. Several months ago, I chose a path of renunciation - of all forms of intoxication for an indefinite period. That period turned out to be six months, at the end of which, I decided to soften my ascetic desire for extreme health.


But it was very instructive, to feel into bare aliveness, without reaching for anything outside of myself - to abstain from the relief of separating from my experience. For years now, my buddhist practice has shown me how to soothe myself by staying engaged, and healing my heart. It's an unfolding process to be sure. It’s fascinating the way that our culture supports and even facilitates a numbing of one’s mind, body, and soul, through various escapes and crutches, dependencies and distractions. These reside at the core of our consumption-life, and gaining the upper-hand with them is clearly the only path to Freedom that I can see as truly reliable. This also seems to be the only clear path to sustainable living, which by definition, honors the Gaia – the living, breathing organism of which we are a part. I don't think there is any healing of the heart without embracing the Gaia. These are not new ideas, and there are far more radical, committed people on this path than I. But this is clearly my path…I want to break the code, buck the system, and live new and improved - from a place of uncommon rebuttal to the assumptions that I was born into.

The Virtues of Zero

Having decided to resurrect this blog, it seems fitting to explain a bit about why I am still here - that is, in Sacramento - and not in the outback of some developing country, as was my plan almost a year ago. I changed my mind about going into the Peace Corps, and made the decision to stick around and trudge through the mud of this shit-can economy. As I worked on my Peace Corps application, I was imagining myself missing my world, on the other side of the planet, surrounded by strangers speaking a strange language. I was homesick and had not even left yet. It really felt like the best option in this stage of my life was to stay close to home and stay connected. Today, I can’t say that I am not open to reconsidering my options, because after one year, things are not much better. But the whole Point of Freedom At Point Zero, was that I had jettisoned the entire package – lost my job, sold my stuff, and generally let go of my world. Like the song says “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to loose.” What is interesting is the way that even “nothin’ left to loose” is like peeling an onion, shedding layers of bullshit and getting down to the good stuff.


What I mean is, the freedom part is a state of mind, and the rest is simply degrees of “nothin.” And I am not talking about simply the stuff that we lose. The unraveling of a man’s life at the age of 42 is a potentially unnerving process to witness, unless one moves with the unraveling…embraces it, swings and bends and jumps to allow the debris to pass gently by. This unraveling I speak of is of course, happening right now on some collective level also, which certainly makes it easier for me to embrace. I’m part of history, baby, so let the pieces fly! After letting my truck go, I was still able to continue my handyman business by becoming the “hatchback handyman.” When I needed to sell my car for rent money, I became the human-powered handyman, doing small handyman jobs on my Xtracycle cargo bicycle! I'm finding that the only thing worth being attached to is the truth of who I am.

A friend of mine asked me a few weeks ago if Freedom At Point Zero is still alive, now that I have taken a part-time job, moved back into the house that I moved out of last Spring, and just generally “recommitted to the grind of daily survival.” My answer is that Freedom At Point Zero is all in my head. It was there the whole time. I am learning that choices are part of each moment, and they are present to the extent that I am present. Choices that constitute freedom are sometimes about what I can get, add, do, or control, but more often my freedom is contingent on what I am willing to let go of, do without, or accept. I had an amazing summer chasing adventure, but had to tolerate living with my mother when I was home. I moved back into my house in beautiful Curtis Park, but this time with a house-mate. There is always something to trade for what we need.

And the truth is, times of financial scarcity usually push us to peak efficiency. There was a time many years ago when I filled my own three-bedroom house in the suburbs, had two cars in the driveway, and drove an hour each way to work. That is a huge footprint, and I was a very different man back then. When pushed off of the money treadmill, living a mainstream lifestyle begins to reveal itself as incredibly inefficient. I mean, cable T.V. becomes a foolish obligation at $80-$100 a month, and driving a car sure looks like a huge waste of resources once we try living without one for a few months. I had been eager to divorce my car for awhile before it actually happened, and now I am amazed at how my stress level has dropped off. I am getting my exercise every time I need to go somewhere, which has allowed me to forego any gym membership. Also, the question becomes “How busy do we really need to be?” I used to cram things into my schedule and then count on speedy travel to make it all work. I would find myself taking silly risks on the road, and frequently arriving late anyway. Now, my level of mindfulness around travel has brought about some revelations - about what commitments I will and will not allow myself to take on, and which ones I actually have time for. In other words, I am doing less, and enjoying it more.

I am cooking much more and eating out less, which equates to SLOW food, and some really wonderful mindfulness around the quality of my meals. I have probably lost about 25 pounds in the last six months, and I feel healthier than I have ever been. I currently only work about 18 hours a week, which has provided me with much more time to visit with friends, walk and run with my dog, practice meditation and yoga, etc. I am planning to start a garden in the next couple of weeks, and get backyard chickens for yummy home-based eggs. What this all says to me is that, holy shit, I am not poor at all, I am free! It may seem impoverished for a man my age to be living on about $1000 a month, and it has taken me awhile to stop holding it as a crisis, but you know what, at the end of the day it’s not bad at all. It’s not something I want to make permanent, but for right now, it ain’t that bad.

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.