"Opportunities for Growth"

For weeks the "bed bug incident" was the gold standard for difficult nights. It was the bar - the night against which I compared all others when I needed to feel better about things. "Yes, this is bad," I would say to myself. "But is it bed bug bad?" Then I came to Peru. In a matter of one week, the bed bugs were usurped and the standard for mid-night misery reset not once, but twice. Before I rush into the stories, though, I want to share a bit of my philosophy with you, so that you don't shed too many tears over my misfortune. Save that water. Warm weather is on the way and it's important to stay hydrated. So here is my disclaimer: I am not having a bad time in Peru. In fact, whenever possible I try to avoid labeling my experiences as "good" or "bad". Each one is just another opportunity for growth. (If you need a motivational speaker, my rates are very reasonable.) Ok, so I don't believe that all the time. Cognitively, I believe it, but sometimes - like when my body is crawling with bugs - the rest of me screams, "Bad! Bad! Make this experience stop!" I'm not enlightened yet. But I'm practicing. And writing is one of my favorite tools for making sense of the experiences that I want to call "bad". On average I tend to write more about things that sound "bad" than things that sound "good" because this is how I get better at accepting them. Oh, and they make way better stories than the days where I have delicious food, perfect bowel movements, and a sound night's sleep. Who wants to read about that? This is another way in which my writing practice serves me. It helps me to accept reality; because even when I can't say to myself, "Michael, two hundred dollars may seem like a lot of money to lose, but be grateful for the opportunity to explore your attachment to material things", I can say, "Wow, this is going to make for great writing material!"

That disclaimer aside, on to the writing material. I am going to share an excerpt from a ten-page journal entry, furiously written in a $60 motel room in Lima where I stayed for three and a half hours under the pretense of rest. To set the scene: it is 1 am in Lima and 3 am in Santiago (my body time). Wearing only pants because of the heat and the dampness of my travel-weary shirts, I sit at a wooden table - to which my forearm sticks with sweat as I write. My body is completely erect as if my entire organism were a missile launcher for my hand, which fires rapidly and with little precision. The lines cannot contain my wrath. All around me is noise and distraction - I can hear every shoe on the stairs outside my room and from the balcony window enter the sounds of laughter and live music that celebrate Friday night - but I am focused only on the pen and the paper and I am not celebrating.

Excerpt: yes $200 is a lot of money but it's not even about the money it's that I am not in control I am not in control maybe this is part of the Peru curriculum of slowly releasing into the Heart telling the mind it's ok you don't have to be perfect you've been driving for so long now and I know you're tired and it's ok you don't have to be perfect here it is another stupid lesson I need about my desire to be perfect I just can't believe he sold me sold me on a hostal bueno y barato (good and cheap) talked all about the hostal bueno y barato he'd take me to so much of course than the airport hotel which could cost $150 he said that he'd take me somewhere good and cheap and I didn't ask what it would cost me to get there didn't ask and he took me for a ride all the while telling me to watch out for the "street taxis" taxis de la calle he said couldn't be trusted but he called himself an official airport taxi really? for an official airport taxi he didn't look so official a yellow polo shirt with zero visible credentials an unmarked car no radio dispatching other official airport taxis and no business card nothing to give me when I asked for his number and he had the worst parking spot one could imagine does an official airport taxi really park on a curb probably illegally at such a walk from the airport that it seemed to be off the grounds of the airport proper that doesn't smell like an official airport taxi but he warned me just the same of the street taxis and the common thieves on the street who would jump me in gang at the ATM when no one else was walking past and then take every last cent I had every last cent I had wow that does sound bad but not nearly as efficient as this guy's system because he got more than every last cent I had we had to visit the ATM twice to meet his price maybe bribe at this point it's sort of understood blackmail isn't it? give me 350 soles (Peruvian currency) or you're on your own here in this neighborhood in evident decay crumbling store fronts interspersed with neon places restaurants bars I don't know really at that point he can name his price and what do I do?

My primary intention for this trip to Peru was to move out of my brain - spend less time there, listen to it less, so that I could begin to hear the soft sounds of my heart. I did not expect it to happen so quickly or completely. And frankly, the brain is very useful for some things. Avoiding consensual kidnapping is one of those things. I could say that it was 2 am in my body and I was exhausted from travel, and that would be true. But I also need to acknowledge that there is a part of me so naive, so trusting that I followed the man in the yellow polo shirt all the way through the parking lot to a place clearly off the airport grounds. This is difficult for me to admit because it is difficult for me to accept that part of myself, love that part of myself. The stupid part. The $200 I can let go much more easily because what is $200? $200 is whatever importance I give to it - it is the entire cost of the trip to Isla Mocha (!!!) and it is also the cost of the electric guitar and amp I bought (mom bought?) in high school. I played that guitar three or four times and it didn't produce anything nearly as impressive as all the writing I've done about the $200 I spent in three and a half hours in Lima. So with some skilled rationalization, I can let the money go. I can accept that. But how do I let go of feeling so stupid, so little so misused? How do I love myself when I feel like that? How do I love the man in the yellow polo shirt?

When you're on a bus full of people who are into spirituality, self-development, and shamanism (as I was for many days) the usual small talk of weather, families, and jobs is replaced with lots of vague, esoteric words about surrender, letting go, accepting reality, self-love. It's pretty easy to talk about that stuff (I'm guilty too), especially with a group of people who listen to stones, cry at the sight of a bird, and pay lots of money to receive energetic transmissions. I don't mean to belittle the importance of listening, crying, and receiving energy. These are good things. But sometimes it's impossible to hear the birds and the stones over the footsteps in the hallway, the raucous music below, and the fury inside. What then? There's the work. There's the reason why I walk and write on an island for a week, or hike into the mountains to pray and listen to my heart. Because in the noise of Lima, the noise of the world, I forget what it sounds like.

Even in the apparent stillness of the mountains there can be so much noise. One week after Lima, on Good Friday, we were preparing our despachos (offerings to the spirit of the mountain) in preparation for the full moon/equinox ceremony. A despacho is a beautiful gift crafted with patience, care, and intention. It starts with a piece of white paper - like a cross between gift-wrapping paper and sandwich-wrapping paper - and on that canvas you create something that ends up looking like an elaborate cake in the form of a circle, cross, square, or rectangle. The ingredients that go into the despacho are many, too many to name, and fall into three basic categories, which - continuing with the cake analogy - form the layers. The first layer is of natural ingredients from the earth (representing fertility), the second layer is of sugar and candy (representing love and the sweetness of life), and the third layer is of man-made objects (representing wisdom and vision). My favorite ingredients were the animal crackers, alphabet soup, and alpaca fat (it might have been llama fat but I like the alliteration). When the offering is complete, it is neatly wrapped - folding the white paper in a particular order - and then tied closed with string.

With my white paper and bundle of goodies, I sat down on the earth, facing the majestic, snow-covered mountain. Even dressed as I was with multiple layers on top and bottom, a down jacket, and fleece hat and neck warmer, it was a cold and windy afternoon at 14,000 feet. And I could feel myself getting a cold. The telltale scratch in the back of the throat had already evolved into that feeling that I should be able to breathe fire if I tried hard enough. My mind certainly spat fire. What the heck am I doing here? I´m making a present of animal crackers and alphabet soup for a mountain! My throat is killing me. I should have the alphabet soup, not the mountain. This is stupid. I can´t do this. That doesn´t look anything like a circle. He said everything should be perfectly symmetrical, like sacred geometry. This looks like the kitchen counter after preparing a meal. It was true. My paper was a mess of sugar, rice, beans, quinoa, and other tiny particles that rearranged themselves with every gust of wind and each touch of my big, fat, clumsy fingers. Imagine trying to build a house of cards on a trampoline while someone jumps on that same trampoline. Now imagine that your house of cards is being judged by a mountain that´s been know to kill people. Fuck.

I can´t do this. I can´t do this. How do I get out of this? I know. I´m sick. Yes, I´m sick. That´s why I can´t do this. Shouldn´t do this. Of course this isn´t my best work. I can´t be judged under these conditions. I stood up and went to the shamans. I told them of my frustration with the elements, with myself, with my health. Jeff told me to put my jacket back on - I had taken it off - and work through it. "This is a powerful mountain," he said. "It´s testing you." It sure was. It had been difficult to work with any skill before I started working with the alpaca fat. Once my fingers were covered in that, everything stuck to them. The offering became an Etch-a-Sketch. Anywhere my fingers went, everything followed. My thoughts became so toxic, so self-defeating that I found myself in middle school art class - an experience so deeply repressed that I cannot remember the teacher´s name (I can remember every other teacher´s name from my seventeen years of schooling). I hated my work in that class. Each day I´d start to push my fingers into the clay and wait for inspiration to strike. I´d play with the lifeless material for forty minutes. When the bell rang, I´d look at the grotesque shape in front of me, and - close to tears - beat the clay back into the pile of nothing that would torment me again tomorrow. After about two weeks of frustration and embarrassment that I couldn´t produce a "work of art" (oh, my other intention for my time in the mountains was to disempower my perfectionist tendencies...) I gave up. I had to because everyone else had fired their pieces in the kiln already and it was time to move on to the next project. So I lied. I told the teacher that someone had stolen my clay out of the kiln room. I am a very bad liar. She gave me a mediocre grade.

I wanted to tell Ausangate (the mountain) that someone had stolen my despacho, all of my materials. I wanted a C+, a cup of tea, and my sleeping bag. No, stop thinking like that. You are not in middle school art class. It doesn´t have to be perfect. it´s the intention that counts, and if you keep thinking all these negative thoughts, you´ll ruin everything. It´s already ruined. Look at it. Does that look to you like a cross inside a circle? It looks to me like the dog got into the pantry and was just sick all over your paper. My paper? You made this crap. I could not think myself out of my negative though pattern any more than war can create peace. So I implored Ausangate, in all his power, to exorcise my self-destructive thoughts. (After conversations with buses, I don´t think conversations with mountain spirits are so weird.) I went back to work and finished the despacho.

Later that night, Ausangate either healed me or punished me. Maybe both. Between 9:15 pm and 3:15 am, I raced out of my tent in a flurry of zippers - sleeping bag, tent, rain fly - between eight and ten times. I lost count. Each time, I put on my boots without tying the laces and raced the hundred or so meters to the shit tent. The night was cold and windy and the ground covered with snow. After our ceremony it had first rained, then hailed with thunder and lightning, and then finally snowed. The tent was too small. That´s an understatement. The tent was only slightly roomier than wrapping oneself in plastic wrap. Shaped like a teepee, the tent was very narrow around my head if I stood, which I had to in order to get in and out, and the wind blew the nylon material against my body as I sat in the dark. With one had I tried to fend off the tent, with the other I fought off my three pairs of pants - rain pants, regular pants, and long johns. Back in my sleeping bag, I didn´t even bother to take off my hat, gloves, neck-warmer, anything. First because I knew my nap wouldn´t last long and second because even in my 15 degree Fahrenheit bag, I couldn´t produce enough body heat to stay warm. The night was the longest of my life, longer than the night in Lima, and longer than the night with the bed bugs.

Last night, I went out dancing and had my first regular bowel movement in five days. This morning, I ate a delicious celebratory breakfast - mango/papaya juice, fresh plain yogurt with granola and fruit, and a banana and chocolate crepe. Life is good.

Safety First

Later today I fly to Peru, but before I explain the Peru trip and how I almost missed my flight to Lima over 72 hours before its scheduled departure, I´d like to return to Isla Mocha and recount the adventure of that flight. If you´ve ever driven in a midsize automobile close to the end of its life, all you need to do to imagine this "plane" is add wings and a propeller. That is not a joke. The smell and condition of the interior remind me of the Chevy Celebrity my friend Brian drove in high school. Everywhere things are cracked, peeling, faded, missing. In many places, gaps in the cream-colored synthetic material expose the metal structure of the airplane underneath. Amid all sorts of fascinating gauges and meters, there is a rectangular hole in the dashboard where something used to be or perhaps never was, as if Mario - the pilot - had decided not to spring for the CD player when he was airplane shopping. My favorite details are the sun visors, which are exactly as in any car, and the "BLASTER" switch. I swear the plane actually has this. Located just above the pilot´s left knee, the "BLASTER" switch is the only red switch among countless white ones. At first I think it might be purely decorational, a relative of the black switch on my 1996 Saturn that theoretically activated the turbo booster or some nonsense that might exist in a Porsche but definitely not in a car whose primary claim to fame is being made out of plastic. To my surprise, and Batmobile-loving delight, the red switch seems very important indeed. It is engaged initially, and then when the engine doesn´t roll over on the first try, Mario disengages and re-engages the "BLASTER" as if hoping for an extra burst of power. It works and the propeller starts to shake everything. I understand why the interior looks weary.

The plane takes off. The plane takes off. Are you kidding me? I look behind me at the cargo we´re carrying: boxes on top of boxes of solar panels, enormous sacks of potatoes and onions, and my backpack. I remember how heavy my backpack is. I can carry it a few hundred meters before I need to rest. I hope that the plane won´t need to rest. As we reach the edge of the continent, my mind decides to wonder which would be less horrific: a crash over land or a crash over sea. It chooses a sea crash, and then questions the utility of the seat belt I´m wearing. From the window to my right, I look straight down. The pathetic sight of the little donut tire of the plane hovering over the immensity of the Pacific is a thrill worthy of Six Flags. My stupid-faced gaze shifts between the sea below and the cargo behind. It´s a magic trick, an outrageous, arrogant magic trick. And Mario looks bored. What is he doing with the cell phone there on his right knee? Is he sending a text message?! Isla Mocha appears. It is larger and taller - is that the right word? - than I had expected. Like a fat piece of burnt toast popping out of the toaster, a forested central ridge is surrounded by a skirt of beaches. The green of the ridge is so deep, so dark that it approaches the color of chocolate, while the beaches are coffee with a generous amount of cream added. Hence Isla Mocha. That´s my explanation, and I should admit that this "mocha" is pronounced with a soft "ch" like "Chile". The plane begins to descend in preparation for landing. I look for a runway and don´t see one. The plane continues to descend. Where is the runway? I should see a runway now. I see cows. We are very close to the ground now, close enough that I could jump out with a chance of survival, and I don´t see a runway. Boom. The wheels hit the ground and we are landing on what I had assumed to be cow pasture. Mario drives to the end of the runway, looks both ways before crossing the road, and guides the plane into his driveway, where he parks it next to a yellow jeep. Welcome to Isla Mocha.

I am nervous about Peru. There are plenty of things to be nervous about - altitude sickness, food poisoning, bad guys (I´m sure many of you saw Cusco in the news last month for events that I hope to avoid). I guess what I´m most concerned about though is change. In his latest e-mail, Jeff - the American shaman organizing the trip - confirms that this is normal and to be expected, "We realize that as you move closer to departure, the ego-mind might have all kinds of false concerns and questions. It should... it is about to be released from the proverbial driver´s seat - little by little, with faith and deep trust we release into the Heart." Oh no. Not the Heart. Kidnap me, kill me, but please don´t make me go there. The e-mail also makes liberal use of the terms "energetic transmissions" and "the Winged Ones"... so when people ask me what I´m doing in Peru, I think I´m going to say "bird watching". I really don´t know what to say because the truth is that I don´t know either. I do know that I will be sleeping under the stars at 15,000 feet in the Andes, participating in ceremony and receiving "energetic transmissions" on the 21st of March, which happens to be the full moon, the equinox, and Good Friday. Clearly, it´s going to be something special. And I am supposed to be there. How else to explain how I didn´t lose my passport on Tuesday. It almost defies explanation.

I will attempt to reconstruct the event as if I had witnessed it myself, though, in truth, I was hardly there. My body boarded the metro sometime around 3:30 on Tuesday afternoon in critical condition. Having slept very little on the overnight bus ride from Tirúa to Santiago (I slept for long enough to have a nightmare that the bus caused a terrible accident at 120 km/h) and having consumed neither food nor liquid since 9 am, I do not take well to the conditions underground. Due to the trapped heat and the density of human traffic - seven people per square meter is the norm (if you happen to have a meter stick and six non-claustrophobic friends on hand, try this at home) - the metro has been known to cause death by asphyxiation. Aboard the car, I find myself entirely surrounded by bodies. Nearby, two youths in school uniforms, presumably not allowed to make out at home, take advantage of the lack of parental supervision. Two friends mock their intimacy by pleasuring the stagnant air with their tongues, which lap so close to where my hand is holding a support pole that I can feel their warmth and wetness. To call the situation uncomfortable would only demonstrate that my vocabulary isn´t quite rich enough to find the proper word, which would mix two tablespoons of discomfort with one tablespoon of disgust, a teaspoon of shock, and a pinch of arousal. Searching desperately for another place to put my hand and finding nothing, I opt to test the balance I have theoretically developed as a yogi. The metro provides a smooth, if not comfortable, riding experience and human bumpers protected me on all sides from severe fall or injury, so the lack of hand grip doesn´t concern me too much. The man to my left twice offers me a piece of his handle, and the second time - not wanting to appear rude or ungrateful - I accept. I reach up with my left hand to take hold of the handle which hangs from the ceiling.

Music streams directly into the brain through earphones. I am somewhere else. Curled up in my sleeping bag, I am alone on an island in the Pacific ocean. Splashing in the surf, I scoop up handfuls of salt water and pour them over my nearly bald head. The sun is just breaking over the ridge, and my knife slides easily into a perfectly ripe nectarine. Such a smooth stroke the nectarine feels almost nothing, but... what was that? Did someone just bump me? Wait. Why did he offer me the handle twice? The train is slowing down. We are approaching a station. People push past toward the door. A wave of confused, tangled bodies is crashing around me, over me, past me... like a group of sprinters who had been playing Twister while waiting for the gun to go off. Why is my heart beating so fast? I look down at my fanny pack. Is it more open than it was before? It looks more open. How open was it before? I don´t know. I didn´t measure. It looks very open now. The doors of the car slide open. My hands plunge into the fanny pack like divers performing a search and rescue. There´s my Moleskine and my iPod and my sunscreen... keep looking. Come on. Where is it? I don´t feel it. I don´t see it. The people around me are gone. I rush for the door and reach it just as it´s closing. I hear people behind me gasp, maybe someone laughs. I don´t feel pain and I don´t feel embarrasment, and there is no way in hell this door is closing on me. It can´t close because my neck is propping it open. With whatever strenth I have left, I force the door open and stumble onto the platform. I see the man who offered me the handle. He is halfway up the stairs already. I run. What am I going to do when I catch up with him? There´s no way he has it. The jostle came from the right. He´s the accomplice though, right? I don´t know. What am I going to say to him? Excuse me, sir, give it back please. Oh, I think you do know what I´m talking about. What´s in that bag there? Then tell me who. Who has it. Why did you offer me the handle? Why did you offer me the handle? I felt something. I´m sure I felt something. From the right. And then you all got off the train. How many of you are there? Yes, I know it´s what I deserve for wearing a fanny pack. And for listening to music. And for not being present in the moment. And I appreciate the spiritual lesson, really, but I need it back. Just give it to me. Take the money if you like, but I need the passport.

Above ground I catch up to him, the man who offered me the handle. I am walking right next to him. He is to my right and we are walking quickly, matching stride for stride. He has a duffle bag and I wonder if the piece of black leather that holds my life is inside it somewhere. He notices a person walking with him and looks up. What is that look? Recognition for sure. He recognizes me. And maybe something else. What else? I keep walking. What am I going to say? A noise grabs me from behind. It´s that noise that only Chileans can make - a cross between a whistle, a yelp, and a shout of "hey!" I turn. A man is walking toward us. Is he walking toward me or toward him? In his right hand I see something black and wallet-size. Before I can react the stranger is placing my life back in my own hands and I am thanking him and shaking his hand and offering to buy him things. He refuses and tells me that he found it... what does he say? It´s a critical detail I don´t quite catch because my mind won´t slow down to listen. He says I dropped it in the subway. Does he specify where? In the car? On the platform? I don´t know. I check the contents. Everything is here: passport, debit card, cash. Why is everything here? Did I surprise him in the hand-off? Was he following me or the man with the duffle bag? Was I just in the right place at the right time? Did he say that I dropped it in the car? That can´t be true. I was without a doubt the very last person off the car. Or did he say I dropped it on the platform? Was I in such a hurry to catch the man who stole my passport that I dropped it in the pursuit? I´m like 95% sure that wallet was not in the fanny pack when I decided to get off that car. Really? 95%? Well, maybe not 95%. But what about the man who offered me the handle? And the bump I felt? And the zipper almost totally open?

I am still confused. Did I create the entire drama? I foolishly left my fanny pack almost completely open and unattended, then panicked when I couldn´t find my wallet right away, almost killed myself in the door in my haste to get off the car, and then - fanny pack still open - dropped my wallet in the mad pursuit of a man I thought might have created the opportunity for an accomplice to pick my fanny pack? In this scenario, I met two saints - a man who offered me a piece of his comfort on the subway and a second who returned my most important possessions to me without taking anything or accepting any reward. Or did I notice an attempted robbery just in time to get off the subway car superhero-style, chase down the perpetrator, and intercept the hand-off. In this case, I met two thieves and put myself in just the right place at just the right time to thwart their heist. The only thing I know for certain: I am incredibly blessed to be able to fly to Peru today. Oh, and be careful with fanny packs. More than a fashion faux pas, they are like tasty candy around the waist of a gringo.

TIMEOUT!!!

It´s incredible the power an audience has over me. Writing on the island, I just wrote. Without stopping, I write about 2,000 words per hour by hand. That´s a rough estimate, of course, because the 700 peso (+/- $1.50) journal I write in doesn´t have that handy "word count" feature. When I sit down to type a blog entry, I can easily spend an hour appreciating my navel before I write the first word. There´s a lot of pressure on that first word, obviously. It has to be a good one. It used to be you had to hook the reader with the first sentence or the first paragraph, but I don´t think that today´s reader has that attention span. Especially blog readers. You could be watching a hilarious video on youtube right now instead of reading this sentence (I appreciate that you are reading this sentence). That´s pretty tough competition. So I fret over each and every word. Each one must be precise because you´ve got other ways to kill time, and they´re "bookmarked" or "hot-linked" (is that a term?) so something better is just one click away. On Isla Mocha, nothing is one click away.

On the ten hour bus ride from Santiago south to Tirúa, the small screen which scrolls messages in red lights displayed but one message for the duration of the trip: TIMEOUT!!! Just like that. All caps with three exclamation points. TIMEOUT!!! At first, I didn´t think too much of it because it didn´t mean anything. In fact, I hardly noticed it because my brain is so well trained to scan the environment for useful/necessary information and filter out the nonsense. Each time I looked up I saw it. And then I saw it, TIMEOUT!!! And I was a little spooked. Wait a minute... why does that say timeout? Why timeout in English on a Chilean bus? Oh my god, I think... no, Michael, I know the idea you´re about to have and it´s crazy... but it´s just too weird. I think it´s a special message for me. The bus is talking to me. The bus is talking to me, and I´m listening. I´m having a conversation with the bus. And the bus was right. I needed a timeout - an escape from the television, the internet, the noise of the city, the air of the city, the city, and from the audience of other human beings. Because anytime I interact with human beings it has an "audience effect" on me; I choose my words, my gestures, my very personality based on what will work best (read: make you like me the most). I spent the vast majority of the seven days on the island in silence - not silence in the sense of making no noise with my mouth (though I spoke very little) but silence as the opposite of living my life as a performance. According to Merton, it is not speaking that breaks silence but the desire to be heard. I love that sentence - so simple and so true - because verbal "silence" can be just as loud as shouting, can´t it? Think of the energy of passive aggressive silence, pouting silence, vengeful silence, "please pay attention to me!" silence.

Without an audience, I wrote three hours a day for a total of twenty hours over the course of the retreat. The 40,000ish words were about half what I expected to write. On the first afternoon, as I waited in Tirúa for the plane to Isla Mocha, my first of three pens ran out of ink. I realized with panic that I had vastly underestimated my ink needs. With only one new pen and one half-used pen remaining, I searched the town for a pen. I found nothing but Bics, and I don´t write with Bics. That might sound haughty and elitist for an unemployed blog writer, a quirky idiosyncrasy that would be cute if I were a Nobel prize-winning author perhaps. It´s exactly the kind of detail that would be perfect for the tour of the writer´s home. And this was Michael´s closet. Unusual, obviously, to have a closet so far from the bedroom, but according to legend, he never wore clothes in the bedroom so the closet had to be in another room so he could undress himself before entering his sleeping space. Ah, and there on the desk you see the pen. He only wrote with liquid gold, which is why you see the glove there; the pen was very hot. It has nothing to do with the price nor the appearance of the pen. I simply can´t write fast enough with a traditional ballpoint pen. I need liquid gel ink - so fast, so smooth. I need to write quickly to outpace my mind. If my mind can keep up with my writing, it will try to make it perfect, and - in so doing - accidentally kill it. My mind wants to fix my writing, make it neat and presentable, more likeable, like a kid on school picture day. Gotta dress it up, come its hair, remind it to smile. My favorite school picture of all time is from second or third grade. I had clearly just had my hair cut in preparation for the big day, and the barber left my bangs as straight as a ski slope. That´s what my mind does to my writing - trims it with all the best intentions and a bad eye for quality.

And what a gift the shortage of ink was. Writing only three hours a day freed me to explore the island. There will be other weeks to write in my life, but there may not be other weeks on Isla Mocha. So I took advantage of the miles of beautiful beaches and the white sand road that encircles the island. I danced with the waves and walked barefoot on the endless road. I took my time preparing my food and eating it. I noticed my senses. I even tried to do absolutely nothing once or twice. That was the hardest. My mind really hates doing nothing, especially on vacation. That´s why I turned Tirúa upside down looking for more pens. If I ran out of ink, I´d be stuck on an island with nothing "productive" to do. I might start to ask myself scary questions like Why am I here? Am I doing enough? Why do I get to eat, sleep and do nothing? Because I´m on vacation. I´m not talking about Isla Mocha, this week. I´m talking about your life. Oh, crap. See. Too bad you couldn´t find any more pens. Both of the times I did nothing it made me cry. The first time out of loneliness and the second time because I thought of sand castles. I remembered making sand castles with my brother and my cousins, Thomas and Elizabeth. It was a rite of summer. We´d march down to the shore with our plastic shopping bag full of the best equipment. And when it was time to make the Sand Castle, we didn´t frolic or skip or giggle as we approached the beach. We arrived with the severity of a construction team on a tight schedule. The tide is coming in, and we´re going to stop it this time. We´ll do it right this year. And so we tried every year to build not just a castle, but a dam, a structure that would stop the tide, divert the waves, do whatever it took to survive. And it never did. The tide is controlled by the gravity of the moon. We were trying to stop the weight of the moon with piles of sand. So I sat at my picnic table on Isla Mocha and cried because that´s ridiculous, and because I love my family, and because I used to be a kid who didn´t know anything about the gravitational force exerted by the moon.

Well, my mind quickly put a stop to all that sentimental nonsense because it had a brilliant idea. Let´s make a sandcastle! Here! Now! My mind processed my emotion and sold it back to me as an idea, a plan, a project, something to do. I stood and went to the trash where I found an empty two liter Coke bottle, which would make the perfect mold for turrets or towers on the castle. I washed the bottle and cut the bottom part off with my pocket knife. Making something out of trash with a pocket knife, I felt - for the first time in my life - almost handy. The circular edge of the mold was sharp, far too dangerous for children, but fine for a grown-up sandcastle builder. Feeling giddy, I almost did skip to the beach this time - only to discover a brutal wind. If I set my mold down, it required a weight to prevent it from blowing away. Waves are supposed to destroy sandcastles, not wind. Furthermore, building a sandcastle should feel futile perhaps, but not miserable. I gave up. I tried again the next day, but, with only thirty minutes until the departure of my return flight, time ran out. It didn´t feel like failure; it felt poetic because it made me think that not building a sandcastle is really the same as building one. I guess that´s the kind of thought you have when you start having conversations with buses...

I have SO much more material to share from my week on Isla Mocha, but time is short; I leave for Peru on Friday. I think that the photos I took will tell many of the stories for me, and certainly give you a better picture of the island than words could. You can see them here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elgringoandante/
I will probably write another entry tomorrow before departing because I don´t know when my next opportunity for an update will come.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

On Sunday evening, I will be the passenger in seat 15 on a southbound bus departing Santiago at 21:41. Approximately twelve hours and lots of stiff muscles later, the bus should arrive in Tirúa, a small coastal town where a local couple operates a shuttle service - in what I hesitate to call an airplane - to Isla Mocha. The island is 14 km tall by 7 km wide and offers neither internet nor cell phone service. I will camp on or near the beach (within 3.5 km of the beach, for sure) and write - if I can find a flat surface - five or six hours a day. Between the hour-long writing sessions, I will jump rope and drink raw eggs. The most crucial part of my training regimen will be Pablo Neruda´s famous finger exercises for improved strength and dexterity. To the untrained eye, this powerful technique might resemble skipping stones. If I survive the seven nights and four cans of tuna fish, I will be ready to visit the shamans in Peru.

This writing retreat is an acknowledgement on my part that writing is of central importance to this entire trip. It may, in fact, have been the desire (need?) to write that invented this journey in the first place. My travels have given me both the time and the material to write like never before in my life. I cannot imagine taking a five month break from my "regular life" to focus on writing, but without admitting it to myself, that´s basically what I´ve done. It is essential, of course, that I call it something else ("travel" works nicely), that it have a disguise so I don´t have to take it too seriously or that - god forbid - anyone else should take it too seriously. As a "traveler", I don´t have to produce too much; people generally seem to be satisfied with a slideshow and a funny story about airports. As a "writer", though, I might be expected to ummm... write stuff. People might ask me things like, Are you working on a book? What do you write about? Written anything recently? If I, without any published work, declare myself a writer, then I become an unpublished writer. There is nothing inherently terrible about that. Billions of people are unpublished writers (unless I´m overestimating the global literacy rate), and, of those, hundreds of millions are gifted unpublished writers. For Christmas, my mother gave me her written account of my birth, which aside from being brilliant, is - to me - of more worth than anything amazon.com carries.

What´s the problem then? Why the doubt and the hesitation? Maybe it´s because even as I write this, I can´t explain what I mean. I get closer. I think I have it, and then it feels wrong again. The frustration, the solitude, the separation that drive me to write, to find the right words, never end in connection. Only slightly less separation. One morning in eighth grade math class, Mr. Reagey angered the bored, hungry masses by dismissing Jared - and only Jared - to lunch early. He let Jared leave with one provision: he could only walk to the door in increments of half the remaining distance. If the dry, mathematical humor of Mr. Reagey´s offer is not immediately apparent to you, stand up now, and try the same exercise in whatever room you´re in. Even if you have small feet, shoes are not a practical tool for measuring infititely small distances, so - if you´re like Jarod - you´ll eventually claim that you have reached the door, and deserve to leave class. But, in reality, he couldn´t reach the door. You can´t reach the door. I can´t reach the door. Even tiny robots can´t reach the door. So we´re all stuck in eighth grade math, the period before lunch, being teased with the possibility of escape. Thomas Merton writes, "Actual solitude has, as one of its integral elements, the dissatisfaction and uncertainty that come from being face to face with unrealized possibility." I wonder if he had Mr. Reagey for pre-algebra.

Merton´s words could also have been written after a visit to the supermarket. (In Santiago, the supermarket belongs to the 20th century and third world countries. Super is a new synonym for inadequate; anything less than a hyper or mega market won´t meet all of your needs. Try to find foodstuffs, school uniforms, and a flatscreen TV at a supermarket. These Chilean behemoths are outgrowing adjectives like snails discarding old shells. What will replace hyper and mega? Giga... Biga... or maybe, Wal? Wal-Mart is probably the closest stateside relative - the crazy uncle from up north who always wears a blue vest and throws a huge party the day after Thanksgiving - of the Chilean superstores.) I was talking about "the dissatisfaction of unrealized possibility", which I´m pretty sure is central to the marketing strategy of stores like "Jumbo", where I purchased provisions for my week on Isla Mocha. Even though I found every item on my shopping list yesterday, I still left Jumbo with feelings of doubt. What if 64 isn´t the right number of wheat bran crackers? I could have purchased a package of 32 or 96 instead. In fact, I initially put the package of 96 in my cart. Minutes later, while examining the ingredients of granola bars, I couldn´t refrain from "checking my answers" (after years of test-taking, this second guessing is an insuppressible instinct)... What is ninety-six divided by seven anyway? Well, seven times thirteen is ninety-one. Will I really eat thirteen and 5/7 crackers a day? That´s a lot of bran. That reminds me... I should bring my own toilet paper, just in case. I put the boxes of granola back on the shelf, and returned to the crunchy snack food aisle, where I exchanged the 96 pack for a 64 pack. I feel pretty good about the 64 pack, but then again, what does conventional wisdom say about indecision on standardized tests... when you´re torn between two answers, your first instinct is correct the vast majority* of the time. (*actual odds first instinct is correct = x + 2y, where x equals current room temperature (degrees Fahrenheit) and y equals shoe size.)

I´m joking. But you know who isn´t joking about how crazy they feel in the supermarket? The children. And the parents. Everywhere I look I see a mother, dragging the squirming body - heels digging in vain into unforgiving floor, arms desperately reaching back toward the one and only source of possible happiness in this cold, fluorescent world - of her screaming child into a future s/he refuses to even look at because it will be a wretched existence without... well, in my case it was a Matchbox car-sized version of the ThunderTank (the fierce, battleship gray tank with huge claws from the 80´s cartoon Thunder Cats). The miniature ThunderTank propelled itself forward with spring-powered wheels when pulled back, and also sharpened pencils. That it sharpened pencils makes little logical sense and may be an invention of my memory, but the point is that this was an absolutely incredible piece of gray plastic. My mother purchased it for me. I will never forget that day. I felt forever and eternally grateful because I was happy. Until we got home and the amazing tank stopped functioning properly. At first the tank zipped around on its own, without a human hand touching it, just like it did on the show! Soon the sand in our driveway - it wasn´t paved at that point - worked its way into the mechanism that turned the wheels, and the tank broke down. I´d never seen an episode where the tank broke down. My imagination struggled to maintain the integrity of my fantasy world in the face of overwhelming reality. I kicked the toy, threw it, and called it garbage. I burst into the kitchen, where my mother was still putting away the groceries, and I demanded that we go back and get one that worked. We have to go back we have to we have to. This one doesn´t work. Look. Look! It´s all... look! I want a new one. Mom ignored me, so I decided to run away and go back to the supermarket by myself. I told her. Then I left. I ran away to the end of Sanderson Street - three houses away - but couldn´t go any further because I wasn´t allowed to cross High Street. So I sat at the corner of Sanderson and High and cried. And screamed. And punched the ground with the tank - not hard because I didn´t really want to hurt it, just teach it a lesson for breaking. Stupid tank.

I see myself - desperate to cross High Street to the promised land of newer, better tanks - reflected in the miserable, whining children in Jumbo. And I want to feel compassion for them. But it´s hard because I also want to fix them. I want them to be grown-ups already so they can understand "the dissatisfaction of unrealized possibility" or at least have the shame not to cry in public. Maybe my biggest frustration is that it is no longer socially acceptable for me to throw a tantrum in public and I haven´t found a better coping mechanism to replace it. Contemplating "the dissatisfaction of unrealized possibility" does not feel nearly as good as punching the ground and screaming. As an adult, I have a greater ability to "self-medicate" because I have infinitely more freedom to choose the toys, foods, drinks, people, places, and events that fill my life. But the ability to treat the specific symptoms of my desires does nothing to heal the condition. I want. I want. I was reminded of this condition in December when a strong desire, which I could not meet given my then situation, overwhelmed me. Many nights, the fetal position on the floor was my favorite place to be. I considered quitting my job. Considered isn´t the right word though because it suggests far more rational mental activity than I was capable of at the time. The part of me that wanted to quit was the same part of me that wanted to run away to the supermarket. For a newer, better life!

Well, tomorrow I begin my newer, better life on Isla Mocha. I´ll be back when I discover it´s exactly the same, when I run out of food, or when seven nights are up.