Seeing Clearly

I just bought my first pair of reading glasses a couple of days ago.

It was a slow process of realizing that I needed reading glasses. It started with not being able to read bills at dimly lit restaurants. Then it proceeded to moving reading material closer and farther from my face to get a good focus on the words. I even started having a hard time reading the numbers to the combination lock on the gate to our land. It was time.

Kim and I were in Longs Drug Store shopping for some things to get rid of the cockroaches that have been skittering around our place. I was in Honolulu all last week to visit with my dad and to help my mom with a few things. One sleepless night while I was away, Kim kept hearing those critters run on the beams above our bed. It can get incredibly quiet up on the land at night and so the sound of the running of the roaches was definitely amplified. It freaked Kim out. It would have freaked me out too. We're trying to balance our tree-hugging ways with our total disgust of the gigantic B-52s. So besides getting a couple of packs of chemically laden Combat roach traps, we are concocting a mixture of baking soda and sugar. We are supposed to spread the mixture on different locations around the cabin. Supposedly the roaches cannot resist the sugar, but eating the baking soda will dehydrate them. Also we will be spreading around bay leaves, which are supposed to be absolutely repugnant to the six legged fiends.

So while in Longs we decide that it is time for me to get some reading glasses. There were a whole array to choose from, everything from old fuddy duddy to über cool. We paid a little more for a pair that fell on the über cool end of the spectrum. Hey, I'm only 40 and it actually makes wearing the glasses fun.

My week in Honolulu was filled with epiphanies and moments of tremendous gratitude. I was there to visit my dad, who had been admitted into a nursing facility over the Christmas Holiday, and to help my mom work through some of the decisions that need to be made.

About six years ago, my dad had a stroke that paralyzed his left side and made him wheel chair bound. Recently, he's been losing some of his strength and it's been harder and harder for my mother to take care of him by herself. Having my dad at home became really a safety issue for both my parents. So, now he's in a facility with around the clock support from a professional staff.

It's an awakening to see the body temple slowing down. Our physical bodies are our chosen vehicles that transport our souls around this third dimension experience. Everyday when I went see my dad, I saw people whose body temples were definitely slowing down. Witnessing that made me really realize that all of our bodies are on a gradual slow down. It is one of those inescapable things about being a participant in this temporal world. Our Life Force and Spirit are eternal, but our bodies are not. From this experience, my inner guidance posed the question, "Are you fully enjoying your body temple?"

Am I? I asked myself. Am I fully present in my body? Do I take every opportunity to dance and sing and move this wondrous vehicle around? Do I appreciate every pore that opens up and drizzles cooling perspiration on my skin? Do I let the sun bathe me and the rain replinish me? Am I savoring the flavors of food and drinks I put into my body? Do I take the time to smell all the amazing fragrances that surround me? Do I listen to soothing sounds or music that excites me? Do I allow my body to be intimate enough? Do I adorn my body with beautiful things? Some may say that this last question borders on vanity. But I want to draw the distinct line between vanity and appreciation. Vanity is when you are adorning yourself with lavish things to fill an emptiness or void in your being. Appreciation of the body, on the other hand, will lead you to embrace and be present with your soul's vehicle. So wear beautiful things and scent your body with wonderful smells and enjoy your temple.

Here's a suggestion--If you are ever presented an opportunity to stand naked in the rain, do it. It is so liberating and it will make your body feel alive. Don't, however, do it if it puts you in jeopardy of a possible public decency arrest. If you really want to do it, and you need a private place, let us know. You can come up to our land. Our nearest neighbor is about a mile away and we usually have quite a bit of rain.

Here's something I came across which may help you enjoy your time in this third dimension--

Apache Blessing:

May the sun
bring you new energy by day,
may the moon
restore you by night,
may the rain
wash away your worries,
may the breeze
blow new strength into your being.
May you walk
gently through the
world and know its
beauty all the days of your life.

And so it is.

Energy

We live in an infinitely abundant Universe and yet things seem to be appearing in finite amounts.

The other morning I was cooking breakfast and just as I was finishing Bodhi's egg the propane tank runs out of gas. Lucky for Kim and I coffee was already made. The water tank has been between low and empty with all the dry weather we've been having and I'm also keenly aware of when our 12 volt battery needs a break to let the solar panels recharge it.

After the gas sputtered out on us at breakfast, two thoughts ran through my mind. First, was that I should have had the spare tank filled. Second was the burning question of why, in an infinitely abundant Universe, do we experience things in finite amounts?

I posed the question to Kim and she had a good sense about it. She said that, by living the way we do, we are actually more conscious of our role as co-creators of the Universe's abundance. When the gas runs out, we know we have the energy and resources to get more gas. When the water runs dry, we know we have access to more of it from different sources. We have been able to tune in our senses to see abundance all around us, not just in places that we've looked before. Knowing that the water tank was running low, we began collecting the water from the melted ice in the cooler and using that to wash the dishes-- cold but effective.

We've become very conscious of how things flow into our lives and that has been a gift. It's very easy to get complacent and lack an appreciation for the bounty of the Universe if it flows in seemingly infinite amounts into our lives. In our modern world, water, electricity, and gas flow effortlessly into our homes and the only indicator of how much wonderfulness has come into our life is monthly paper statements we get in the mail. We should all be continually amazed at turning on a switch and seeing a dark place lighten up. We should all feel so blessed to stand under a warm shower and feel our bodies and spirits washed clean. We should all be so grateful to be able to cook a hot nourishing meal.

Karen added some clarity when I asked her the burning question about living in an abundant Universe and experiencing things in finite amounts. She said it's all energy. Energy takes on different forms that may be finite. The chair is energy, the floor is energy, the fan is energy, it's all energy, everything is energy.

The comedian Louis CK did a wonderfully entertaining and thought provoking interview on the Conan O'Brien Show a few months ago. It really talks about appreciating this amazing world we live in. If you haven't seen it, it's really worth a look on youtube. Here's the link--http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOzNrO54xsY

The energy is always flowing and that is infinite abundance that we all have access to. So the key is for us to have an appreciation for all this energy that surrounds us and to have a conscious awareness that we are the co-creators of how it appears in finite form in our lives.

Flowing

The water tank has been empty for the last couple of days with no rain in sight.

We've been able to get by with bringing up county water in seven gallon containers and spending the weekend at Karen's. Running low on water is not dire for us, it's more inconvenient than anything else. It's actually been pretty nice to dry out a bit on the land. A couple of days ago the trade winds returned and blew out the vog that has been hanging around, the sky was clear with a few wispy clouds.

It's getting pretty close to Kim and I needing to build another compost heap for our humanure. Jim suggested that we build it next to an avocado tree growing on the land. That way, even if we don't do anything with the compost we create, it'll slowly feed nutrients to the avocado tree for years. Good idea.

The saw dust toilets continue to serve us well. Bodhi sometimes asks us why we don't have a water toilet, but for him the system seems pretty normal. A few weeks back we ran out of saw dust and we knew that it would be a few days before we would be able to get to the mill to get more, so the substitute we used was grass from the lawn. I grabbed a five gallon bucket and a rake and gathered up as much cut grass as I could. The grass was a nice substitute. It had been cut a few days earlier so it was all dried up, but I gathered it in the morning so it was covered with dew to add some moisture to hold down smells. After doing our business, we would just grab a handful of grass and cover up our stuff. One night when Kim was sitting and doing her thing, a very familiar, "KOH-KI!" comes from inside of the five gallon toilet bucket. She gets up and grabs a flashlight to see what was going on. Sitting on top the mound of grass was a brown frog. The light caught his eyes and he dove deeper into the toilet. What we surmised is that the coqui frog must have been in the grass I raked up. No one was going to dig in and try to find the frog, and Kim couldn't muster it up to use the toilet with the little guy in there. Lucky for us, we have a bucket set up downstairs as well. We actually have more toilets at the cabin than we did at our cottage in Honolulu. I never heard the coqui in the toilet, but the next morning I took off the toilet seat on the bucket and lidded it up. It has since been dumped into the compost heap. Maybe he's living out his life in the heap or maybe our collected human waste was too much for him.

After almost five months out on the land, I'm still so grateful for the experiences that living off the grid has brought to me. It's little things like hearing a coqui in your toilet that make me think, "Wow! How cool is that?" If I had a regular flush toilet I wouldn't have such a fun story to tell. Although, I have heard stories of people coming home and finding a huge rat sitting on the toilet seat just hanging out. Now that would freak me out to no end.

During this past Christmas Season, Kim was on a rush to finish some DVDs she made. She would be working on our laptop for hours and our 12 volt battery would start to run out, so she would run off of the computer battery and that would run out. I ended up running an extension cord from our car battery to the laptop so we could charge it up. In the meantime our rechargeable lamps started to lose steam, so we worked in the dark with only a few flashlights. It's fun to think back to that night and the scramble to get our projects done.

So we're building a little bit of resilience out on the land and some of it has been a lot of fun. I think of the lesson of the flowing stream. The lesson goes that when the water flows and it hits an obstacle, it simply finds a way around or over it and continues on it's way. There is a good World War II story about a Tokyo University Professor after the bombing of Tokyo. His home was completely destroyed. As he walked through the ruins, he could pick out different areas of what used to be his house. There were charred remnants of the rare books and scholarly works he had collected over the years. Amidst all of this devastation, he reached down and picked up a handful of ash, "This," he said to his wife, "will make fine tooth powder."

The power to move on.

We'll make it through this drought and have fun doing it. Life flows and so do we.

Trust

Kim and I worked on refinishing Lois' teak table and chairs. We're hoping that this effort finally gets rid of the mold situation. It's been a two day process of bleaching the surface of the table and chairs, working some steel wool over the surfaces, and then getting some tung oil on the pieces. The project has been a real big lesson in following one's intuition.

Yesterday we finished the bleaching and steel wool scouring part and planned on letting the tables fully dry over night. Just before bed, Kim asks me if we should cover the table to keep any moisture off. I tell her I didn't think we needed to do it and that actually putting something like a towel over the pieces will actually get them wetter if the towels get wet from the evening moisture. We wake up this morning to find the table, chairs and extension sleeves wet with dew. A swing and a miss--strike one for me. Kim calls my cousin, a woodworker, and he tells her, "Yes you should have covered all of it."

We let all the pieces dry in the morning sun and did a fast work over with some steel wool. Luckily, the wood didn't swell up from the moisture. The next phase was putting on the tung oil. Simple enough, I thought. Kim asks me, "Do you think we should work on the sleeves first? Just in case we make a mistake, it's not a major part of the table."

"Nah! Let's just do the table first." I read the can of tung oil and it seemed pretty easy.
1. Apply a generous coat of tung oil.
2. In 5 to 10 minutes buff the surface with a lint free cloth.
How simple is that? The tung oil went on so smoothly leaving a shiny gloss on the surface of the table. I could feel the satisfaction of a real woodworker making dry, thirsty wood come to life. Our rookie mistake was that we were working out in the sun and the tung oil began to dry faster than the 5 to 10 minutes recommended on the can. So, when we started buffing the surface the tung oil gummed up on us, leaving little lumpy areas on certain spots. A swing and a miss--strike two. The lumps can only be seen when you look at the table in certain angles, but they are there. Had we listened to Kim's sense about things, we possibly would have made the mistakes on the sleeves and perfected our technique by the time we got the table. Now, the table looks pretty good with just a couple of small lumpy spots, while the sleeves and the chairs look really great.

Sometimes it is really difficult to trust that inner gut feeling you have about something. Kim is very intuitive and generally follows her inner voice, but with something we had both never done before and with items as precious as Lois' furniture, it was easy to disregard that inner inkling and search for an outside voice.

Lately, I've been wanting to hear the booming voice of God give me directions as to where to go and what to do. Or I've had a desire to sit with a psychic who can see a broader perspective of my life and have him tell me what to do. These are all symptoms of a lack of trust in my own inner voice. I'm looking for authority outside myself. The only way an individual can have true authentic action in his life is by trusting his own guidance system and acting from that place. Everything else is just reacting to outside stimuli.

Today, before we started working on the furniture, Kim and I had a re-birthing session. We are both trained practitioners in this form of breath work therapy. Basically, it is using the breath to release any area of your life that needs to be surrendered. I did the session on Kim with the intent on releasing fear and worry and gaining clarity. Boy did she gain clarity. While in the session, she had a very clear vision of what we need to do with the land. It washed over her, along with a feeling of peace and serenity. She came out of the meditation with a very calm but energized look on her face. It was very exciting to see.

So how do you trust that still inner voice within? It's a continual process of surrender, surrender, surrender.

Coming Home

Kim and I spent some time walking our land yesterday. It takes us about ten minutes to walk from Jim's cabin to our house site. The trail has gotten a little grown over in the two months since we last visited. Seeing our land is so inspiring. As we looked out from where our house will be, we began to visualize ourselves living there. Kim could see herself coming out onto our deck with a cup of coffee, seeing the tall Norfolk Pines that border our property and the majestic ‘Ohia that surround us. I could see Bodhi running around in a future lawn area with some of his friends. Hawks screeched over head, the breezes blew gently, and the sun shone bright.

Being out on our land was a very soothing balm for us. It had been quite a few days since we had been up at the cabin in general. Most of the Holidays were spent away. Kim actually joked with me that after spending six days on O‘ahu, the Christmas weekend at Karen's in Hilo and the New Year's weekend at Jen and Renato's in Sea View, her toe nails were actually clean. Some of the ruggedness washed away as we got used to hot showers, refrigeration, and lights that go on when you flick a switch on the wall.

Sea View in Kalapana is like la la land. There are quiet streets with friendly children bicycling freely around the neighborhood. Neighbors come around to say "hi" as they walk the streets with cups of espresso steaming in the morning chill. There is a definite cool, artsy, hippie vibe there that we like. At certain points during the weekend Kim and I did silent calculations in our heads to see if we could sell our acreage in Kurtistown and buy a small plot in Sea View where electricity flows into the homes and the streets are paved.

We drove away from the weekend questioning who we are and what we are doing with ourselves. It was going back to understanding how we define ourselves. Would Sea View be a good fit for us? What we realized was that part of the appeal for Sea View is that it is an established and defined community that we could simply move into and have a life. This is in contrast to our raw acreage that sits like a block of clay waiting to be crafted into something wonderful. There have been times recently that Kim and I have just felt so overwhelmed with this perceived mountain that stands before us waiting to be traversed.

Sitting on our land the other day helped to energize and recommit us to our Journey. For all of its charm and beauty, Sea View, was the seductive Sirens beckoning us to stay a while.

The potential of what we can do with our acreage is what keeps us rooted to where we are. Imagine with me a beautiful green ‘ohia forest with organic farming, chickens and goats, housing units for WOOFERS (Workers on Organic Farms), a meditation center, and room for Bodhi to run free. It's all there for us. The question is how committed can Kim and I be to defining our own lives.

Carl Jung once wrote, "Your vision will become clear when you can look into your heart. Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes." When we look into our hearts and allay all fear we know we need to be out on the land.

Over the Holidays, we got to see "Polar Express" on video at Karen's. At the tail end of the movie the train conductor had this message for the young protagonist, "One thing about trains: It doesn't matter where they're going. What matters is deciding to get on."

All Aboard! The 2010 Express is heading out and life is happening on it! Dr. Howard Thurman has this helpful advice, "Don't worry about what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."

Blessings and Aliveness for 2010.