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For most of my life, I’ve been a seeker. The trouble was I could never quite figure out what I was seeking.

As is typical with a lot of things in life, we find the answers we are searching for in the most unlikely of places.

I was wandering around Philadelphia, PA looking for nothing in particular when I stumbled upon a very small bookstore. It had funky new-age presence that was attractive.

On the stacks I found a book titled, That Which You Are Seeking is Causing You to Seek, by Cheri Huber.

It has taken me 14 years to figure out what that means. I would like to say that I spend my days in endless bliss now that I have figured out the riddle.

I’m reminded of a poster I saw a few years back. On this poster was a monkey scratching his head and looking very perplexed. The caption underneath read: “Just when I figured out all the answers, they changed the questions.�

That is where I find myself at now in this great adventure called life, standing on the threshold.

And the quest continues…

Here’s the video I put together of our little adventure in the brecon beacons last month. Enjoy.

[youtube]8V2r5zhemqY[/youtube]

He would come for her she knew.  He was a sweet boy, innocent in a naughty kind of way.  But she liked them like that, unspoiled, eager to know a girl in a carnal way for the first time.

Why can’t they wait to meet someone special?

They were born bastards, all of them. Better to use them and hurt them before they hurt you.

Still he was tender.

**

I’m afraid of me. I’m so bitter I’m afraid of what I’ll grow up to be, of how twisted and inhuman I’ll become. I have more than a handful of sins to my name, but nothing twists the knife like the hate I have for my mother.

She’s been working on a screenplay for about a year now, and she was watching TV and they had a commercial for a show debuting next season, which is basically the same plot as her screenplay. This is not the first time this has happened. In fact, this happens to her almost every time. I don’t know why the hell it happens. And a normal person would feel sorry for her. But I guess I’m so goddamned tired of her sadness that I don’t feel anything but hate towards her now. She complains about being overweight, and then opens up a new bag of Doritos. She complains that people are stealing her ideas for screenplays, but won’t listen when I remind her that everything is derivative. She can’t manage to see the beauty in anything she does. I feel like I’ve given up on her. But she’s given up on herself.

My mother remarried when I was fifteen.  It wasn’t until I was sixteen that her new husband started coming on to me.  At first it was the way he looked at me.  Always staring at me.  He never looked me in the eyes.  Always his eyes drifted down to my breasts and they would linger there longer than is decent for a father…even a step-father to be looking at his daughter, even a step-daughter…maybe his daughter’s friends but certainly not his own daughter.

What my mother could see in such a scrawny black bastard I’m not sure.  She seemed to have a thing for black men.  My mother really was a real slut.  My father found out that she was bopping a black guy and he left straight away.  As it turned out later, he was also seeing another woman, so my mom just made it easier for him to leave.  Because she got caught first, my father had the grounds he needed for a divorce.

Shortly after my father left, he moved in and my life began to change.

The first time he physically touched me, I was in my nightshirt standing at the kitchen counter pouring a bowl of cornflakes.  He came into the kitchen.  He was wearing his bathrobe open.  Underneath he had on boxer shorts.  I didn’t think much of it, but then on second glance, I saw his thing was hanging out of the little slit in the front.  He must have known especially when he saw my face go red.  He came up behind me and pressed against me under the pretence of getting a bowl from the cabinet.  I could feel his thing against my back.  I scooted underneath him and took my bowl of cornflakes to my bedroom.  I kept the incident to myself.

It got worse after that.  We started this goddamn bowling league and every time on the way home he would park somewhere dark and start saying things to me like how pretty I was and how he couldn’t help wanting to be near me because I was so pretty.  He would feel me up. I would beg him to stop and try to scrunch myself up into a tight ball.  He would paw me and kiss my neck until I started to cry.  Then he would say he was sorry and begged me not to say anything to anyone and that he wouldn’t ever do it again.  But every week he did.

He started coming into my room late at night.  The first few time he just stood and stared at me.  I pretended I was asleep, but I could see him standing there in his boxer shorts.

Then one night he climbed into my bed underneath my covers.  His kissed my neck and cheek and pressed himself against me…feeling me…rubbing me, touching parts of me that wasn’t proper.  I wanted him to stop; I begged him to stop.  In the end I would just lay there like a cold dead fish unmoving, no moaning, not even a protest.

**

“Jen told me you’d be here,” he said.  She caught his reflection in the mirror.

What a sweet boy.  I like him.  He’s a black kid.  I must be like my mom because I like these black boys, their dark skin.  There’s something primal…something exotic about it all…

She turned to face him.  He tried to look her in the eyes, but her lame eye looked eerie.

He had to avert his gaze.  She was too hard to stare at.  Instead, he let his eyes rest on her breasts.

Look me in the eyes you bastard.  They can’t even look me in the eyes.

If only my breasts had eyes, things might be different.

I doubt it though.  They’re all bastards, no matter how innocent they look.

Earlier this week I was in Snowdonia. As regular readers of my blog will know, I spend a lot of time in the mountains of Snowdonia, as they are, in effect, a spiritual home for me. This time I was there for a different reason. I was being interviewed for my thoughts on leadership. The producer of the film, Tim Clague, thought it would be great to capture my thoughts on leadership, while actually leading a group up the mountain. I was up for the challenge.

While packing for our little adventure, I was rummaging through my bedside table drawer looking for my pen knife. I saw the blue case that holds my West Point class ring. On a whim, I opened it just to take a look at the ring. I don’t really wear it anymore. But on this occasion I felt compelled to put it on.

There is a power in collective talismans.

In our West Point class rings the principles of West Point are embedded as well as the memories of our cadet days.

And those days did indeed flood my consciousness. To deepen the connection, I found my Bugle Notes and flicked through them. And things I should not have forgotten, I felt compelled to remember.

Duty, Honor, Country are words we lived and breathed as cadets. They are small words, but the power packed into them is staggering. I could never do justice in explaining them so I will share with you General Douglas MacArthur’s eloquent words:

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poety of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

You can listen to or read the full speech here.

I have started wearing my class ring again and I feel humble. I also feel a sense of renewed strength and idealism. The world suddenly seems much brighter and my footsteps more solid.

Words are innocent.  They stand neutral until people get in the way hiding connotations between inflections, meaning between gestures.

“I’m going to ask you to do something for me,” she said, “but you can’t ask me to reciprocate.”

He stood beside the bed looking down on her.  The room was dark apart from the low glow of light escaping from the half-shut bathroom door.  It was enough light for him to see the smudged mascara around her eyes.  Had he done that?  She was still in her red dress, damp and clinging to her body.  Her perfume, soft and spicy, mingled with the smell of musky clothes made wet from the autumn storm they had walked through to get to here.

She didn’t belong here in this room with him.  But she had looked lost at the party like a wild animal that suddenly finds itself trapped inside a house, confronted by the screams of a frightened wife.  He had stepped in like a man full of courage and indifference to shoo the scared beast out the back door.

“Take off your shirt,” she said, “I know I have no right to ask you this, but you invited me here and I want to know how your mind works.”

Words can build bridges across chasms of incomprehension and chaos.  But as she shifted her position in the bed to make room for him, he could only comprehend the thought of her naked.  She was the real thing, sexy, hot, and ambitious.  She was also not his wife.  But then, the idea of marriage and a wife were only social constructs to legalize the transference of property. Marriage was nothing more than a legal transaction.

Morality.

Morality is for the meek, a concept that exists in the mind and free for interpretation. None of it is real.

Reality.

She was reality.

And he looked forward to getting to know reality in a way he had never known reality before.

“Where does your mind go when you are not here?” She asked.

“As far as I know, if your mind is not in the present, it goes in one of four places, either in the future, the past, subjective-me, or objective-you.”

He slipped her dress off.

She didn’t protest.

“Give me example,” she whispered, nibbling on his ear.

“A moment ago, when you walked into my room dripping wet from the rain, immediately my mind jumped to an imagined future of you naked and in my bed.  I trembled with excitement over something that was not real.  And all things considered, should never be real.”

“It is real now, no?”

“Oh yes, if we’re defining reality by what we can see, taste, touch, hear, and smell.”

He kissed her small breasts.

“Our minds can take a walk into an imagined future and fill us with excitement or dread depending on what we imagine the future to be like.  Or our minds can take a dip into the past and fill us with either nostalgia or regret depending oh how we choose to remember the past.”

“I only think about the here and now.  I care nothing about the past and even less about the future,” she said.

“That’s a good place to be if you can pull it off,” he said.

She kissed him hard. And in that moment of her hot kiss, he forgot about his past and his future.  He forgot about his obligations and responsibilities and the promises he made.

He forgot about…

The consequences…

Of a kiss…

To fuel your addiction to surfing, I thought I’d create a category to share sites that I find interesting and seem worthy of a visit.

Like a lot of webheads, I spend probably more time than I should surfing the Net.   When it comes to surfing, I’m like a sentinel in the Matrix on a search and destroy mission, looking for useful information.  If the site is good, I stay.  If not, zap, boom, bang, gone!
Anyhoot…
The first two I’ll share with you are both based on cutting edge interactive design display of information.

If you are music buff, Musicovery is a site that lets you explore music according to your mood, tempo, genre etc.  I like the mood search, which for some reason I always set to dark.

For newshounds, I found Newsmaps, which visually reflects the Google news aggregator and creates a treemap visualization algorithm or something or another…it sounds complicated, but looks great.  If you are a person who takes in information visually, you’ll love this.

In the twitterverse we are all little messiahs trying to convert the army of the masses into followers. Compared to twitter gods and goddesses like emilychange (2,358 followers) and calilewis (4,435 followers) and waynesutton (1,282 followers), I am an insignificant messiah with only 21 followers. I’ve got to do something about increasing the numbers in the temple before I lose my guru status.

I staggered out of bed at 3 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the lunar eclipse. Instead all I saw was clouds, so I staggered back to bed. I won’t get a chance to see another total lunar eclipse now until December 2010.

I’ve spent the last 3 nights in The Selfridge.

Hotel rooms make me incredibly sleepy.  Like a bear, I go into hibernation the moment I crawl underneath the sheets of a strange bed.  I just want to sleep and sleep and sleep.  Unlike at home where I sleep on average only 5 hours a night and am up before the sun most mornings, including the weekend.

I read an article that said men sleep better alone.  Perhaps I am a testament to this premise.

**

London is truly a diverse cultural experience.  I know it’s sad, but of all the restaurants I could have eaten at in London last night, I chose to dine on the fine cuisine of a Big Mac and large fries.  The truth is I really wasn’t in the mood for a proper sit down meal.  Anyway, I say London is truly diverse because while sitting in the downstairs eating area, I couldn’t help but noticed that there was very little English being spoken.  In fact, if you were to close your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to tell what country you were in.

**

Success is a choice, not a lottery.

**

And just in case you wanted to know:

Ontology is the study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being.  But what is real right?

Hey I made it into one of the local glossies: (click for a larger view)

I spent some time in the Brecon Beacons yesterday with some friends.  We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect mountain day.  The sun shone bright against a blue sky offering us some warmth out of the shadows.  We walked a trail that is less frequented by the casual weekend hiker, which meant we basically had the mountain to ourselves, passing less than 10 people on a 6-hour hike.

As usual, we spent a great deal of time sharing our stories and the challenges we are currently facing in our day to day lives.   When I share my story with others, I feel less alone and come to appreciate how much we are all the same at some basic level of being human.  A good mountain day strengthens that bond as we whittle away the miles together.

I did take pictures of the walk, but unfortunately I left my camera with Will.  So I’ll have to post them another time.

Click the image to enlarge:

Click the image to enlarge

I overheard two women chatting in a restaurant at lunch today.  I know it’s not polite to eavesdrop, but I can blame it on being a writer and my interest in people and dialogue.  Anyway, I pretty much ignored the two of them until I heard one of them say she had been to see her fortune-teller.  I stopped devouring my burger and leaned back in my chair under the pretence of stretching my belly to accommodate the 16oz of meat I was stuffing into it.

They were telling the same story I’ve been hearing for the last 8 years: there are no more good men left on this planet! And all the good woman are left to pick over the scraps in hopes that there might be some redeeming quality about them.  I can’t turn around to see what these women look like and one is a low talker and the other a high talker so I’m only getting half the story.  The fortune-teller tells her some stuff that’s not all that interesting.  The story ends with the high-talker resigning herself to her fate: “I’ve come to a point in my life where I just have to accept who I am,� she sighs.

Her words were heavy as if soaked in the sadness of believing that she could never have the life she wants.  Instead, she must settle for whatever she can get.  That to me sucks.  And I wonder what has she been through that she has come to this point in her life.

I watch them go up to pay their bill and the one friend strokes the arm of her friend in a gesture that says, ‘I feel you.’

I feel her too, now.

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? – Morpheus, The Matrix

How do you know that what you are experiencing moment to moment is actually real and not just a complex construct of your mind?

There is a thought in therapeutic community that we are not who we think we are and that we are all living in a massive trance state with only rare moments of being truly awake.

The theory goes that the problems you have, or think you have, are always about yourself.  You become the object of our problems. But in order to be the object, you have to be something; and that something is always an idea or a set of ideas.  The idea is only a suggestion of who you are, but it is not you.

For example you might look in the mirror and say I am fat, or I am not handsome enough, or host of other you might say about yourself.  In order for you to say you are fat, you must have in your mind a self-image of what you imagine you should like, an ideal self.  When this ideal self doesn’t match what you see in the mirror, then feelings of unhappiness or discontent follow.  Basically what you have done is tied your identity to the problem.

To liberate your identity from the problem ask yourself, “Who is the ‘I’ that is fat?� The ‘I’ or imagined ideal self is an illusion born of a myriad of personal, social, religious, and cultural influences.  You could, in theory, walk away from the illusion.  But then who would you be?

You can find out through a process of self-inquiry.  And a great place to start is by asking your self the question, “Who am I?�

What you will eventual find is that who you really are cannot be comprehended by thought.

One day you’re going to wake up and you’ll be dead.  All life is folly.  Your time here is transient.  From the moment you are conceived, the big countdown to the end starts ticking and you haven’t even tasted your first breath.  Life moves towards death.  It seems almost ludicrous to get attached to anything, or anyone, or to life itself for that matter.  Life is precious and precarious.  You can be snuffed out in a moment – the next moment or the moment after that.  Maybe you’re lucky and fate has arranged your cards such that you get to languish around into your 80s or 90s but you know what, you still die in the end.  The whole equation life = death, makes everything we do, everything we strive for or worry about, seem insane.  What’s the point?  Why go through all the trouble of trying to collect and hang onto all the scraps you fight for every day?  Why not just get naked and party hard?

“Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, champagne in one hand – strawberries in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming WOO HOO – What a Ride!â€?  I can’t find the person who wrote that, he or she comes up as unknown.  They were probably to busy living hard to bother about leaving a note to get quoted!

I think I might be on the brink of becoming a hedonist.  It seems insane to do otherwise.  Why not get the maximum enjoyment out of life and do the things you want to do? Or as the Grateful Dead sang:

I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe
But at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride
At least I’m enjoyin’ the ride
Yeah, at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride
Yeah

Saturday morning, I can see a little blue sky peeking through the drawn curtains of my front room.  The blue conjures a feeling of mountains and open spaces and I suddenly long to be outside.  I realise that I haven’t planned anything for the weekend apart from attending my daughter’s play on Sunday.  Usually if I don’t plan something, it means I will end up on the computer for most of the day with intervals of time spent reading or playing PlayStation with my son.

Creation…the greatest gift of life is expressed through our choices.  Through our choices we create our realities.  Shatter the illusion.  If our reality dissatisfies us, we are free to destroy it and begin again.  It is time to stop the ignorance. – Big Mountain

I went to my first barefoot boogie led by the magnificent Mandy Kasafir. Transcendental dance is a good way to describe it. Imagine a room full of people who share an interest in peace, harmony, respect and love for all life. Imagine this group of like-minded people moving their bodies in whichever way feels right to them in time and not in time with soul stirring, foot tapping music in a dimly lit room…that is a barefoot boogie

Joseph Campbell wrote: “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.  When you see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.  I say follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”