my amazon wish list...
my favorite astrologer...
my favorite artist...
yerba mate revolution!
erowid: a travel guide for interior journeys...
no more war:
MoveOn.org
United for Peace and Justice
True Majority
seek the truth:
Common Dreams
Unamerican Activities
The Nation
people I adore, diaries I read:
rev.raikes
ariana
cubiclegirl
epiphany
glitter333
laurakay
wammo
the music:
the asylum street spankers
backyard tire fire
blue highway
bill camplin
wendy colonna
freedom tribe
joules graves
guy forsyth band
hamsa lila
hanuman
libby kirkpatrick
leftover salmon
pamela means
medeski martin & wood
the motet
the nice outfit
nickel creek
open road
rose polenzani
railroad earth
south austin jug band
string cheese incident
taarka
tha musemeant
the devil makes three
tim o'brien band
trolley
wild sage
keller williams
yonder mountain string band
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...the ones I love best...
whispering in my ear ~
March 9, 2005 - 12:49 a.m.
a quiet night. the ipod on shuffle, doing its deliciously strange and serendipitous thang. bruce springsteen, at the moment. me, groggy from a nap.
i heard something on this american life that felt like a sign from the universe tonight. i was listening to an old show from the archives, which i am working my way through. i'm currently somewhere in 1997.
and this show was about people who thought they were going to die. and this guy told a story. about being in his twenties, a freelance photographer running around asia. and in jerusalem for easter, he got locked out of his hostel and wound up sleeping on a slab in a church where jesus is said to have been crucified.
he woke up early and headed down with the crowds to the tombs where it is said that he was resurrected. and watching the sun come up, was taken by this powerful belief that jesus actually had been resurrected. and as he drowsed in his hostel bed that afternoon, he was trying to think what that meant, what he should do about this new feeling of his.
and the idea came, and would not go away, that he should live as though he would die in six months.
and so that's what he did.
and what surprised him is that what he really wanted to do was go home to his parents and be utterly ordinary for a while.
and so he did.
went home and lived the ordinary life, spent time with his parents, took out the garbage, lived a life nearly exotic in its ordinaryness.
and spent a lot of time thinking about mortality, about what it means. he wrote his will, gave away thousands of dollars as anonymous gifts to friends. and after three months at home he took a bike trip across the country to visit all of his brothers and sisters.
he arrived back at his parents' house on halloween, at the end of the six months. and went to bed, not knowing if he would wake up.
and there was resonance all through his story, but what really got me was listening to him get so completely choked up describing waking up the day after halloween, waking up into a perfectly ordinary day in a perfectly ordinary life and being so grateful for it.
this ordinary life of mine, this place i've found myself in. is as precious as the adventures, the wild nights of ecstatic dancing, the motorcycle rides and my life on the mekong.
to remember this, to know how much is right here in the palm of my hand... this is a piece of what i've come here to learn.
and in case i missed it, the story ended by telling us that this man is now the executive editor of wired magazine.
and i was just reading wired this afternoon, sitting in the back of my plane and waiting to hear if our flight would be cancelled. i was reading a copy of wired that someone left behind last week, and thinking what a good magazine it was, and how enchanted i am about the magical possibilities which technology creates, and thinking about getting a subscription.
when the radio story ended, i pulled that wired magazine out of my bag and found the masthead. and there's a different executive editor, but i found my guy down at the bottom, under the title senior maverick.
i love it when the universe tells me things.
remembering to listen, is all.
previously... * and then...
(((rings)))
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