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Slow Down and Play in the Dirt

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I didn’t think it was possible to get sunburned in February in the Pacific Northwest. And I hear the weather is awful on the East Coast right now. Something about minus forty? Ninety inches of snow? Winterpocalypse?

I just spent the day working on a friend’s farm on the outskirts of town in Portland. We were digging, hoeing, broad-forking (I can’t believe I had never seen this before — basically a two-foot wide, full-body pitchfork) the beds that are going to be enclosed in hoop houses this season. It was 60 and sunny. Sorry East Coast friends. I got sunburned.

It felt so good to be out working in a field (Did you hear about the scarecrow who won the award? He was out standing in his field). I haven’t done this for too long. I farmed in Italy for a half-year way back when, and I was part of a super rad collective garden in Seattle. I also grew up on a family farm in Vermont, but that mostly consisted of chasing goats and chewing on sticks.

So, I miss the dirt. Don’t get me wrong, the city is great. But there is something so natural and healthy about being on a farm. Being near animals, being away from technology, getting dirt under my fingernails, doing some hard work. Finding worms! And snakes! We brought the cat out to where we were working, and in less than fifteen minutes he had caught a mouse. How right is that?

Yeah okay, so I was out there for like a half-day. Six hours or something. I can’t really talk about how slow it felt, or how great farm life is, or any of that. It was a nice one day activity, not a lifestyle I went and tried out. I’ve done things like that before, though, and it reminded me of the wonderful slowness of life out of the city. Stimulation underload. Things can only happen as fast as our bodies can make them happen. And don’t think that I’m saying slow is easy — part of why the work is slow is because it is so hard.

Did I mention that they have goats? Maybe this is from my early childhood nostalgia, or maybe it’s a more universal thing, but goats are just the best. Oh man. They’re so funny. Smarter than sheep, who are friendly but not very interactive. Dumber than pigs, who are too smart for their own good and know something is fishy with the fact that they’re fenced off and you’re not. Goats are just right. Silly and playful, but without making you question your livelihood.

It also felt really wonderful, after doing so much solo work on my laptop recently, to be doing physical labor in a group. Teamwork is the best. So much more gets done. Being in a situation that’s either a bit stressful or a bit difficult for everybody makes group bonding happen that much faster. This is also why group backpacking adventures are so wonderful.

And there will be vegetables! Let’s not forget about the eventual rewards of all this work. I’ve been reading “A Slight Edge” recently, which talks all about doing small positive disciplines over time to reap a reward in the future. This applies to all aspects of our lives, from health and exercise to relationships, work, and skill acquisition. Plant, cultivate, harvest. In our day-to-day live, we’re always wanting to jump straight from planting to harvesting, skipping over the long intermediate period of getting good at something and developing a relationship with it.

Getting into the soil forces the “cultivate” on us. No matter how much work we put into those fields, nothing is going to make there be vegetables tomorrow, or next week. It locks us into the natural rhythm of things, which we’ve otherwise eliminated from our normal lives. Most things happen slowly, seasonally, and only with continued effort. There is a long period of working without results before they start to trickle in. 

This life demands patience. It is a beautiful thing. If we can simultaneously cultivate both patience and determined effort, we can achieve anything. One without the other will either leave us stressed and pushing too hard or complacent and waiting for life to happen to us. But sometimes we’ve just got to get out to play in the dirt.

Great housemates!

Six House Rules To Live By

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At my old house in Seattle, my roommates and I decided to make some house rules to help us build community and live intentionally. At first, these were straight-forward, kind of silly things. No Facebook. No internet at home (easy, because we didn’t have internet). No drunk texting/emailing exes (we had elaborate rationale about how calling was fine, just not the passive-ness and permanent-ness of texting). Eat a lot of beans. Okay, this might not have been an actual rule, but it was a fundamental principle the house was built on.

Needless to say, we had a good time with it. Breaking a rule meant a dollar in the jar, to be spent at some future date on something fun for the house. We gradually acquired more and more rules, but eventually started to realize that while these highly-specific stipulations were fun and good for building community, they weren’t helping us to do better or live more fully (except No Internet at Home – that rule was the best!). Instead, we decided to set positive intentions for how we ought to live our lives.

Experience New Things

Well, this seems obvious. Except that a lot of the time it’s not. Often when we’re deep in our routine, we need special impetus to go out and experience something new. Whether it’s an art walk, a basketball game, joining a kickball team (this is a popular thing in the Northwest), or just going for a walk in a new neighborhood, we need to keep it fresh. One of the major advantages of living in a city is that there are more new things to do than can be done in a lifetime. Not to mention getting out of the city, which is wonderful. But even in a smaller place, there is always new experience to be had. This goes hand-in-hand with always learning and generally being a curious, creative person.

Meet New People

Along the lines on experiencing new things, we can always be meeting new people. We don’t have to become best friends with everyone we meet, but we need to keep putting ourselves out there and seeing what kinds of connections arise. As we grow and change, we often find that some of the friendships and connections we’ve had have become stale. Sometimes, this is the perfect opportunity to reconnect and reinvigorate those relationships. Other times, we need to recognize that we can’t be friends with everybody all the time, and that people drift apart. This is a natural part of the mobile society we live in. Slowly, we may find our tribe of people who support and inspire us. Even then, that tribe may evolve and shift as we continue to grow and explore.

Be Mobile

Winter in Seattle is dark. Portland, too, although not quite as much. It’s not freezing cold or blustery like the northeast or midwest. But it’s dark. Cool and wet. Getting out into the world can be a serious challenge to even the most optimistic person’s psyche. The other thing about Seattle is that it’s a city of neighborhoods, and while each one contains everything you’d ever need, there are whole parts of town you never go to. The geography of the city makes it tough to go from one to another. Hence our third rule: be mobile. Get out there and do it! Bike around! Get wet! Play sports! Visit people! Try new parts of town! We basically decided that it was not acceptable to decide to skip an event because of its location. This was one of the hardest rules to follow, but it paid off. As a transplant in a city, being mobile is the only way to get to know an area and meet people outside our immediate circle of friends.

Don’t Hold Back

Do you feel like you’re holding back? This could be in any sphere of life: in physicality, in love, in friendship, in work. There is often a nagging feeling of “I could have done more,” or “I could have been more committed, more present.” Don’t hold back! Just don’t do it. We need to put ourselves out there, be vulnerable, make mistakes. This is how we learn. This is how we build up experience and wisdom. Not by reading about it on the web. By actually going out and experiencing it, by giving ourselves completely to our endeavors. Also, it’s a great thing to yell down the stairs when your friend is walking out the door to go on a date.

Be Generous

Generosity is one of the most magical character traits. It is so wonderful to be around generous people. People who are generous with their time, money, and attention are the ones we like the most. The positivity generous people create comes back to reward them, too. Life is all about abundance and sharing, not scarcity or greed. Sharing whatever we can with people close to us (and people not so close to us, but in greater need) is one of the best feelings. We tried to make generosity a built-in practice in our house, usually by sharing food and making an effort to bring people together however our means would allow.

Practice Gratitude

If generosity is the most magical outward-facing trait, gratitude is the most magical inward-facing trait. Developing a deep sense of gratitude fills us with love for life and appreciation for all the people around us, while diminishing any negativity that comes our way. We have so much to be grateful for. Just the fact that we are alive and here on this planet is astounding. That we live in an affluent and free country? Almost unbelievable. Not to mention a good education, our strong networks of friends and family, our clean drinking water, our relative peace and security. Practicing gratitude every day makes us fall in love with the world. It makes us want to give back, and to make it better for everyone else. It makes us calm, kind, and compassionate. It’s the best.

What are your house rules? What do you live by? What do you like to yell down the stairs to your friends to get them excited about life?

For a Lost Friend

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Every so often, the simple fact that life is short comes into stark relief, and did so for me recently with the death of a friend. We say “life is short” often, but I don’t strictly believe that to be true. It is hard to know how long life is, or how long it feels, as our perception of it changes all the time. Childhood feels a lifetime away, and even my college days are a faint memory, despite only being a decade past. In that sense, life feels long. I could live another sixty years, which would certainly make the feeling of these days small and perhaps insignificant.

What this sentiment is really trying to get at, I think, is that life could end any moment. We are used to continuity of consciousness. It’s the only thing we’ve ever always had. And still, everybody dies. At some point that continuity will come screeching to a halt. It could be in sixty years, it could be in a decade, it could be next week, or it could be in five minutes. We often take for granted that we will live long, relatively healthy lives. And I hope we do, I truly do.

At the same time, always believing that we’ll live long, relatively healthy lives may make us complacent. “There will be time for that.” Will there? Maybe. Maybe not. For the absolute most important things, it is not worth taking the risk that there will be time for that later. This includes visiting loved ones, reminding them how much we love them, hugging, making eye contact, and generally having a lot of close human connection. The things we do have time for later probably include: working, running errands, checking our email, watching TV, and cruising the web.

This past week has made this especially clear for me. Our community has been struggling to come to terms with the tragedy of our lost friend. We haven’t been working (much, at least). It just hasn’t felt possible. We have been visiting each other, bonding, talking about what happened, trying to figure out life, and taking solace in our connections with each other. We’ve been meeting up in groups of various shapes and sizes, grieving collectively and individually.

One piece of this which has been especially troubling is the fact that our friend took his own life. There is a constant nagging of “What could have been done? What could I have done?” We tell ourselves “nothing,” or “I’ll be more vigilant with my friends in the future,” but that doesn’t make the feeling go away. Ultimately, we have to live our lives as fully and as lovingly as we can. We have to spread compassion and joy, and empower others to do the same. We can’t change the past, but we create our own future by deciding how we act in the present.

Alan Watts has an idea of “living as if you’re already dead.” This is not about being fatalistic or nihilistic. It is about living with the knowledge that we could be dead at any moment, and that in a relatively short time we, and everyone we know, and everyone who knows them, will be dead. Not too much longer after that, nobody will even know we existed. The experience of this brief continuity of consciousness is fully ours to create and embody. We have no reason to hold back. We have every reason to live whole-heartedly, to speak boldly, and to share as much love and compassion as we can muster.

We can say life is short. Or we can say it is long. In a sense it is both. And in a way that aspect of it doesn’t matter at all. What matters is how we live, how we connect with others, how we express ourselves, and how we love. In a better world, we would not have to lose a friend to be reminded of this.

Meeting the Dalai Lama

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I’ve been staying in Mcleod Ganj for two weeks now, the home of the TIbetan government in exile and the Dalai Lama. It’s just up the hill from Dharamsala in the Himachal Pradesh region of northern India. Like most places I’ve been in India, this place is completely different from every other place I’ve been in India. Only the difference is more extreme. The Tibetan community and culture changes the vibe completely. There are also a lot of westerners here, but they tend to be socially-conscious volunteering types rather than travelers looking for the cheapest bed. It’s just about the calmest, cleanest, most
coffee-filled city I’ve visited in India.

I’ve been into Buddhism since I was a teenager, so part of my idea coming here was the hope that I’d get to see the His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Based on his official website (he also has Twitter), it seemed like he might be in town for a few days between trips to Japan and Norway, but that he wouldn’t be holding any public audiences. Then last week while returning from a hike, a man recognized our new friend and Pacific Northwest yoga teacher, Paul, and stopped us. This guy had done an acroyoga workshop with Paul four years ago in Mysore. Who knows how he recognized him, but he told us that the Dalai Lama would be holding a receiving line for foreigners on Saturday, and that you had to register at the Tibetan security office. We booked it down the hill to the office, got there 45 minutes after they were supposed to close but just as they were getting ready to actually close. It turns out we would have been able to register the next day as well, but registering that afternoon saved us a multiple-hour wait in the line.

Saturday came and it turned out about four times as many people as they expected had registered for the event (1600 foreigners and 400 Indians – I could have told them this would be popular), so the Dalai Lama would be standing with small groups for photos and giving a talk instead of receiving everyone individually. This rarely happens for westerners, so we basically got super lucky to have this opportunity while already in town. We arrived around 6:30 AM, slowly got shuffled into the courtyard in his residence, and stood around for a few hours. Eventually we were instructed to organize by country and break up into groups of 40-50.

Sometime after 10 AM, His Holiness appeared from his residence, grinning and wearing those awesome tinted glasses he wears in all his photos. I’ve heard people talk about how the energy in the room changes when certain great people are around. I had some feeling of this when visiting Amma’s ashram, but it was not as tangible as this. When the Dalai Lama appeared, everyone immediately buoyed up out of the haze of hours of waiting around. I could feel a sensation of opening in my heart, and a huge smile immediately formed on my face. Part of this is due to expectation being satisfied. A bigger part, I think, is the collective energy of the group. And a third part, which I can’t explain but may be the real reason, is the energy and aura of the person. I don’t know what to think about auras, but you can tell when someone has good energy, and this guy has great energy. Supposedly you could feel the Buddha’s aura from three kilometers away.

As the Dalai Lama walked from group to group, every movement seemed to be filled with joy and kindness. He joked around naturally with everyone, received their greetings with grace, and transmitted an amazing sense of compassion. It was all a little bit rushed because of the size of the group, but he took the time to connect with people who felt compelled to ask or tell him something. The photo itself wasn’t such a big deal. It was a lot more fun to watch this 78 year old man navigate a crowd of 2,000 adoring fans.

Dalai Lama

Posing with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his residence in Mcleod Ganj

After all the photos were taken, the Dalai Lama made his way to the stage to give his talk. It was great to hear his voice, and his laugh is unbeatable. I took two main points away from the talk, though the whole thing was powerful. First, that all the struggles created between groups of people are based on secondary (or tertiary, or lower) characteristics. Skin color, religion, ethnicity, nationality, economic status, politics. All are secondary to the fact of our common humanity. It can be so difficult to see beyond these apparent differences, but the fact is that each of us is one of seven billion people on this planet. We’re all striving for pretty much the same thing: a happy, secure life. He also gave a shout out to India for being the largest democracy in the world, and for having such a strong cultural attitude of nonviolence and tolerance. There are always exceptions, but it is remarkable how many different kinds of people live so densely here, yet in such peace.

My second major take-away was on the secular education of compassion. Formal education systems around the world focus on facts and analytic thinking in the maths and sciences, and leave ideas of kindness and compassion to religious and community organizations. It turns out compassion is not religion, and there’s no need for it to be confined to a segment of life with so much other baggage, and which is absent from so many people’s lives. Cultivating compassion is crucial for living a joyful and happy life, even for atheists. The more I read about neuroscience, the more I understand that this is a quality of the human brain, and has nothing to do with God or saints or what-have-you. It’s science. “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion” – HHTDL. I have a lot more thinking to do about this, but I’m pretty sure I want to make it a big part of my life.

The main piece I’ve left out of this story of meeting the Dalai Lama is plight of the Tibetan people, and the fact that all of this joy and kindness comes from one of the most persecuted and repressed populations in the world today. I’ve been finding out much more about the issue since I’ve been in town, and I hope I can relate some sense of what’s happening in my next post. To be continued…

North! Haridwar, Rishikesh, Dharamsala

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I’ve made it north. Chennai to Delhi, Delhi to Haridwar, Haridwar to Rishikesh, Rishikesh to Dharamsala. I’m acquiring stories to tell faster than I can tell them. Similarly, I’m getting inspired faster than I can act. Plans for businesses to start when I’m back home, places all around the world to travel, classes to take, ideas to share. But very little time to make any of it happen. I’m realizing this is the nature of traveling. It fills your cup with novelty and experience, but doesn’t leave a lot of room to put energy back into the system. So, I’ll have a busy summer and fall.

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Train rides!

From Delhi, I caught an overnight sleeper bus to Haridwar, on which I got to share a twin-sized birth with a very nice man. Fate smiled on me and he was pretty thin, and had the idea to sleep head-to-toe. Turned out to be quite comfortable. In town, I met up with my friend Kelly from Seattle, who I’ve been traveling with since. For more in-depth impressions on Haridwar and Rishikesh, check out her latest blog post here.

Very briefly, Haridwar is a holy city for Hindus, and is packed with tourists and pilgrims from around the country. It’s nearly absent, however, of westerners. We stayed for two nights, checked out some cool temples and watched a fire ceremony that happens every night on the Ganges, the holiest river in the county. We ate some really good dal (lentils) and poori (fried dough – this is breakfast here). It was nice to be in a place without many white faces, just the opposite of what we found in Rishikesh.

Rishikesh is a holy city for Hindus as well, but it’s also popular for westerners because of the yoga scene and the fact that the Beatles spent some time there. More or less, the Ganges separates the hectic, crowded, Indian side of town from the chilled-out western side. A lot of people come to Rishikesh to stay in yoga ashrams and basically seclude themselves to do internal work. I’ve been to a couple ashrams, and at this point in my trip I’m not feeling any need to isolate myself. So we stayed in town on the chill side of the river.

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Laxman Jula, the chill side of Rishikesh

There are definitely some cool things happening in Rishikesh, but largely it’s the same scene as all the other popular traveler towns. Lots of cafes with peace signs painted on the walls serving western food and muesli very slowly while you sit on the floor with other westerners, play guitars and drink coffee. Normally, these are some of my favorite things to do, but it feels inauthentic here. It’s our idea of what India is supposed to be like, so we’ve manifested it here. Also, a bit too much pot-smoking and dreadlocks for my taste (fashion note: apparently the new way to have dreadlocks is to shave half your head and keep the rest).

But we had a good time. We did some yoga, checked out some far-out meditation workshops, and went rafting down the Ganges with a group of 19 year-old boys from Agra. It was great to catch up with Kelly and throw around some ideas about Seattle and the future. After a few days we caught another overnight bus, this time to Dharamsala, the home-base for the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.

This was almost a week ago, and I’m loving it here. Most people don’t stay in Dharamsala itself, which is a relatively large and bustling city. We’re up the hills in Mcleod Ganj, which is where the Dalai Lama’s temple is (he’s not in town right now unfortunately). Farther up there are a couple smaller towns which are great for walking around, but which have the same muesli-vibe we caught in Rishikesh. The Tibetan community is really strong in Mcleod Ganj, which gives the place a wonderful feel. There are all sorts of organizations around to support the refugees, and I’ve just started helping a bit with English conversation classes. The air is clean here; the mountains are beautiful. We’re just in the foothills of the Himalayas (6,000 ft), which I’m planning to explore more deeply in the next few weeks.

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Mcleod Ganj

I’ve also met back up with Samyak Yoga, the group I did my yoga teacher training with. It’s great to see them again, drop into a few classes, and feel immediately like I’m part of a community here. Today I started a 5-day intensive Iyengar Yoga course, which will be a whole different way of looking at the practice, focusing entirely on alignment of the body. There is strong coffee here (without the pot-smoking and peace signs to go with it), and the desserts are the best I’ve had in the country. Indians love sweets, which tends to make their treats one-dimensional along the sugar axis. The Tibetans have it better figured out, with a good balance of sweet, salt, and chocolate.

Seeing the Tibetan community in exile first-hand has also opened my eyes to the insanity of the struggle going on across the border. It’s a desperate situation. All those “Free Tibet” stickers and t-shirts have been changing over to “Save Tibet,” which is much more accurate at this point. This is a story for another time.

Basically, you are probably getting the idea that there is a huge amount going on over here. My days are full and the energy around is powerful. There is so much good stuff to do, and now I’m down to my last month in India. The trip is simultaneously flying by and endless: one of the mysteries of time. I’m excited to get back to the States to pursue some of these ideas, but still savoring the experiences of the trip.