OMG!!!!!!!!

It's happening! I could say "Finally", but really, timing is everything, and the right time is apparently now here. We are under contract for selling our house and land on the rocky New Mexico hillside known as Cerro Chato, and on our personal road called Grateful Way. And we are deeply grateful.

The desire to sell arose in 2014, and the plan was to buy a house in Santa Fe in order to be able to keep working and to be able to have easy access to the services and conveniences of town life after, then, 23 years on the land. All that changed of course, and our travels began. Now, 5 years later, we are about to embark on the next adventure, and on the new book of our lives we have begun writing.

Assuming all goes well.......and we all believe it will, it's possible that we could be vacating the house by mid August. The new plan is to buy a Class B motor home ( a van RV) and to head off into the wilds of our imaginations and of the incomparable natural beauty that North America offers. There will presumably need to be a transition time between leaving our 28 year home and acquiring and outfitting/provisioning the van, before driving away from Santa Fe - we guess(?) - into the next unknown.

Right now everything feels a bit dreamlike. Also a little anticlimactic. Huh. Ok. It's happening. One foot in front of the other. A lot to do to empty the house and shed, move stuff, sell stuff, donate stuff, give stuff away, keep stuff for the van, store stuff in town. Besides that though there is a part of me that can't help but feel incredulous that there are actual real people, right next door so to speak in Madrid, who love our place and want to make it their own. And they are not acting impulsively. No, they have been out here numerous times, thought it all through for weeks, and are prepared to buy the property at full price (which is a steal of sorts), as is, with no contingencies. Exactly what  I've been saying for years that I wanted.

Sadly, our own daughter has always been something of a naysayer regarding our humble home, with an attitude of "who would want to buy that place!?" And even Nancy has been inclined to think we'd need to do all manner of "improvements" to the place in order to make it sell-able. My own approach has always been that it is what it is, it ain't  Sunset Magazine, and the right people will appreciate it for what it is, and at the price it is. And now that's precisely what has happened. It's just a little hard to believe.

The couple who will buy "the old David place", as it will always be known by some out here in deference to the original builders, are experienced grown ups with talents in multiple directions, including gardening and building, as well as herbalism and Feldenkrais. Al has been rehabbing a commercial/residential building on Main Street in Madrid for the past year, and it's now on the market. The photos look beautiful, and there might already be a buyer through our realtor. (All this could happen very quickly). We get paid when they sell their place.

They are eager to put down roots, have looked at numerous places over the past year, and found nothing they liked until they saw our place less than 2 months ago. Hard as it may be for some to believe they fell in love with it. And while they clearly appreciate and love it for what it is (Sarah has been in tears on at least two occasions while visiting the house), they surely have their own vision of what they can turn it into for themselves. A win/win situation is what it truly looks, and feels, like.

So Nancy and I are now working on the assumption that we will be ready to vacate by August 15th (whether that actually happens or not), and are getting busy clearing out stuff in preparation. Yikes! Suddenly it all feels overwhelming.

Where To Be?

(This was actually written several months ago now, while still in Thailand, but I didn't publish it til today......see next post with other new developments.......)

In reflecting on what I enjoy about being in Thailand, and how being here effects me in different ways, I'm aware that this lush, moist, yin, expansive, outward leaning life of the past 4 years may be diminishing in its constant appeal. It's not that I don't still love it, because I do. It's more that some of its qualities have begun to seem as though they need a different kind of dynamic balance. Maybe spending 6 or 9 months a year in Asia is more than I now want? Maybe not. My energy and focus have shifted toward what I am envisioning as our new way of life in the States, and I am a bit eager to jump into it and see if it will really work for us. The initial experiment will doubtless take a few months, and so we are talking about not returning to Asia in the Fall of 2019, but rather giving a proper trial to van RV living over a likely course of time.

I have been saying for these 4 years that I don't really want to be in the States at all, and that living – more or less full time – in Asia would suit me just fine. We have both been saying that we feel done with our house and land, and it is this feeling that has at least in significant part motivated our travels and explorations abroad. I'm now thinking that, while our mutual feeling has been accurate in terms of describing something about our future, a future away from Cerro Chato and away from 36 Grateful Way, it may be that it is necessary for me to have arrived at this internal point, and for Nancy to have previously reached her point of letting go, in order for us to finally be on target with selling our place. As Nancy has put it, we now have a clear direction, something concrete that we are moving toward. (I thought I had my direction, but Nancy has always put the breaks on that; well, at least “always” once Elijah was born).

In coming to terms with the necessity to be in the States part of the year at least, the camper van RV theme arose last summer in Santa Fe, when I understood that I needed to find a way to be in the States that would make sense for me, and for us. It was 3 years ago, after our first trip, that it dawned on me that we were, in fact, living as nomads. We were renting our house and so were effectively “homeless”; we moved around Santa Fe and around the country a lot, staying a while here and a while there; we left again to return to Asia, and then again back to the US. We had not set out to become nomads, and the idea was not at first appealing, but the truth of it became apparent and so there we were. Now, 3 years later, we are intending to embrace the nomadic, “houseless” life in America with a teeny tiny home on wheels. (Please don't mis-understand this as relentless moving around; the choice of moving or staying put is ours to make at all times).

I believe we are both excited about this new direction, and it does lend itself to a certain enthusiasm about being in America, which I clearly have needed if I were going to stay there for some months at a time. Where the road may lead we of course cannot say, but I think we have become at least somewhat comfortable with leaving things open, and the new adventure has a call that I can hardly resist.

Two And A Half Years Later.............

We're on the verge, it seems, of the next major leap, or change, or book, as Nancy originally named it, of our lives. We've been talking about the meaning of this next stage, in political/personal, spiritual, and ecological terms. Some things are becoming more clearly imagined. Family. Our impact on the planet. Logical next steps in our lifestyle, given our last 28 years of living off grid, of pioneering a piece of raw, inhospitable, rugged, harsh New Mexico land, of having taken a nearly 4 year break from living in the house we built, of spending significant time in Asia; given that we will return very soon to this house and land in order to sell it and begin that next new book of our lives.

The thought that we may not return to Asia later this year, as has been our recent habit. The idea that we may instead remain in the States, in the Van RV we're planning to live in, and see what it's like to do that, and to not travel by air so far, and to settle in, after some fashion, to a new way of life. A way of life that is consistent with our way of life to date, and even, I affirm, a next logical evolutionary leap in our way of living.

Since we are indeed destroying our planet, and leaving a legacy of despair and difficulty to our children and grandchildren (Nancy remains more hopeful than I tend to be about this, believing that the infinite creative potential of humanity may still offer as yet unknown positive possibilities......) then what can we do, that is, what can Nancy and I do that is within the scope of making sense for ourselves, that will be consistent with the magnitude of the losses and changes we are painfully aware of? The way of life we are imagining next for ourselves, that of living nomadically in a rather small vehicle, makes a great deal of sense for us. We both wish to live more and more consistently with our renunciate selves, while appreciating that this choice has not only concrete implications in and for the material world, but that it has also potently symbolic and ritual meaning for the psyche and soul especially of our American countrymen. What statement do we wish to make with how we choose to continue to live on Earth, now, in Her decline, and in our individual ever more assured declines?

Simplify, simplify, simplify, has been one of my mantras these last few years, increasing in volume and intensity with each passing year that we have lived so simply, and comfortably, and minimally in the world, and have not felt or been deprived, and have enjoyed ourselves, and have been healthy and creative and compassionate. In other words, we haven't sacrificed anything of value in order to do this, but instead have increased our appreciation of the value and quality of our lives. We wish to continue this development, and we believe that downsizing even further in what we call our home is the best way that we can now do this. My wish, or one of them at this point, is to be houseless, but not homeless. (Nancy says that this move into a more minimal living arrangement is still a bit of an experiment for her. No way to know now where exactly it will lead).

Personally, I do not want the responsibilities (one could say the entrapments) of house ownership, or the expenses, or the energy consumption demanded by it, or the wasted – for me – thinking and imagination required by it. I don't need it to ground me, or to define me, or to shelter me, or to perform any function at all for me, and so I wish to be free of it.

I don't want to consume more and more of anything. I rather wish to consume as little as possible to keep me comfortable (by my own definition), safe and nimble, and thereby continue my personal revolution of transformation of the consumerist mentality now more universally embraced around the world. When the Idiot Bush 2 told us all to go shopping after 9/11, he actually knew precisely what he was talking about, in order to facilitate the endless rapacious expansion of American, and now global consumerism, the very heart and blood of the endless wealth expansion of the 1%, and perhaps the most fundamental enemy of the Earth and of life on Her. Much more so, I suggest, than the often touted over population “issue”. I maintain that there are more than enough resources on Earth – or.....there were? - to sustain the entirity of Her populations, but that the insanely misguided mismanagement of these resources may be the single ecological issue underlying all others. To put it simply, but in much less fashionable terms, greed. And the corollary of more and more, and insatiable, desires. Which of course become imagined needs. Blah blah blah.

We intend to move forward into greater simplicity and into the greater expression of native intelligence and common sense. I'm grateful that we are able to do this (well, it's a bit speculative at the moment, but not entirely unprecedented; we shall see), as clearly not everyone is. We apparently need to remain out of the box even in the latter/final stage of life. And why be surprised by this?

My Heart Remains Heavy

We're carrying on with daily life, now at our beach haven near Chumphon. Terra has been with us for 9 days, leaving tonight on her two day trek back to San Diego. Of course it's been good to share our experience with her, and hopefully she may begin to appreciate why we're here.

We went with her to one of the islands off the east coast, Koh Phangan, for just a couple of nights. My intention was to get some first impressions, just a taste, to see if it was anything like Pai, but at the beach, which we were led to believe it might be, in which case we would have an additional location that we might like to spend some extended time in. I'm not sure why we even thought about additional locations, when really, we're quite happy here, but we did, and the notion of a Pai at the beach had a certain appeal, even though in the last couple of days I've realized that, for all of our appreciation of what Pai has to offer in terms of feeling like some part of our "tribe" is there - that 70's hippy thing - we have no community there at all, while I've realized more strongly that we do in fact have a community right here at Thung Wua Laen.

Anyway, life goes on, daily enjoyments and joys, including my long morning walks on the beach, meetings with new friends, adventures driving a motorcycle with an elaborate side car contraption that accommodated all three of us on more than one outing, hanging out, going to the little town or the "big" city for bicycle shopping with Sidney and Gail, eating, newly riding bicycles and imagining expanding this endeavor (we did buy a bike for Nancy, and I'm now borrowing another one to find out if I might like to get more involved - I already expect that I do), visiting local areas of interest like the "monkey temple" with John and Helen from Oz (I was duly reprimanded by a self appointed lexicographer farang woman when I referred to it as the "monkey" temple: "Not monkey's! Lemurs!"), etc.

All this goes on, and in the midst of it all, simultaneous with the joys and the laughter and the fun and the calm and the everything, my heart remains heavy with the pain, grief and sorrow of what people are capable of doing, and not doing.  In a profound emotional and psychological way my world has been turned upside down. Nancy shared a very good article by Ken McLeod, about whom I know nothing other than that he is some kind of well respected Buddhist teacher, writer, scholar(?), translator(?), and apparently publisher of a newsletter called Unfettered Mind: Pragmatic Buddhism, in the December 2016, Number 29, issue of which appears this piece talking about "difficult feelings". I recommend it, and I assume it can be found online, but if you try and can't find it, let me know and I'll send it to you.

Part of my upside down-ness is this experience of heavy heartedness. You'll be aware for example that I'm not publishing photos of our experience in the last few blog posts. I haven't been taking many photos of things and people that I could well be photographing.  No motivation to do so. And I haven't been posting nearly as much of anything as I was. No motivation to do so. I'm living my experience, but I'm not motivated to display it, or share it much, or document it in the way I had been. It seems a bit irrelevant, or of considerably less importance, in light of how the world, and my experience of the world, has recently changed. I'm subliminally preoccupied, in the midst of my blessed daily life in our beautiful, happy, comfortable bit of tropical paradise, with digesting and integrating what it all will mean, or already means.

So here's a little update, just because I do still want to be in touch, and I do still want to express what I'm up to. I'm just up to something very different right now than I was before November 8, 2016, and I suppose I will be up to this something different for a while yet, time being what it is, and leaving it open being what it is, and the relatively unstructured life in retirement being what it might be.

Until next time, then.

The Slow Return

It's been good to talk with newer and older friends about all this  over the last weeks. Many people are or have been in shock, in deep grief, in disbelief, in fear, in confusion. Sharing this experience has helped me begin to come to terms with the implications. I'm not in a place of resolution, but I've begun to feel myself return from the depths of despair and terror. In the spirit of practicing/being in Grace and Easefulness, the direction I'm taking is toward the full embrace of surrender to what is, to begin with. Where that will lead I can't say just yet. I do believe we are experiencing further manifestations of the darkness of the Kali Yuga.  I do believe there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, or as we would more likely say today, heightened death and destruction of all kinds.
 
It is clear that those who are now in power in America, and also, according to our European friends at Sherabling, in some cases abroad as well, are Fascist promulgators of much that will welcome, advance, inform, energize and promote this death and destruction. There is no way to completely avoid this, in my opinion. There won't be a Savior or a Messiah arriving to clear the decks and make all things loving and wonderful. The saviors and the messiahs that we might  like to see reside within each of us, and they can be cultivated and nourished, or not.

People will suffer in the next years. Basic services that we Americans have come to rely upon, somewhat paltry though they are in comparison to many other places, will change, be diminished, or disappear. Human rights that have been won with blood and dedication will be diminished or will disappear. Hate speech and hate driven actions will increase, and will be not only tolerated, but encouraged. More people will die as a result of this. Our Earth will be further degraded for profit, and out of profound greed, stupidity and ignorance. Amen.

Not a particularly hopeful picture, I admit. But I haven't yet arrived at hopefulness. I'm still coming to terms with the truth as I see it. If we were dealing with rationality, there might be sensible reason to be hopeful. Of course we aren't. We are dealing with the deepest, darkest, basest aspects of the human psyche, driven not by reason or compassion or caring or wisdom, but by fear, megalomania, unbridled power, violence, lust, and dissociation. There's nothing rational going on here, and so I don't believe we can hope for reasonable behaviors or resolutions just yet. We are being subsumed within the irrational drives of wildly out of control Egotism.

So. Allow me to be a bit psycho-analytical for a moment. We all have within us these same capabilities. I could be, and have been in my perhaps smaller ways, a rigid, controlling and dominating fascist. I am or have been a hater and fear monger. I could be a murderer, a rapist, a power glutton, a war and money addict. And so could you. There is nothing alien or other worldly or incomprehensible here. On the contrary, it is entirely comprehensible and familiar. And it is, simply, the failure to admit, to acknowledge, and to integrate healthfully these psychic components that has brought us to this point. The great Shadow is upon us, only because we, as a species, and our current leaders most dramatically at the moment, prefer to ascribe these qualities to "others" who are "outside" of ourselves: our "enemies", who are the cause of all of our unhappiness and woes and troubles and frustrations and hard times, and who must therefor be rightfully blamed for and made responsible for it all.

Oh Lord, there's nothing new under the sun. This has been, and continues to be the desperate story of human kind on Planet Earth, at least in this Dark Age. There have always been exceptions however, and these are the blazing light figures who inspire us. Their message has never been an easy one, or one that will guarantee escape from the pains and trials of the human condition. It is precisely because of this though that they inspire. For those of us who have seen some of this light, who yearn for a truly and more fully human possibility, there isn't much choice, I think. We must be, after all, the change we want to see.

And so I accept the challenge of the moment: to re-commit myself to the path of wisdom, of love, of compassion, of service to humanity and to Truth. I think of the Prayer of St. Francis at this moment: Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.......................
Or the Bodhisattva of Mahayana Buddhism, dedicated to serving and fostering the enlightenment and liberation of all sentient beings for all time.
Or the teaching of Tikkun Olam, that we work to repair the world that has been torn asunder.
Or the Sermon On The Mount, in which blessed are the peacemakers, and the gentle, and the pure in heart and the merciful.
Or Thich Nat Han's breath taking poem, Call Me By My True Names.

I remember Gandhi, and King, and the Buddha and the Christ and the Baal Shem Tov, and Kabir and Rumi and Mirabai and the countless other carriers of the light of Truth, all of whom, we must remember, experienced a good deal of pain and suffering, either voluntarily or otherwise, on their paths of great Light in the face of great darkness.

My prayer today is that I be able to surrender, gracefully and fully to God's Will, not my will, and see where that takes me. May it be so. Amen.

Sorting Through It

Since the election I've - we've - been experiencing shock, grief, fear, futurizing, all sorts of emotions. Personally I'm looking into a bleak and sometimes terrifying future. In my mind we've just experienced the beginning of what Germany experienced in the early 30's (1933?) when Heir Hitler was elected to office. The Third Reich lasted only about 12 years, til the end of WWII, rather than the thousand years it was  projected for. I don't think I'm being too hysterical if I think of America now as having just initiated the Fourth Reich. We may be looking at 8 years of extreme damage, and a  lot of extreme damage can be done in that amount of time, as we so clearly know. Nothing the president elect is saying or doing offers hope; everything he is saying and doing supports my thesis.

I'm writing this because I haven't been able to write lately, not knowing what to say,  sorting through my feelings and thoughts, struggling to find a place to "land" with it all, knowing there may be no such place. Wondering what "leaving it open" means now. I've read various Buddhist writer's blurbs (see Lion's Roar magazine online) about how to approach this situation. Some I find saccharine and unsatisfying. Some make some sense to me. Between the extremes, for me, of  taking to the streets and passivity, I'm searching for how to be loving and compassionate - I still hold these as dear, and now somewhat more challenging than before - while remaining realistic, aware, prudent, not wedded to fear or anger or numbness, non-violent both outwardly and inwardly.

When the burnings and shootings and hate crimes and political policies of destruction take serious hold, will I be able to remain "accepting"? Will I offer myself, my children, my beloved wife, to the fires of hatred without resistance, calling it, and meaning it, God's Will?

Any way, this is where I am now, so probably the tenor of the blog has changed for a while. When I'm in this moment, and not in the future I'm seeing, or the past I know about, it's pretty ok. Maybe that's really all we have, after all, which I'm sure is true, and yet now not all that reassuring. We're off to Bangkok by air today, then on to Chiang Mai for just a few days before heading up to Pai for a couple of weeks, and then down to Thung Wua Laen for the imagined longer haul. All is in flux. All is open. All is unknown (or is it?)

Be well, dear friends and family. Take good care of each other. 

Oh........My.........God.

Anyone else ready to think about leaving the US now?
I know......jobs, kids, family, etc. Of course, all important reasons to stay put. But Jesus H. Christ. What does it take to make you wonder, for real?

I can only see this latest horror as another signal of the collapse of the American Empire, in the way that every previous empire has collapsed of its own accord. Surely, ours will follow suit. Or so one can hope.

We're deeply disturbed by the just won presidency by a person who ought never to have been taken seriously by virtually anyone, let alone gotten himself elected to this office. And of course it isn't just the presidency. It's the control of Congress and the Supreme Court as well, with seemingly no real limits in place to temper the onslaught of heightened insanity that is about to come. True madness here. Diagnosable pathology. The real deal. The damage that will be done is....................well, I was going to say unthinkable, but I know better now. Now I'd say it's predictable.

If we thought the economic collapse starting in 2008 has been bad, I think it's entirely reasonable to be expecting something of an even greater magnitude now. Will we see bread lines again in the good ole US of A? Will Social Security as we know it disappear? Medicare? Certainly, it seems, The Affordable Health Care Act will get repealed, with no elected power to stop it. Legal abortion rights?
Planned Parenthood? Medicaid? Food Stamps? Higher education out of reach for all but the super rich? Climate Change accords, finally signed, now ignored?

Achhh. Who knows where it will all end? Well, it's been a while since the world has seen a large, major Fascist State dedicated to the worship of a morally bankrupt, but "charismatic" personality. Maybe it's time again. The cycle of things. The Kali Yuga. The Wheel of Samsara.The raison d'etre of Planet Earth?

May all beings be happy. May we remember to allow for the evolution of souls in the midst of the devolution of governments. May compassion not be lost, especially. May we understand more deeply the surrender to that wisdom which we cannot see or fully comprehend. Shit happens. Always has. Always will. And so does Grace, let us not forget.

Be well, my friends. Be kind.