Recovering

I just got home from the hospital a few days ago, where I was for a week. I thought I might have had a heart attack, but it turned out to be pericarditis, an inflamation of the lining of the heart, very painful but not as serious. It weakened my heart pretty good though, so I have to take it easy for a while till it repairs.

This really took me by surprise. I guess I'm a typical man that way, staying in pretty good health until all of a sudden I fall apart. And suddenly have to start taking massive quantities of pills and obsessing about my lifestyle and every little action I do. Weird.

I'm not sure, but I think the inflamation was brought on by the accumulated stress of some run-ins I had with this strange instructor I have for the distance-education course I'm taking. I'm not going to get into what happened (the last thing I need is to repeat it over in my mind in order to write it), but let's just say that she isn't exactly a role-model for the selfless kind of person us students are supposed to be in training for. And I guess it irritated me more than it should have. But I've come to see that she's simply an example of "those who can't do, teach". I've come out of the experience much more able to tolerate people's inadequacies, including my own.

Let's face it, all of us are full of holes. Yet we do manage to stumble on. And in the process we've managed to build up this amazing civilization. It's incredible when you think about it.

How big a change is this...

I'm going from twenty years as a florist to being a community mental health worker! Try to put that together in your mind. Right now I'm about three quarters of the way through my course and can't wait to get started working.

After Linda and I retired from the florist business (and went to Hawaii), I've been very unsettled about what to do with my life. It was just sheer luck that I found out about this job. Too bad I hadn't twenty years ago, instead, but then again I think I was too immature for it until now. Fifty seven is about the right age for this kind of thing, I think.

Right now, it's Christmas Eve. I don't have time to write more about it now, and am also in a bit of a panic studying for my mid-term. (Can you imagine that at my age?) There's a heck of a lot more I could say about all this but it will have to wait a bit.

It's all very... Well, let's say interesting.

Just woke up

, originally uploaded by burfield.

Just woke up.
Granola. Green tea.
Lap top in front of me...

I was hanging around the information desk at the hospital, knowing some of the people who work there. A guy came in to visit someone, asking directions. The desk was short-staffed at the time so I volunteered to help him. We walked off to some chairs and I pulled out my hospital map, showing him where the cafeteria was and so on. I asked what room the patient he was coming to see was in. He said it wasn't one patient, it was the girl's trumpet troop. I remembered hearing about them, that they had been involved in some horrific accident. I went back to the desk for their floor number. When I returned I had a big smile for the guy. I said that apparently there had been some remarkable recoveries among the girls.

As I talked to him I imagined the effect the happiness of the girls who recovered would have had on the girls who weren't recovering. It would probably make them even more depressed. I was thinking this as I was waking up. It was that kind of a dream - that so captured my imagination and my thought process that it blended right in with being awake. I was trying to think of what I could say to one of those girls to cheer her up. Well, first of all, maybe cheering her up wasn't what she needed. She had a right to be sad, just as the recovered girls had a good right to be happy. This is what gives a person's life its richness, I thought. But beyond the sadness, and depression, what could I tell the girl that would allow her to be positive about herself again, even though she was terribly debilitated. This was very important to me, that I come up with a good answer, even though I was now awake, staring up at the ceiling.

Here's what I would say: I would say, down into her deep sadness: "I have something very profound to tell you that you need to know in order to come out of this." Then I would tell her about the little man I had seen long ago on a TV show - I think it was the Guiness Book of Records show, or something like that. He was the shortest man in the world, less than two feet tall. The show had taken a camera crew to his home and had shown him sitting on a chair. It was shocking. He was mostly head, with what looked like a little sack of a body underneath, hidden inside some modified clothing. It wasn't much bigger than his head. He had no legs and just short, deformed arms. But I remember myself suddenly waking up inside somehow as the interviewer asked him the first question and he responded in a normal voice: It was so strange that, looking only at his face and hearing him talk, he could have been anybody. They asked him how he felt being so small, did it bother him, get him depressed. He said not at all. He lived a normal life. There were things he could do and things he couldn't do. He did what he could, and tried to find ways to do what he couldn't. Then he introduced his wife. She was a woman of normal height. Again I was shocked. Certainly she was a very homely woman, who no doubt married him feeling no one else would have her, but when they asked her how she liked being married to this little man, she beamed happily and said she loved him very much. And then they introduced their two children, a boy and a girl, both normal in all ways and very good looking, towering over their father, but responding to him in front of the camera just as any kids would to their father. And again I was shocked. The kids obviously liked and respected him, and didn't think about his size. I accepted that, but couldn't really see how it would be possible until he was asked about how he earned a living for his family. He said, come on, I'll show you. He hopped down from his chair onto the floor, walked himself with his hands and the stub of his body across to the door, went outside, got onto a board with wheels and showed the interviewer around his farm, which he had bought, had made a success of, and largely worked himself. Then he put his cowboy hat on, pulled himself up into the driver's seat of a one-tonne truck, waited for the interviewer and cameraman to get in beside him, and, with foot pedals that were modified for hand use, drove into town and waved proudly to all his friends and acquaintances who waved back from the sidewalk. End of story. He reminded me of my own father, who owned and operated a farm totally blind, which now seemed even a worse debility than the little man's. I thought I would tell the girl that the profound lesson here is that everyone has personal limits, that everyone's limits are different than everyone else's, andthat the essence of life is to find those limits, to accept them, and to thrive within them, and to be satisfied with the life that results. The short man, as opposed to being very unlucky, actually was one of the luckier ones. It had been very obvious to him right from the start, as a child, what his personal limits were, as opposed to those of others. So at a very young age he learned to accept them and to thrive within them. As I saw him on TV I was brought to tears by the seeming contradiction between the weakness of his body and the incredible strength of his person.

As I completely woke up, looking at the ceiling, still thinking about the girl - that I would tell her this profound truth, that in the end a deep appreciation of it was all she needed for happiness - I began to think about my own life. Ever since Linda and I sold our flower shop I have had a difficult time. A very difficult time. I've found myself lost in distraction for months on end. During the brief instances when I managed to get myself to think about myself seriously, I realized that I had lost track of my life's journey, that I no longer knew who I was. When I was young there was a definite course forward in my mind, not one anyone else would recognize maybe, not a course through society or the outer world in any way, but a kind of searching course. There were things I was searching for, and slowly making progress in finding, that involved my idea of the world, the universe, and who and where I was in it. Each little step on the way thrilled me. I would have had a very difficult time describing most of them to others, but I recognized them clearly and they were major campsites along my way. Then I got married, to a woman I loved, and still do, and that was both another campsite and a distraction as well. Then together we opened a flower shop and it was yet another campsite and yet another distraction. As time wore on, along with the responsibility of it all, and of dealing with flowers, which were not the kind of things my essential self knew or cared about, I began to feel like I was drastically off course, and was losing my course, and was losing my self. Too much time wore on. Finally Linda and I got rid of the store, and moved to this island, and I practically became immobile here, unable to find myself, or to a large degree even to remember myself. I started reading pulp novels, for the first time in my life, and just passed time. As you may have noticed, I even stopped writing in this blog. Luckily, Linda kept loving me, and the overwhelming beauty of this island supported me somewhat, as did the fact that we were making friends here amongst our neighbours - the first time I've experienced that in my life. Slowly little bubbles of myself began popping unexpectedly to the surface. Maybe once or twice a week lately I would get a glimpse of my real life, and would either reel back into distraction or smile about it and then promptly forget it.

And then this morning I woke inside this dream of being in a hospital, and of trying to help someone, who of course was myself, who wanted to help these girl trumpeters (also of course myself) to overcome their disabilities so they could begin again letting loose those long high notes of joy.

As you can imagine, I'm relieved to be told that not all my feelings are irrevocably damaged, that some have survived and even recovered. I can feel it's true. So now I'm thinking of my limits, of what I'm good at and what I'm not. And of how good and how not. And I can see that to find those limits and to begin to live within them is to live in the present, not in past ideas and dreams and disappointments. This blurb is the first action I've taken in the direction of my self for some time. It feels good. And right, once again.

Down from the clouds

Picture 245, originally uploaded by Stan2.

Most of the travels I've gone on have been very personal journeys, directed as much inward as outward. It's a habit I've formed, so that when Linda and I went to Hawaii recently, even though we were in a land dense with tourists, I was always anticipating some personal revelation to show itself, even there amongst all those middle managers and their families in their Hawaiian t-shirts and artificial leias.

Well, when you have your eyes open for something you just might see it.

This one came in three parts, and actually began before we left for Hawaii, maybe a month before, one morning as I woke from a strange dream. During the last second of the dream I was plunging down through the air, at breakneck speed, towards jungle, which suddenly appeared in great closeup detail below me. I wasn't in a panic, but, of course, when my eyes popped open, just in the nick of time, I assumed I must have been crashing. And as I thought about it that day, all I could imagine was that it had been a prescient dream of an airplane crash. One that I was in, of course. And that killed me. I mentioned it in a comment on this blog (we were talking about dreams), and a certain Ms Black was kind enough, and astute enough, to replace my interpretation with a much more palatable one. She said the dream may have been prescient alright, but not of my death. Rather, it was more likely symbolic of "coming down to earth after a very long bout of stress and uncertainty. You're finally getting some relief." And of course, down to earth means essentially back to reality, away from my habitual mental life, which is no doubt the source of the endless cycles of stress and uncertainty, and into a more practical, real kind of life. By way of this trip to Hawaii.

When we boarded the plane, I clung onto this interpretation, reciting it to myself at appropriate moments. Actually I wasn't that anxious, but of course I didn't have to be until we approached the jungle around the airport in Maui. En route, I pulled out a magazine I had bought to read, one which you can only find in the bigger magazine racks, one of my favourites. It's called Parabola, subtitled The Search for Meaning. Each issue (it's a quarterly) focuses on a different aspect of that search. And the cover photo or painting reflects the theme. Well, this issue had just hit the stands before our trip, and I was amazed, and shocked, by the incredible painting on the cover. Was this just coincidence or what? It was of a jungle - very high, dense, beautiful jungle trees - looking at them from a meadow's space away, a meadow on a hill, with the trees climbing into the sky as they began to drop down the hillside ahead. In the middle there was an opening in the trees, as of a cutline going through them down the hillside, with the canopy of the trees coming together high above it. And down on the grass, just where the opening began, sat, crosslegged, a man, gazing in meditation down through those incredible, very peaceful trees.

This scene was more than a coincidence, as you'll see in a moment: It was incredibly prescient of the next part of this whole experience.

Anyway, you can imagine that as soon as I saw the jungle on that cover I had to buy the magazine to read on the plane to Hawaii, especially as the theme of the issue was "Coming to our senses"! That fit perfectly, not only with what I wanted in Hawaii, but with Ms Black's interpretation of my dream. So now even the picture helped to convince me that maybe she was right. And that maybe reading it would help calm my fears.

As soon as things settled down on the plane, meaning when I had got my fill of looking down on the clouds (which I've always loved to do on flights), and when we had been fed, and I decided I could do without the dumb movie that was being shown, and as soon as boredom had begun to set in, I pulled out that magazine and began to thumb through it. Hmmm. What article would I read (as there were a lot in it)? And how would I even make that decision, since reading it had to do with more than just information gathering, but with such etherial things as prescience, dreams, fears, existential thoughts, and so on. In other words, with my subconscious. The main article, at least the one emphasized on the cover, was called "Shaking Our Senses Free", which sounded perfect. But then again maybe it wasn't. How to tell. So I looked at the table of contents. "The Invisibles - enigmatic dimensions of the everyday." Hmmm. "How I Pray is Breathe: Thomas Merton in the Hermitage Years - Merton's rehabilitation of the sensible." I thought about that one. I have always been a little fascinated with Merton for some reason. And this was about his time as a hermit, something I could relate to from my own experience as a hermit out in the wilderness. I wondered what had happened to him. What it was like. But on down the list: "Common Sense - An interview with Peter Kingsley." Wow. Common sense. Something I do and don't take deeply seriously. Yes, I want to read that. "A Walk with Krishnamurti: From his Journal - Attention without wish, without search, without complaint." That sounds like an idea I like, but ever since I read a bit of one of his books when I was young, and thought "That's Nuts!", I've had a hard time getting back into it. "Recovering Sight - Freeing the gaze from "mere looking"". Sounds good. "Embracing the Irrational - An interview with Marion Woodman". I, Mr. Rational, have always wanted to see that flip side clearly. "Smell - Scent as medium between Heaven and Earth." Okay. And "Embodying Wisdom", about Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's teachings. And finally, "Now I am Sitting Here - Experiencing sensation and feeling." Sounds just right. And by Gurdjieff. And then there were short articles just as interesting, and poems, and epicycles, and film reviews, and book reviews. What to read. I still couldn't decide, so I started thumbing through it.

But first I noticed at the top of the contents page a description of the cover picture, a painting by the Cuban Tomas Sanchez, "...known for his paintings of dense tropical forests, full of etherial light and the sound of cascading waterfalls, just this side of magic..." Yes. Can't wait.

I flipped the page. The first article was illustrated with meaningless paintings of some kind of flowing something, looking all too familiar, like the hippy paintings of the sixties. I need more than that. Then I saw Thomas Merton. He was sitting at an outside table, reading a book with a pen in hand, wearing a denim work jacket over a sweater, with a little smile on his earthy face. (Reader, try to remember this image for later.) I was hooked. Listen to this. He wrote it from his hermitage in 1965, in a letter to a friend: "...This is where the silence of the woods comes in. Not that there is something new to be thought and discovered in the woods. But only that the trees are all sufficient exclamations of silence, and one works there, cutting wood, clearing ground, cutting grass, cooking soup, drinking fruit juice, sweating, washing, making fire, smelling smoke, sweeping, etc. This is religion. The further one gets away from this, the more one sinks in the mud of words and jestures. The flies gather." This reminded me strongly of what Ms Black said about my dream. I was excited. I read on. Since Merton was grounded in the practicalities of life, as that quote suggests, he then was free to practice his Catholic meditations without drifting off into the clouds, so to speak. He even made Zen Buddhist meditation part of his daily life, helping him "to clear an inner space, to simplify and cleanse." What he discovered in those years was only hinted at in his writings, to say nothing of the article I was reading. It seems he discovered a new vision, or rather a way the world is put together that isn't normally seen. Totally new ideas are generally very difficult to wrap one's mind around, and much of what I was reading certainly was that. But here's a quote that will give you a feel at least of his direction: "The sensible around me (nature, etc) becoming conscious of itself in and through me. A solitude in which one allows nature this virginal silence, this secret, pure, unrelatable consciousness in oneself. ... The self-awareness of the great present in which my body is fully and uniquely situated." He's saying that he is part of nature. A component of it. And his consciousness of it is it's consciousness of itself! I think when you just read this you can easily deny it, saying that consciousness is still confined inside his own mind. But when you're there in the midst of nature meditating, just seeing the rest of nature, not thinking, and so being a part of it in your consciousness (not just your body being a part of it), then it seems quite different. In fact, I'm not really sure that the one point of view is any truer than the other. We are a part of nature to a much greater degree than we are generally willing to admit.

In any case, I finished hemming and hawing over the article just before we finally began to descend toward the Maui airport. Three hours had passed. The Fasten Seatbelt sign was on. I looked out the window and thought about my feelings, and about the reality of what was happening. From my window seat I could see the jungle way down there as we dropped toward it. But all those ideas of Merton's were very solid in my mind, and they were intertwined with Ms Black's comforting explanation of my dream. So I was fairly relaxed. Alert, certainly. And thinking of possibilities. But waiting to land.

Which we did.

A taxi took us to the Banana Bungalow hostel, a situation which would take some days to get used to, especially for Linda, and the next day we immediately went on the first of the hostel's free tours. It took us through Lahaina, where we saw the huge banyon tree, then snorkelling amongst all those schools of colourful little fish at the reefs at Kaanipalli, and we even stopped for a quick side visit to a Buddhist shrine.

Which was nice. There were a few of those beautiful Asian temple buildings with all that intricate and very colourful woodwork supporting the roofs. There was also a big statue of the Buddha sitting on a wooden platform. Some offerings lay at the top of the flight of five or six steps leading up to it. This was billed as the largest statue of Buddha outside of Asia. I was curious why it was so big so I went to read the plaque about it, as I had about the temple buildings, but then another glance suddenly stopped me. Something about the statue told me it was not something that should be seen through tourist eyes, by way of a plaque. You see, it was not only a large statue, in fact a very large statue, but as I looked up at it, I realized there was something about its size that was important in itself. It wasn't just a large version of the zillions of little Buddha statues in the tourist shops. In other words, it wasn't big just as a show of big reverence. There was something else. As I gazed at it, I slowly saw what it was. Now picture this clearly in your mind if you can: This is the Buddha sitting with legs crossed and hands at ease, meditating. His back is straight, not slumped, so there seems to be no effort in his posture. In fact the whole feeling is of effortlessness, even from such a large person. Rising behind him, and to each side, there are very tall Norfolk pine trees, but the Buddha himself is so large that when you look up at his face you only see the tops of the trees behind him. He is not dwarfed by them as we are. He is up there with them. Well, this juxtaposition makes me think of the trees themselves, something I have more experience with than the Buddha. The trees are very old. As I look at them, their feeling overwhelms me: They are not going anywhere, not struggling to get anywhere, as we are. And yet they have not given up either, you might say. They are just there. Period. Unmoving. And unmovable. Comfortable being there. Fulfilled. Always fulfilled. Not needing anything more. I can't help but compare them to the statue in front of them. That very large, presumably heavy Buddha sits so comfortably in that cross-legged position and with that perfectly straight back, as straight as the trees, yet with such a relaxed, alert posture. He's very much like one of the trees. He's not even 'doing' a meditation, but just silently being there. As Merton described the trees, he's an exclamation of silence. He seems like he could sit there, without aches or pains, unmoving but alert, forever. Before I see him closely I expect his eyes to be closed in meditation, but instead they're open, open to the trees and the world around him, and yet not looking, just seeing. That's exactly how the statue looks. Just seeing, alertly. As Merton saw himself, he is a part of nature, not apart from it.

And he has a very slight smile. Or is it just the natural expression of his body, so comfortable with itself and the world around and all the time passing?

I would love to be like that.

Linda and I passed on through the world. I did my share of hiking the jungle trails and swimming in the ocean. And now we're living in a rainforest in Canada, yes actually living amongst huge trees, in the dappled beauty of nature. I'm slowly getting used to a less-stressful life. And I'm learning to discipline myself, to have my own source of strength and motivation, not to just run all the time from my fears as I did in the city. What I do is for me. And Linda. It's a start.

What works

What works, originally uploaded by Stan2.

It's been extraordinarily rainy here for the last week and a half, some kind of record. A week ago the fancy big outdoor luau we had reservations for was cancelled because of a storm the night before. We managed to attend last night's, during which it only sprinkled at the beginning and then at the end of it (they gave us ponchos). Didn't matter really. It didn't make or break our Maui experience, which is just about over.

This morning we were sitting in our rockers out on the balcony. The morning rain had stopped and it was still warm enough for me to have my tea in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts, although Linda had just got up so I put a blanket over her legs. We were gazing down at the parking lot out behind our building. I was space cadetting as usual, and Linda was observing. She said, "Have you noticed that so many people, when they have even a small bag, put it in the trunk of their car?" No I hadn't. I couldn't even imagine such a thing. I had to think hard to come up with a theory for this one, it so took me by surprise. "It must be that some people have a mindset that they must do everything the way it SHOULD be done, or is SUPPOSED to be done, without thinking about it," I said. "A LOT of people," Linda said. I couldn't imagine such a life. I thought about Linda and I. As different as we are from each other, neither of us are anything like that. I said, "You and I tend to do what works, or is easiest, first, and then secondly think about rules."

We thought about how we've spent our month in Maoi. Linda said it's surprising how little time we've had a car - for three days - and we've only taken cabs four times. On the other hand we really like the little local buses we've piled onto so many times, along with the friendly Hawaiians. And as much as the hostel took Linda by surprise during our first week, she looks back on it as the best time, considering all the people we met and the tours they took us on. Since then we've had lots of time to relax and get Linda out of her work mode.

The rain has just slowed us down to an even better pace - the most languid moments and days either of us can remember. This is what they call here 'Hawaiian time'

..........PS A reader, in the comment section below, told me the real answer to the bag-in-the-boot riddle, and this isn't it. It's simply a response to living in a crime-ridden country, something I have little experience in, being I'm from Canada.

Ghost ship

Ghost ship, originally uploaded by Stan2.

I bought this camera here in Maoi, and have never had a digital one before (as you can tell from my blog). I had only tried to use the time exposure setting on it once, but last night I saw the lights of a cruise ship out in the harbour.

Well, I've always been strangely (subconsciously it would seem) attracted to ships that were lit up, possibly because they seem like little self-contained cities, or, more to the point, floating images of people getting along harmoniously. (For an introvert, that is a very big dream.)Also, they have always had for me a sort of religious feeling, maybe representing some kind of heaven, which, way out there across the water, is unobtainable. (Maybe this is just another way of saying the same thing.) And they usually are seen very unexpectedly, as happened in this case, as if appearing from another world.

Well, I whipped out my camera and decided to try my second-ever time exposure on it. Linda saw me fiddling with the camera and said she would be across at that gift shop over there, and wandered off. I took my time and got the settings right, for two seconds' exposure, then found a large tree trunk to hold it tight against. It took a while getting it at the right angle, wedging one finger under it and so on. Finally it looked good so very carefully I clicked it. For a second the screen showed "processing", and then I could see the little picture (the screen on my camera is smaller than most). The tree looked good, but when I looked down at the ship I could see something else there, something white. I pressed the telephoto button. It zoomed in on the middle of the tree. I scrolled down. There, under the tree, was a white figure, looking straight at the camera. A shock went through my system. For a split second I recalled seeing this in so many movies: Somebody would suddenly see some dead relative or business aquaintance across a busy street, standing still, looking at him. Then a big truck would go by and the person would no longer be there. I zoomed in closer on the white person and it was Linda! But she had gone to a store! I had the immediate feeling it was her ghost looking at me. From the other side. (Later I thought it was like she had been killed crossing the street.) I immediately looked up, across the street, and there was the white figure still standing there staring at me exactly as in the photo. Another shock overwhelmed me. I stared at her. She didn't move. Finally I snapped out of it and realized it really must be her, in body, not just in spirit. It had to be! I waved. And she waved back! Ha ha! Very funny! Don't do that to me.

Well, her excuse was that she saw me behaving in a very still manner, so she decided that's how she should be.

Let me tell you this about Linda: She is not a totally predictable creature.

Maoi Moments

Maoi Moments, originally uploaded by Stan2.

Sitting at a table in a shady, cobble-stoned area between buildings, with seller's stalls, milling people, stores - everything - under the sky-spread green of a banyon, it's massive trunk rising beside me, I was watching a local cat, lanky black and white, meandering among the tables, sitting contentedly sometimes, living there on its own, not needing an owner. I petted it lightly behind the ears, and under its neck when it stretched its head up happily. Then a little boy came around the table, spotted it, and said to himself, "There it is." The cat immediately slipped under a fence behind me and walked off. I recognized this situation. I thought about it a while, then realized the cat was like a woman. I was the man who loved her. I felt her feelings, touched those feelings. The boy was MEN. The cat was an object. He wanted her. He wanted to grab her and pick her up.

**

Linda and I were sipping tea, waking up out on our balcony in the warm humid morning air, sitting back in two easy chairs. Linda had her feet pressed up against the railing. I put my cup down on the little wooden table. Just at the edge of my vision I noticed movement. I looked closer. Scurrying over the table were some tiny insects, so tiny I could hardly see them, looking like spiders, except that they were following each other like ants, running around on the table top and up and down one of its legs. They were very tiny, whitish. The more I looked the more of them I could see. I thought how strange to see spiders that behaved like ants. How would they find their prey without building webs? Were they scavengers? I brought it to Linda's attention and she was kind of ambivalent about the entire mystery, not really wanting to let it enter her morning mind, but wondering about it nevertheless. Because I was. She's like that. Well, eventually I took my glasses off and got my eyes right down there on top of them and could see that they had six legs, not eight. They actually were ants, just strangely coloured ones. I sat back. I had this feeling of having looked into some kind of a between-world. Yes. For sure. There are two worlds of critters in terms of us humans. There is the world of cats, birds, geckos, whales out in the water, brightly coloured fish, that kind of thing. They catch our attention. Then there are for instance the chicken-flu viruses, the assorted tropical amoebae and bacteria in the water, zillions of things we injest every day like dust mites (have you seen those magnified?), worm eggs in our boxes of cereal, and on and on. They are so tiny and we are so monstrously huge, mountain-like, that we don't notice each other. Can't. Wouldn't want to if we could. Don't need to. But between the geckos and the mites there are these in-between creatures. My little white ants for instance. Linda and I had just come back from the beach up at Ka'anipalli, a fancy resort area, where I swam for a bit and then where we had some lunch in this great, outdoor restaurant beside the sand, its heavy tables under huge shade umbrellas. I watched the little birds that liked to sit on the edge of the umbrellas, scan the tables and sand under them, and then flutter down fast to grab scraps - in and out before those great human legs came along. Well, now I wondered what else had been running around on those tables that not even I had noticed. And of course the waitresses were focused on much larger things, not the least of which was stress. The eyes of the tourists were half shut, seeing only the blue out there, sometimes the white rolling surf, and each others' eyes drifting in the ambiance.

Eight-sided pie, a local delicacy

Eight-sided pie, a local delicacy, originally uploaded by Stan2.

The other day Linda met me at the wharf as I got off the Lahainna Princess, a charter boat that took about 20 of us out to the Molokini atoll to snorkel. We went for a cup of tea and I told her about all the colourful fish I saw and especially about my regrets at missing the octopus. (After I had got back on the boat someone said he had seen it, and described exactly where it's hole was, from which he could see its tentacles emerging. I could see in my mind exactly where the hole much have been and kicked myself for missing it.)

Linda said, "Oh, I hate those things - all those tentacles, and the way they all come together and it shoots off," gesturing with her hand like a rocket. "And that head." She made a face. I watched her with a smile. (The more she's just being herself the sweeter she is.)

I said, "Yeah, it's alien, like a creature from another planet." Which got me going in my own direction. And the more I thought about it the more worked-up I got. "Yes," I explained, "they are exactly like aliens. Because they evolved on a completely separate line from ours, ever since they were I guess one-celled animals, or nearly that far back. They came up through what we now see as clam-like things, and snails and slugs, and squids, to the ultimate end of the line, the octopi. They have highly developed eyes, for example, and brains probably equal to many primates. But here's just how alien they are: The workings of their eyes are inside out, compared to ours, and their brains are not two sided, but are built evenly around a ring. Their whole chain of evolution could easily have taken place on another world, it has so little to do with ours."

Linda was nice enough to listen to my spiel, but with this little smile she just couldn't repress.

Under the banyon tree

Under the banyon tree, originally uploaded by Stan2.

Last night I went out for a walk in the late evening. There were only a few little groups of late partiers out still, but mostly I was alone, which was a shock. In the daytime Front Street is crowded with tourists. Now it felt a bit like it must have back in the early part of the last century. The buildings are still all the same, preserved just as they were then - wooden two-story structures, many with balconies on the top floor. The great trees, and the warmth of the night are the same as when whaling ships crowded the harbour. I kept walking, just couldn't turn around it was so quiet and peaceful. I finally came to the great banyon tree. All of its twelve trunks were lit up with spot lights under its immense canopy, which covered the whole block of two thirds of an acre. I walked in amongst them, totally alone. The only sound came from one of the branches over to one side. Two of the tree's hundreds of mynah birds were yapping at each other, in their usual loud but musical way. I don't know what about, but it did sound like a late-night conversation - they never seemed to repeat anything. I wandered around under the leaves, eventually leaning against one of the very strange, probably 40-foot-long branches, a foot in diameter, that run out horizontally only five or ten feet from the ground. At 40 feet this one had put down a trunk, again a foot in diameter, just to support the branch, and then went on horizontally another 40 or 50 feet where it put down another trunk that this time continued up into the canopy, pushing the tree on outward. I wondered how sturdy the branch I was leaning on was, so I pushed against it rhythmically. Eventually the branches going up into the canopy way off at the far end began slashing around. A mynah bird on it protested quite vociferously, "Hey, what's going on here!!" Then another added his outrage, and another. "It's night time! How come our branch is going all over??" Then a few in a neighbouring branch that wasn't moving at all said, "I don't know. It's all pretty quiet here." Or something like that. Others joined in, all expressing their concern or relief. Of course, no one bothered to come down to look around and see what was happening. I got a chuckle out of it for a while, but finally stopped and wandered off. The tree became still, and the mynahs stopped chattering and went back to sleep. I don't know if they snore, but I didn't hear any if they did.

Linda with big snails

Linda with big snails, originally uploaded by Stan2.

Linda and I were walking down the street in Lahaina the other day, talking, and she was looking at me with this little smile on her face. I can't describe it. I said, "Why can't I ever get a picture of you looking like that?" She said, "Well, because I had all these little feelings in me."

I guess our feelings mold our faces a lot more than we think they do, or, more to the point, those subtle expressions have a lot bigger impact on the people who know what they mean than you would think they would. And that impact is what they are trying to photograph. What I'm trying to photograph in Linda. Of course, the act of photographing someone instantly puts them in a whole different emotional situation. And even beyond that, there's the person we think we are, and so the person we think we look like. That expression may actually make it to the surface now and then, but not in a particular situation that detracts from it, meaning just about any situation that involves other people, especially for an introvert like me!! Ha ha ha!!!

An incident I remember from way back in my college years: I was working in the college paper, and at one point I was standing up on a chair getting down a box of something for some reason. It so happened I was alone at the time, and being an introvert I was very relaxed in that situation. Well, at that moment the door opened and the paper's editor, a fellow student, walked in. For some strange reason, my open, relaxed feeling carried on, even with her looking up at me. I knew it must have been on my face because it was all through me. A smile immediately came over her face and she said, "Stan, you would make a great Santa Claus!" This was nowhere close to Christmas. Anyway, you see what I'm getting at. Our emotional situations really colour how we look, and how others see us.

Here's another one from way back in my teen years, that I'll never forget. I was walking up to an intersection in Calgary. It had just started to rain. This fairly good-looking business woman, the only other person at the intersection, had just reached it from ahead of me. Well, just as she glanced at me I happened to glance up at her umbrella with a feeling of envy, which I could tell for that split second had come become visible on my face. I, a young man, a stranger, was walking toward the woman at that moment, and incredibly she immediately said to me, "Would you like to share my umbrella?" She held it over slightly, with her on one side and I was expected to get under the other side. She must have been as shocked as I was at her offer. I smiled and said "Sure", but immediately both of us felt how awkward it was. We walked across the street sharing the umbrella. I tried not to touch her. We didn't say anything because we didn't know each other, and were too much in shock to talk anyway. When we got to the other side, I guess I could have kept on walking under the umbrella with her, but instead I smiled and thanked her and went down the street the direction I had come from. I didn't want to put her in an awkward situation. And yet it was her who had made the offer. And yet I knew that she didn't have any choice. She was just reacting automatically to my expression. Well, here's the thing. That expression of mine was, unlike the vast majority of peoples' expressions, pure and spontaneous. Just like my Santa Claus one. What does that imply? That the great majority of our expressions are manipulative, either in terms of trying to make other people react in a certain way, or in trying to make them see us in a certain way. And the people seeing those expressions react defensively to them inside. The result is a constant battle going on between people.

So when someone sees a dog, with it's pure, spontaneous expression of happiness at seeing us, we cannot help but react to it just as spontaneously and strongly as the newspaper editor and the woman with the umbrella did to me.

And when two people who love each other deeply look at each other, that feeling can overwhelm their faces with a freedom their feelings seldom otherwise have.

Warmth

Warmth, originally uploaded by Stan2.

A cloudy, breezy day. She was feeling a bit chilly. I took advantage.

Incredible times

P3060053, originally uploaded by Stan2.

We can scarcely believe our eyes. Such strange, and beautiful things.

Life is..... (Hawaii part 2)

On a couple of the Banana Bungalow hostel's tours, I found myself sitting with Linda and a very urbane, extroverted, gay guy from Chicago. He liked me, I guess.

Anyway, the night before he had suggested I use his cell phone on this day's tour to try to find accommodations for the rest of the month (starting within a couple days). We were beginning to panic, as we had only planned our first week at the hostel, leaving the rest up to fate. Since fate was turning a blind eye, I phoned a couple places whenever the van turned a corner that got us within range of a cell phone antenna. The only success I had was a bed and breakfast in Lahaina, at $150 per night, up $90 from what we were paying at the hostel! And that was only available for three days. We grabbed it. At least we had that. Then the gay guy suggested very seriously that we try the resort he was going to be staying at, a gay and lesbian resort, but an open-minded one, at least so he claimed. He said he thought they might have a unit left, as they did when he got his that morning. Usable air space was rapidly disappearing when the guy from the resort answered, and yes did have a unit, for only the exact four days that would finish off week two of four for us, so I thought God or someone had decided to give us a reprieve and rapidly read my credit card number to him and yes he did get it all without interruption. So I sat back and tried to enjoy the rest of the tour. And forget that that four days would cost us $180 a day! I concentrated my attention on the crazy trees outside.

Well, the bed and breakfast turned out to be on the exact opposite end of the scale from the hostel. It was UPscale. Seriously designed. Everything went with everything. And it had the best of everything, from the shower to indoor architecture to the swimming pool and jacuzzi outside. And waiting fruit bowl. I thought at least Linda would enjoy it, being a designer at heart, and badly in need of CLEAN. But I guess only a woman could have predicted this: She couldn't relax the whole time we were there because every little disturbance we caused in the perfection of the place caused her stress, feeling we were messing up somebody else's home, and maybe even that at any moment her long-deceased mother might walk in and frown. So it goes.

The gay resort was in another town, Kihea, basically a series of resorts and strip malls on the beach, where you had to have a car as there weren't even any corner stores in walking distance. So we had to rent a car for that four days, which cost us another $80 on top of the $180 for the unit. Oh well. The price of not planning ahead in a high-demand area. I should have expected it from my years dealing with the supply and demand of flowers. The guy we knew was only there for our first day, and when he saw us strongly suggested we (meaning I) should come up to the clothing-optional rooftop. He said you wouldn't believe how liberating it is! Really. It's not sexual. Just gives you a very liberated feeling. Well, believe it or not, for about an hour, to Linda's amusement, I stewed about whether or not I shoud go up there, just out of politeness at least. I considered all the ramifications of embarassment, by whom, of what. But finally, in the end, it occured to me that maybe I should just be myself, that maybe that's what life is all about, especially when you're on vacation. And being myself meant not going up and exposing my private parts to a bunch of hopeful lads who may or may not have much else on their minds. So I didn't. Basically we just ignored them for the rest of the four days, and they us. Seldom were we or they around at the same time anyway, as we used this precious time with a car to drive everywhere we wouldn't be able to get to otherwise.

During our last two days there, however, three really big, built guys moved into the unit on top of us, and spent every second they were in (and up) bounding back and forth using our ceiling as a trampoline for their massive, muscular heals. They stored all their goodies in the kitchen area and ate outside on the opposite end of the place. Each of them would crash back and forth for each item he was using: a plate, something to eat, a knife, a fork, a cup, a saucer, some sugar, some milk, a spoon to stir it. Count it: That's at least nine jogs for each guy, 27 for the three of them, coming and going making it 54, with at least five beats per trip, totalling more than 270 body slams per meal. And that meal only gave them that much more energy to storm around with later.

On our last day, Linda and I packed and called the cab, and waited outside in the blissful quiet. The only sounds were the light breeze in the crazy trees, a few cars going by, and the most beautul bird song that just didn't stop. They were quite small birds, one up on a line, another on a branch of a palm tree. When I'm relaxed, my brain starts putting things together. I told Linda have you noticed how the bodies of birds and fish and whales are all the same shape, like the cross section of the fuselage of an airplane. I meandered on about this being an example of convergent evolution, totally different creatures evolving into the same thing to fit the environment. I could have kept on that tack for a long time, but the incredible non-stop song changed my direction. The song, I said, of each bird contains a lot of information about it: it's species, it's age, how big it is, how long it's been in that territory, and so on. I was getting ready to compare it to human society when it occured to me that Linda had already heard her daily quota of theories, so I asked her about the garden bushes she had been looking at. She said she couldn't get over the fact that she knew all of them, but only as much smaller indoor house plants, and she loved how much better they looked here, bigger. you see, her and I have completely different interests.

Anyway, the taxi came and took us to a village where the bus to Lahaina stopped. We caught it, stashed all our luggage in the front and rolled on through this very weird, unexpected, desert-and-cactus side of Maui. The Lahaina Inn was an old hotel, built in the 1920s, and now a very pleasant 'inn'. We have a little room with balcony, filled with antique Victorian furniture, which Linda loves. It's quiet, and not as expensive, $130 including taxes, and we have no need for a car for the next two weeks as the bus can take us from here to everywhere we haven't gone so far.

It's an interesting time for us, a nice mix of expected and unexpected. We're planning things moment-to moment, and it's getting easier for us all the time. And more enjoyable. We like doing things the simple way, taking the bus, buying food in a grocery and sitting in our camp chairs by the beach eating it. The second you let your guard down, the beauty that's everywhere here comes storming in.

We were looking at paintings by famous rock and rollers in a rock and roll museum here after we got set up in our room this afternoon. I read one of John Lennons songs, a hand-written original copy. It was called Beautiful Boy, written for his young son, saying he couldn't wait to see him grown up, but would have to be patient and get there from where he was, day by day. The last lines were, "Life is what happens to you/while you're busy making other plans."

Hawaiian breeze.

I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Lahaina, Maui, with a black guy behind me playing reggai and the warm ocean breeze moving around me. In the breaks in the music I can hear the surf out on the other side of the road.

Linda and I were in such a panic before we left Vancouver, first getting the last details of the sale of our store cleared up, and then moving all our possessions into storage, that we didn't do a very good job of preparing for our time here. We decided to give ourselves a month in Hawaii, time to really relax and get the albatros of the store off our backs, especially the stress of it all, and the continual feeling that we should be working even when we no longer had a store to work. Linda, especially, was burdoned with that.

Anyway, since we were going for a month, the idea was to keep our costs down as much as we could. I had gathered from a relative who had been to Hawaii not too long before that the hostels were good and a lot less expensive than anything else. You didn't have to be young anymore, and presumably the facilities were nicer than they used to be when I was hitchhiking back in the '60s. So I decided to do a search on the internet. The Banana Bungalow hostel in Maui turned up, and looked quite nice. So we phoned and booked a week there, a room at $59.00 a night.

Well, when we arrived, it looked EXACTLY like the hostels of the '60s, down to the thin walls, the co-ed washroom (there were others as well), the big bunk rooms, the communal kitchen and all the young HIPPIES! Yes, hippies. They looked exactly like I remember them! And were still into the same things. I guess I could have adapted fairly quickly if I was alone, but Linda had no experience with this kind of thing, and when she saw the shoddy room, and that we had to share a washroom, and what they were like, and the kitchen, and let's face it they weren't any cleaner than you would expect hordes of young travellers to leave them, she got pretty down. And when I saw that, I got REALLY down. I mean depressed. Let's face it, I got her into this. I couldn't even enjoy the beautiful Hawaiian environment for the first day. I was amazed, however, that Linda began to pull herself out of it fairly quickly, faster than I did. When she sees how things are, she can really adapt. I'm very proud of her.

In the back of my mind, I knew that mainly we really needed to get out of our shells and to start talking to people. Also, the main benefit of the hostel is that it had free tours of Maui, different ones each day of the week, which otherwise would cost us quite a bit. So the second day we started talking, and then immediately went on the first tour. In a couple days we started to relax and by mid week we were enjoying it. I was snorkeling (even Linda was a bit), even went surfing once in the long rollers coming in (okay, boogie boarding - which is a mini surf board you body-surf on). As each day wore on, we felt closer and more comfortable with the others, people from all over the world - especially when they found out I had done some 'travelling' that was big even for them, not just touristing, a big insult at a hostel. The really big tour of the week was a twelve mile hike through the vast Mars-like crater in the centre of Maui, ending with a nearly vertical 1,200 foot climb up the crater wall, with what seemed like endless switchbacks. I was by far the oldest, and even though I was the only one who had to take a break part way up, I'm proud to say I actually made it. And conquered my fear of heights enough to do it. It was an incredible, unforgettable experience, and the hostel we were staying at was the only organization offering a tour of the crater! So that made up for a lot of the negatives.

In the end, we had met some really interesting people, done things, and seen things that we had no idea of before, and then suddenly found ourselves with no place to go to. Panic set in, and we began searching like mad for new accommodations. The adventure continues.

A wonderfully horrible day.

I must tell you about a very strange day I had a little while back.

Lately I've been trying my hand at trading stocks on the internet. Some time ago Linda's cousin won an $800,000 Lotto prize, and in trying to make that money grow for himself he invested $4,000 in a stock-trading software program. He became very excited when it seemed to actually fulfill its promise, multiplying his money quite magically. Well, since then, I've discovered that it isn't nearly as easy as it seemed to him at the time, that time being an up-market for stocks in general, what they call a bull market, during which it's close to impossible not to make money.

Anyway, I've been studying this stuff for some time, even though the whole thing is quite alien to my nature, out of the hope that one day I might increase our little potful to the point where we may not have to work at all anymore. (Retirement these days isn't what it used to be.) Well, I finally started getting the general drift of it all, and then worked out an angle that whould hopefully hold up in the world of real money. I practiced it for quite a while with Monopoly money on stock price charts, and sure enough it did seem to work. It amounted to buying low and selling high, as per usual in stock trading, but it involved a way of actually determining where the lows and highs were. (Don't get me wrong, this is all pretty standard stuff.) So I was excited to dive in.

Which I did. Well, suffice it to say that the reality seemed to bear little obvious resemblance to the theory. I went up and down and up and down, but more down than up. As did the contents of my account. Finally I heard something on the business channel on TV - which I had on beside my computer. It was a very good bit of news for General Motors. I can't remember what the news was now, but anyway I decided to put some money in it, thinking that others would too, which would drive the price up. Sure enough during the minute or two it took me to make up my mind, I could literally see the price shooting up on the computer screen, thou. I wasn't worried, though, that I was late, because I assumed the price would go up for several days. So I put my money down. Anyway, just after that I heard some good news about another company, Sirius Satelite Radio. The owner was buying a ton of the company stocks himself, which presumably meant he had confidence in the company, or at least other investors would get that idea and drive the price up, a self-fulfilling prophesy. (The stock marked is driven by self-fulfilling prophesies.) Sure enough, while I put some money on it, I could see the price jumping on this stock as well. That afternoon I felt quite proud of myself, thinking I had just made up for most of the money I had lost up till then.

Well, next morning, on the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, at 6:30 am my time, I was horrified to see the price of each of my new stocks plummetting. I looked at the news and saw that there was a general downturn in the market that morning. Trying to think through my stress, I decided hopefully that, after the prices dropped to some degree, hungry investors looking for a deal would snap them up, driving the prices up again. No such luck. Down and down they went. By early afternoon I realized they weren't coming up again, so I sold them both and lost about 1% of the total amount I had to play with. I was in shock. Very depressed.

Well, then I had to go somewhere in my van for an apointment. What I wanted was to hide in a corner and lick my wounds, but instead I dragged myself to the van, got in, turned the key, and nothing happened. The battery was stone dead. Oh God. I was VERY down now. Pretty much ready to cry. By sheer willpower, I got myself together, went back in and called a cab. It boosted the van and off I went. The motor hummed nicely for about ten blocks and then just stopped. This time I called the automobile association, of which I'm a member, for a tow truck. On our way to the garage, the mechanic explained all the possibilities, including being boosted by a vehicle with it's motor running, which would blow the alternator, which normally charges the battery. So the lightly charged battery would then only get me a few blocks before dying again. Oh great. Why didn't the dealership warn me about this when it sold me the van? Well, as the mechanic said, why should they care?

While I was waiting for the garage to analyze the situation, I sat in their waiting room staring at the TV hanging above the desk, thinking about all the money I lost today. Incredible! The dead battery alone would cost me about $1,500.00. Not to mention... I started going over my trading mistakes. What had I done wrong? What should I have done? Why? When? Back and forth. Eventually I calmed down to the point where I was able to see through my emotion, and the whole picture came together. I had done everything that the books had told me not to do, ignoring all that advise, actually not even realizing that I had learned it in the first place. It was as if I had done no studying or practice at all!

But now that the mistakes had been made, and the study and practice had lept back into my presence, all the answers were very clear. Now, for the first time, the theory and the practice were one. The words I had read earlier were visceral to me, part of my body, of my real functioning. I wouldn't make those mistakes again.

And then I thought about all I had learned from the mechanic in the cab of his truck, with my disabled van in tow, basic things about the world of vehicles that I would never forget. He taught me a lot, things unrelated to the battery. Like the fact that in these modern vehicles the gas pump is built inside the gas tank and relies on being immersed in gas for it's well-being, so that if you let your tank get below a quarter full the pump is likely to suddenly seize up. And to replace it inside a gas tank is a very time-consuming, expensive, operation. The dealers don't mention this. To their benefit. Because many of the newer models are built with computerized locks on everything so that only the dealerships and no one else can repair them. This is the kind of thing the mechanic taught me, while we were out there shaking around in the cab of his tow truck.

In the lobby of the garage, staring blankly up at that TV set, a very strange thing happened: I began to feel happy. Energy was surging in me again. I was so surprised at my reaction I had to try to figure out all over again what I was reacting to. It was quite simple really. What had been a terrible day had turned out to be a very good one, even a victorious one. Because I realized now - it became very clear - that the way to really, deeply learn something is by making mistakes. Trial and error. Emphasizing the error. I realized that without the mistakes, or at least without some serious struggle in trying to apply what has been easily learned from words, the words could not become a part of the real world a person lives in. All the way home from the garage, on the sky train, through a huge mall, on two busses, and walking the final stretch, I beamed with the feeling I had had a VERY successful day. Expensive, but more than worth it.

I became very self-conscious of the fact that I had not smiled to myself so much for many years. But that didn't stop me.


Linda and I are heading to Hawaii now for a month, our first vacation together for twenty years (we could never both leave the store at the same time before). I will have access to a pay computer and so will make the occasional contribution from there, but I won't be able to visit other blogs till we get back. To anyone nice enough to put comments here, I should be able to respond. See you later.

You may also want to read through the comments below, since many of the best ideas in my posts occur to me and my readers during the give and take of the comments and responses.