God

We are in Taos, New Mexico now to try out the infamous slopes of Angelfire for a few days. The mountains here are huge, up to 13,000 feet in some places; the runs can take a half hour to go down because they are so long and rambling. The views of the mountains and valleys below are breathtaking.

Every time I would fall, or even when I would sit down to take a rest, I would take the opportunity to just look up at the clouds in the sky and listen to myself breathe, or to stare out at the beautiful vista of the snow covered towns far below us. you could see for miles from almost anywhere on the mountains.  Snowboarding is not just a sport. It is a meditation.

I have not talked on the phone in about five days now nor checked email. I think it’s a record. And I feel great. It is very liberating and I find that I am still at the stage of the vacation where when I think of going home or talking on the phone or watching the news or checking email I start getting this feeling of dread swell up in me. so I am just totally hibernating. Trying not to think about anything at all actually. Just trying to stay afloat in each moment.

At one point while laying in the snow I thought about everything with Juliet and how after our meeting there seemed to be this strange kind letting go. an exhale. Again, still a little dumbfounded by the whole experience. I thought about the strange almost miraculous series of coincidences and synchronistic events that took place all around us and regarding us. Our parallel dreams, our dreaming in stereo, and so many more things and wondered how it could all mean nothing... I thought about that one night when I was praying and had said to God/spirit that I was going to drop the whole thing because the signs were not clear enough, and then the next day I get this email from Juliet saying she had dreamed that she was walking down the aisle getting married and it was me she was marrying... now in all honesty I took this to be a kind of sign from the universe if you will. but today or yesterday I don't remember I reflected on it more and realized that through my own thoughts that it could be highly probable that I had created that myself, that we co-created it together. that God was not so much a someone or a something that was in control of things as much as a power that we wield. All on our own. God must be something that we have the power to wield through our mind energy rather than some conscious being that exists outside of us.

Of course I wanted to believe that this strange synchronistic occurrence had a deep meaning and was a sign from a higher power. but lets be honest here, it wasn't. what it was instead was a sign that I was able to create this event from my own consciousness. And because Juliet was game, because we were so plugged into one another, it was an easy thing to have happen. concentrate enough on anything without secondaries and you can manifest all sorts of seemingly miraculous events.

As terrifying as the thought may have the potential to be – a godless God, a God not in control, but rather being controlled, by us, and who knows, perhaps by others as well --- I found comfort in the thought. It certainly makes more sense. Is easier to swallow. In fact, if you step far away enough away from the way we were and still are all raised here in earth in this kind of monotheistic ‘God exists and is the ruler of all mankind’ sort of ideology that has been so prevalent in our history for so many thousands of years, this other idea upon closer inspection seems much more probable ---- that God is not a God at all, but more of a unified force that is indeed responsible for life and death as we know it --- we got that part right, but it is a workable pliable force that we can breathe into and latch onto and can use at our own discretion. For good and evil. I mean that part at least seems much more likely. For certainly if there is anything close to a God or a force of any kind in the universe one would not be very successful in arguing the case that he/she/it is all good any more than he/she/it is inherently all bad.

Leaving for nyc again tomorrow to find a place and take part in the protests and marches around the city in defense of America against the inane tyrants. Something like that anyway. It is so amazing, but friends of mine from all over the country are emailing me from nyc who are already there and who have been there for weeks some of them. working for free, living however they can some of them the ones who aren't wealthy, but all of them, wealthy or not, are up there volunteering their time and energy for free in support of one of the 750 different groups who are protesting the republican national convention. Unbelievable solidarity the country is experiencing at this time in politics to try to defeat Bush and his merry henchmen.

Signed up for cell phone text messages from various activist groups. Any minute you may receive a text message that will read: “jail solidarity protest Wednesday at 10 am...” or “rnc area hot from 27th and park to 28th .. police coming. Be careful...”

Matrix anyone? Yes totally. a small battle is being waged between the corporate run government attack-dogs, and the American people. only, many of the American people don't even know about it yet. in the office today I met a real life republican. an older woman. hadn't actually met one in a long time. thought they all lived in the middle states. it was a surreal moment. She was gaga over the mayor Giuliani speech. Hey nothing wrong with rudi. But then she was going on about bush and his fighting terror and so I just casually mentioned how remarkable it was that so many people from all over the spectrum of American politics and entertainment were banding together to beat Bush and how unprecedented it was in our history. And she just went ballistic saying they were all idiots. I mentioned various criminal and nefarious activities of the current administration, including postponing the Kyoto agreement, defying the world war crimes commission or nato or the UN, abu graib prison abuse, occupation of Iraq, health care, same sex marriage, logging our forests, drilling in Alaska, on and on, and her answer? “Who cares about any of that stuff when our safety and freedom is at stake? None of that stuff is important compared to his war on terror.” I swear to God I'm not making this up. it was totally crazy. we could drop a bomb on the entire region of the middle east and kill millions of people and you get the feeling that there is this small Neanderthal like group out there that wouldn’t care as long as it was in the name of freedom and democracy.

When I told her that I was not a democrat and in fact was the grandson of a republican congressman, she had this look of shock on her face. She didn't expect that. said I should be ashamed of myself. What she doesn’t understand is that my grandfather was a republican during a different administration and he was an American patriot at heart, not simply a republican. life is not that simple. Mam, I sure wish it was. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Don't join any clubs.

Dictionary.com of course is marvelous invention. No reason to ever read a word in print and NOT look it up. you can just go there and in less than a minute you know what the word means. Today I learned the meaning for the twenty millionth time of sybarite – a wonderful word, or rather, definition, if I do say so myself – intrepid, beguile, a few others. Funny how we tend to forget the meaning of words all the time. I wonder how many we can actually hang onto... if there is there a limit. I read once that the average vocabulary consists of approximately 5000 words. wonder if there is any truth to this. the Ferret has an amazing grasp of English vocabulary. I don't think that there's a word in English that he doesn’t know the meaning of. Of course that's just English. And that's where it gets tricky. Because you realize that there are a lot of languages out there. so having a good vocabulary in one language isn't necessarily the most important thing. I think in the bigger picture it might be better to know five thousand words in five languages than to know ten thousand in just one. your ability to communicate with more people in the world increases, and perhaps through that your ability to understand the world around us is amplified.

fate and the universe... learning or rather the universe seems to be trying to teach me, that just because we see signs of things, coincidences or synchronistic events that in the new age state of mind we are all too quick to look for meaning in, may not mean as much as we take them to in each moment. Could it be that these synchronistic events only hold as much meaning to us as we decide in the moment? Could it be that God or the universe throws them all out there randomly but its up to us to really decide what to do with them?