The Long Beginning of the Beginning of the Way Out

My friend Brandon, whom I thought was just doing the whole Euro-tourist thing, has just informed me that he's actually MOVED to Madeira, Portugal, which looks like...


that. (see below)

The new plan is to fly into Lisboa, Portugal (which costs the same as flying to Dublin and back), and then stay with Brandon on Madeira for a while. There are lots of good under-the-table jobs earning cash to busk for bars and pass out flyers and such, which we'll do til we both have a fair chunk of cash saved up, then take Brandon's motorcycle up through Europe, over to France, where we'll ferry to Dublin and then hike across Galway on the Western Way. Then we'll fly out of Heathrow or another major airport and meet my family in Okinawa for Christmas.

I'm so stoked on this.

I want the experience of time as something largely inconsequential, something measured by the basest of things: hunger, thirst, a need for a place to lay a tired head. As something measured by nature: sunrise, sunset, a time when the fish are active in the mouths of the coves, the point at which a sweater comes out, or comes off, or when a plant blooms out into the morning.

I want to be where schedules, such as they are, are reserved for busses and trains. Not for people. Not for life.

Travis said something last night that I very nearly laughed in his face for. He was telling me about this friend of his who's a monk, who's been devoted to his monastery (Hari Krishna, I believe) for almost 13 years now. This monk-friend just recently decided to return to university and study for a degree in divinity, which Travis finds "sad" and "ridiculous". Then he told me how he and his best friend from Brooklyn used to visit the monk and spend the night staying up talking to him "about the world", and that he (Travis) was pretty sure that it was those talks that had made the monk decide to "change his life".

Someone can try to lead by example, try to exemplify what must be done to change. A person can spread stories around the campfire, can write a letter, can talk a blue streak about how easy or hard or necessary that change is, but the simple truth is that, ultimately, the only person who must get up and walk across the threshold and meet the world anew is YOU.

No one can change your life for you.

He's also one of those well-read, intellectual types who prides himself on the sheer volume of what he knows. James Joyce. The cultural secrets of the Middle East. The exact location of the Fertile Crescent. This in turn made me realize...

I hope never to be an expert on ANYTHING, because with expertise comes the crushingly sad realization that you will never again experience the sheer sensory/emotional onslaught of that thing in itself for the first time.

Throw me from an airplane into a jungle where I know the name of nothing, not a single flower or bird or beast. Not one. I want to be new there, to hear all the stories and myths and urban legends. To have to ask "What?" and "How?" and "Why?". It's how we learn as children, that constant stream of inquisition until finally, one day, we are able to bear the depth and breadth of the world on our own, and our own stories arise from it.

In the end, with all his idiosyncracies and self-assuredness and air of intellectual and spiritual superiority, Travis is just like everyone else who sets out on these kinds of adventures. He's just a kid (we all are, no matter what age), who's far from home, and is homesick, and needs someone to hold onto him, needs to feel grounded and safe and loved in a way that only other people can provide. This occurred to me last night as I was on the verge of sleeping in the armchair because he was making me so nuts, and had commandeered my bedroom. And then I realized that for all his hyperbole and semi-acting (he was reclined on the bed listening to Bob Dylan and looking forlorn), he needed a hug. He needed someone, not to talk to, but to lean on. And so I let him.

Someone else (Jeremy) is on a quest to prove to me that, to ideally open the mind and free the thoughts, one must take hallucinogenic mushrooms. To that I say, RIDICULOUS. Where's the authenticity? I want everything I perceive to be completely authentic, unfettered by drugs or drinks or someone else's opinions. There's nothing any substance can open me up to that I'm not already waiting for, a child posted near the mail box waiting for a package, the package containing a decoder ring, the decoder ring itself one giant leap of faith.

The world is a neverending string of perceptions, of sight and sound and smell and of the feeling of being part of it all, the collective consciousness of people, their crumbling cities, their fallible laws and governances, their hearts.

Every day now I wake up and go do something, routine or not, that makes my chest feel like it's furling out on itself like a fern and there's nothing to stop it doing so, and I think that when I stop walking out onto the world with this painful and storm-like and totally overwhelming sense of pure love, I want someone to take and lay me out on the banks somewhere to die, because I never, never want to stop being so in love with living that it moves me to tears each day.

The world is still flat. I'm ready to jump over the edge.

* Nota Bene: I realize how utterly I am proving his point here, by writing an entire blog based on what Travis said or did; all the world's an ideal and we merely hypocrites, every one.