and it feels weird. Even with all the prep I did in anticipation that it would be overwhelming, I am still amazed at how fast-paced and relentless life in the USA is. Nice that only 3.5 months can make you forget. I have pulled back a bit to ground myself and take care of all the crap I left behind. But coming home I do feel the onslaught of being in this country. Very aggressive society compared to where I was. So retreating a bit. Not that that’s a problem. Retreat is a fully viable form of interacting with the world. And the things that I have been gathering are still here, and it is me and the world, and that is actually not two but one, and even if I can’t easily feel that every second, I can feel it on another level, on the level of faith. And that gives me strength.

So my takeaway after 3.5 months in the Buddha Belt (Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar) and predominantly Muslim Indonesia is that we’re living in an evil world. These places are super corrupt, and nobody is really looking after them. There is no higher authority helping us out.

But that is just one level, the level of what we initially encounter. At the same time, it’s all good. We can bless this world and love it all the same. We can see see the evil for what it is: ignorance and confusion, and we can work to overcome those problems. Evil will always be there. I don’t think it’s something we can get rid of. It’s up to us how we want to relate to it and what we want to do about it.

Intensely experiencing Buddhism and Islam as I did on this journey, I thought a lot about how the channels to people’s minds often come thru religion, and wondering not just where we are at, but how we got here. Here’s a good interactive historical map that shows how the religions covered the earth:

Above is a video of me on the island of Seram, as dusk fell and I fell with it, under the spell of enchantment as the call to prayer echoed out through the village of Sawai.

I really can’t say enough about the island of Seram. It is known as the “Mother Island” (Nisa Ina) of Malukku. Everyone is supposed to have come from there. There are a lot of islands in Malukku, but Seram dwarfs them all. It is huge. In the south there is Masohi, which is the capital. It’s spread out, weird, slow, a bit warm, not where you want to hang out if you could be anywhere you wanted on the island. But it certainly has some pretty neat people there. I had an hilarious time with the entire staff of National Park office, who all came together for several hours to fill out a form, and with some of the teachers at the local high school, and became pretty good friends with one of them, Brandon, who teaches English and is visiting from Minnesota. We ended up trekking together for several days.

In the middle and north of Seram are ancient tribes that are still pretty wild. Running horizontally across the island, and effectively blocking the very northern coast from the rest of the island, [click to continue…]

After 3 and 1/2 months on the road, the takeaway is this: the whole world is what we make it, and we’re making it every day. We have such a bigger role in the creation of our experience than we typically acknowledge or are even aware of, life is a journey to realize how much we are creating this journey. And it’s a journey of paradoxes. It’s an endless journey, but it does end. Everything that happens happens for a reason, and at the same time it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. There is fate and it’s random. So the only true thing is that both seemingly opposite things are true. I have just been trying to hold onto this paradox loosely, and it’s really stretching my mind.*

What else I can tell you? I am in Ambon, which is kind of a pit, but as a result, it’s really cool between the cracks. The rock and roll is great, the people are wild and screaming and out of their minds, there is no center so there’s nothing not to hold, they live in heaven and have been through hell, and I kind of like it and will be thrilled to leave.

My time in the Malukku Islands has been great. It’s the land that time forgot, mostly due to insurrections and then utterly heinous and retarded religious conflicts that were pretty major and lasted until believe it or not 2006. That’s right. People were slaughtering each other here until 5 years ago. No biggie, on a per capita basis we still do it more up until this very day. But anyway, that’s all over and everybody is like, whoa, what the fuck was that? Can’t we all just get along? So that’s going to stick it seems, so now people are kind of ready to get somewhere good, and rebuild what little they had started and had lost of a tourist infrastructure. It’s only the prettiest place on earth, and at the same time one of the most clueless in terms of what tourists might want or enjoy.

The people are amazing. They think nothing of taking the cell phone you’re reading right out of your hands to show you something they want to see, grabbing you and taking you where they want you to go, getting in your space and in your face and imposing on you in ways that are rude and preposterous. The room service guy will walk into your room and start going over the things on your desk, asking you what they are, how much, etc. I, being me, handle it fine, and enjoy responding in kind, either by grabbing their stuff and asking what it is, or walking into their lives and poking around, or replying at their same decibel level, etc. When I act this way, push back, or just jostle with them in a clear and strong and loving and funny way, they _love_ it. They remark to ea. other about me, and laugh their asses off. For utterly poor people that have been thru the moral equivalent of a civil war, these guys and gals sure do laugh a lot. They think everything, especially me, is hilarious. I guess they are right.

And they won’t think anything of giving me whatever [click to continue…]

This is probably my last longish text post before I start heading home and rejoining the wired world. I have ended up in the Maluku Islands, and will be here more or less until I head to Bali on the 25th of Feb. Then to San Fran on the 28th, arriving SFO midday the 1st of March.

Bottom line: Asia is really cool. In a huge state of transition. Mainly, it’s exploding. So there’s this feeling of frenzy amidst a very mellow and traditional culture. It’s very pretty, and the people are also. And they all are very talented. Everybody knows how to sing, and their voices are strong. Not only that, but they are into rock and roll in a way that does a rock and roll heart good. Having seen what the French do, and the Germans, and the South Americans, and the Russians, and the Indians, and the Chinese, to rock, it’s amazing to be here and hear and get into Indonesian Rock. I made a mix tape that I think will amaze people who have long been chauvinist about the four things the USA still does best, which, in addition to rock and roll, are movies, software and high speed pizza delivery.  Yea, I am from a healthy distance witnessing the erosion of the last vestiges of cultural empire, and it feels good! Remember growing up and seeing other cultures listen to our rock and sing words they didn’t understand with such feeling?! And feeling that feeling of knowing you don’t have to live in a culture where the best music is written in a foreign language? Well, I am happy to report it also feels good to fall in love with music from another country. I don’t mean fall in love as in go to the world music section and have an eclectic music collection. I mean fall in love as in this is simply good music, qualifier or no. I have no idea what the songs I am digging here are saying, but I am increasingly comfortable living in a world where my country’s music, in addition to everything else, is not #1. OK, so that was a personal side point. The main point is there is crazy good talent in this country and it shows up in their music.

And in their talking. Indonesians are into, and I mean really, into talking. God they can talk. and they love taking the longest possible way to say something. I guess most people in warm countries are like that. Work is slow, talking is fast. I mean it’s beautiful, but it’s like rocks shaking in a can, and after awhile you wanna say: what are you saying? It’s like singing sometimes. It’s all very pretty, and the people here, for the most part, value pretty. It’s cleaner than a lot of Asia. The day-to-day is nice. Their way of getting their point across is nice. Strong, but never angry. Not the easy going thing of the Buddhist countries (much more rat-a-tat in every way here) but still nobody gets mad. I really love that. Yet another reason to avoid the US.

One reason to avoid Indonesia though: the food. They are purposefully antagonistic to caring about good food. It’s white, tasteless,and nutritionless rice every single meal without fail, and then some other bowl of fried meat. Again and again and again. And it’s not that they don’t care. It’s not just that. It’s that their entire personality is devoted to not caring. Their ability to be oblivious to things like that, or, mainly to trash itself, the pure form of that thing which in all its adjectival ways are those things that serve as irritants to the traveler (i.e. the trashy aspect of your hotel room, your meal, all the decrepit, unclean, uncared for yet piled high obstacles to traveling) is amazing.

Take the Banda Islands, where I now am. It is the prettiest place on earth. The sea is as clear as air. There are more fish in the water than I have ever seen in my whole life. It is paradise. And there is more trash piled up, in the lagoons, floating in the Bay, than the Pacific Gyre. And it is not just that nobody cares. They literally cannot see it. They come from a land with the healthiest food and environment on earth and they almost to a person (no exceptions [click to continue…]