I wrote this a week or two ago, when I was a little down after Abby and I got back from the beach at Borocay, Philipines…
—–
How is that I can travel around the world and have such profound and
soul touching experiences everywhere I go? My life is absolutely
enchanted.
I just spent three months in Ottawa getting to really know myself and
my parents, and doing a beautiful project with my Church. I then
spent two months living in Paris with my beautiful lover Abby, getting
to know her and again myself much deeper. And then now I have spent
the last three weeks with Abby and her parents here in the
Philipines. It’s been beautiful– beaches, gorgeous hot weather, and
lots of touring around– but also deeply challenging.
I know some of you wonder how I do it. I know– because I too wonder
how I do it. How I am living in the funkiest apartment complex in
Manila that everyone envies? It shouldn’t really be possible. At
least not in a world of work visas, careers, jobs and saving and
planning.
I don’t really plan. I make intentions. Lucid intentions that I
craft with discipline and joy. They shape my life and experiences,
but I don’t save up for them, nor try to schedule them out. It is hard
to explain to those who don’t have the experience, it seems as magic.
I have spent ten years of my life studying religions, philosophies and
learning from mentors about the spiritual underpinnings of this
universe. This wasn’t to accumulate knowledge, but to guide my
living. My Grandparents once asked me what was the most important
thing I had learned. I quoted Jesus:
“Seek and you shall find, ask and you shall receive, knock and the
door shall be opened. For all those who ask receive, all those who
seek find, and to all those who knock the door is opened.”
And it’s true. Profoundly. Neale Donald Walshe describes it as the
universe being a great creative power that manifest every single
thought and idea that we have. Our realities and moments are pure
self-creations. Paulo Coehlo puts it the most poetically– when we
have a dream the entire inverse conspires with us to make it happen.
There is thus no need to struggle or work or even plan to make things
happen. You have a dream? Speak it. Write it. Then watch as it
materializes about you. You dont need to save up money. You don’t
have to wait until you retire. You dont even need a job or carreer.
Just choose it. Then watch as that becomes your “job” or “career”.
Of course this flies in the face of the whole structure of society.
This isn’t how our orderly economies have been maintained. By being
this way you step out from being a cog in the massive machine. You
are no longer a piece of the Big system that keeps us all in place.
The big system that all we know is so up-side-down-crazy-irrational
and destroying the planet and the source of the ludicrous economic
disparity of sultans in their pinacled towers to babies crawling on
cardboard on the Manila street.
Alas, when you step out of this system, you also step out of
generational and family patterns and expectations for relationships
and careers and Right Life.
And that’s not easy. It has taken me down a road that often makes me
feel so far from others.
Jesus also said something else. He talked about how he brought a
sword to divide families.
I never really understood this. But now I do. I so would like to
connect with Abby and her family. But it feels like there is a chasm
between us. They don’t understand me, and really I can’t blame them.
My way of living is incomprehensible and I makes a terrible match for
their daughter. It makes me sad and down.
Living my dream full out… It is hard enough sometimes for me to live
this way sometimes. It make it so much harder when it divides me
from those I love. It makes me sad.
Sometimes, I just don’t understand.
