Today I leave my home on Lake Atitlan and hit the road again. What has been my home since January has been packed away. I arrived at Lake Atitlan a year and a half ago with just a backpack of things—now I need a tuc-tuc to cart my things around (what’s next, a truck!). It…
Could we have entered the ocean in a crazier way? Yes. Sure, for what limits hath insanity but that which we impose upon it? Left to the imagination, we could have entered the ocean in a variety of less sane ways. We could have built a gunpowder fueled rocket painted blue and used it to…
In a past more prolific mode, I'd of been doing a lot more online sharing of the progress," The release of Jerry the Hamster." But life serves it's tacos with strange cosmic sauce, and sometimes you switch up your usual order. I've stopped trying explain of life. To drag my metaphor out, I have stopped…
My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Puttree taught me the most valuable and enduring lesson of all my years of school. She said, “If you had fun you won.”
I put that lesson deep in my heart and I never lost again. But I had a lot of fun. Had to. Didn’t want to lose.
Things were going really great. Life was suspiciously working out in such a wonderful way that I should of known something real shitty was around the bend. In the family of my new roommates, in the new house, in the new village, in my new office, we ate a delicious dahl dinner that Mario made.…
It’s the eve before a silent retreat. So no wonder I fall naturally back into this neglected habit of exploring thoughts and inner urgings with words. This year, still so fresh, has been unfathomably kind to me. My life has settled so seamlessly into a present that resembles decades of future dreaming. There seems little…
In November, in a cold country, a fresh snow fallen and the future a frolicking of ideas, I went to Amazon.com and decided I needed some things I didn’t REALLY need—but I desired each item with a celebratory feeling. One of these things was a small brass telescope. “Please can I have it!” I said…
“You may now use a laptop computer,” the stewardess’s voice announces. But I don’t anymore—a crazy thing for a writer, but I’ve settled into a life without it since my neck went out two years ago. That changed everything. Pain is this brilliant teacher—unremitting, consistent, and unrelenting. “Pain is your best friend,” a monk told…
When people in Australia tell me about places I should visit, my first question is, “Can you get there by car?” The look I get back when I ask this is a look I’ve seen before. In Mexico, it is the who-is-this-stupid-gringo look. In Thailand, it is who-is-this-crazy-farang look. And here in Australia, it…
Encounter With a Sea Warrior In the 70s, the local Papua New Guineans called him The Sea Warrior for his fondness of swimming 20k across the ocean. “Any white guy who did anything outstanding was a warrior in that thing,” he says. I tell him that I am the chai latte warrior. We meet in…
