The Art of TRAVEL

Mastering the art of travel is not accomplished with practice or talent.

No school will give you a bachelors degree in not getting shot while backpacking through eastern Africa. Or in avoiding Montezuma's revenge on your trek through Mexico.

It's a way of life. Unknown to the majority, it's almost impossible to convey to your friends back home over the course of a single conversation. It's more of a feeling, it's the excitement I experience the night before a trip.

The high that comes with booking a one-way train ticket to a place I've never heard of. It's the little things that so often go unnoticed.

"After A While" ©1971 Veronica A. Shoffstall

After a while you learn

the subtle difference between

holding a hand and chaining a soul

and you learn

that love doesn't mean leaning

and company doesn't always mean security.

And you begin to learn

that kisses aren't contracts

and presents aren't promises

and you begin to accept your defeats

with your head up and your eyes ahead

with the grace of woman,

not the grief of a child

and you learn

to build all your roads on today

because tomorrow's ground is

too uncertain for plans

and futures have a way of falling down

in mid-flight.

After a while you learn

that even sunshine burns

if you get too much

so you plant your own garden

and decorate your own soul

instead of waiting for someone

to bring you flowers.

And you learn that you really can endure

you really are strong

you really do have worth

and you learn

and you learn

with every goodbye, you learn...

: I'm doing GOD, How are you doing?

Whereas doing GOOD is usually a part-time thing, doing GOD is full-time.

Doing GOD is the highest form of living. Everyone is capable of doing GOD - it is what we were created to do.

I used to think you had to be a priest to do GOD full-time, but I realize now that you just have to faithfully walking in alignment with your GOD-given purpose daily !!

-As shared by a Friend

You Should Date An Illiterate Girl by CHARLES WARNKE

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

The Language of Your Soul

The language of your soul is multi-dimensional. It bypasses restrictive linear or left-brain thinking and conveys information through your feeling centres using creativity such as music, art, poetry, writing, inventions, inspirations or dancing, etc. It has no limits - there is no beginning and no end; anything is possible without logical or valid reason. With left-brain or linear thinking, you always need to search for explanations, proof or reasons why something is, but the language of your soul cannot be measured by cause and effect, so instead you must learn to build trust and have solid belief in the power of your soul self and its connection to universal consciousness. Start first by knowing and accepting who you are without worrying about the opinion or beliefs of others and then acknowledge your truthful and positive inner dialogue.

Fear, impatience and frustration can impinge drastically and shut you off from the language of your soul. Your development and relationship with intuition revolves in cycles and will require infinite patience, trust and understanding of self.

Healing from your soul is all about releasing and letting go of outdated unconscious thought patterns and belief systems by transforming your present state of being. Communicate through your intuition and listen to the language of your soul - it will tell you through your feelings what is not working in your favour. With a loving heart, accept what is, then learn to live in the present and not worry about your past, whether it is based on past associations/relationships, past incidents, past memories, past-lives or past karma - whatever the past is - release it and let it go. This is not inferring that you ignore your past; on the contrary it is important for you to experience everything, because it is through each experience, whether good or bad, positive or negative, that your soul learns, grows and expands to a higher energy frequency.

Although this may sound easier said than done, you can readily release or let go of anything that no longer serves in your best and most positive interest. Merely bring it to your conscious level by recognizing it with honest awareness, accept responsibility for it, learn the necessary lessons from it through forgiveness and loving intention and then affirm your goal for the present time or the Now. If you fail to do this then your past, in whatever capacity, will always remain your present - you will always feel as if you are a victim and your energy becomes stagnated or polluted. And this is why it is so important to clear out the clutter before true healing can begin, for you cannot allow anything new into your life if you are already filled to capacity.

But in order to communicate through your intuition and listen to the language of your soul, you must be free from clutter and stagnation. The language of your soul is composed of fluctuating energy, which needs room to move, room to grow and room to be flexible. But above all, it needs freedom - freedom to explore, freedom of choice, freedom to experience, freedom to learn, freedom to develop and freedom to elevate to higher levels of consciousness in a loving and positive manner.

Let’s Talk about ME!!

I can talk about shopping, eating, cooking, walking, sleeping, sitting, running. I can talk about Paris, Rome, SFO, NYC, Sydney, Zurich, Chile and Cairo. I can talk about Notepad, Gizmos, iPod, iPad and iPhone. I can talk about Federer, Schumi, Kaka, Rooney and Dhoni.

I can talk about movies, music, soaps, reality shows, dance and theatre. I can talk about skyscrapers, villas, holiday homes, sports cars, Euro rail, crusies and jet planes.

There are (a lot of) times when I actually talk nothing, act like dumb, act with indifference or simply enjoy the rhythm of silence!

I can talk aloud about everything that is material and worldly perhaps because it seems as though all that is tangible, routine, material, mundane and generic is ‘Safe’. We See, Comprehend, Assimilate and Absorb everything through our interface with the outside world.

As I try to talk to the other side of the bridge, I realize that walking alone is the ‘safest’. I really can’t talk about all that is intangible – my journey to find myself, to the innermost space in ME.

My Fears & Joys, Failures & Successes, Emotions & Feelings ARE My LIFE!

These are stuff that keeps me ticking; these make my heart flutter. Precisely, these sum-up all that matters most to me – what some might call ‘True Calling’.

All this is guarded and tenderly watched just by ME. This part of my world belongs just to me and it is very rarely indeed that I would allow anyone in. We learn, evolve and grow with our own experiences. For me, the concept of spiritualism is too personal to be shared.

I have lived most of life like this; that’s how my mind and body are conditioned. It is a status quo that has been maintained and I am not ready, yet, to get rid of it. There has been a constant tug of war between pleasure & pain, dream & reality, reason & emotion and inner & outer self. But I do hope to acquire someday – sooner rather than later – the wisdom to bridge the ‘gap’ between the tangible and the intangible. May be that could bring in more peace and solitude in ME. For now, however, I am content to just Wait & Watch what life has in store for Me.

10th March 2010