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I’ve reached a waypoint on my journey where it’s time to meditate and reflect and then set course for the next waypoint. This is a journey, an adventure. And that is the key to understanding how all that I do fits in with my life structure.

just enjoying the moment…

everyone is special…

I took the kayak out for it’s maiden voyage yesterday (well maiden for me anyway). I can see it’s going to take some time for us to get used to each other. In my previous post, I talked about access rights to the rivers, well we decided to forgo bothering with access right on this occaision, the thought being, “what the hell are they going to do? Make us get out of the river and walk?” As fortune would have it, we didn’t encounter any opposition and had a rather peaceful time on the River Avon.

After 3 weeks on the trot in Scotland, it’s nice to have a little break. Well I say break, i’m still working, but at a more leisurely pace. Like today, I worked out for about 2.5 hours (Tai Chi, Boxing, and a 3.5 mile run). I was suppose to have a mentoring meeting with a young business owner who is sponsored by the Prince’s Trust. The lady from the Prince’s Trust showed up, but unfortunately my prospective new mentoree didn’t show. Apparently she forgot about our meeting. Not to worry. I called my French friend and went to meet her for a coffee and a chat. The conversation, as usual, went all over the shop. We talked about politics, war, religion, and the search for ultimate truth. Nice stimulating conversation to get me warmed up for lunch.

I stopped by another friend’s house to pick up a CD with some unedited film footage of the crew of which I’ll spend some time this week editing into a documentary on their epic adventure of rowing across the Atlantic. I interviewed the crew a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully I got some good footage.

And then it was back home to do some mundane stuff like drop my suit off at the cleaners (I rarely wear a suit anymore), deposit some checks (always a good thing) and buy some fruit (gotta stay healthy).

I finally got around to doing some “proper” work at about 2pm. I had to balance the books and send out a couple of invoices (also a good thing).

I’ve decided to have a go at keeping a video diary to augment my LJ action. Perhaps I might be able to string that into something useful.

I’ve been having this internal debate about whether to buy a Land Rover Defender 90 or not. I’ve been talking about getting one almost since I came to England, but each time I’ve talked myself out of it mainly because the price of fuel here is insane. But now with the new addition of a kayak, plus my mountain bike, and climbing gear etc I’m thinking my lifestyle is more conducive to a Land Rover than a Ford Escort. But then again, I commute like a madman all over the country. Ah but, I could start using public transport more, which could keep my fuel costs down, and help save the environment…Hmmm

At any rate, I’m off to view/test drive some Defenders tomorrow…

peace

WOW! Times has a sneaky way of passing by. I’ve spent the last three weeks in Aviemore, Scotland surrounded by the beautiful Cairngorm Mountains. Unfortunately it was not a trip of leisure. I was working with a client helping them get their call center staff trained up to handle calls for a new client they picked up. I found myself in more of a project management role then a training role, but I had fun never the less. I’d like to visit Aviemore again, but with my mountain bike and kayak. There’s some great looking trails and lochs in the area, and Ben Nevis is only about 45 minutes away.

Speaking of kayak, I just picked up my new kayak today. I’m itching to get the thing in the water, so tomorrow I think I’ll spend the afternoon getting acquainted with her on the River Avon. One disturbing thing I learned to today about Britain is that the rivers are privately own and for the most part the owners don’t seem that accomadating of kayakers or canoers. For instnce, in Wales, there are over 300 rivers and only 6 have partial public access. It’s incidences like these that make me miss the wide open freedom we enjoy in the States. Oh well.

Yes, yes, I’m still around. I’ve been busy (but who isn’t busy right?). At the moment I’m on a contract up in the highlands of Scotland in a little mountain village called Aviemore. I’ve been keeping notes in my paper notebook, so perhaps when I’m finished here I’ll spend sometime digesting my experiences and then post them.

I’ve been stuck inside an office building for over 10 weeks with little time to get outside and play in the great outdoors. I’ve had just about enough! Today, I drove down to the Sea, my second spiritual home after the mountains, and spent some time meditating to the crash of the waves. As always, I left rejuvinated, but only just. I’m in dire need of another epic adventure. I’ve been sitting on my ass home bound for far to long now. If I don’t push the boundaries of my limits soon, I will go insane. Without an adventure to focus my mind, I start to do stupid things and push myself in destructive ways. It’s time to dust off the gear and get back outside where I belong.

The gears are shifting. I am unsure where the ride will take me next. The question is can I control the destination or is control an exercise in futility, an illusion designed to give the perception of control, when in reality we have no control. I have lived a lifetime of seemingly no control and I have loved nearly every minute of it. I like it when I’m pushing right up to edge. Reminds me of a Van Halen lyric:

You know I’ve been to edge
And I stood look down
I lost a lot friends there baby
Got no time to mess around

So where has Clay been? Nowhere but inside my own head. It’s a dangerous place indeed.

3 March 2005

I’ve found the key to thing I’ve been searching for – the elusive goal. I’ve known this thing in the past, but have not known it enough to name it, only to experience it. In fact, it is nameless. People have tried to name – I have tried to name it, but labelling it only negates it. And now I have run across it again in a passage from the Inner Game of Tennis:

The Inner Game is the moment-by moment effort to let go and to stay centred in the here-and-now action which offers the real winning and losing, and this game never ends. The Inner Game frees the player from concern about the fruits of victory; he becomes devoted only to the goal of self-knowledge, to the exploration of his true nature as it reveals itself on level after level.

In the true nature and style of Zen, this concept is best understood in the manifestation of the physical. For example Zen and the Art of Archery, Zen and the Art of breathing, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zen and the Art of Flower Arrangement etc. As Miyamoto Musashi said: “To learn one thing is to learn ten thousand things.”

” Before enlightenment – chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment – chop wood, carry water.” — Zen Buddhist Saying

I bought a heart rate monitor yesterday. I hemmed and hawed for a few days trying to decide which model to buy. There are some many different models each with a ton of features and it seems that no one HR monitor, apart from the super expensive ones, has all the right features I desired. At first I though the F6 was the model. It seemed to have everything I wanted. In reality, all I should have really needed was one that measured my heart rate. Wasn’t that the point? Anyway, I then saw the F11 which was a few bob more, but contained a few more features I felt might be useful. Ah, but then I saw the S625 which has a GPS unit in it and can therefore tell me how far and what rate I run. Now that would be a handy feature because quite often, I go out for a run and only have an estimated distance in my head, plus I spend a lot of time working away from home base and so planning a route in a foreign place is not always feasible beforehand. The trouble with the S625 is that it costs £208!!! I just couldn’t justify spending that kind of money on a watch that measures your heart rate.

In the end, I decided to buy the F11. Now I had to decide where to buy the thing. JJB sports wanted £99, a shop on the internet wanted, £83.95. As always, I wanted the HR monitor right then and didn’t want to wait a week of more for it to come through the post, after all I have training to do. So I had resigned myself to forking out the extra cash and buying it from JJB. But low and behold, as I was driving by the Southam Leisure Centre, I had a sudden urge to go inside and see if by some chance they sold them. I did a quick u-turn, ran inside, and sure enough they did sell them, and for cheaper than any of the other places. They wanted only £75 for it. Bargain. In the transaction, I did get to see that the unit cost is £59. So JJB Sports is making a mint on theirs.

Anyway I have myself a heart rate monitor and I’m happy with the purchase so far. I measured my fitness level and it turns out I’m only moderately fit with an OwnIndex of 43. The OwnIndex is apparently equivalent to VO2max which is a measure of aerobic fitness.

Later today I’ll get to train with the F11 and see whether I’ve been training to hard or if I’ve been dogging it.

Talk about meeting interesting people…last night I went out with the team I’m working with for a meal and a few drinks. After they all called it an evening, I started wandering back to the little hole in the wall of a hotel I was staying in, which apparently is in one the worst areas of Derby. I couldn’t face hanging out in the room waiting to fall asleep, so I rang one of the other consultants who is working on the project and I knew to be a bit of a gambler. Sure enough, he was in the casino. He told me to come on over and have him paged and he’d sign me in. So that’s what I did.

As we were sitting at the bar, An older guy, white hair, black suit, comes over. Pat (my consultant friend) starts chatting with this guy, you know, the usually stuff, “how this one, how’s that one.” I assumed it was a mate of Pat’s who lived in Derby and that they were catching up on things. Pat then introduces me to him. His name is Dez. We start talking. “Where are from in the States?” New Jersey. “I know New Jersey. I’ve spent a lot of time there.” Atlantic City. “Yeah, and other places.” We banter on like that for a while. We discovered that we’d both been to Boston and I tell him about the time me and some friends broke into someone’s house (someone we knew and knew they were away) to watch football and drink beer from the keg we’d “acquired”. We were kids, all under aged drinkers, and needed some place to drink this thing and not get caught.

Anyway, he tells me about his dad and the time they were in Boston how they drove where they weren’t suppose to be driving and had all these people pissed off at them. We chuckle at bit. Then Dez calls his dad over and introduces me to him. We exchange a few words and then his dad grabs a pint and heads to the end of the bar. a few feet away. Dez and I continue to talk. I tell him I like dog racing. He says he’ll arrange a night out for me at the Nottingham track, dinner and all. I tell him I’m into adventure racing and mountain biking. He disappears for a moment and comes back with, and introduces me to, an elite class downhill mountain biker. Dez says, “you have to have contacts, you never know what’ll happen.” I chat to the downhill mountain biker. He’s raced all over Europe and some in the States. It turns out we’ve both been to Morzine in France and we exchange stories about the mountains there. We chat for a little while longer and then mountain bike man nips off to go back to gambling.

Dez and I start talking again. I tell him I’m looking for a female team-mate to race with us in April. He disappears again and returns with a fit looking female. It turns out she’s a fitness freak and likes the idea of adventure racing and wouldn’t mind giving it a go. I tell Dez about Ascent. He says, “Call Richard Branson. He’s into those things.” It’s about this time that I start to think that Dez is my genie in a bottle. I ask. He conjures it up. Dez sees that I’m married. “How far are you from Wolverhampton?” 45 minutes. “Good. I own a fantastic Greek restaurant there. You bring your wife, have a meal, all on the house.”

The hours pass and Dez finally disappears back into the casino. Pat leans over and tells me who Dez is.

The last scene in my dream I remember is looking in a closet. The closet floor was covered with clothes, jackets, boxes, and a lot of other miscellaneous items. A green raincoat caught my eye because I thought it was my Gortex jacket. I pulled this green raincoat from underneath the pile of junk only to discover that it wasn’t my Gortex jacket. In fact when I looked up I saw my Gortex hanging up on a hanger. I found in the corner of the closet an old bad of crisp that had been left there opened and with crisp still inside. The crisps were molded so I decided to through the bag in the trash. Well on my way to the trash bin, the bag starts to move. Low and behold, there’s a mouse in the bag. He pokes his little head out to see what’s going on. Well I didn’t want him in the house for fear that more mice would come. I opened the back door and attempted to throw him out. Only he just fell out of the bag onto the porch, so I tried to kill him by throwing heavy items at him. I missed. The mouse, in a frantic attempt to escape my flying objects, fell into the little pond we had beside the porch and started to swim away. But he didn’t get far as one of the frogs in the pond saw him as meal and went straight for him. The mouse started climbing up the side wall out of the pond, but the frog was quick to zap him with his sticky tongue and yank the mouse back down onto a ledge. The frog jumped out of the water and onto the ledge to finish the job. He managed to swallow the mouse.

I must be undergoing phase change as I’m feeling a bit emotionally detached, unable to hold on to a concrete feeling. My rational mind, of course, has moved in to fill the void. Being more in tune with my emotions/intuition/spirit than my intellect, this is causing me some difficulty because my rational mind likes to analyze things and look for opportunities to say why this or that is not working. Whereas my feeling mind looks at the same situation and says no problem, there’s nothing that a little energy and enthusiasm can’t solve; let’s get to it.

I had an odd thought while washing the spaghetti stained dishes at midnight. I was thinking about the various ways folks in the business I’m in go about marketing themselves and I thought in a lot of cases, well in most cases, they/we parade ourselves around like cheap tarts on a red light street. We mangle the truth.

On the other hand, artists, poets and writers (creative) are committed to the truth and are willing to starve to death in order to maintain the truth and their commitment to telling the truth through their art. I’m reminded of one of Bono’s lyrics, “All I have is a red guitar, three cords, and the truth.”

I sold out a long time ago. I abandoned my search for the truth in order to consume the intoxications of adventure, treasure, and the fairer sex.

The end of a long work week has finally arrived. I decided to entertain the team today by eating a live worm for every piece of product they sold. I swear I can still feel the worms squirming around in my belly.

I’ve been away from my fictional world for a few days. I started redesigning my website and got caught up in the excitement of making some forward progress or should I say some visible forward progress. The fruits of my labor were immediately perceived. Whereas, my fiction seems to be a lot of agonizing over even the smallest of words and the smallest of choices and hours go by and all I have to show for it is a dubious 700 words which I probably won’t use. I suppose that’s the reality of writing fiction, especially long fiction where the end can seem an eternity away. Still I’m not disheartened by it. I can ride the wave of the emotional high I’m feeling from accomplishing some of my other tasks.

Slaying Dragons…I’ll have to work that into the title of one of my books. I like the metaphor of slaying dragons, where the dragon represents some obstacle or problem one has to face. I’ve been wearing my ST Michael’s pendant. It’s a special pendant, one forged specifically for airborne soldiers as ST Michael is the patron saint of paratroopers. On this particular pendant, he’s jumping from the sky, along with other paratroopers, to slay the dragon.

I’m touching places in the depths of my soul that i haven’t touched in a long long time…and it feels good, good to be alive, awake from an enchanted lumbering lifeless dream…