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Journal (The Ember Update)

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Thursday, August 24

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Quite well, actually. We have 12 heirloom tomatoes busting out of their cages, bell peppers, hot peppers, eggplant, and one not very happy Brussels Sprout. We've followed organic gardening practices, and the tomato yield this year is turning out to be overwhelming. We actually bought some Mason jars in preparation for canning. Our tomato varieties include red, orange, yellow, green, purple and black, with these names: Green Zebra, Regina's Yellow, Isis Candy, Peace Vine Cherry, Black Pear, Persimmon, Speckled Peach, Druzba (Russian for "friendship"), Eva Purple Ball, Indian Moon, Cherokee Purple, Black from Tula, and Aunt Ruby's German Green. Peppers are Fat-N-Sassy, Northstar and Hungarian Hot Wax, and the eggplant is Diamond. Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to a page of photos:

Blast from the Past

An old co-worker and friend of mine—one I hadn't seen in five years—came to stay last weekend with her boyfriend. In those five years, Jen has become an architect working in Ohio, and she's hooked up with a very nice Russian physics researcher named Codrin. Jen and I used to work together at CDG Solutions, a creative design and interactive development firm in Washington, DC. I was happy to see Jen so happy, and she likewise of me. We were supportive of each other during the dark year of 2001, before I moved to CA and she embarked for architecture school. We've come a long way, baby!

Jen and Codrin arrived already abuzz with the notion of going to Burning Man someday. Codrin was especially enthusiastic, wanting to go next week! Of course, being the evangelists we are, Kevin and I talked it up, and to make a long story short, we may have found an architect to design a dome for a theme camp! Jen has ideas based on her final thesis (which sounded really interesting), and of course we too have theme concepts we've developed a bit over the last two years. Now if we only had tens of thousands of dollars for that dome…

Anyway, we hope to see Jen and Codrin again before too long. They're only in the midwest, so who knows. We had a really fun visit—at one point Jen remarked to Codrin that we might be their "soul mate" couple—and we can definitely see them thriving on the playa. Yay to revived friendships!

Moving Towards Spirituality [started August 11]

Okay, this entry is really only half-baked (or half formed), but these thoughts have been swirling about in my head and I've been trying to make sense of them. So take what follows with that in mind … and if you think you have relevant insight or helpful ideas to add, please send them along to me (thanks!).

A passage in my favorite movie, Bill Murray's The Razor's Edge, haunted me for many years:

Larry: "I worked in a coal mine to come here [India]."
Raaz: "A coal mine? What was the intention?"
Larry: "I told you, to earn the money to come here."
Raaz: "No, that was the reason, but what was the intention? For work that has no intention is not work at all, it is simply an empty motion."

This passage caused me to look up the word intention numerous times over the years. I found definitions like "goal" and "purpose," which didn't seem all that different from "reason" in the context of the movie quote.

I didn't grasp what was really being said. I'd never been introduced to the concept of intention in a usable way.

From the Transforma Burner list earlier this month:

Unfortunately [most people] are creating by default and not by intent. It's not their fault. They just don't know any better. … It's time we learned how to [create with intention] so that we get the results we really want instead of all the stuff that we "don't want."

Yup, creating by default was what I was doing for many many years. I used to call it "going with the flow" … and I thought it was the best way to go, the way "the universe" was taking me. But I failed to differentiate between a flow and my flow, so I wasted(?) years dipping my toes into other people's flows, and trying to go with theirs. I spent a lot of time making wrong decisions, and then I let those wrong decisions try to make me into their own likeness, such as trying to be a conservative and a hermit with my first husband.

Like so many, I was letting life happen with little thought to whether the direction was right. I fell into jobs, career paths and relationships. I didn't differentiate between bad energy or good in the situations I encountered, because I knew nothing about energy. You've undoubtedly gotten a bad "vibe" about someone. Vibe is vibration, which is what energy is. Though I've never taken physics, my understanding is that science has shown we're made of energy, not matter. Apparently when you look at matter in increasing levels of magnification, what you find is space and more space. Perhaps a better way of explaining it is that matter is a manifestation of energy. (I hope to learn more about physics someday.)

So I drifted with the flow, ignored the vibes around me, and gave no credence to intuition. For years I actively (subconsciously) suppressed any brushes I had with intuition. Reason was king.

There's that word again: Reason. Though many may disagree, I now believe that reason is only a small part of the picture. Ekhart Tolle points out that thinking is just one of the states of consciousness, but many in the western world see it as the only state, or the only commendable state. However, the eastern world brings us meditation, and meditation is about clearing the mind of thought so divine instruction and inspiration can flow in, or one's true nature can be perceived. (Converse to what some believe without trying meditation, it's not about subjugating or losing oneself, but rather about self-realization.) Can you turn off the voice in your head? People that practice meditation learn to do so, and I've read that 1 hour of meditation, done right, can equal 2 hours of sleep. I imagine that's because we don't know how to rest (turn off) our minds when we're asleep either.

What is reality anyway? Often we don't see what's really happening because of all of the constructs that we automatically filter our perceptions through: our history, "knowledge," emotions, etc., leading us only to an interpretation based on what's come before. We act out of the past, sometimes coupled with hope for future outcomes. We behave as if our collective attribution of agreed-upon parameters constitutes reality. We concur that a $100 bill has $100 value, when really it's just a piece of paper, worthless if the government crumbles. What is reality when several people witness an accident? The accounts of what happened can vary widely. So both interpreted perception and cultural "reality" deceive us.

I wonder if one can really begin to understand what's going on around him or her without intuition, without grasping the basic concepts of energy, and/or without removing the veil of our past-based filters through meditation. There is certainly more than one way to skin a cat, but the underlying thread is that understanding is NOT made up entirely of perception and reason.

Perhaps the shaman is the only one who really "sees." Where is the shaman today? Largely regulated to the realm of mysticism, and we all know how much mysticism is accepted in mainstream western thought.

If we want to act rightly, first we must lift the veil. Once we truly see, we can then act with right intention. And reportedly, with the veil lifted, the commonly-held intention is based on compassion.

This is the path I am ready to embark upon.

Afterthought

Heh, didn't G.W. Bush campaign as a compassionate conservative? "It is compassionate to actively help our citizens in need. It is conservative to insist on accountability and results." [source] Well, yes, that's a good definition of compassion. But since when did insisting on accountability and results equal conservatism? And when has the Bush Administration embodied either quality? Don't tell me that it was their intention, because I'd counter by saying that their reason was to get elected.

Tuesday, August 8

Remembering Dad

As of August 2nd, it's been 5 years since my dad died. Sometimes I still miss him terribly and find myself grieving for my inability to talk with him. How things have changed in 5 years. If only I had blossomed before his passing … so many things I'd like to discuss with him now. If you haven't lately, please tell your loved ones you love them; you may never get another chance! And if you haven't already, you can read about what happened to my dad.

Wish List

My birthday is in three weeks (and according to big retailers, fall is here, which means Christmas is almost here too). I've created a Wish List mainly for my family, but everyone else is welcome to browse.

Burning Man Principles

It's old news, but you might find this interesting: "Burning Man defies Katrina? How can a huge, feral party in the desert possibly matter?" It's a response to criticisms about partying during a huge national disaster.

As a follow up, Burning Man volunteers helped with "Camp Katrina" for seven months, and Thailand's tsunami, and are doing more through BurnersWithoutBorders:

"Every summer Burning Man participants (aka "Burners") meet in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada to re-engage with our community, and to celebrate shared values of radical self-expression and self-reliance. We celebrate the power of community, honor the importance of art, and enjoy the immediacy of experience. Then we leave—without a trace of our having been there. But that experience and those values don't get left behind in the desert. They inform who we are, and how we interact with the larger world around us. Burners Without Borders is a manifestation of what can happen when we take our values off the playa and out into the rest of the world." [source]

And bringing the leave no trace philosophy to further realization, some Burners have started CoolingMan.org, to help offset the greenhouse gasses emitted by Burning Man.

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