One of my watercolor sketches for the mural
All my life I’ve wanted to live in a traditional indigenous village. I pictured it being somewhere in the amazon. Little did I expect it would happen this past year in the mountains of the Philippines. But it did. What an unbelievable experience. I mean, it has been off the freaking charts. First, it has been unbelievably tough. Running out of food, money, everything. Second, it has been unbelievably profound. You know how it is the modern-generation-x dream to sell everything and live in an Eco-intentional-community? Well, baby– the village I live in is a last vestige of full out old fashioned sustainability and integrated indegious wisdom community and family. I feel like a fool for not integrating more deeply into the community sometimes.
But, that’s me just being hard on myself. I have learned so much. What I take with me, the stories and the sights, are the type of profound wisdom that us modern-yuppy-hippies (I write from a Starbucks) need to integrate. And we are. And this experience surely has meaning and wealth to it far beyond what I can see from this plush couch.
I desperately need to process this. And so I am. I am doing a mural in my friend Vince’s cafe. Vince is one of my best friends here. He’s given me beer and food when I was tapped out. The mural will be an ode of grattitude, inspiration, integration and subconscious processing of the unbelievably rich life I have lived this last year.
