Thoughts from five minutes of the Olympic opening ceremony from a bar with no sound

I saw five minutes of the opening ceremony for the Vancouver Olympics with no sound at a bar last night. I thought about how it is a performance that is not really supposed to be good. It's not supposed to be bad either, but goodness is not the measure that they are going for. It's supposed to be good in the way that it's supposed to be wintery and expensive. These are all boxes that must be checked, but they are not the ultimate goal. The goal is for the ceremony to defy explanation. It wants to be visually spectacular and register a "DOES NOT COMPUTE" across your system.

I find this sort of thing stratifies the available reactions for someone watching it. There is accepting, impressed and disgusted. I found myself mostly towards the first. It is what it is. They are supposed to do something so over the top, that you lose your feel for where the top even was. That's their job. I had some impressed too. Skiers air-slaloming vertically from the ceiling of a huge arena? Pretty cool. That and Peter Pan were all I saw. From what I understand it was too long to actually enjoy it all, but again, the point is not to enjoy all of it. Short things can be more easily explained than long things. One of the ways to hit the DOES NOT COMPUTE button is to make it long enough so that you have multiple moments of "Wait, there's more?"

Disgusted, accepting and impressed are three points on a continuum that reflect where you stand on the Olympics in general. If you see it as a massive waste of money and resources, then there is no better example than the opening ceremony. If it's just something that is, then it is, and if you get a shiver of "Oh boy! Here come the Olympics!" that will last you through most of the ceremony, which gets its significance from that feeling.

As for me, it's all those things. It's cool, it's a waste, it is what it is, and it's partially redeemed by my love of hockey. That sentence describes my basic attitude toward the Winter Olympics, which will come and go with only a few scattered blips across my mind, but it also describes a chunk of my adolescence: Cool, a waste, is what it is, partially redeemed by my love of hockey. I remember back in the day I would freak out for the Olympics. I bought every moment of its self-inflated meaning. Now I'm more jaded, pragmatic, less patriotic. I wouldn't mind seeing the Americans win the hockey tournament, especially because it is one where they are solidly underdogs, but my favorite player is Canadian, and I have an odd affection for the Swedes. None of it is likely to strike a chord deep within me, the way it all used to, or even the way the White Album did this morning. The Olympics is a circus. It could be more- a cultural celebration, a moment of diplomacy- but it doesn't seem to want this.

I guess it's all about what you believe in. I used to believe that sports mattered more than anything. I don't think that any more, but I still hold on to my arbitrary partisanship toward the Mets and Devils. It gives the stories meaning, the way gambling does. Most likely the Olympics will be gone in two weeks and I will barely notice, but if I happen to catch them at the right moment, if one of the unfolding narratives captures a greater meaning for me, if somehow it all takes on a much greater significance than a few people, miles a way, doing one very specific thing that they have made themselves very good at, then I'll get to enjoy a few moments of that cosmic power that instilled so much of my youth.

Dreamy

So I wanted to write something this in this space, because it's been a while, and if I don't tap on the keys with my fingers, they get restless and start doing the New Jersey Devils' work. Problem was, nothing was coming to me to write, so I'll start with the dream I had last night and go from there.

Weird one. Good weird though. My dreams lately had been weird and a little uncomfortable, like a movie more concerned with being personal than good. This one was fun though. It took place variously in Japan and my homes in New York and Berkeley. It involved Buddha, some sort of nature spirit, some sort of emperor, flying cartoon bunnies, and a visiting friend from New Zealand.

The main part I remember is a Japanese coworker (not one I had in real life) having me help him carry a table over near a stove. Behind the stove was the Buddha, or perhaps just a concentration of Buddhaness, or Buddha, but not the only Buddha. The table, which had to be rectangular and wooden, was an offering to Buddha. Not that Buddha actually took the table in any way. For starters we couldn't even get it behind the stove. It was just a way of showing him that we were putting in effort around being in his presence. Something like that. I told my Japanese friend that you can send Buddha good vibes, and that's sort of like a present too, just in case there's no one around to carry the table with him.

We both went back there and got a good Buddha high. Later I went back again and the stove was much more similar to the one in my home in Brooklyn. I still got the Buddha high, but things felt straighter and flatter. The Japanese guy said he can get a similar thing when he goes to Madras, India, and I thought about highs can be triggered by all sorts of things.

There was a bunch of stuff with the nature spirit and the emperor that I barely remember. The emperor wanted to turn invisible, but it was pointed out to him, perhaps by me, that between Buddha and the nature spirit, someone was going to be able to see him. Let's be reasonable here. There was also a moment where something or someone was ascending toward the ceiling because of something the emperor was doing, and a cartoon bunny jumped up and knocked it out of the beam it was ascending in. That was good, and someone needed to do it, but I don't remember why.

The rest was mostly mundane, involving things like assembling a bunk bed and getting ready to go outside.

I don't know if I'll ever hear a satisfactory explanation for why I get to experience things like this several times a week consciously and probably every night unconsciously. Obviously elements of processing recent events and various emotions and feelings is a big part of it. I've heard that if your relationship between body-mind and mind-mind gets more consciously communicative, that your dreams will become more obvious in what they mean. I'm loosely familiar with the idea of astral travel and similar concepts of some part of you literally wandering around (expanding? airing out?).

Those explanations, and plenty more, make enough sense. I just don't know if any explanation that was explained to me without some sort of seminal experience could make me say, "So that's why I thought Buddha was behind my stove when really I was just passed out in bed." Maybe if the explanation could be predictive or testable in some way. But no, that seems unreasonable, given the subject. I think if I'm ever going to really understand dreams it will probably be through them.

There is a sort of "loophole" that might provide for something that I can work with. As some of you know, I'm pretty into the Hawaiian system of thought known as Huna. The central principle of Huna is ike (ee-kay). Ike refers to the senses of sight, hearing and touch (possibly the other ones) and also means experience. On the esoteric level, it refers to the idea that your experience is all you have and all you know. A lot of people know this as the "your blue might be my pink" idea, but really it's "your walking in the park might be my battling space lizards," and "my whatever could be your anything." Um, got that?

A corollary of all that, and one of the main ideas contained in the word "ike" is that experience is not passively absorbed by your senses, but actively created by your being (I'm saying "being" because I don't want to get into a whole body-mind rigmarole). Our hardware is all very similar because we are all the same species, and our categories are somewhat similar, so can we agree on a lot, and we spend more time on what we can all agree on (I don't mean political issues, I mean that I am a human, and that is a computer, and these are words and they mean stuff, and we can mostly agree on what that stuff is). The experiences that are completely personal- the ones that only you have and only you CAN have- those we don't talk about as much, tend to forget, and tend to write off. The only catch is that anything you call a distinct entity has a distinct experience. What I'm saying is that qualitatively, dream experiences and "real" experiences are the same, but the real ones don't reveal as easily how they are created by you, and how personal they are. Fortunately, our completely personal experiences can also be largely shared, which I'm tempted to call a miracle, but what I really mean is that experience, both shared and personal, is a mystery on the level of why anything exists at all. If you say you know the answer, I probably won't believe you.

Good Strange Things, Vol. III

There was one night on the campaign that I would describe as storybook style magical. There were lots of intense moments. Too many? Whatever, it's over. There were moments of elation and defeat. Moments of blowing past my quotas and moments of having no hope of making them. There were moments of everyone being giddy with Sarah Palin, followed by cathartic moments of Sarah Palin becoming a joke. Anyway, there were all varieties of moments in those three months.

This one was joyful and absurd.

So, remember the Obamamercial? The Obama campaign raised a lot of money. Do you know how much? Bush raised $250 million in 2004, but Kerry actually stormed past him and was up around $300. Obama spent $200 million on the primary. He spent about three-quarters of a billion dollars total. Not joking. For what it's worth, they gave us a month's pay as a bonus, and I'm typing on the laptop that they gave me to do my job. Anyway, it was revealed a month or so before the election that Obama had bought 45 consecutive minutes of ad space on all the major networks five days before the election. I was excited. My buddy Evan was nervous, he thought it would backfire.

On the night of the Obamamercial I was doing what I did nearly every night: making 3-5 hours of calls. I was also, at this stage of things, really really tired. The pressure to get through these calls was immense. It was kind of the lifeblood of the job, and a nightly slog, so calltime was sacred and there was no arguing with that. On this night the fatigue caught up to me. I was failing. I would take an inordinate amount of time to move from one call to the next, and I found myself doing the extremely-tired-stare from time to time. When the Obamamercial came on, I put it on in the background, but after a few calls I gave in. I was going to sit and watch the guy who I was doing all this stuff for.

My friend Lois, bald, talked more like a New Yorker than a Southener and cool as school, walked in. She flopped down in a chair and we commiserated on fatigue. The election was making everyone fatigued, but we were doing the legwork. The 45 minute piece was well-reviewed, did well in the polls and was therapeutic for me. Don't worry, Obama's got it all under control.

Midway through, Lois turns to me and says, "Hey who's that with the Obama truck? Have you talked to THEM about volunteering?"

???

I look out the big front window to see "the Obama bus" spray-painted playfully across the side of a van. It was pulling up in front of my office on an otherwise deserted night in late October. Two guys and a girl, all college-age and wearing funny homemade shirts hop out. They came into the office, gave us hugs and handed us t-shirts.

Their story as best I can remember it: They were from California. They had been deeply inspired by Barack Obama. Inspired to get in a van and drive through every swing state, spreading Obama love and good cheer. They had a blog with a map of all the places they'd been and the places they would be, and it showed a jagged line going across, then up, then down, then east again across the country. For reasons I don't know, they were driving through my dusty little county. They were not looking for me. They did not know that there was an Obama office in this town. They stumbled on me by providence.

We chatted for a while. They sharing their story, we sharing ours, both of us marveling that our paths happened to cross. Come to think of it, they might have been the only people not worn down by the campaign at that point. They were still full of magic. They gave me a much needed push toward the finish, got back in their van and went their merry way.

Here's the shirt they gave me, modeled by a certain someone who I gave it to after the election:
Pretty sweet huh? I was wearing it the next day when I heard the guy in the diner say, "I don't think Obama's a terrorist, but I think he's maybe a little more of a terrorist than John McCain."

This concludes the "Good Strange Things" series. Bizong.

Whistles and Those Who Hear Them

Alright, Ecua-blog is back with a vengeance. Here, in four parts, is the crazy story of our shaman experience.

Part I: The Whistleblower

A very brief history of John Perkins: For over two decades, Mr. Perkins worked to undermine the economies, and often the rights and general well-being of third-world nations in favor of the profits and power of multi-national corporations, international banks (namely the IMF and World Bank) and the United States government. If you want the details, and I recommend them, because all the same things are going on today all over the world, you can read his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and/or his follow up, The Secret History of the American Empire. Since retiring from that life, Perkins has written these whistle-blower books, spoken all over the country, and started a non-profit called Dreamchange to empower indigenous people and promote certain shamanic ideas and practices.

In May of this year, I went to Greenfest in Chicago to check out the various vendors, nosh on samples, and see an amazing line-up of speakers that included Perkins, Alice Waters and Paul Stamets. Perkins was first in that threesome. He recapped the major points of his book, and emphasized that every time we buy something, we vote for at least one company and everything that it's doing. Waters, it turned out was ill and couldn't make it, so instead they put on videos of her edible schoolyard, and stuff that I didn't stick around for, because if I wasn't going to see her talk, I figured I'd get a bite and wander around some more. John Perkins had a booth in the bookstore area where he was signing books and chatting with people. I didn't have a book for him to sign, but I got in line anyway, because I did have a question for him.

While I was waiting, someone handed me a card that told me how to get some sort of discount through the website of the bookstore. I generally resist acquiring slips of paper that I know I won't do anything with, but somehow I ended up with one in my hand. Eventually my turn to say hi to Mr. Perkins came and I said something like, "Hi, I don't have anything for you to sign, but I loved your book and your speech, and I'm going to Ecuador in a month, what should I do?" (He spoke a fair amount about Ecuador in his talk).

"What are you interested in?" he asked. As it happens, I am very interested in shamanism of all varieties, and have been getting more and more interested in South American shamanism for a while, and I knew that I shared this interest with Mr. Perkins. I didn't think to say that when he asked me, though. Instead I talked about the jungle and seeing what life is like for your average Ecuadorian.

He nodded, and took the card that was dangling awkwardly out of my hand. There was enough white space, amidst the offers of free shipping and 10% off, for him to write "Kapawi" on one part of the card (both he and a server at an upscale tea lounge in San Francisco recommended Kapawi. It's a lodge in the Amazon that looks amazing, but it's expensive to get there and stay there, so we ended up opting for a cheaper Amazon adventure) and on another part of the card he wrote:
"Otavalo
Carabuela
Esteban Tomayo"

"You're flying into Quito?"
"Yes."
"Take a bus to Otavalo, and find a cabdriver who knows Esteban Tomayo in Carabuela. He's my godson and a shaman. Tell him you're my friend. How's your Spanish?"

I'm getting chills just writing about it. I didn't have any particular expectations for that brief meeting, but that was a better outcome than I would have considered reasonable to hope for. Thanks again John.

Part II: The Whistler

After doing some research, Rachel and I planned a leg of our trip around being in that area and seeing Sr. Tomayo. There was plenty to do around there, including a famous Saturday market in Otavalo, a nearby bird-of-prey reserve and a stunning waterfall, so even if nothing special happened with Esteban, we could justify a couple of days there.

I was tentative about following Mr. Perkins' advice and stopping cabs to ask if they knew a specific person in another town (I grew up in New York City where that would be borderline crazy-person behavior), but I gained some confidence when we happened to tell a random guy at a bus stop where we were headed, and he said he knew Esteban Tomayo. The first cabdriver we stopped didn't know him, but the second, Luis, was a friend of his.

Once we were in Carabuela, it was clear why we weren't told to take a bus there and then find Sr. Tomayo. It was a hilly, rural area with rambling, unmarked, unpaved roads. There didn't seem to be a main drag, or any particular area where cabs might have been trolling around for business. Finding a specific house from the highway on foot would have taken hours.

Luis the cabdriver told us that Sr. Tomayo is famous in the area, and that his sons live nearby and are shamans as well. At this point you know about as much about Esteban Tomayo as we did when we were dropped off at his door.

There was a courtyard in front of his house that was littered with lazy dogs. They didn't pay us much mind as we cautiously stepped around them. A short, middle-aged woman appeared out of a little side building and greeted us friendlily. We explained ourselves as best we could, and said that we didn't want to inconvenience anyone, but we would love to meet Sr. Tomayo. She turned out to be the shaman's wife, and she showed us to a room in the larger building where we would wait for him.

The room was sizable, but contained only a refrigerator, a table and two benches. We waited maybe 15 minutes. Rachel asked me if I wanted to ask him anything specific, and I said no, I'll just say my semi-prepared opening and let whatever happens happen.

Enter Esteban Tomayo. He was maybe five feet tall, probably in his 50s or 60s (I either misheard John Perkins when he said that Esteban is his godson, or its possible for godparents and children to be roughly the same age). He had a wrinkled face and a slow, stable walk. He wore blue jeans, a white button down shirt, and a cowboy hat. He had a definite presence- not necessarily a room-commanding presence, but something that projected that he was sure of himself, and was sure of being sure of himself.

We introduced ourselves, and I explained that I was a friend of John Perkins and that he told us to come see him. I also presented a small gift to him, a smooth, skipping-stone sized rock with a turtle painted on it that I had gotten in Hawaii. I told him that in Hawaii, the turtle is a symbol of energy and power.

My Spanish isn't great, and he probably doesn't hear my accent too often, but I think he understood most of it. He asked us a number of questions, mostly basic stuff like our names, where we were from, our relationship, etc. Some questions he asked several times, but never (if memory serves) repeating the same one twice in a row. It was unclear if he didn't understand, needed clarity, or just wanted to hear the answer again. His peculiar but calm and present demeanor made it feel like his questions were akin to a musician getting to know the timbre and feel of an instrument, sometimes returning to a note to hear it again. He was learning about us, but also getting attuned to our vibrations.

He also repeated certain statements, perhaps to help his thought process and to reinforce certain ideas being passed between us. He said a number of times that I was a good person (usually accompanied by a warm touch on the shoulder) and that I would live a long life. He also told Rachel that the most important thing for her right now is her work (he said this not knowing that she was a month from starting law school) and the most important thing for me was my un-calm, discontent heart. I can still hear him leaning into the adjectives as he said "No es calma. No es contenta." in reference to mi corazon.

Somewhere during that conversation I remember thinking that if this was what the Esteban Tomayo experience amounted to, I was perfectly okay with that. It was one of those things where half of the importance to me was just to do it. Whatever came out of it was mostly bonus, and the interaction had already been positive. It was also, as it turned out, just beginning.

Part III: The Whistling

Sr. Tomayo asked us if we would like to have him and his wife perform a ceremony on us, and we said yes. What that meant, we had no idea, but I had quietly been hoping that some sort of formal healing would come out of this.

The first stop was to the bathroom, which was an outhouse- the sort where dainty Westerners like us try not to touch anything while using it. The time spent waiting for the other one involved the closest thing that either of us had to small talk with Sr. Tomayo. His slow, measured way of speaking meant that there wasn't a lot of conversational space to fill, and he talked to both of us about the mountains in the area and their various spirits and energies.

From there we proceeded into a long, dark room that wasn't much fancier than the ones we had seen so far, but did feel more like a room where a shamanic ceremony might happen. Sr. Tomayo told us that the healing would involve a general cleaning of our energy fields, and additionally would address Rachel's work and my heart. The procedure was not different for each of us, other than, perhaps, the intentions that our two shamans were holding during it. It cost $40/person.

He showed us the tools of his trade that would be involved in the ceremony. They were stones of a size that would fit in your palm, rose water, aguardiente (sugar-cane liquor), tobacco (traditionally, American shamans would use tobacco leaves rolled up or in a pipe, but these days, many, including Esteban Tomayo, just use cigarettes), eggs (in shell), and a fragrant brush, most-likely sage, that resembled a feather duster. Each had a sacredness to it, and a specific purpose in cleaning our energy field. (His wife had been going in and out of the room, getting things ready, but she was there the whole time once things got going.)

He checked with us one more time to make sure that we were on board for this, we affirmed, and it was time to begin.

He lit two candles, and stated that each would represent one of us for the ceremony. He had us remove our shirts (by good fortune, Rachel happened to be wearing a sports bra that day) and stand in the middle of the room with enough space between us that we could stick out our arms and not bump into each other.

They began chanting, which they did more or less continuously throughout the experience. It was neither particularly loud nor obscure. Just a steady repetition calling for our spirits to walk with the spirits of the mountain, of Pachamama (Mama Earth), of nature, and so on. He and his wife handed us each a stone and covered it with the rose water and told us to use it like soap to wash ourselves. When we were done they went over our bodies, holding one stone on a certain spot, the middle of the chest for instance, and tapping it with another stone. I had to bow my head so that Esteban could reach the top of it.

After that came the aguardiente... and the first major surprise. (We weren't expecting anything in particular, but there were some things we really weren't expecting.) He had us hold our arms out to our sides, and then he and his wife walked behind us with aguardiente in hand, chanting the whole time. Then, without any warning that I was aware of, he took some liquor in his mouth and sprayed it at our backs (I don't remember who got it first, I just remember hoping Rachel was okay with all of this). That happened a few times on both sides. It was bizarre and, in a strange way, thrilling.

We "washed" ourselves again with rose water covered rocks (that happened after every step), while Sr. and Sra. Tomayo prepared for the next step. The next part was much like the previous, with one added element: a candle (not either of the ones that represented Rachel and me). Even as Esteban was walking behind us, chanting, holding the bottle of aguardiente in one hand and a candle in the other, I didn't anticipate what was about to happen. He had us turn perpendicular to him with arms out, stood a few paces away, took some aguardiente in his mouth and used it and the candle to breathe fire at us! He did this at least twice on both of us (once per side). The plume of flame was large, and came close to my arm, but I never felt afraid- I trusted Sr. Tomayo to know what he was doing. It was more surreal than anything else. Each step on our journey leading up to that moment, to Ecuador itself, to Otavalo, to Carabuela, to that room, was a further step away from my normal reality. Esteban Tomayo breathing fire at us was the pinnacle of other-worldness for that whole experience.

The remainder of the ceremony involved both Tomayos rubbing us with the eggs (they thankfully did not break), blessing us and our "washing stones" with cigarette smoke and whacking us from head to toe with the sage brush. While he used the brush, he whistled. It was a haunting and beautiful whistle, the sort you might be asked to imagine when reading a fairy tale.

Part IV: New Songs

When it was all done, Sr. Tomayo returned to his seat on the other side of the room with the two candles. He said a closing blessing that acknowledged us, the candles and the healing. We thanked him many times, said goodbye and went outside. We did the same for his wife, who had returned to the little room she was in when we first approached.

We left glowing. It was sort of like the glow that stays with you after getting really good news, but this glow felt higher, and not attached to any particular item. We felt up and happy and alive. Most of all, we felt reset. All the stories and issues that we had been carrying around had been scrubbed off, and we were just ourselves. There was space to reassess the wiry mental structures that are generally part of my day-to-day life, and to see how snugly they fit. I even felt that dreams that I had realismed out of consideration had new life.

Dreamchange, John Perkins' organization mentioned above got its name from something a shaman in Ecuador told him (it was in the jungle, so it probably wasn't Tomayo, but I suppose it could have been). From Perkins' The Secret History of the American Empire (Penguin Group, 2007),

"The world is as you dream it," he told me. "Your people dreamed of huge factories, tall buildings, as many cars as there are raindrops in this river. Now you begin to see that this dream is a nightmare."
I asked what I could do to help.
"That's simple," he replied. "All you have to do is change the dream... You need only plant a seed. Teach your children to dream new dreams."

After our experience with Esteban Tomayo, that wisdom of dreams, and how they can change, was somehow apparent. No one needed to say it. It was as true as love and gravity.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Post-campaign I got lots of praise and thank-yous. There was many a "good job" and "thank you for your service," (which I'll admit feels pretty appropriate), and a friend of my roommate who stayed with us after the election bought me coffee and a donut for "bringing change we can believe in to North Carolina." And that was awesome. But the one I always come back to, the thing that solidifies that whole experience as worthwhile (I never questioned that it was, but it's nice to have little moments to crystallize things) is when my friend Aria told me she didn't recognize me at first when I got back. She figured I was my own cousin or something like that, and I don't think it had anything to do with a tan or facial hair. I think (and those of you who know Aria will back me up here), she recognized some sort of transformation that occured over those three months.

Part of it was the sheer volume of work. There's something transformative, hopefully positively so, about pushing yourself to a limit, any limit, because "to a limit" usually means beyond those limits. When you wake up after it all ends, you're a person with new, farther limits.

There was also the stranger in a strange land element. I honestly felt more out of place in southern North Carolina than I did during my year in Japan, but to be fair, no one expected me to act Japanese, so it was easier to define my space and self in Japan than it was in Richmond where every new acquiantancing started with some sort of tacit "See, I'm not from here." Constantly defining myself made me examine my lines more than usual. Never before had I considered how I fit the archetypes of "northener" and "yankee." As the Richmond County perspective seeped in a little, unusual (for me) thoughts and feelings would come out of my own mind. My decision to not eat meat felt snootier. My feelings on spirituality felt removed and over-intellectual. The fact that I had been asked to do little more than read, write and think for most of my life... not that I'd never considered that, but breathing RC air for three months gave me a new take on it.

Beyond all that, and at least partly because of all that, reality just seemed to play by subtly different rules down there. Perhaps it was the overall backdrop that contributed the most to that. I'm in Berkeley now (so far, every bit as awesome as advertised), and when the sublime and/or ridiculous happens here, it feels like NoCal tossing me a little extra sunshine from its perpetual surplus. When something truly nutty happened in Richmond, it was like a walrus in the living room. It was frogs and snakes falling from the sky or Curly spontaneously combusting while Larry and Moe merely feel a draft. Everything there was in a different context, and so the meaning was different too, and the whole poetry of experience was brand new for me.


So, all of that and more for three months, plus six weeks in Durham on the front end. That'll change a guy (or gal), and that's a big reason why I did it. I wasn't in a rut exactly, and I don't think I had gotten complacent, but, like the country, I needed a change.

That said, after three months of Richmond, I can't even describe how good it felt to go home.

Ecua-blog!

I just got back from two weeks in beautiful Ecuador. Two weeks isn't really enough to really hit all of Ecuador. Another month or so might have done the trick, but it would be easy enough to do a month volunteering at the Andean Bear reserve. As for the two weeks that did happen (and not the months of travel Rachel and I have dreamed up at various times- prepare yourself Easter Island!) there are many stories, but first I wanted to empty my head of a few facts and observations from my time there. Maybe after that we'll get to a few stories. Ready, set, jet:

In Quito (the capital) it is very common for pedestrians to run across the street to avoid cars. It is simply a cultural acknowledgment that in many situations, a person can cross the street if the car slows down, or if their feet speed up. In most cultures I've been in, the general choice is that the car slows down, unless it's the car's turn, in which case the pedestrian just waits. Travelling Ecuadorians seem to only use the turn taking system when the other option involves the hospital.

In a similar vein, the driving is free-form, unless there is an immediate physical reason to fall into line. If you think about it, there's usually space for a passing lane in the combined empty space in most two-lane, two-direction roads. Everyone just needs to move over a little. It's easy enough, as long as you're not completely terrified by the whole idea, which none of our drivers was, and we only were some of the time.

A guy we met at a hostal said they had a near miss on a bus. I didn't think much of that comment, because saying that in Ecuador is sort of like saying you almost bumped into someone on the train at rush hour in New York. It was only clear how near his miss was when he said that the bus driver pulled over to catch his breath and steady himself while all the passengers yelled at him for almost killing them.

Enough bus- Cotopaxi is the highest peak in Ecuador and an active volcano. According to our guide, it last went off 100 years ago, and so the citizens of the nearby villages (which are very much in range, should it go off again) are not worried. I can't recall if that's because 100 years is a long time for a human (it's been forever) or a short time for a volcano (it's not due for a while) or a long time for a volcano (it seems done for now), but as long as they're living there anyway, I'm glad they feel safe.

A full moon will make it harder to spot caiman, because they like to have as much darkness as possible. You spot them by shining a flashlight around the shores of the river and looking for their glowing red eyes.

There is a town called Iluman that has a shaman collective with hundreds of members.

We met a shaman in the amazon who is a mere well-informed mortal by day, but at night, when he takes ayahuasca, he can look into your soul and describe what ails you on the level of raw energy.

One day I hope to take that potion, but our actual introduction to shamanic ceremonies of South America was perfect. You'll have to stay tuned for that though.

In Ecuador, sometimes there are large rocks in the middle of the road. Not often, but more often than never.

I'm a big 1 for 1 in hitch-hiking.

You can make an awesome bread out of yucca root.

All this time, you people have been keeping possibly the best part of the cacao plant from me: the gooey stuff around the beans! It's colorful, sweet and nutritious! Was anyone going to mention this, or did you want me to figure this out on my own?

Church (1)

I don’t know what YOU came here for, but I came to PRAISE the LORD!!!
I mean, hello again.
One of the coolest parts of my job as a community organizer was that I had to go to church every Sunday. It was a black church every time except one Sunday when I was going to go to one church, but for some reason that didn’t work out, so a friend took me to a mixed church. That’s the one I’m going to write about this time, though the other churches deserve at least one post.
The black churches I went to all had a choir, and usually a drummer and keyboardist, but the mixed church had a full band. Actually they had at least two full bands. There were three or four guitarists, a couple of drummers, a lot of people singing, some of them into microphones, and I don’t need to tell you who was the most into it of anyone, it was the chick on the tambourine. It’s practically a law of nature that what tambourine players lack in range of instrument, they make up for in raw passion. They sounded good, and I’m not just saying that.
This church was the most consciously interactive of any that I went to. It might have been too much for me, but it was also really big- probably at least 100 people there- so if you weren’t rocking as hard as most around you, it didn’t make you stand out too much. At most of the other churches I went to, the bulk of the time was given to cultivating a good “Jesus high.” At this one, it was of the utmost important that you feel God’s love, that you are purified by his holy light.
(A quick word before things get out of hand. I think church is awesome. I don’t feel the need to make it part of my life, I don’t feel the need to draw hard lines around my spirituality, and I definitely don’t need to get it from one particular source. I’m sure some of my personal feelings are going to seep through here, but I’m not trying to endorse or anti-endorse anyone else’s choices.)
Once we were all feeling good and charged up from the music and the singing, the service proper began. The pastor was charismatic, non-judgmental, and carried a biblical wisdom to him. He was absolutely going to save as many souls as he could. To him, there was a very direct line between sinning and misfortune. He passionately told a story about trying to save a boy who had lost God. But he couldn’t. The boy drowned. This, to him, was not a coincidence. And you know what you have to do if you’ve been sinning, you need to confess… in front of everyone. Okay, maybe you don’t need to do that, but it sure helps…
I’m going to cut to the chase here: Not one, not two, but three, three different people over the course of the lengthy confession/sharing part of the morning announced their addiction to pornography on stage. At one point the pastor said “This is the difference between life and death here.” It was cathartic for all of them. There was no laughter or derision. These men had sinned, but now they were asking for God’s forgiveness, and who was going to argue with that.
I don’t think that morning did anything to advance the Obama campaign in Richmond county, but I’m really glad I went. For starters, you cannot understand church culture without going to see it. I see it as a lot of things, but perhaps most as an organized way of getting high. The experience is facilitated and mediated by a very specific set of beliefs (in the case of church). It doesn’t have to involve any sort of belief, it can come from music, drugs, (especially) community- anything that makes you feel connected to something big. The phrase “bigger than yourself,” is used frequently, which is fine, but I don’t like to imply separation- the whole idea is that YOU are big. Whether that comes from being a part of a god that plays by Judeo-Christain rules, or from being a child of mama Gaia, or from something more abstract that has less to do with a belief and more to do with a feeling.
For those folks, they are a part of a very special club, and if that means that they occasionally have to announce their masturbation habits in front of their friends and family (!), well, ego is nothing in the face of God’s love and acceptance. And it basically works for them. It may involve some brutal guilt sometimes, and much more (I don’t really know), and I would feel a little more comfortable with it all if I got more of a sense of choice of belief/lifestyle/the whole shebang, but at the end of the day I don’t have many judgments to pass out here.
That said, for those 3ish hours, I felt not at all like an organizer and very much like an anthropologist.