July 8, 2009 at 11:49 pm (Thoughts)
Tags: childhood, emilia, oregon city, papermill, work
Last night my childhood friend and I met up in a place we had lightly haunted as fourteen-year-olds or perhaps more accurately had scared us for a day. It was in Canby, Oregon where we had gone one school day when we felt like breaking the rules and visited an old classmate in a trashy trailer park on the outskirts of town. We did every bad deed we could and then I spent months afterward dreaming of emulaing his sister, a beautiful blond seventeen-year-old chainsmoker, pregnant with a second child, living in a romantic dirty campervan-sized trailer. The trailer park has been cleaned up and re-named an RV park and even the bowling alley no longer doubles as a smoky bar so we hit the next town, Oregon City.
Oregon City is the official end of the Oregon Trail and also has one of the oldest paper mills in the country; an enormous sleepless smash of smoke streamed buildings straddling a historic bend of the Willamette River. As nighttime beckoned we followed stone-walled steps up to historic houses and a park that overlooks the city and down a walkway. From that vantage point the constantly roaring trains and churning factory were perfectly visible. We’d always marveled at this factory with its myriad stairways, strange tanks and mysterious doorways. This time we decided to walk to Emilia’s sister’s house along the tracks where she narrowly escaped a train speeding along a bend as we hopped the fence onto the shrouded tracks. Suddenly a stairway beamed next to us and we ascended it to a cobwebbed portion of the factory that was like a new-age passage to a mad scientist’s office in a tiny box suspended high in the air. Hairy spiders teetered inches from our heads as we squinted to read the dusty papers on the desk inside the dark greasy-paned windows. Then, suddenly we heard footsteps scaling the precarious twisting stairwell. We ascended higher and higher until we remained forever trapped in that moment in a spooky papermill in the same room where countless workers were slain back before the riots and the layoffs and Oregon City was never the same..
So that’s the story, of me stepping back in time with my best friend. And now my childhood is just a thing in the past,as nothing does last forever except in imaginary stories. But I work with children everyday in summer school and play their games in recess and enjoy the wonders of youth and relish in the fact that even if it seems to be gone on the outside, those years gone by can be recaptured at any moment, anytime, in the recesses of one’s mind.
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February 25, 2009 at 1:49 pm (Thoughts, Uncategorized)
Tags: darshan, madrid, spain, travel, work
So I’ve been in madrid for three weeks now. The city of the fast walkers, and nervousness! I never realized how nervous everyone is here, or maybe it just seems that way after being in a bit of a peaceful state, physically and mentally. People also are not in the moment, they walk rapidly not really paying attention to anything but their own thoughts and what’s directly infront of them. No one meets your eye, I suppose that’s just the way of this concrete world. People hate their jobs yet they are scared to travel anywhere for fear of losing them! Everyone is caught up in this daily grind and though I’m not there, I feel guilty for not wanting to live out my days like this. I suppose the office is an intriguing place for some, the thrill of accomplishment gotten from achieving a project or difficult assignment and the applaud and envy of boss and co-workers. It’s like its own little gladiator stadium, you do or you die. And now with the crisis and lost jobs many feel like they might as well sacrifice themselves to the lions, if only this was ancient Rome. I feel now more aligned with the spiritual path rather than the worldly one. As Amma, “the hugging saint,” said in Darshan:
Because there are two types of education: “Living,” meaning your job and “life” which the gurus teach. In the materialistic world teachers teach practical things. In the spiritual world some things aren’t clear.”
So I was taught to be practical and make a decent “living.” But I don’t really want that type of life, so instead I’m an impractical vagrant. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, I’m happy, but at the same time it makes me difficult to understand, which is fine with me. Others argue that I’m sloppy, I much prefered the Indian way of sitting and sleeping on little more than the bare dirty floor. People live in a world of fear I think. Scared of being poor or attacked by terrorists or their families and of dust, of the unknown and of other people’s thoughts. I wish we could live without fences, that there was no worry of thievery and of the sun burning us and of bad intentions. I suppose I am an over-trusting person, I don’t assume anyone would want to take anything from me, but like with everyone it’s happened a fair share of times – from my jacket to a mcdonald’s transformer to my purse – people have taken many things and I’ve also witnessed the grief of those who’ve had more than possessions, but irreplaceable journals and photographs, the remains of memories lost in time, so to speak. And so we have to be vigilant, even the tent in Bolonia had to be shut and tied up to keep the cats out. But I suppose I’d rather have less expensive possesions and less worry, less money and less choices of how to spend it, less drama with relationships and jobs and less chances of wasting my precious time on this earth. This life I feel truly is a gift, as the old Buddhist saying goes, we have less chance of being born as humans than a dolphin has of coming to the ocean’s surface through a ring. Now I want to embrace this life and be thankful for all the wonderful people I’ve encountered and so many unique experiences. I could write a thousand books about it. And not one would be boring. I don’t think boredom can exist, not when you realize the unlimited potential of this moment.
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