To not travel is to hold in your lap the book of life and never leave the first page.

-somebody

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It’s probably not that super common for an ant to encounter a human being.  Especially not a country ant.

A dragonfly just landed on my forearm.  Talk about a weird looking animal.  There’s these black ants walking on my legs and hand and they must be just freaking out.  I mean this strange new texture with these skinny looking trees (hair) and smells from these little wet holes (pores), spaced evenly.  And none of their friends have ever experienced anything like this before.

Maybe an elder, who is almost a week old has been ostracized to the distant edge of their kingdom.  (One’s trying to get under my belt and getting frustrated.  His little legs are pointy) The old guy is an outcast because he talks about this time when he was a boy, 6 moons ago when he took a ride on a giant continuous field of blue and green and red woven material.  Aliens made it for sure.  And it took him all the way to the other end of the sun where he walked, lost, for an entire day.  This is like a year for an ant.  (They actually live 1-3 years surprisingly, but the i’m not rewriting the thought)  And an old sweet ant took him in and gave him leaf and water and said everything was going to be alright.

But it wasn’t alright.  He was labeled crazy by society and had to either live a lie or live alone.

And now these young ants are looking at eachother and saying, “Holllllllllly shit!!! That crazy old bastard was telling the truth all these days…”

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When you do “should” activities, it’s difficult not to multi-task.  When you do what you actually want to do, there is an authentic focus.

It’s not how we feel, but what we do with those feelings.

Leave time in your planning for fun.  That’s the hardest part for me.

The machine does not like art.  It takes away from productivity.  I didn’t consider paintings, dance, drawing, or writing before I left the machine.

White shoes have always creeped me out for some reason.

I worry about the future a lot.  I’m not talking about the distant ten or thirty years down the road kind of thing.  I’m talking about the way the rest of the day is going to go.  When does this restaruant close?  Will it be dark by the time we get back?  What will I have for dinner?  I’m not even hungry and I’m thinking about what I will want once the emotion, the feeling of apetite gets here!

How am I supposed to know what I’ll be hungry for?!

Instead, I could be more practical and gather current, relevant information and make rational decisions based on that.  I have to resist going on to the next thing because the current situation is already pretty cool.

I’m sitting on a porch, overlooking a lawn lined with exotic hardwoods and tall palms at the edge of a mountain overlooking the valley in which the pueblo of Copan lies.  An old yellow lab is snoring beside my rocking chair and I’m sipping chamomile tea, writing this, listening to truly strange tropical birds, on acid.  Yea, I think I’ll chill in this moment for a moment.

One reason drugs are good is they allow you to take life less seriously.  I haven’t taken nearly enough in my life.

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Chewing to Health

Ever get a stomach ache after a meal?  I got a BIG one this week and it came and went for 3 days.  I also got a fever, couldn’t sleep, and other symptoms.  I researched enzymes a bit.  According to one source, we are designed so that 70% of our digestion takes place in our mouth.  That’s a lot of chewing!

Actually, if you just chew a little more than you think you need to, the food totally loses it’s texture and is so easy to swallow that it’s difficult to consciously keep chewing.  You begin salivating enzymes that then travel to the stomach (they are not already there) to continue the digestion process.  Without these enzymes, your stomach is an unregulated acidic mess.  It’s a wonder I can digest at all the way I inhale food.  I mean I literally only breath air between bites.

“Well I don’t have time to chew 32 times per bite! Muh, muh, muuuuh!!!!” one might cry.  Well, could eating slowly possibly be a source of effective multi-tasking?  See what happens when you try to chew your food longer than 3 seconds.  You begin breathing through your nose (healthy).  You actually have time to enjoy the taste of the ingredients (fun).   You have time to think (productive).  It is as if you are meditating for the 20 minutes of your meal.

If you were going to meditate at the most critical times of the day, in order to keep the big and small pictures in perspective, what times would they be?  For me, it would be early in the morning, in the middle of the day, and then again in the evening.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  You can eat slowly and still share someone else’s company or read the paper.  They don’t conflict.  Meals can go back to meaning something and being more than just a necessary item on the to-do list.

I realized while tripping on the mountain: We animals eat quickly when we are afraid.

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Something amazing just happened.  I just got paid for something I wrote and offered to get paid to write something else.  I wrote a review on Trip Advisor and went back to the restaurant (See Review Here) to try their coffee and yogurt.  The guy wouldn’t let me pay because he liked my review so much.  Then he offered to comp a massage if I would write a review for the massage therapist.  Conflict of internet?  I’ll focus on the positive and be honest.

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If you don’t get rid of the old, there’s no room for the new.

—

 Don’t WORRY about what you want to do for the rest of your life.  Life isn’t lived in the future, it’s lived one day at a time, one second at a time.  It’s impossible to know what you are going to want to do ten years from now.  It’s a dumb thing to ponder, yet almost everyone in the westernized would demands it!

Ignoring their own problems, they demand you tell them right now what you’ll be doing in ten, twenty, thirty years like today doesn’t exist.  The only thing anyone really knows is what they want right now.  So do that.  And if you keep doing that, a pattern will naturally develop and you’ll have answered, eventually, the first question.  As my brother’s friend and mentor Carl says, “Plot your course as the water passes under your keel.”