Jewel Song and I are on 91, just left Karme Choling (KCL). Its Monday about 2:20 and it's overcast but bright day, there has been a lot of rain the last week so it's vivid green everywhere…
i91 is one of the few interstates I enjoy driving. Goal is to get to spencertown in relaxed but efficient way, do laundry, recover energy from the program I coordinated - there were a lot of challenges, I'm quite exhausted. Then to embark on the itinerary I've been planning. Confirming places staying the next few days.
What about to not be from anywhere? This quality of wanting to pin something down behind the question. Tring to know someone by where they are from and your associations with that place, or if you don't know that place, that has its own feeling too. We're always trying to figure out our world and who is who or what they are, but if you don't have those reference points, how do you relate to people. Can you relate to them just as human beings? Feel who they are as you feel yourself to be? So there are conventional ways and I guess there are universal ways but we usually just rely on conventions of our native culture. Conventionally ssociating with a place, job, role, age, physical appearance, gender, particular group, teenagers, religion, political view. So I've taken away a handle that people can use to label me and so, I kind of think those labels are helpful to a degree. A person uses their previous experience to infer what you might be like - there is the curiosity aspect of I want to know you, and the small anxiety of your new-ness and uncertainty if you are a person they want to like.
What it comes down to is it's about orientation. This program I was coordinating was partly to learn a new way of practicing meditation that includes an aspect of becoming aware of feeling - what's happening in your mind & body so you have some orientation to who you are, what your mind is like in that moment, and what aspects of your environment are an important element of that. It's very much about orientation - having a clear view of where you are, what is reality, and what you are in that reality - how you are "being".
Mile 94
Rocky faces of shale with bright yellow flowers on long stems growing out of the rocks. Bursts of yellow rising from the rock crevices. I want to pull over to photograph them but there's no shoulder and we're at highway speed.
Mile 68
What I'm doing with my life now is re-orientation. There's a feeling of being a compass needle floating on the face trying to find magnetic north. I've left my job, left my home, and am embarking on something. I will be putting myself into a constant transition…the transition of going from place to place and trying to not become scattered but instead more focused. I know it's possible or I wouldn't have had the insistent intuition that this is what I wanted to do. But that's just the first part of what I'm trying to do. The first part is stepping away from everything thats been stable for me the last several years, but to tour. From stasis to movement. And then I'm expecting to land somewhere. Idea is to land at Karme Choling, because when I'm there, all the feedback from the environment, from how feel there, to how people in my world interrelate says this is where you belong, should be next. Or just should be, and there is no next next, it's just where I am at that point. Once that happens, there's not a lot of stillness at KCL - on the one hand, it's very quiet place relative to the city, nurturing environment ecologically, food, landscape culture. It's a place where if you need to be someplace in solitude it's possible to do that pretty easily. At the same time, it's a place of great transience because you have people coming and going for programs all the time. Just when you get used to someone being around, they leave. Not like a university where people are around for 4-10 years. The longest program at KCL is a 3-month institute. The people living there, the background society, constantly have to work with phenomena arising and dissolving: programs and people, and the moody weather. It's extremely powerful to learn how to work with that - for anyone. So I'm embarking on this series of free transitions, tastings, touring, to have no reference point but myself…and the car. Out of that I feel that something will arise that will be the magnetic north…and that will be the next phase of my life.
On Rte 11 west through VT. A few nice villages and smaller ski resorts arise and pass with the attendant funky restaurants. A friend has a t-shirt that says "Keep Vermont Weird". A nice week to be here - everything in bloom, huge 3' tall ferns, all the grasses are flowering, their tops different colors in white, red, tan, in a meadow you see subtle swaths of color. Rhododendron and azaleas all a flower in lavender, burgundy, pink. Lupines in dark purple with a single pink or white. Earth appears to be bursting with life. Rte 11 starting in Chester parallels a branch of the Williams river that even after all this rain still looks low, a lot of rocks. But you can see sections where (near O's road east of Tater Hill golf club for example) you see repaved where the river might have taken out the road during Irene. Mountains ahead capped in mist.
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| Bennington North, Obelisk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bennington_Battle_Monument |
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| Rte 7 south of Williamstown, MA, view of Mt Greylock to the SE. |
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| Entering Pittsfield on Rte 7. |
