Hot, Dry, Deep thoughts

It is a hot day today. I feel like I am being cooked for a lavish feast. Instead of spices, I am being cooked in dust. I had plans to visit the school today and also work on a world map painting project in the high school until I looked out my window this morning and saw kids still playing football and running by barefoot at nine o´clock. There is no school today. It turns out that the teachers are on a country wide strike because some have not been paid by the government. So for me that means an overly relaxing day. As most of you know I LOVE to be busy and RELAXING is something that I DO NOT enjoy… So I find myself finishing up my latest reading adventure—The Gringo Trail, by Mark Mann. The book focuses on the travels of three friends through South America (Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia). While at first, I didn’t like the novel because the travelers heavily used drugs and I found it to be a hippie tale, it ended up having a lot of perspectives on life that I appreciate and will share with you.

While hiking in the rainforest, the main character reveals his thoughts… “There could be a million different life-forms within a mile of us—all fighting, competing, living off each other, living in symbiosis with others. You name it, and it’s probably out there somewhere, close by. Every conceivable evolutionary strategy—there’s a plant or animal or insect doing it around us now.” Standing in the middle of the cloud forest over Easter weekend, I had the same feeling that everything around me was so full of conscience, consciously watching me.

Imagine the world mapped according to consciousness. Every life source registers a point brighter or weaker depending on how complex it is. People, animals, insects. Even a plant is conscious, in a sense. It reacts to its environment, and that’s all consciousness is, at a basic level. The capacity to absorb and respond to stimuli. All around us—millions of little points of consciousness. There can hardly be a single spot on the planet more conscious than here. (149)

…”But to my mind, what the animist world-view expresses—with its multitude of spirits and the magical parallel reality—is a sense of the sacredness of Nature itself. The crucial thing is that it’s not just humans who have souls, but everything. To animists, the whole natural world around us is charged with a magical, divine life-energy. The sacred is located within Nature, not somehow outside it, as with our own God. It’s a crucial difference. The Western conception of God reflects the Western belief that humans are intrinsically superior to the rest of Creation: that the natural world has been given to us by God purely for our benefit. If you ask me, it’s this belief that sowed the seeds of today’s environmental crisis.” (160) The Mormons feel that they have it all right, the only true way to God. The evangelic people feel that their faith is the only path to God. The Catholics feel that they are the only ones with the truth. The Muslims feel that Christianity is backwards and that their faith is the only one that leads forward to the realm of their God, Allah. Maybe everybody has a little part of it right. I feel that we are all droplets from a big pool. We leave that big pool when we are born and become vulnerable to sadness, loneliness, frustration, and anger because we are away from the whole. We spend our lives looking for connection, love, closeness to others. During our lives our meaning is to help the other soul pieces along their journey and finally in the end death breaks us away from our individuality and back to our whole spirit once again. I think we are all one, all in the same struggle of life battling the same negativity of feelings and that there is no reason for fighting within religions. The environment, animals, and plants are also part of the whole and a part of life that we need to respect and not waste out of carelessness.

Instead of a usual job path, I chose to escape. I chose peace corps. Many times I feel that our culture is overly centered on the success of a full time job, year round with only two weeks a year of vacation. What about family, love, children, experiences? The main character reflects on his friend who wasn’t the most responsible, nor productive in his life, but he had a few things figured out… “Mark and I hadn’t always seen eye to eye, especially on this trip. But he’d remained a special person for me. Perhaps it was because, almost alone among my friends, he’d rejected all that hypocritical, poisonous career shit. To most people, it looked like apathy and idleness, but I saw it differently. Mark had refused to sell his mind—his soul—to some bland, evil, world-fucking corporation just so he could swarm and backstab his way to self-important middle-management middle-age. I’d seen the vitality sucked out of too many other friends as they signed that Faustian pact. But Mark remained free. Alive. He’d refused to let a System’s projects and values become his projects and values. To Mark, music and drugs and having the time to think always came before money and respectability and a career. And he was right. They do. They should. I respected him for it. I respected him for not caring about things that were not worth caring about.” (283)

Sometimes there are events that you feel you knew were going to happen, somehow you felt them coming. Sometimes there are moments that you feel that you´ve done before. Is it all just coincidence or is there something to it? “Were these just coincidences, only invested with significance by a tragic accident? Probably. Or was there some strange magic here? Maybe all events have presentiments, like ripples in time stretching backwards as well as forwards, so faint that only a few tuned-in people can detect them. Maybe something as powerful as a death sent ripples big enough for even me to detect…” (284)


I am done with deep thinking for now. I am going to bake in the sun and cook in dust on my attempt to walk home and eat beans and tortillas for lunch. I hope you all find a piece of inner-happiness and feel that I am thinking about you today.