Olympic Mountain Range looking West, towards Seattle.
The earth being made.
(Source: killz0ned, via hatethesinlovesinner)
Recent flights from recent airports: JFK, SFO, and a shot of the engine on the 737-800 that took me to Seattle-Tacoma tonight.
LA Story: Letting the Dogs Out
EDIT: And just after I wrote this, a man walked up to me speaking in a German accent. He told me he couldn’t use his own laptop because the wifi wasn’t transmitting to it, and he needed to book a hotel room for him and his wife? in Kona, Hawaii, because they had not had time to do it. I let him use my laptop. It turns out, he’s a pilot for Lufthansa. These things aren’t hard to do. Life is an echo. What you give out will come back to you.
Original story:
Alyson, the Airbnb host where I was staying in Silverlake walked up to the top of the stairs and welcomed me the morning after my late arrival. It was her day off. Her bleached blond hair was pulled back and she was wearing long john pajamas and a really scruffy robe that went down to the floor.
“It’s my day off, so I am going to garden, but I wanted to say hi to you since you got in so late last night.”
Her husband had shown me in, and walked up two flights of stairs. AND he had a herniated disk that he’s been trying to heal for the past eight months through organic methods.
“I gave up this month,” he tells me as he draws me a glass of water from the filtered tap. “I went to a doctor today, I can’t take it anymore.” I couldn’t believe it. Walking around for eight months with a herniated disc. How do you survive.
He shrugs. Pain killers, the good kind.
Alyson is standing at the door in the late morning and her two dogs run in, and she starts talking about how she let them outside last night. But this is so classically LA. She goes:
“I let them out last night to party. I don’t want them messing up the place.”
They are milling about on the bed and jumping on and off the bed. They are two little hyperactive runts. One looks like a cross between a Jack Russell and a Doberman, and, well, we don’t know what the other one is, something like a chihuahua and a greyhound?
I’m having a good day, and packing for the airport. I just got a new job. I’m moving to the West Coast from NYC in a few weeks. My head is dizzy. I call a cab. I tell my family the news. I call J. and tell her the news first. She can’t believe it. Her heart is pounding. I thank her. She thanks me. She’s a grateful person.
Now I am sitting at the airport waiting to go home and all these people are filing past me with their bags on their shoulders. If it was the third world they would be hauling bags of beans or coffee grounds, or linens to sell in the market. People on the move.
People changing. People being starstruck and amazed at seeing their work pay off into the shape of their dreams. Every one of them, whether they are speaking Cantonese into a phone, or slapping hands off the plane and talking in ghetto slang. They were in one place a few hours ago, and they are arriving at a new place looking forward to new things, or dreading new things, but whatever it is, this moment is different than the last one.
The mind is travel. It’s not about holding on to the moment at all. It’s about having a vision and acting through that vision in the moment, and realizing that every micro-transaction that is happening is your dream.
The things that bore you, the things that spark you. That’s your dream talking to you.
You don’t have to be asleep to see it happen. I like doing my life awake.
I am watching this guy in the airport on his phone. He’s waiting for someone getting off the plane. He just came from another plane, another flight. He wants to know where to meet his friend.
I thought for a moment he was in a reality show, like the Amazing Race, and then I thought, I wonder what is going on between him and the other person, and what that feels like, to be on one flight, wanting to meet someone on another flight.
Then I thought, what a wonderful world this is. YOu can climb into the belly of a 125 ton beast. It will haul you across the skies to meet your friend. It parks delicately at the gate and all the people spill out, and you put the phone away.
And there is your friend.
To me this is a metaphor for the work of life. The avocation of life. So much makes life possible, makes it at our disposal. Life is not easy. But leading your life with your heart and your dreams is easy. It sometimes doesn’t feel good to do it. You do get crushed. You miss things. You fail.
But that action is so easy.
Think of all those times you watched the wheels touch down on videos of airplanes landing. Maybe you saw that in a scene from a movie.
So gentle, the bulk of your life touching down at hundreds of miles an hour. All the mechanical engineering that got you there made everything so easy.
The fundamental circle of the wheel. The support it brings.
You coast to a stop and the door opens.
Today was the first clear day after three days of cloudy overhang. It was one of those high pressure days. You feel the air differently on these days; the barometer has risen, there is not a single cloud in the sky and it looks like someone took an opaque blue blown-glass bowl and turned it over this half of earth.
The moon was rising behind the elms in the park, and the tarpaulin was flapping in the wind of the Christodora House on Avenue B, right next to the dog park.
In nine days I am going to be on a plane to India, with a stop over in Dubai. Four new countries in the span of six weeks and a long stretch of it in a well known country, India, in what will be my first return to this sub-continental wonder.
When the nurse slid the needle into my skin and injected the yellow fever vaccine, it burned.
A week later, I was lying in bed, I could not move. I had burning sensation in my eyeballs, and a headache that came in waves and then disappeared altogether. My joints hurt like I had arthritis. I could not get to sleep. I had to take Advil just to numb out.
I started to think about how delicate my life is, and I realized I had not thought that way before. I remember first going to India when I was 30. I worried about getting sick, but it seemed like an adventure, and I was flushed. Anything I worried about before I got there, it passed.
Cows wandered the road. Holy men smoked marijuana in their tattered sarongs and wrappings. I bundled up in a wool scarf and a heavy coat and wrapped a shawl around my head in the back of an autorickshaw in the cold New Delhi winter night. Fog tumbled into the roadway and then it stuck, you couldn’t even see the other taxis taking people home from the Taj Mahal hotel in south Delhi.
Now I have this reaction, my arm swells up, and the injection site turns bright candy apple red, and is shaped like a heart.
I realize how mortal I feel. I have to inject myself with something that kills me to keep it from killing me.
I have to do this in order to talk to people on the other side of the world, people I need to get to know, who have to live with this every day.
It makes me think of the spiritual necessity of this trip. The closer I am to realizing that I am not permanent, that I have to be vigilant to be alive, the more the sanctity of those moments of quiet reflection stick out to me as the real manna of my life.
Because they are taken for granted in areas where there are no reasons to take them as special, they seem considerably special to me now. Now that I am aware of them, I want to treasure them.
And I at once feel delicate and emboldened.
This is the motivation behind love, I think.
You love someone because the moments of your separation and the moments of your time spent with them are both fleeting. People pass by, or you interact with people and they don’t know the mystery with which you encounter this other person. This person looks into you, and sees this same temporary-ness.
They recognize it in you, they see you passing, a shade on the walkable earth.
And they acknowledge this passing you.
Each time they see it, they honor you.
When we travel, we are aware of two things, I think.
That there is something Other than us that is much bigger than us, but something that nothing other than our contemplation can enable us to experience. We are left to this device, our consciousness, to experience it.
And we are also aware of how subtle our connection to this big Otherness is. we are someone’s Other, as we travel. we are someone else’s figment of awareness in teh world.
To me this means the condition of the world is primed for love.
When we travel, we practice the tool skills that enable us to love.
So when I journey out into the world, delicate, vulnerable, and fully focused on the dynamics between myself and the other, I remember all of this, and I come back.
I come back, eventually, to You.
New York City must have been created in a rainstorm. All of its neon and its lights come out as soon as it rains at night. Makes you feel ilke you are walking through a protean Big Apple, on the evening it was born.
Leap Day, February 29, 2012
The Etihad flight is going to take me from New Delhi to Casablanca, but before it does, I am going to spend 18 hours in Abu Dhabi. Here is what you can do in Abu Dhabi while you wait for your long long layover to end.
For an inspiring exploration of culture, art, architecture and faith:…
This is a great photo of a cabin at night.
(via ifly747)
