Leavin' Soon

About to leave for Gaztemundu 2008.  I'm procastinating packing, messing about on the internet, my room is a pile of clothes and toiletry bags, my mom is yelling at me to hurry up... the trip is getting close.

Just now, it's getting to the point where I'm excited.  It takes me awhile before all the upcoming excitement becomes tangible for me.  It will probably not fully manifest itself until we get to the airport.

page 11-1234

I really feel like this dream was pretty meaningful.  I was eating lunch somewhere with Becky Anderson and perhaps two Tiffany Elsberry’s.  Kat Ely was there too.  Genny Gerke was, so I sat with her.  I was wearing some kind of weird clothes with shoes that wouldn’t really fit, so I took them off.

As we were leaving lunch, Genny and Tammi O’Rourke (I think) went into this room.  I’m assuming it was in Boone because I didn’t recognize it before.  Or it could have been any college, maybe not C of I..  Anyway, I sat down and the professor was talking about western civilizations.  Our textbook had ancient Greece in it or something. And we were on page 11-1234 (which turned out to be the introductory section.) 

We were talking about global energy consumption and I made the comment like “isn’t it true that if everyone consumed energy the way the U.S. does, we’d need like 3 or 4 Earths to keep up?”  He somehow didn’t completely agree, which was weird.  Then there was a 5 minute break.

During the break, I inquired about the class (Genny said it was a 1-credit class every Wednesday from 7-11 or something) and the professor took me by the arm and said “well, I’m not really a traditional, orthodox professor here…” and dragged me down all these stairs, jumping through auditoriums, etc.  Then I was in this wormhole, and I can’t explain it.  But he basically showed me the mental journey the class was geared toward.  Like the pinnacle of it.  I somehow completed the entire meditational experience right then, when everyone else had to study for the entirety of the class in order to reach it.

When I was back in the seats in class, we were watching clips from people’s mental journeys, kinda as a promo video for the class.  Apparently, during mine, I was an egg bobbing in the water (like a chicken egg), then I was a pretty fish that turned out to be a beta hatching from the egg.  The professor was a huge gorilla, like the size of two cars, except he had a huge huge head and face.  Disproportionately huge.  And he was next to a beach and there was a convertible there parked with two people in it, and he as the gorilla grabbed the people and threw them into the rocky shore/surf. 

Crazy…..

Zion National Park

 

We went here in April of 2008, for an Outdoor Program Spring Break trip.

Life Could be Simple

Oh and why can’t we always just type, and play with different fonts and love who we want to love and they’ll just love us back? Why can’t I sit with my back against an old oak tree, bare toes in the grass, and be poetic with someone’s head in my lap and draw birdsongs on a clean white piece of paper with a fine-point black Sharpie pen? So many questions, but it’s mostly because I don’t want to learn about Clara Schumann and Mendelssohn and the Cult of Virtuosity. Don’t worship others, worship yourself.

the Big 10 on the palapa

Courtney and I went on our run today, and got cat-calls the entire time we were within sight of a construction site full of locals. Did the big 10 on the palapa deck and the dock. We met a guy named Moose (James) that looked like my dad in the 70’s. Well, if my dad had his 70’s look, aged 30 years. He was Caucasian, but had skin like tanned leather, and blonde/gray dreadlocks. He was riding a bicycle with no shoes on and said that if I brought my harmonica to the Roadkill Bar tonight, I could get onstage and sing.

And there we were, crashing through the narrow, dirt, potholed San Pedro streets, stacked to the top of the golf cart with beer bottles rolling out behind us, waving at every local and careening around corners screaming “woo hoo!” We blustered into the Roadkill Bar, didn’t buy drinks, and overtook the sandy dance floor. The girls in skirts, stomping and twirling, and BK and Geoff doing their best dance that boys can do.

Sang “A Whole New World” on the way back home under a full moon, and I don’t believe our rabble-rousing was appreciated by the locals.

island boy

Yeah. Laid out on the beach all damn day. Listening to some Bruce Springsteen, wind is blowin through the beachouse so hard it knocked over my bottle of tanning oil. Geoff climbed the palm tree wearing sailor boy pants and a bandanna, and came down with an armful of coconuts looking like a native. We told him he had to wear the bandanna for the rest of the trip.

thoughts on God as a freshman in college

If you find contradictions between religion and science, you are simplifying them too much. There is no contradiction. They ultimately work together. It is entirely possible for people to believe in both.

I think I gave the name “God” to forces I cannot yet explain or comprehend. It’s like a placeholder. Someday I will know more; one day I may eventually replace “God” with my own words and conclusions.

Derek was talking about the “God of the gaps.” That scientist that could see the trend in where science was going and could predict it enough to do away with the concept of God because he knew science would eventually explain it.

Derek's comment, in a nutshell (and I believe this too): "I attribute God, not to an entity, but to “what matters most” (phrase courtesy of Denny Clark). My beliefs are vague expressions of my faith. My faith is WMM: my family, caring about people, the ones I love, relationships, learning, etc. My beliefs are expressions of this faith. When my dad was sick and he miraculously recovered, the doctor said “If you believe in a God, he just graced your family today” or something like that. I don’t believe that God has the power to do these things, necessarily. God didn’t interact and switch some red blood cells around for my dad to live; he can’t just choose to interfere like that. But “he” was there. Since God is my faith, and my faith was there, he was there."

I get defensive when people start talking about God as the conventional God that I’ve grown up with, as the bearded old man in the sky. I know, and have finally reconciled, that God is actually just my concept of faith (well, everyone’s concept of faith.) I think I’ve known that for a long time (see “Mortalis Idem”), but Derek just said it again tonight and hearing it again gave it new solidity for me. It’s easier for me to talk about religion. It needn’t be as controversial as it is, or taboo. Just like sex is as simple as procreation, etc. and is taken to new taboos in our society, and politics needn’t be personal, but it’s just about who gets what, and when and who has enough power to get the majority, religion is just a paradigm from which people think.

I wish I was more articulate. Especially when talking.