Month: March 2018

Far away indeed.  Greetings all y’all from the bottom of the world.  I arrived yesterday in Punta Arenas – the southernmost major city, and my last stop, in this fine fair country of Chile.  Hell, nearly the southernmost point in all of a South America.  Not far at all from penguins and icebergs and the South Pole.

I’ve spent the last five days pounding out body beating miles in Torres Del Paine, one of the most incredible places I’ve ever been to.  It was beautiful and brutal.  Amazing mountains, miles and miles of challenging trails, weather beyond belief, and even a glacier.  I was really quite lucky in that it only rained a little, but the wind was wild!  At one point I swear a gust of wind lifted my lanky body, pack and all, clear off the ground.  No small feat indeed.

I learned a few things too in this hikers paradise.  I learned that there is a wee bit of difference between being in shape, and being in long distance hiking shape. I worked my way up to 8 hour days of 16-18 miles, over many hills and very rocky terrain. Terrain not at all unlike the Pacific Crest Trail where I calculate I’ll need to average 23 miles per day over 5 months!  Needless to say I’ve got a little work to do over the next month. Especially since those 8 hour days left me feeling like I rolled down a hill in a barrel full of rocks.  Don’t fear though faithful reader, I am ever optimistic. If it can be done then I can do it!  And if I can’t do it then I’ll have a lot more free time this summer to go to the beach.  Win win either way if you ask me.

Other than that I took a very nice boat ride through the fiords on the coast for 4 days, which was quite lovely even though I was in bed most of the time with what was undoubtedly a case of pulmonary bubonic plague that I picked up mid-way through my time in Pucón.  After all, it wouldn’t be an authentic trip to South America without some sort of brutal illness, and at least mine did not involve my gastrointestinal tract.  Thank God for small mercies.

And lastly, before I regale you with some delightful Torres Del Paine photos I feel compelled as usual to ramble a bit about the state of my heartmind.  Wouldn’t want to leave my readers without some personal musings on my human experience.  Truth be told, this trip has been a lot harder than I thought it would be.  Here I was setting off on this grand adventure that would undoubtedly provide a plethora of delightful tales to reflect on fondly for years to come.  What I found however is that life presents no small amount of challenges no matter where you go or what you do.  I find that I’m not infrequently sad or lonely or homesick or just experiencing some low level of discontent.  This has been doubly hard because I’m supposed to be having a great time.  And I’m supposed to be a Buddhist.  A spiritual practitioner filled with peace, kindness, joy, and equanimity, not a mildly disgruntled and often discontent ingrate.

Fortunately though, the world provided and a dear friend recommended a very useful book called, “The Power and the Pain.”  A Buddhist book with a practical presentation that provided a powerful reminder that life is hard sometimes.  That meditating and practicing spiritually is hard sometimes.  Sure, both life and spiritual practice contain moments of bliss and joy and insight.  But they also contain great struggles.  As a friend of mine said, if you’re exerting yourself towards growth then the level of your difficulties is really the metric of your success.  That really helped.  It’s nice to remember that if everything isn’t great all of the time, or at least when I think it should be, that doesn’t mean that I’m doing something wrong.  That with the right outlook difficulties can be constructive.  That Chaos is good news.

So, I’ll keep on keeping on.  Doing my best to take it as it comes – both the easy and hard.  The pleasure and the pain. Until next time…

 

 

 

Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.

-Kurt Vonnegut

Hola mis amigos. My sincerest apologies for keeping all y’all on the edge of your seats for so long.  I have no doubt that you’re nearly overwhelmed with anticipation by now for the latest episode of Gulliver’s Travels. Where did he go?  Why don’t he write?  You don’t think he got bitten by a huge and terrifying spider, do you?!?  Nah, they don’t have those in Chile… except this one.

Truth be told I avoided the spider and they’re not actually poisonous.  What’s kept me away for so long is that I just plain have no idea what to say about the second half of the Buddhist program I just finished.  Everything was chugging along swimmingly.   Lots of study and practice, increasingly delightful fellow participants, sunny days, and starry nights. Then something happened, even though nothing actually happened (hence my reluctance to try and explain).  At one point after week two I had a humdinger of an experience.  Or more accurately I felt the aftermath of an unidentifiable experience.  Like an invisible Yeti stepped on my head.  I didn’t see a Yeti, and I don’t remember getting stepped on, but boy did I have a footprint on my mind parts.

And what was that experience you ask?  It was my ego.  It was my pride.  It was an overwhelming realization of my own spiritual materialism.  Of the subversive view I had unknowingly developed that I’m better than because I’m a Buddhist.  That meditating, studying, compassion, Shambhala, and this Guru were going to save me. That I was going to get something that I could keep forever and ever. An unshakeable sense of equanimity.  An unchanging knowledge of the true nature of life – of reality.  Who knows, maybe even the ability to levitate!

I say experience because I felt all of the aforementioned in a way that nobody every could have explained to me. No words, no pictures, no stories, and no songs could ever have shown me what this experience showed me.  How had I missed this?  How could I still be so foolish, so conceited, so selfish, so naive?  And when I saw this, when I experienced this, I was furious.  I felt so threatened, so destabilized.  It was like this little kitten we adopted as our mascot at the program first seeing herself in the mirror.  She saw merely the truth of her own reflection.  Saw herself, as I saw myself, and frankly our reactions were about the same.

click here to see…  A Glimpse

Well my savvy readers, I’m sure by now some of you may be thinking – that’s just Buddhism, no?  You see where you’re stuck, you treat yourself with compassion, and you move on the best you can.  And of course you’re absolutely right insightful reader.  That was actually the very intention of this program. To look in the mirror – the big cosmic mirror – and see what I see.  I just saw more than I bargained for and got leveled as a result.  I got a powerful feeling of being destroyed and left absolutely groundless.  A feeling of being completely heartbroken.

So what now?  I truly don’t know.  I’m not really sure how I’ll continue on this path of spiritual awakening. Somehow though, deep down, I know that I will.  Maybe just not in quite the same way.  Maybe I’ll see if  I can somehow manage to avoid rebuilding the same house of cards that just came tumbling down.  And if I can’t avoid it, let’s just hope a strong breeze comes along a little sooner this time.

Last but not least, since you’ve been so patient in slogging through this perplexing monologue, here are some pictures to reward your noble efforts.  Just arrived in Pucòn yesterday – Chile’s own version of Vail Colorado.