Because I cannot say it any better myself...

I will quote Edward Abbey:


Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for awhile and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: You will outlive the bastards.

Note that his seeping scorn is directed to the socialization of the wilderness. While I'm not 100% in his environmentalist camp, and my system can't carry the kind of anger that he made his career out of, nor can I support his rather caustic view of immigrants, I do share his left of the Western wilderness. And of living life fully. The combination of the two carries a special magic, which is only now becoming apparent to me. With my 3rd trip to the desert in just over a month coming up this weekend, I think a bit of Joshua Tree pollen has crept into my bloodstream. Swept away by the naked, scorching, mysticism of the Valley of Fire a few weeks ago, I was helplessly hooked.

But, back to Abbey:

I wonder, did he actually, as he claims to... "Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly." Environmentalist litterer? What do you think?

And every trip I take abroad convinces me more and more how right he is when he says "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." (Well, okay, so science class convinced me of the obvious truth... its implications continually deepen)

While I appreciate his point and his wit, I have mixed feelings about his hostility in asserting that "Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top." I don't know if its my affection and highest hopes for the current American administration, or a year and a half of spiritual psychology education, but I can't help but think a path without insults littered about would probably move more smoothly. Oh, I've become such a peace-loving hippie.

My thoughts on Abbey Overall? Like many authors and activists, I love him when he's loving. And, I will be finding a copy of Desert Solitaire.

What do you think of him?
Learn more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey

Going From Broke #5 - Winding the clock

My professional life has changed dramatically since my last "going from broke" update, and I'll leave it to say that my financial situation is now clearly improving. I'm settling into the busy work life of the business I purchased in December, and so so grateful. Strangely though, now that my earlier guiding focus of finding a heartfelt way to pay the bills is taken care of, I find myself showing symptoms of purposelessness.

I have beautiful fulfilling work days, with lovely clients, evenings filled with dance and social outings several times a week, a great reading list I visit almost daily, a couple interesting men on the fringes of my life, shrinking debt, a plan to buy my own condo by the end of the year, and, for this week, a house in Santa Monica to myself. But still, I find myself chronically tired - that emotionally drained feeling of not really wanting to move forward. I have the persistent belly bloat that tells me my digestion is not working quite as it could be, I'm spending way to much time trying to distract myself with what other people are up to on Facebook, and I keep catching myself sadly longing for the comfort of my last relationship, in a way that doesn't fit the picture of really how great my life is now.

My Zen Page-a-Day calendar had, as it always does, a rather compelling little thought one day last week:

"Life without Zazen is like winding your clock without setting it; it runs perfectly fine, but it doesn't tell time." -Suzuki Roshi

Zazen here is the traditional Buddhist practice of meditation, the exact significance of which I'm currently examining a little deeper. I've tended to assume that one could simply replace "Zazen" with the spiritual practice of his or her choosing - anything that would help guide us back to a greater focus than the everyday toils of this mortal coil. (Yes, that rhyme was both painful and completely irresistible.)

I'm beginning to suspect there's something crucial about meditation that nothing else quite gets to in the same way. I've been setting intentions, working a bit with affirmations, tracking psychological reactions, working a compassionate issue-resolution process with myself: simply, engaging in a lot of psycho-spiritual practices. They're all great, but they're also all grounded in material reality. That was what I loved about these exercises the most, as I was learning them, when I'd been searching for a way to make the spiritual practical. Now, I'm finding my needs are different.

I suspect this melancholy is not dissatisfaction with my career, or the days it creates for me, in fact I love those both. I don't think it's just physical blech, although a physiological issue could certainly play into my malaise (eg: the most hated tendency for candida albicans overgrowth in the human gut, for which the best remedy is cutting out all sugars, which is simply not in my realm of possibility at this time - I've tried.) I don't think it's fear at the magnitude of changes in my life, although there have been biggies for sure. I don't think these are just break-up blues, although I do still have a heart full of love for someone far away.

I think this subtly exhausting undercurrent of sadness is a completely spiritual one. I suspect it's actually me longing for something that's not grounded in material reality, that connects me again with my transcendent nature and goes beyond the fleeting highs and lows of life on planet Earth. And, fought it though I have, I think Suzuki Roshi might be right: meditation might be the only way to set my clock right again.

I love other spiritual practices... I love chanting, and dancing suptahs, and eye gazing, and sunset revelling, and loving forgiveness, and random acts of kindness, but as soon as interacting with other people in all our humanness is involved, something of the direct intimate experience of sweet silent divinity is lost for me. The key, I think, to being able to live in spirituality, is to be able to hold a perspective of altitude - one that sees the forest through all the trees. As long as all my spiritual practices involve other trees, however sweet and joyous they may be, I'm not getting re-tuned to the greater forest.

In much lofty hippy-speak, what I'm really saying here is I want to spend more time sitting by myself, staring at a wall.

Actually, when I put it that way, it sounds like something I've heard several friends say after beginning new jobs :)

Welcome to the real world, huh?

If you'll excuse me, I have a clock to set...