No Yesterdays

William Least Heat-Moon turned 70 years old yesterday. He wrote Blue Highways: A Journey into America in 1982, an account of his travels on the back roads of the USA.

Heat-Moon began his journey after he lost his job and his wife of 11 years left him. He decided to take to the open road and "live the real jeopardy of circumstance."

Over the course of three months, he traveled 13,000 miles around the United States. In comparison, I have been traveling since August 2008 and have put about 12,000 miles on Michelle.

Heat-Moon said, "When you're traveling, you are what you are, right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."

He's so right.

This Is the Best Part of Your Life

I'm hot and sweaty from packing for the cruise so Susan Werner's poetry will suffice today. I not only couldn't have said it better, I couldn't have said it nearly so well.

Stay in the Present.

It's the Now Again

The high note is not the only thing.
- Placido Domingo

If you're reading this on Facebook, I've included the Daily Peace Quote above, there being no sidebar on FB, because the wise words of P. Domingo are the text for today's "homilita" (that's Spanglish).

When I began my journey of discovery a year ago this month, I decided I would blog for all those folks who kept saying, "Now you keep in touch, y' hear." (That's how they talk in North Carolina, after which they say, "C'mere and let me hug yer neck.") I finally summoned the nerve to write my first post in September. It contained, among other random yet oh, so interesting ruminations, the question of what I would do to make the world a better place while enjoying the selfish pleasures of retirement.

Here's the simple truth about that: making the world a better place is not only about the world, it's about me and what I need to feel good about myself. Because making the world a better place comes with recognition for my accomplishment and for me, Recognition=Contentment.

What I have learned, with the help of Eckhart Tolle, is that learning to be in the Present is the greatest accomplishment of my life, and that that alone will help the world more than all the committees, marches, drives, campaigns, donations of time and talent, petitions, solicitations, letters and phone calls combined. And what's more, I don't need to be recognized by anyone but myself in order to be contented. If you don't believe me, read A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, and try it for yourself. Or ask Oprah.

By the way, Eckhart has a new TV series you can subscribe to online (for a fee) at http://www.eckharttolletv.com/. If you have never seen or heard him, you may be surprised by this little beige, unprepossessing man with the British/German accent and the subtle sense of humor. He lives near here, in fact, in Vancouver, BC. Here's a little YouTube sample for you to try: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwr4zCuEmw0, which is taken from a PBS show and is introduced by two women who set it up for you.

Singer/songwriter Bill Staines reiterates what Mr. Domingo says:

All God's critters got a place in the choir
Some sing low, some sing higher
Some sing out loud on the telephone wire
And some just clap their hands, or paws
Or anything they got.

What is the sound of one bee clapping?

Are You Aware? Yes, You Are!

Awareness is our true self; it's what we are. So we don't have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our judgments. We're either in awareness, which is our natural state, or we're doing something else.- Joko Beck

Do you subscribe to the Daily Peace Quote? Oh, you must. The address is http://www.livingcompassion.org/. Every day you will receive a wonderful quote, some more wonderful than others, like the one above. I have a special folder in my "saved" emails for the ones that really hit me between the eyes, and I go back and look at them now and then. Sometimes I use one for the signature line on my email. My current email signature is a quote from that old curmudgeon H. L. Mencken: We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

But let's get back to Joko Beck, whose full name is Charlotte Joko Beck (born 1917 and still living, in Prescott, AZ), who is a Zen teacher and the author of the books Everyday Zen: Love and Work and Nothing Special: Living Zen. Once again we are told that we already have within us everything we need in order to be fully conscious, fully present as Eckhart says. All we have to do is stop thinking about everything else and there it is: inner peace.

I had an opportunity to practice today while doing my volunteer assignment. Second Harvest is getting ready to do a Hunger Survey to find out more about their clients, the people who are served by the 200 agencies who help Second Harvest distribute food. As an incentive for the clients to complete the multi-page survey, each one will be given a $15 VISA card. My job was to open the 500 envelopes containing the cards, detach the cards from the printed material, recycle the paper and reinsert the cards into the envelopes in number order. It took nearly four hours, and I did it by myself, with no one around to talk to, not even a radio playing to relieve the tedium. I thought, what a great opportunity: four hours with nothing to think about. It wasn't the same as painting furniture or drawing (two things that never fail to engage me so fully that I forget to eat) but, amazingly, I was able to focus on the task and not think about what I would do afterward, or what I did earlier, or where I would go to dump the holding tanks in the RV, buy gasoline, do laundry and get a shower (which are the things that have been on my mind lately).

Later I went to the warehouse to help with food packing and came upon a group of adults from The Arc, the organization formerly known as ARC (Association for Retarded Citizens). They were packing "backpacks," which are bags of food for kids to take home from school on the weekends.

The bags include non-perishable, ready-to-eat foods such as Spaghetti-Os, pudding, snack crackers, fruit cocktail, etc., and they go home with children who usually get their daily breakfast and lunch at school through the free/reduced-price meal program. I have been aware of the school program for years, having worked in a school district where 50% of the kids are served by it, but I never stopped to think what those children ate on the weekends.

Anyway, here were these developmentally disabled adults packing bags of food, and I thought to myself that if anyone is probably conscious most of the time, it might be these people. They certainly seem to be living in the moment.

So I've had many reminders today that I have within me the ability to be at peace any time I choose to be. Incredible, isn't it? And if I can do it, you can do it. And everyone else can do it, too, all over the world. Stop thinking. Do it now.

What, Me Worry?

Remember Alfred E. Neuman from MAD Magazine? Heck, maybe you still read the rag that taught Roger Ebert how to be a movie critic (according to Ebert). My siblings and I used to have a blast reading MAD and sometimes making up our own mini-skits loosely based on something we read. That was around 1963 and MAD had already been in publication for nine years.

I don't know how or when I became a subscriber to Alfred E. Neuman's famous philosophy: "What, me worry?" The implication in Neuman's case was that he was too simple-minded to worry. Clearly, anyone with "a lick o' sense" would realize that the world is a horrible place and we need to be very afraid, every day in every way.

And so it follows that if we need to be afraid we also need to worry about all those things we are afraid of: everything from global warming, fluoridation of the water supply (I watched "Dr. Strangelove" again the other night), terrorists and burglars, to what might happen if we don't get that raise, or worse, what might happen if we get laid off, or lose all the money in our 401K. Then there are our children to worry about, and our significant others, or our lack of children and significant others. One of the Monty Python crew sings about being "worried about the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow" Airport.

Last week my daughter, my grandson and I were in the car when I heard Austin pipe up from the back seat, "Nanny, did you know there's going to be a flash flood? I heard it on the news." My daughter sort of laughed it off but I know my grandson, so I asked him point blank if he was worried and he said he was. I explained how his Chunns Cove neighborhood was about as safe a place from flash floods as anywhere in the county but I knew he wasn't convinced.

You see, Austin is a global worrier, a term I first heard from a previous boss who applied it to his ADHD son (Austin is also afflicted with the condition). People who are globally afraid must have very active imaginations because they worry about things like tall buildings falling down, events they have neither experienced nor even seen on television, and over which they have absolutely no control.

I know where Austin got it: from his mother. I once said to my teen-aged daughter, "I don't know how I got such a worried child: I never worry." She answered, "I know, that's why I have to worry for both of us."

One of the best definitions of worry I have heard is "negative goal-setting." Eckhart Tolle says that worrying is the ego's way of keeping us thinking about what might happen in the future rather than being fully present, in the Now, when everything is always perfect.

While eating my breakfast today in the RV, I happened to glance out the window and saw a chipmunk picking up some of the acorns that have bombarded me since I arrived in my friend's backyard a few weeks ago (thankfully, they have mostly stopped falling). What a cute little feller, no more than five inches long from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail. He scurried around, picked the acorn he wanted and stuffed it into his cheek. Then he stuffed another one in the other cheek. These acorns are large, about an inch long, so you can imagine what his little face looked like with two of them shoved into his little cheeks. Then he picked up another to carry with his front teeth and he ran off. A moment later he was back, minus the three acorns, and the process began again. Then another chipmunk ran onto the scene so I immediately dubbed the pair Chip and Dale after the Disney cartoon characters who used to harass Donald Duck with their nut gathering.

These two chipmunks never worry. They just do what has to be done to prepare for hard times. They never sit around thinking about what might happen if they don't pick up enough acorns. Sure, I realize they don't know any better; they don't have the capacity for thought and reason we humans have. But we would do well to take a page from their book. If there is something you can do to prevent whatever it is that worries you, do it. If it is beyond your control, don't think about it any more. Go out and pick up acorns, or rake leaves, and focus on the activity at hand, right now, in the moment. It's all there really is.