in response to Phreelosophy's comment on Practice

*bows deep*
only a truly enlightened being could see how awesome i am (without wearing a Mindfold)

But for the real practice, it fell into me more than I into it. This recent trend certainly grew deep roots in the bloody mess of my broken heart - my ex-wife suggested taking a class again when I called her crying one morning during our Separating. As it turns out heartblood spilt is a verdant compost for growing Qi. The moment I tasted it I was home.

So when I was on the road without a space of my own and needed a way to center that did not involve possessions, a routine (such as shower or shave because those were not always available) or a bedroom, etc. this found its place in my mo(u)rning.

Of course, I have been fostering an image of non-conformity for years so doing weird spirit-summoning gestations or whatever it might look like to the uninformed only really helps to paint a picture of my's elf that keeps me malleable within others' eyeballs. So there's no hesitation on how i am perceived that might get in the way of a practice.
And verily, I say unto you, when you are doing crazy headstands because you have put a year of Chi into your centre, well, the practice suddenly becomes real.

But even that is not the payoff. The real thing that keeps me motivated to do this every day is the more in my body I am. Now as I connect that subtle movement to a sitting, breathing meditation...the mind and the body are aligning that the soul may more fully incarnate.

Shining Rock

C-double-you and I took a hike along the Art Loeb trail into the Shining rock wilderness. This trail runs across an entire spine of a mountain ridge, which is not unlike many ridges in the area, but for one thing, most of it burned 50 years ago and the re-growth in the area is not nearly as thick as all the surrounding hills so you have spectacular views; that and its really high up.


We hiked in Sunday afternoon as most folks were leaving. He and I talked and talked about outdoorsness. He is from the perspective that can be summarized by Ray Jardine's The Ray Way, which is a method of making and packing gear that is all about multi-use and efficiency so you can get to the middle of nowhere. I on the other hand, have subscribed to the idea that REI is
a store of the gods and have been happy to pay for their expertise so I can get to more important things like accounting. Anyhow we picked a great place to camp in a grove of hemlocks on the Southeast side of the hills to avoid prevailing winds; it was also only a hundred feet from a spring where we filled our water bottles. He pitched his tarp, and I my tent, and then we went back up to the ridgetop to cook dinner under the sunset.


The night was spent around the fire with us sharing stories of everything, as campfires in the middle of nowhere have a way to draw out the depths. I told the story of how I had proposed to my ex-wife before even holding her hand; and he spoke of things that are held in secrecy under the Code of the Campfire.
He taught me to tie a couple of knots and I have found that once I have the motions down, its easier to do without looking and to not bother my mind with seeing, but to trust my fingers. The training is paying off. After sipping the fine fine aged scotch C-double-you brought along (even his liquor bottle is wrapped with duct tape, so he doesn't have to carry a whole roll of the stuff) we put the fire out and were both relieved to find that neither of us stood by the tradition of peeing a fire out because, well, it stinks, but more importantly, isn't how you show respect to something that can disintegrate you down to molars.
I sleep fitfully because my sleepmat, the inflatable kind, has blown a seam and doesn't inflate. This has not bothered me for months as i've slept on hardwood floors on it from Florida to NYC, but when the ground underneath you is, literally, frozen, that missing layer of insulation is found to be crucial. But its hard to complain about the ice on the bottom of your tent when you wake into the sun rising off the eastern ridge.

We decided to shoot for Shining Rock, a HUGE quartz deposit a few mountaintops from where we slept. In the spirit of our adventure we decided to forgo the trail and bushwhack our way through the network of blueberry bushes. After half an hour of this we found a bunch of bushes the birds had not picked clean, which revived us to continue off in the wrong direction. This took us into the most magnificent hemlock clearing I have ever crawled through briars into. It was clearing like this after clearing like this interspersed with rhododendron thickets. We were amazed by the space so much that we were devising a way to mark off boundaries for a paintball or capture the flag game on the mountain top. But then we realized we were off track and doubled back by walking through thousands of blueberry bushes to camp and took the trail.
There C-double-you split off from me to climb the quartz boulders up to the Shining Rock. Even though these boulders that started off the size of me and grew to the size of cars and beyond up the hill were strewn about with time's degradation of the rock, I had enough bushwhacking so I took the trail all the way up. It was immense and amazing and it filled my soul with the magnificence of this evolving creation of a world. Here's a photo from the top of Shining Rock

As we packed up camp and moved towards a different spot for the second night we noticed it had not gotten any warmer even with the sun overhead, big clouds were rolling in, and the water in our water bottles was freezing, all this plus the wind was so hard it moved me around on the top of the ridges (even with my heavy backpack on) led us to decide that it would be better to just make a fire and hang out until we felt like driving home. This proved to be a wise decision as it started snowing by the time we got to the car. So we put on another layer and started gathering firewood before it got completely dark. Around this fire we shared the majority of our foodstuffs remaining, made hot cocoa -put cinnamon cereal in it because things you would not normally eat at home can taste amazing in the woods, and talked more about the intricacies of fire-shaping. Then it got really cold. So we jumped in the car and I stuck on Tom Wait's Heart of Saturday Night, which fused the mood into the night as we wound around the Blue Ridge parkway for what might be the last time of the season as icicles were already formed on the rock outcroppings which, C-double-you explained, would continue growing until they reached the ground then they would cross the road, forcing the authorities in charge of such things to swing the gate closed on this road for the season. But, he continued, rock climbing clubs, would hike the miles in with all their gear and climb the ice for the two or three weeks it was frozen enough. And people look at me like I'm crazy.
When Wait's crooning ended I offered C-double-you to pick from my collection and without my prompting he picked the best album ever, Ambient.

Arriving home we unpacked the car and let the cat in. Then I made a foot bath in lieu of a shower, because the hiking boots I bought in Colorado are still not broken in enough. I set it up in the kitchen next to the stove so I could reach the beer in the fridge as well as the kettle boiling water. I proceeded to put on the ipod and sit in that chair for over an hour munching Kettle Chips and reading about Hermes Trismegistus.
(PS I don't know how to keep the pics from loading HUGE when you click on them, if anyone does, please let me know)

Into the Fold

Once at Shooters I seemed to have stepped into a voidhole and fell into myself. Deepression and ignoring everybody all night except to order a drink or two. Even when folks were referencing me or speaking to me directly I was ignoring. I was feeling not thrilled being in Quito after the idyllic Mindo, but after a couple of hours of this deep silence something clicked in the back of my head or somewhere near the back of the head and I decided to move into interaction.

Just a bit ago when I was writing the outcome of the JW Marriot escapade at the bar here, one of the patrons tried to speak with me as I was writing. I ignored the words because my head is already full of them and that's why i'm writing can't you see that? So I got to the end and the click and I said,
"thank you for your patience, Atlanta and No."
Like I said I had gotten to the end of writing at that moment but faked it a bit more to let her mull it over. Yeah, I'm a player, but its an entirely different game i'm into.
"Wait, oh, let's see...where are you from and, wait, no hmmm. I can't remember the second question."
"I set down my pen, removed my glasses and was rubbing the bridge of my nose..."
"Uhm" she's had many beers at this beyond midnight point "oh yeah, are you tired?"
"Correct." And I pull the Mindfold down from my bandanna over my eyes.

The world shrinks as the majority of my sensory intake is reduced to a vast black (with the rare faulty pinprick of light from the nose area that needs to be revisited by the manufacturer; might just have to buy the whole company to fix this issue) not a complete eradication, mind you, for when the eyes are open within the fold they are still active and the brain portals they feed are still open accepting the darkness as if it were the picture of the world currently surrounding the mind. The initial urge is to fall into this security and act upon it as if it were truthed. But in this instance the dispellation of such comfort was in the shape of a crowd's roar at something I mentally picturated as a whisp of draft by my cheek that did make me reflexively jerk my neck and head back a half an inch.
"The bartender's sister just tried to kiss you." El Capitan is chuckling and probably rolling that 50 centavo piece across his knuckles while standing behind the bar.

I sat on this for a moment trying to imagine why the initial gambit into this Mindfold was for a stunningly gorgeous girl to sneakify me in such an abrupt manner. We certainly have not exchanged any meaningful words across the language barrier; now you can see why my theory of how stunning I look in this attire is brewing! So I realize I need to play this one cool and I turn to the asker of drunken smalltalk questions, and say "can you tell her to try again?" I sit back with a lilt to my head and stroke my chinwig. She starts "por favor," and I jump in both hands on the bar "I didn't say please" and flash that looney smile that I can't hold back at times. If they are going to be introduced to the Mindfold I ought to make sure its memoric. Too many beers girl swings her voice hole towards my unseeing sound receptors and I focus in on her head which says "it doesn't translate without the Please." I could care less, I've made the ruckus, now I settle into listening for silent movements and am rousing laughters with my dodgings that most times were for nothing, surely not kisses.

The girls of the bar enjoyed this and similar sillinesses narrated by El Capitan's experienced Seership over the situation. So much so that they invited us to go dancing. Which is when the following Mindfolded recordation of the conversation on the previous page of my journal captured the hilarity of the night's merciless pouring of darkness into the Mindfolded open to receive such nonlumination. The next day the sightless writing was easy enough to make out because it took up the whole page.
"Wanna go dancing with us?"
"I didn't even go dancing with my wife."
"You have a wife?"
"Not anymore, I wouldn't go dancing with her."

For pete's sake, its Reggaetone. Have you ever had to listen to that schlop?