...But Not Too Far

Soundtrack:
Of Monsters and Men - Dirty Paws

Shortly before leaving from the Wheaton national headquarters of the Theosophical Society, I was elected to be on the board of directors for Far Horizons Camp in the Sequoias of California.  One of my intentions in coming out to California was to find different avenues of service, especially Theosophical ones.  Then suddenly the opportunity to help a Theosophical camp in California appears before me. My response was something like, "Well played, Universe. Well played."

Firstly, I am not one for drama, or even drama associated with politics.  I should say I don't like to dwell on it- I am beginning to gain some aptitude for the game, even though I am not interested in the game itself.  As such, I don't feel it is productive to describe all the details. But guess what? Drama bombs aplenty!

It is actually all very well and good.  Here's my view on political drama, especially in regards to spiritual or altruistic organizations: It is like any spiritual endeavor in that your flaws will rise and bubble to the surface.  It is your choice if you want to try and remove your impurities in the process or if you want to waste the opportunity.  If service is the goal, you will appreciate that you can refine yourself into a purer vessel.  But we all stumble, and usually a part of that stumbling is a regression into childlike emotion.

I am surrounded by people having childlike emotions. I have a few myself. But I really really want to see it clearly; I really want to just observe those around me who are having their issues triggered so I don't judge anything rashly, and so I can have the energy to observe myself,learn from it, and grow myself. In that sense, I am the happiest man alive right now.

Believe It!

On that note, Far Horizons is magical. This is a tag line I've been hearing people say as I made my way up to see it. And always with the same far off dreamy look in their eyes. I was piqued, but suspicious.

It's magical though. It is. Not because of the mountains or the redwood trees everywhere either. In some places there is manifested, by human devotion and spiritual practice, and by extra-human response to said devotion, a profound serenity. Far Horizons has that, despite that it just looks like a summer camp. And now I find myself working even harder to ensure this place retains its sense of wonder amidst the politics.

Amber and I also had the opportunity to spend some time with our Paracelsian brethren, Ken and Trin.  Ken and Trin are so much fun to be around. It is nice to have that community of people in the same position you are, who just want to grow spiritually and to help.  We got to visit Ken and Trin's Live Oak Monastery in San Luis Obispo, which is also magical.  We got to imbibe many flavors of magic on this trip. We really need to muggle it up for the next few weeks just to re-adjust.

Dirty Paws

As we had an adventure, so too did the Chronicles of Brutus continue.  Before the trip he met Sunny, the dog that just showed up at Madre Grande Monastery a few years ago, and has decided to live up to his name ever since. We visited to Monastery right after a sweat lodge, so that we could visit our friends Luis and Ciarra, so Brutus suddenly had a fan club of young people who wanted to see how soft his fur was. He felt this was well overdue that people should line up to pet him.

When we were on the road, we found him a sitter, but that doesn't quite do it justice. We found him a person who has devoted her life turning her home into a rabbit resort, and she just so happens to live near the beach in the upscale town of La Jolla. We will definitely use her again. Brutus was significantly less angry at us than he usually is when we leave town.

One Mountain, Many Perspectives

Soundtrack:
Gipsy Kings cover Hotel California

Theosophists Assemble!

The conclave was afoot.  I did not know the word "conclave" a year ago, but it is much like other impressive words, words like oubliette, catacomb, and autodidact.  These words sound wholly serious, though I would be hard pressed to understand the meaning just by sounding it out.

A conclave is a meeting.  Traditionally one where hard decisions need to be made, to the point where everyone is locked in until a common decision is made. Luckily for the Paracelsian Order, we are all enlightened people and therefore agree on everything, because we can see every eventuality spanning out in front of us like a map across space and time.

Wouldn't that be something?  Actually, the annual Paracelsian Order conclave met at Madre Grande Monastery on June 29th, and there were many ideas and much altruistic passion.  It was great to meet new people, all of us inspired by esoteric teachings and by living according to Theosophical principles.

What's more, is that Amber and I got to walk there through the mountain path leading from our place to the monastery.  We were wandering up just as they were blowing the conch shell to start the conclave.

I was especially happy to meet Allison and Karina this visit, as well as Ken's husband Trin.  Ken and Trin run the Live Oak Monastery in San Luis Obisbo. And of course, I was happy to see Ken, Sally, Monica, Marty, and Jonathan again.  Sunny the dog was also in attendance, but from just outside the glass door to the patio.

What was also nice is that we all knew John Drais, and it is amazing to me that one man can inspire such a forward momentum of dedicated people.  That was kind of the point of this conclave. How can all of us pick up the slack so we move forward successfully?  Even though Amber and I just got here, we are just as willing as everyone else, but talking to everyone and getting their perspective on things helps us all work better as a team and as a family. It's a nice feeling. Also, I am confident Sally will lead things well, especially with Monica to help her.

There Will Be Blood!

Meanwhile, back at the farm, preparations were being made for a July 4th party. What this meant is that there was going to be a smoked pig.  And where do pigs come from? The farm! And where are they bled out and butchered? About 20 feet from where we are temporarily residing! Yaaaay!

To begin with, our landlords, Don and Renee are extremely kind and generous people.  I like them. I think they like us, but they are of course wary of vegetarians since they raise and slaughter their own animals.  I made them feel a little easier after telling them I used to be a cook and learned to do some butchery myself.  Then Don asked me if I could help him bring the pig down to the slaughter area so he could shoot it in the head.

My first thought was something along the lines of that elevator scene in The Shining. I wanted nothing to do with the whole idea.  Then I wondered how I got to be so pretentious.  It was an inner dialogue thing going on.

A part of the reason Amber and I became vegetarians in the first place was because of the way meat is mass manufactured which leads to prolific animal abuse.  These good people treat their animals very well.  They are happy animals, cruelty free. So in the spirit of learning new things I helped Don bring the pig down, but nothing after that.  Amber and I would take Brutus on a park adventure so he didn't have to hear gunshots and smell buckets of blood all day.  I can only imagine what our landlords think of the way we treat our rabbit like a child.

Long story short, moving the pig messed with me a little bit.  It screamed! We put it in a mobile cage and it pressed its face against the bars and screamed bloody murder. If I was the type of person to tell myself "This is the way it is. Humans eat pigs, and they scream. Get used to it." Well, then I would desensitize myself to it, wouldn't I? Several years ago I was often wrist deep in animal blood just to make a meal and it wouldn't phase me.  Now I don't eat meat, and I know there's another way to live. And this screaming pig, banging himself against the mobile fence as we walked it down to the gallows was a little disturbing to me.

I guess I'll leave it at that. I'm not a preachy vegetarian, just a guy with an occasional story to tell.

To update on a happy note. Even though Brutus and all of us are adjusting to the heat, it does get cool in the evening.  This means every sunset we let him out to run around and he has a whole field to frolic and play in, only under our supervision though, obviously.  There are other wild bunnies in the field too, but they haven't socialized yet. Brutus enjoys his free time thoroughly, and he's shedding more and more every day.  He may acclimate to the mountains sooner than we do.

Bonus song: Gorillaz - Mountain Called Monkey

"Polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert."

Soundtrack:

Jose Feliciano cover of California Dreamin'

The California border has a checkpoint where they check what animals and plants (or flora and fauna if you're cool) you may be bringing in.  California is an odd bird for many reasons, and this is just one of them. Lucky for us, we picked one of the lanes where no one was there to check us. If there was, they would have looked into our car and seen a white rabbit with red eyes doing one of his classic 'I didn't do it!' stares he is so well known for.  Then where would we be?

Probably still fine, but it's a funny image I like to think about.

Immediately, blindingly so, after the Arizona desert is green! California grows a lot of produce, and there were growing fields as well as palm trees right away. I don't know why palm trees suddenly begin in California, probably some artificial reason I don't want to think about (a la the movie Chinatown), but they're everywhere.

As you drive through the fields of whatever crops they grow, blissful things like strawberries, there are suddenly no longer the same green bugs squishing into your windshield at high speeds.  Like many things on the trip, this bug smashing is something I became so used to that I noticed immediately when it stopped.  I felt I was in a magical place.  Then I knew I was in a magical place, because there were these little yellow butterflies everywhere around me.  In the fields, around the road... and then squishing into my windshield.  Not green bugs, but little yellow butterflies now.

I wondered to myself, is this a good sign? Is this a bad sign? I am squishing beautiful butterflies now - are they some welcoming gift to me or am I angering the blissful yellow god of sunshine by running into his yellow minions? After enough dead butterflies are on your windshield you begin wondering why they can't figure out the trend going on and avoid the road.

We stopped at a gas station. There was a lot of young people sitting around doing drugs, which really bothered me, because I'm getting old I guess.  Then there was this old homeless guy with a friendly white beard collecting cans in a grocery cart. I think it was the beard that did it but I approached him and gave him a little money. I never know the rules on that sort of thing, but I needed to do something nice for someone because I was so tired from travelling, if that makes any sense at all. When I shook his hand, he smiled at me and looked me in the eye and said, "You are welcome!"

And I was! I felt good after that. He was a nice guy, I think. I hope he did something good with it.

Then Amber and I went through a vast hilly backroad that was leading to the deserts of California. There was a yellow traffic sign before that said "dips ahead". We speculated how bad the dips, whatever those were, had to be for there to be a sign.  Very bad, apparently. Dips are just up and down hills, as we learned.

This is also a foreshadowing to the kind of winding bumpy roads that some Californians are used to. On the mountains, for example, people drive roads I would have once considered very unsafe. They think they are perfectly acceptable, and my mountain landlords refer to any paved road as highways. I think they are savages, and I refer to them as Wildlings when I speak of these people to Amber. Although I suspect that one day their ways may become my ways.

By this time Brutus had become good at maneuvering different roads in his seat so he didn't get sick. What I mean is that on the first day, he would have just looked scared at less than smooth roadways. Now, when things got choppy, he turned himself around so he was facing the seat for better traction, and he would bob and weave with the motion of the car. He developed this technique on his own.  I imagine him thinking, "I am a leaf on the wind. I am a leaf on the wind," to himself as we drove through the up and down wasteland.

Then we straightened out on the road, and as we began to have a moment to look around I felt very peaceful.  This was the California desert. I pulled over with Amber and the hot burning wind and white sand just felt so purifying to me. I took a few pictures, and we moved on. Even stranger still, the "desert" as we thought we had been in became moreso. It was all sand dunes and this one road we were on.

Amber and I both stopped again.  I looked at her and said, "Where are we?" She shrugged. We both were thinking it was like Saudi Arabia only in California. I'm looking at a map now, and it had to be the Glamis Dunes on Rte 78. I need to go back there, just to prove that it was real. It's amazing.

It was nighttime when we finally started going up the mountain to our place. Brutus starting really doing his maneuvers, because the roads kept moving back and forth, winding up. Then we went through the rocky pathways and our new landlords showed us where we would sleep.  We slept for about a day, and Brutus laid down in the same spot for at least two day.

I am not cut out to be a nomad, but it was a wonderful journey.  We will see if Amber and I are cut out to live like these Wildlings up here.