On the Road Again

In this trip of a lifetime I had several places which for me were pilgrimmage destinations and London was one of them.   From Jane Austin to Oscar Wilde to the Beatles, Mary Quant and Vidal Sassoon, it was a “must visit” on my list.   And boy, I will never ever go back except to pass through the airport.

Even as a nativish New Yorker, I was unprepared for people who don´t like tourists, over priced pilgrimmage sites and tourist attractions, it cost $25 to walk through the gates at Westminster Abbey, $20 bucks for a ride on the ferris wheel (the London Eye), and another $20 to visit the Tower of London.   I skipped them all.    I have been to enough cathedrals and abbeys and religious sites that I do not begrudge paying a reasonable fee to visit them but $25?  You’re milking the tourists friends and the only reason they don’t know it is because they don’t get exchange rates.

A walk in Kensington Park was lovely, but walking up Bayswater Rd was at best disconcerting (we were two women alone). 

And the other reason is that the streets have begun to look like the streets of Manhattan when I decided to stop going there.    The homeless are every where and as in New York they are homeless for many different reasons and while a heart breaking sight it is a little scary.

Prayers to the Whale soul family.  Over 700 whales have beached themselves over the last week in New Zealand and Chile.

Rarely have I been so glad to kiss a year good bye.  While like all years it had ups and downs, this one was a constant, stress based learning experience.  And I learned.  2 languages and to relax my way of being.

I learned I am grateful for my freedom of thought.   I think odd stuff compared to many folks but I like the way I think,it´s fun.   I learned that not everything is as it appears, and that can be good or bad, or neither, perception is everything.   I learned that truth is difficult to find these days so when you do be grateful for it.   And I learned that I can up end my life and thrive.   And that my instinct was correct for me, it was time to change my life before life changed me.   And I am deeply grateful for having the will to make the changes.

As a very strange year winds to a close, I am more and more grateful for my meditation practice.  Since that first workshop week my practice has grown and evolved both through the practice, and through the books of masters which have fallen into my hands, most notably Osho.   It is by no means the same as it was in the first months after receiving my first mantra.

Of all the ways we choose to seek to improve our selves and our lives gratitude is the most powerful from my experience.   It was not surprising that within a very short time as a daily meditator, it made itself a part of my daily practice. Softly, on little cat feet.  

 There are many, many guided meditations on youtube and in books, but I must be honest, mine evolved organically in the flow.   It started as I found myself letting go of my mantra, the thought flashed, “Thank you for meditation”.  And I felt a shiver of energy at the crown of my head, as I noticed that I thought, “wow that was cool.”   And another thought floated by, “Thank you for my abundance”.     And I felt the same ruffle of energy in my muladhara chakra, and this time I thought, “That was weird.”   As I settled down again, (I was taught to take a few minutes after my meditating to let the body absorb its effects, this experience happened as I was trying to do that) another thought floated by, “Thank you for my freedom”.   With that thought my manipura chakra rang like a chinese gong.   And that was when my “mind” got it. And started letting my practice show me the way. 

The Gratitude piece comes almost every day now.   If it doesn´t come to me I don´t chase it, but when it does, I savor how much there is for me to be thankful for.   And I have noticed a smoothness to my life even when things get weird.   All lives get weird, but sometimes you find yourself with a slide out of the trouble zone.   I believe the practice of gratitude is that slide.

We are book people.   American book people.   When the kid was 7 my dad sent us the American 3 pack of “Sorcerer´s Stone, Chamber of Secrets, and Prisoner of Azkaban.  I read every chapter of all three books to the kid despite both of us having finished the series before New Years.   It was the pleasure of reading together.   She thought they were great, I thought they had some weird plot holes.  Now I know why.

While Christmas shopping we found a Dutch second hand book store which turned out to have a large English section.   While prowling the stacks she found a copy of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher´s Stone” and asked if we could bring it home.   Since we got that one, and they didn´t have “Chamber of Secrets” I also bought “Prisoner of Azkaban”.

One of my LEAST favorite plot holes was in ‘Sorcerer´s Stone”.   It was the fact that there was absolutely no early indication that Quirrel was the bad guy.  Turns out in “Philosophers Stone” there is.  That made me mad.   And curious.   What had they done to the rest of them.

Turns out quite a lot.   Removed beautiful scenes of Snape´s inner life.  Scenes that made him a way more sympathetic character.   They also removed most of the things which prove the point that James Potter was an asshole.   And all of the suggestions that Dumbledore was anything other than a benevolent headmaster until the very end.The sanitized, children´s version of the books pale in comparison to the original volumes. 

The question I have is why?   Scholastic Book Services removed nuance, color, subtlety, and the ENTIRE thriller aspect of these books.   In the originals smart kids can figure out who the bad guys are with a little logic and SBS sets kids up to guess wrong, with not enough clues to figure out the real ending.   When all the clues are in the originals.

It has been way too long since I hit this blog. but as the political reindeer games spiraled out of control last fall, I didn´t know which end was up, and while I don´t mind stupid thoughts, I hate committing them to ....the blog.  But this last month, the Advent season in Germany has helped me find my words again.

Christmas is a difficult time for so many people, we are fed so many heart warming images designed to tell us WHAT Christmas is, and by the same token told that the way to make Christmas happy for ourselves is to BUY BIG STUFF...CHEAP!  A truly effed up distortion of the purpose of gifts.   Last year we learned that the pesents are a symbol of unconditional love for the person you are giving them to.   Well, honestly I knew that. I am a mom, trying to make something as intangible as unconditional love materially understood is a big part of my job.  But the kid, not so much.  She´s a Capricorn, stuff is love.

We went off and tried visiting a famous Christmas market in the Netherlands and it turned out to be Walmart in a cave.   I tried to make my daughter an advent calendar and couldn´t get past day 10.   She was hiding in her art.  But when we headed to our favorite Netherlands town, Nijmegen, we walked through a couple of stores half heartedly looking for Christmas decorations.   ‘She found a musical Christmas “Grumpy Cat” and she used the money from her first online art commission to buy it for our landlady who likes to think she is a grump but is really a peach.  Maybe that lit the candle, but I´m not sure.

From the moment she gave Ina her Grumpy cat, our holiday started to shift and Istarted thinking.   Maybe it was time to bag tradition and find our own way.  There was no formally assembled calendar, but every day she got a token of mom´s unconditional love.   One day a Kinder surprise egg, another day a mobile made of feathers, and on Christmas Eve a pair of rutilated quartz earrings.   And she did the same, one day a handmade bath bomb with a rubber duck inside, another day a stone to add to my crystal therapy necklace.  (She is a burgeoning crystal healer with genuine talent)   But the one problem I couldn´t solve was Santa.   Frankly, Santa is my personal Christmas tradition.   My own little piece of unconditional cosmic love.   My kids have known since they were little, Santa fills my stocking.  

But this year, it´s just me and the kid, she hates surprises and I love them.   And when she finds a good present she has a helluva time keeping a secret.

Leave it to the South Park boys, to make my Christmas happen. 

Have you ever heard of a #Lootcrate?   I never had.    And to celebrate the 20th season of South Park they had put together their very first lootcrate. The first time I saw it I sniffed, $60?   No way.   Turns out if you want it sent to Germany it´s $115.   But I have become a serious and nuanced South Park fan over the last couple of years.   Still won´t watch the Mr. Hankie episodes but hey I´m a mom.   Their “Raising the Bar” episode is one fo the most honest pieces of both humor and social commentary I have ever seen.   Respect.

So, on the 10th of December I ordered a South Park Lootcrate.  It arrived on the last delivery run on Christmas Eve.  And it was Perfect.   My daughter is an evolving Cartman and I will forever be “Butters” with a dash of Kenny.

“They may be imaginary but their more important than most of us here and they´re all gonna be around here long after we´re dead.... So in a way those things are more real than any of us .”

I have written a great deal about meditation and how I started, meeting a famous “Guru” to the Stars at a retreat I won in a charity auction.   I received my first meditation mantra July 3, 2011, was hooked on the practice by the end of the week, and committed to teaching it by the end of the same month. A year later I was a certified Yoga teacher and had taken a very good certification in basic Ayurvedic practices for health.

I meditate at least once and usually twice a day and I have missed brushing my teeth more often than I have missed daily meditation.   I wish I could be as good about yoga as I am about meditating.  One step at a time.

But what happens when I sit on the cushion now is very different from what happened when I started.   Those whose advice I read about meditation come at it from a very different place, than the people who started me down the road.  Meditation is like everything else, the more we practice it, the deeper it gets.   To mantra?   Or not to mantra?    

Osho´s writing about meditation was a real eye opener for me.  (or perhaps closer)   And again, he reinforced things I was pretty sure were true, but no one working in the world I was learning in (except maybe the Geeman) encouraged us to really grasp.    The big one for me was that much of the stuff sold as meditation or meditation tools is really mental junk food.   Autohypnosis marketed as meditation.  You can do it yourself and save a bunch of money on cds.   But it´s not meditation.

A big part of meditation is about watching. Observing how your mind is working, what it regards as important, with the long term goal of it being able to sit quietly in silence while you observe it. By noticing how your mind works you give yourself the opportunity to change its method if you don´t like it.

Another big part is about not doing, but rather being.  The mind chattering is the mind doing its thing.   Jumping through hoops.   Chasing butterflies.  And causing trouble.   When you shift gently from doing to being for at least a little piece of your day, you allow new things to find their way up from the depths.   Good things you can work with and bad things you can observe and let go of. 

While my favorite quote to describe my life comes from the Grateful Dead, “What a long....strange trip it´s been.”, this last year has been a profound gift.   Sometimes if you stay in one place too long you paralyze, and end up spending the ensuing years on automatic pilot.    I didn´t realize until I had been on the road awhile that this had begun to happen to me on Cape Cod.    I, and my life, had begun to bore me to death.

Funny all of the plans I threw around trying to figurre out how to do this.   I had thought I would start with “the Camino”.   a 600 mile pilgrimmage from southern France through Spain.   And if it had been just me and my dog I might have gone that road but it wasn´t.   First a month of me and the girl because of a glitch with the dog and after the boy joined the team 11 countries in 8 weeks.   A flood in Cannes, a lunar eclipse on a hillside in Tuscany, nice people everywhere, and a flood of memories triggered, not because of how “the same” places I was sharing with my kids were, but because of how different they were, from when I discovered them as a young army wife.

Yes Europe is a very different place from the one I knew 30 years ago, not nearly the number of Americans, and the FEELING toward Americans is palpably different than it had been.   We may have been loved back then, but we were definitely LIKED in most quarters, these days; not so much.   If there is a single sad consistency about this trip, it is how often (everytime we visit a new place) we must prove ourselves.   We are not like”those Americans”.   The ones you don´t like.   We are DIFFERENT.   I cannot tell you how many times we have heard that sentence, and in how many different countries.  “You don´t seem like Americans.”   “Are you Canadians?”   In Italian, Irish, Scottish, French, Flemish, Dutch, Danish and multiple times in German.      Following the news from here I understand it more than I used to, but it makes me sad nonetheless.

That was probably the biggest lesson of the last year (and that includes learning to drive a stick on BOTH sides of the road), the world´s view of America and Americans has changed radically in the last 30 years.   And the ONLY people who don´t know that are the Americans.   The saddest joke that made me laugh out loud, I only heard because it doesn´t apply to me or the kids.   I guess nthat makes us cool.

What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages?   Trilingual

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?  Bilingual

What do you call someone who speaks only one löanguage?    American

One of my favorite Wiccan Feast days just passed and it was kind of funny in a sweet way.   Lammas is kind of the Wiccan Feast of Bread.   The main altar decoration tends to be a corn dolly.   A largish cornbread shaped like a maiden.  It is a harvest festivaL  And in one of my rare connections with a Wiccan Coven it was my first festival in a coven in New York City (wow!) over 30 years ago.  How time flies when you are living your life.