Amanda Kovattana

Betrayed In San Bernardino

2012-01-27T19:41:00.000-08:00

Here be the sorry saga of how a relationship across class lines ended in eviction. What redemption there was and what future hope for my landlording venture.

Betrayal

I pulled up to our San Bernardino rental property an hour ahead of the sheriff and prepared myself for the eviction of my contractor, Mike, from the house he had put so much of his talent into restoring, making improvements as if it were his own. I had sorely wanted to avoid this eviction scene, the tawdry humility of it. I had told him so too, but he had chosen to draw it out to the bitter end, long overstaying his promise to be out after Thanksgiving. He had nothing left to lose. His life shattered by the betrayal of his wife. His son plucked from his life (the son of the kidney transplant story that had so long been the focus of everyone's concerns).

"Hi Mike," I called out to him when I saw him coming out of the house. He had a large old truck I hadn't seen before, backed up to the porch and a section of the railing had been removed to make it easier for him to pull things out of the front door into the truck bed. He smiled his easy smile and came down the stairs towards me rolling his eyes as if to bear up against all that the universe had poured on his head.

"So you've had quite a time of it," I say to him playing into his victim role, hoping to have his cooperation by being friendly even though he had refused to return my e-mails or phone calls in the last week, having not moved out as promised. It had made me uneasy about what I might find at the house, so I was happy enough to ease back into our old camaraderie. He introduced me to his assistant Frank, a pockmarked Hispanic man who seemed eager to please. Mike was moving next door to the shabbiest house on the block. He had asked us, early last year, if we wanted to buy it for $40,000 presumably so he could have steady work fixing it up. It had been on the market nearly a year; the owners needing to follow a job. A sale was pending; the across-the-street neighbor had bought it for $55,000. Their son had moved into it. Mike had probably traded his skills for a room. He was storing all of his tools in their garage.

I hadn't wanted it to end this way. Nor had he.

"I wish I'd known," he said when we got to talking about Jennifer and the latest news on her criminal activity. The rent owed added up to nearly $3,000. Catherine had called him every day since we'd given them notice, but he didn't call back. He said Jennifer had stolen his phone, deleted all his messages. Mike had entrusted all administrative details to Jennifer. She was the one who kept us apprised of things at the property, sent us pictures of repairs, sent the rent money. When Jennifer first decided to grift us she just asked us to forgive them not being able to pay the full rent, that they were short that month. The language of her e-mails included both of them and were filled with emotional promises about how they would pay us as soon as they could. Then she wrote me that her mother was ill from a bad reaction to a drug for her kidneys and she had to go to Oregon to take care of her.

"This woman knows way too much about kidneys," I thought, but didn't say anything, figuring Mike knew about this excuse and was hiding his inability to find work behind it.

In June Mike got a big disability check and they were paid up again so all seemed well. The next month the new tenants in the back house entrusted Mike with their rent in cash and asked him to buy a money order and send it to us because they were afraid they would be late. Jennifer wrote to tell me about the cash being given to Mike. I received an envelope, but no check. I called Jennifer to ask if she had left the money order on her desk somewhere. She swore she had enclosed it. She also wanted to tell me that their truck was broken into the other night, but oddly enough nothing was stolen. As I talked to her I discovered a tiny hole in the lower right hand corner of the envelope and a crease as if someone had extracted the money order through that hole.

"It's been stolen", I told her and she voiced surprise. I asked if she could find the receipt and get a replacement. She said Mike had the receipt in the truck, then reported back that it was nowhere to be found.

"It must have been stolen from the truck," Jennifer reasoned. By this time the whole story was so fishy even I couldn't believe it. I called up Mike and asked what he thought. He said he would shoot the son of a bitch who stole it.

"But doesn't it seem suspicious?" I asked. He changed the subject, started talking about alien sightings. So, I thought, he was in on it too. Eliseo, in the back house, had lost his phone so couldn't be reached for questioning. We were stymied. A thief would not bother with a receipt nor would one bother to take the trouble to pull a money order from a hole in an envelope when it would be easier to take the whole thing. Obviously someone wanted me to know the check had been mailed and a replacement could not be had. Then Jennifer sent their money order it was short $50. This made it the same rent Eliseo would have paid, but again we didn't ad it up. Catherine was mad that they had arbitrarily set the rent lower at their whim.

In September, Jennifer wrote again. "I don't know if Mike told you, but my mother died and I had to use the rent money to fly to Oregon," she wrote. I figured mother died years ago and was being made freshly dead for this new excuse, but we didn't think a person would lie about such a thing. In October, she wrote to say she was still in Oregon waiting for money to bring her back and then they would find a way to pay us all the money owed or find a less expensive place to live. This was Catherine's cue to write them and ask them to leave by November 1st. We heard nothing from them after that and I realized we had lost control of the situation. I was sure they were blowing us off and would stay as long as they wanted rent free. We would have to actually evict them. I got a referral from my friend in LA who had sold us the house.

The law office referred cranked out evictions like hamburgers. For $650, I hired this MacEvict house and on Halloween our three day quit or pay notice and our 60 day notice was served. (Because they had lived there longer than two years it had to be 60 days, not 30.) The lawyer speculated that they would be long gone before then. I still couldn't believe that Mike would so easily give up the house he had lavished so much time customizing to fit all his needs. Two weeks later we both got frantic messages from Mike.

"I know I'm behind on the rent, but I'll make it up to you. Jennifer stole all my money," he said pitifully. Then another message to say that she had been arrested near the border of Oregon. I felt a sense of relief that it wasn't him; that he was still the man I thought he was, but Catherine didn't want us to call him back and get roped into his drama.

He called again. This time I answered. He talked to me in his most calm professional voice, telling me he could understand how it must look especially given how Tally had disappeared on us with two months' rent due just last May. Told me he was not the kind of guy who didn't pay his bills. That he was nothing without his reputation and would pay back every cent he owed. I wanted to believe him, wanted to give him back his home, help him find his kid, but Catherine didn't trust him; why hadn't he called as soon as Jennifer left given that November's rent was due?

Jennifer was doing time, had several cases of elder abuse against her from her job as a caretaker in the homes of ill patients, Mike told me. A patient had been screaming for her and a neighbor had come to see what was wrong; Jennifer was not on the premises. She had stolen from others, whatever she could lay her hands on. I tried to reconcile my acquaintance of her with this criminal mind. I remembered the first time I met her. I was curious to see what kind of woman Mike was hitched to. When I walked up to see her face I was almost sorry I had been curious. She was not just plain, she was ugly in a way that made me feel sorry for her, but repulsed me at the same time. I had gone out of my way to treat her as a peer, ate dinner with her, even talked about how important it was to gain the trust of my clients. I had assumed she shared my assumption that one had to actually be trustworthy.

When I saw her last summer she had told me that she couldn't work overnight anymore because Mike couldn't seem to get their son to school on time. It was an issue, she said. But was that enough to leave him or was she just sticking around to embezzle his disability money? When our eviction notice was served she must have realized the game was up. Mike said he never saw the eviction notice.

Jennifer's sentence for her elder abuse was all of three months, only the jails were so overcrowded she got off on a work permit and only had to serve her time on the weekends. Later she was arrested for a hit and run which she tried to blame on Mike, but he had already reported that she had taken the car so that wouldn't wash. There was no end to her badness. Nor was her mother dead, but mother was a shady character too, Mike said. The whole family was like that. I asked him what she did with all the money she stole. He said he had no idea. Later he revealed to me that she had a conviction for possession of cocaine on her record which should affect the custody case. He had had his own run-ins with the law he admitted, but he'd never been convicted of anything. This did not exactly reassure me.

On the morning of the eviction he was telling me how he got her car back. The sheriff drove up, saw us talking. A young man in a sharply pressed uniform, he asked me if I was Jennifer. I said I was the homeowner. Trying to be friendly he made an attempt to pronounce my name. Then he walked through the mostly empty house, picked up the vacuum cleaner and put it outside as if to fulfill his role. I asked him how many evictions he did.

"Twenty-five a day, 100 a week," he said. He made it seem routine.

This one too was routine so he had me sign off on it. Then he stood there shooting the breeze with Mike, ignoring me. Mike showed him his truck, put up the hood and told how he had fixed it after it had been parked for years in someone's yard. Mike appeared to be writing his number down for the Sheriff in case he too needed cars fixing. He was networking at his own eviction.

Redemption

When the sheriff left, the plumbing company showed up; the foreman striding in with a clipboard, a blue tooth headset in his ear. Mike had told the truth about the leak he had written me about in his final e-mail. There was a lake under the house that required another company to come out and pump out 326 gallons of water before the plumbers could begin their work. The galvanized piping was rotting and the foreman recommended re-plumbing the entire house with copper and PEX. I saw the wisdom of it, though I was pained by the sticker shock—$6,400 not including the $1,800 for the water pumping. The foreman shut off the water, not realizing the back house was shut off too. Said he would be back in two days after the ground had dried up a bit. Then the locksmith showed up to rekey the 15 locks on both houses since Mike had keys to the back house as well and we didn't want to worry about Jennifer or him trying anything. It would take all day to do both. I offered the locksmith a bagel; he smiled and explained that he was on a special diet for medical reasons, told me about a holistic doctor he was seeing. How his cancer went into recession because of this diet. He looked more computer tech than working class. The law firm had sent him. He also served as the eyewitness reporting on the condition of the property.

I went to check on our tenants in the back house at the end of the day. They asked when the water was going to be turned on. I called the foreman; he said the water couldn't be turned on until the end of Thursday. This was disastrous. I couldn't leave my tenants without water for three days. I went next door to find Mike sorting his things in the garage.

"We have a situation here," I told him. He reached for his wrench came over to turn the proper shut off valves to the front house, then turned the main on. We went together to tell Eliseo his water was back on. I owed Mike now and he knew it. I drove to my room at the Super 8 motel. No camping on the property this time round.

The next morning as I drove in from the commercial, spruced up end of town, I called out to the powers for help, any powers out there. Asked for the day to go well, named all the details I had in mind, listing them out loud. I worked alone in the front house spackling and cleaning. Mike had promised to come over and help. At eleven I went next door and rang the doorbell. He answered, said he'd had a late night, would be right over. An hour later he makes it over and asks me what I'd like him to do.

"I'm worried about the pool," I tell him. It was a large inflatable variety with a pump set-up on cinder blocks. It was deflated and looked terrible covered with mud and algae. I asked him to remove it and fill in the hole. He takes the pool away. But shortly after digging the hole back in on itself, he quit. Said later that he didn't feel good, but he revived enough to take another truck load of his tools out of the garage that night. Catherine was mad that his stuff wasn't off the property yet. Mad that I was still talking to him. Wanted to fly down and throw his stuff on the street. I still felt I needed him. There were too many things I wasn't sure how to fix. One of the bedroom doors was missing a doorknob from an unfinished repair on the door, the kitchen counter was missing a piece of molding and the railing on the porch hadn't been put back. Mike brought me the doorknob.

In the afternoon a van drove by, slowed to look at my 'for rent' sign and made a U turn. The passenger asked what the rent was.

"$975" I told them. "And a $500 deposit."

"That's not bad at all," she said and asked if they could see the house. A very fat Hispanic woman who had been driving, climbed out, followed by a moderately fat one, a skinny young white guy and a child. I showed them in. The first woman introduced her daughter whom I realized was not fat at all but was pregnant. The mother said she had five kids all told. The young man said he was the boyfriend.

"We get social security," the daughter told me.

"So do I" said the boyfriend. "I'm deaf in one ear," he added by way of explanation and turned back his ear to show me a scar.

"How are seven people going to fit in a two bedroom house," I asked them.

"Oh this is much bigger than the apartment we live in now", said the daughter. "We have bunk beds", they explained. I was feeling out of my depth and was wishing someone would tell me, right then, that I couldn't possibly rent to seven people. I gave them an application so as not to appear to be discriminating. Then my mother calls and they drive away while I'm still on the phone.

The plumbers came back the next day. The foreman looked serious; he hadn't counted on the line running all the way to the back house. It was going to cost more to replace that line too, $1700 more, might take two days longer too. I groaned inwardly and approved it. If they didn't complete the line the old pipe would clog up the new. Our loan on the property would now top $200,000. We were in for the long haul; a very long haul of renting. Luckily help was arriving.

Veronica, our real estate agent, a young, ambitious Hispanic woman had agreed to be our eyes on the ground for an hourly fee. She pulled up in her black Mercedes and jumped out in a black Nike warm up suit, a white Nike cap over her long black hair. She gave me a hug. I gave her the tour, introduced her to Blanca in the back house. She admired all the work that had been done since she sold us the property. She was studying Suzie Orman's online class and was practicing her financial analysis, asking how much we put into repairs after the $100,000 we paid originally.

By a stroke of good timing, she was also able to meet a couple who wanted to rent the house. They had come by the day before and had returned, having seen the condition of other offerings and apartments with no yard, no patio for their cat. They were moving from San Diego to be closer to family. I liked this pair; I could see they were normal in the middle class sense, though his teeth were sorely in need of dentistry. They were struggling some to rebuild a life. Everybody who comes to San Bernardino is struggling some. It is the end of the line. They didn't have jobs, they had SSI benefits and an army stipend. But she was a fighter—a feisty bantam fighter—determined to put her life back together after a breakdown. He was going to go to school on army money. Veronica asked if they would send copies of their bank statements and documents to prove they were getting these benefits. She was a lesson to me on tracking accountability. They actually had bank accounts. And decent credit which was even more rare. I promised to peruse their application over the weekend.

When they left I told Veronica about Mike, how he still had stuff to move. How he was living next door. She was incredulous that people were taking him in, that he would actually find housing after an eviction.

"He's friends with everybody," I said. Mike was a living example of community building, of surviving on connections and I admired that. "He's charming," I added, "even I fell for it. He fixes things; he can bring cars back from the dead," I added. This idea of trading skills for favors was a novel concept to her.

"He a white guy?" she asked.

"Yes," I said appreciating her having made this distinction. In this diverse neighborhood a white guy was the universal glue. His approval and friendship were valuable to everyone of minority status. Veronica nodded. Being a white guy also meant getting away with more.

While we stood there watching the plumbing job in full swing, a truck from the electric company drove up. I realized he was there to turn off the electricity. I told him I was the homeowner and he said he would leave it on if I would call up the electric company that day. He showed me the name on the current bill. It was Mike's last name, but with a different first name. He must have been dodging old bills. The man assured me I would not have to pay his delinquent bill.

Showdown

After Veronica left, I went to tell Mike he was missing out on the fun. He was still in his boxers looking confused when I knocked on his door. I wanted him to put back the railing and finish smoothing out the dirt after the pool clean-up, but he looked quite pale and was clearly out of commission. He went off to the doctor, came back later and told me he might have an ulcer.

"Well that wouldn't be surprising", I said. He was often conveniently ill when he didn't want to face something. The final day of my visit, the day I had to have everything of his off the property as I promised Catherine, I saw him take off in the morning with Frank and I knew they had found work and I would get no more help from him. I called him up reminding him that he still had stuff to move and I was leaving at five. At four-thirty he dropped Frank off. Frank came over and politely asked me what I wanted him to move. I pointed out everything and he set to work while I went to the hardware store for bolts to put back the railing on the front porch because the plumbers had cleaned up everything when they were done and thrown them out.

"Those bastards," said Mike when I called to tell him, but he made no offer to come back and fix it. I was getting tired of these not quite finished jobs he had left me and the plumber leaving me holes in the wall to cover. But I was proud of being able to do it myself. When I came to the final sweep out I saw there was still a stack of particle boards and closet pieces and a kitchen garbage can full of trash left from Mike's stuff.

I went next door and knocked. Frank answered the door looking nervously at me.

"Can you move the rest of the stuff?" I asked him. He said he'd do it later. I explained that I had to have it finished before I left.

"I'm busy right now. I can't do it. I'm waiting for Mike," he said. I didn't like the way he was blowing me off like that and his tone of voice was condescending. I gave him another half an hour then called Mike to complain. Mike didn't answer. He was blowing me off. Had no reason to make good on his lip service to make it all up to me. It was my turn to show my irritation at his having dragged things out, left me to clean up after him.

I did in fifteen minutes what Frank was too busy to do. I'm surprised he didn't come out, given the racket I was making tossing the garbage can into their yard and the particle board and closet pieces on top of it. The final touch was a bag of soccer balls. I tossed each one over the fence at Jennifer's car parked in the front yard next door. I threw a few into the engine compartment just to unnerve Frank. He had the hood propped open to charge up the battery. There was a stick almost thick enough to be a log in the pile of leftovers and I tossed that gently onto the engine. Frank came out ten minutes when I was just about to load finish up. He threw the soccer balls back into our yard trying to hit my car which was in the driveway just before the porch steps where I was standing. A ball hit the house with such force I knew I was in for it.

"Why did you do this?" he asked.

"Because you're so lame," I said.

He threw more balls at the car. I felt strangely calm. My black belt training had accustomed me to physical attacks, allowing me to think clearly. He wasn't aiming for me. He was completely focused on the car. I heard him mumble something.

"What" I said.

"You're so fucking stupid," he shouted.

"No you are," I said calmly, "I'm just giving you the same back."

He bent over to pick something up. And I heard a thwack as that something hit the side of my car. It was the log. Then silence. We both realized he'd gone too far. I saw myself standing there alone after dark, having deteriorated to the level of my slum lord neighborhood. Things could get unpredictable.

"Okay," I told him, taking out my phone, "I'm going to have to call the police." But I was not wearing my glasses so had to squint a bit at my phone as I pressed 911.

"Go ahead", he said and went inside. I was rid of him this stand-in of Mike's lame performance. No one had come out to see what the ruckus was about. I stood listening to the quiet and closed my phone, the call uncompleted.

I locked up the house, loaded my cleaning supplies and step ladder, drove off the property, got out a final time, listened for any trouble and closed the gate. I felt in control again. I had reclaimed my property and had new tenants waiting. Mike might take it out on the house given my losing it with his last bit of crap, but something in me had shifted. No one was going to take advantage of me quite so easily again. I had faced my fear—an eviction—and acquired a new authority. I was no longer operating on a hope and a prayer. Things would be businesslike now and probably not nearly as entertaining, but that was fine with me.

Happy Paradigm Shift

2012-01-09T10:33:00.000-08:00

In which I enter the auspicious year of 2012 through various avenues of my subconscious from shopping cart to under the house storage to apocalyptic revelations.

Let There Be Little Lights

At breakfast I rarely pass up looking at the newspaper shopping ads to see what trendy new stuff people are tempted to buy that I might later have to persuade them to give away. Plus I like camping items, my category of shopping vice. Thus I found myself perusing the doorbuster ads for Black Friday; the deals were particularly vehement. Possibly the impact of Buy Nothing Day, combined as it was with the Occupy movement, had spooked the retail sector. (Buy Nothing Day is timed to coincide with Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, said to put the retail sector into the black as we go into the Christmas shopping season. This is partly because it is a holiday falling as it does on the day after Thanksgiving and family members communicate what they might want for Christmas by going to the mall together.) In recent years the retail sector has fought back such anti-consumerist notions with more and more breathtaking deals on their most popular items guaranteed to lure shoppers into the mall on the day and make the evening news with some mob incidence of bad behavior.

I eyeballed the Home Depot ad. The store is so close to my house it has become a part of my route. My eye was caught by a modest offering of LED Christmas lights priced at $2.95, a quarter of what they would normally go for. Festooning the outside of the house with strings of light to create a winter wonderland (and add to the utility bill by hundreds of dollars) was a feat we enjoyed vicariously courtesy of our neighbor across the street. But we did have a string of lights outlining the perimeter of a room inside the house. They created a lovely festive atmosphere for parties and were bright enough that we didn't need any other lighting for our dining purposes. LED lights required so little electricity that it occurred to me that I could power the entire room with a car battery that could then be recharged with a solar panel. I had seen a truck battery put to domestic use powering a TV at a cafe in the outbacks of Brazil. When I asked how the battery was recharged I learned that it was put back into a truck every so often. These simple technological work arounds devised by the developing world have always had enormous appeal to me because they sip, from the first world, cogent bits of technology while preserving the magnificence of the surrounding landscape and the timeless lifestyle. Such timelessness was perhaps a fantasy associated in my memory with exotic travel, but I still longed for it.

In order to get this string of lights hooked up to a car battery I would need an inverter to convert the 110 voltage and accommodate the conventional two prong plug. Traveling consultants have been using such inverters for years to power laptops from their cigarette lighter outlet while working in their car. It so happened that Pep Boys, the automotive big box store next door to Home Depot, was offering doorbuster sales of inverters. And jumpstarters. A jumpstarter is simply a mini car battery inside a portable box. It is usually used to jumpstart a dead car, but also comes with a cigarette lighter outlet. Now I was really excited.

In complete violation of my long time covenant with Buy Nothing Day, I found myself at the above big box stores at 7:30 a.m. filling a shopping cart. My guilt was somewhat mollified by another idea. I could now take this show on the road. Because all of the components for my third world workaround were available at such chain stores it could be easily replicated by others who were more mainstream than me and not quite so geeky. And by combining the festive notion of Christmas lights with the back up components normally associated with an emergency I could introduce a new paradigm. A power outage was no longer about fumbling with a flashlight waiting for a utility company to restore power; it was a festive holiday liberating the house from an unreliable centralized system. It was this kind of paradigm shift that really excited me.

The solar panel is a little pricey at close to $90, but the point was anybody could create a mini off grid system with these off the shelf components. My solar panel was also bought, several summers ago, from an auto supply store; Frye's has them too. It comes with all the bits to connect it to a battery. No additional wiring is needed. It would recharge the jumpstarter battery in a day. Thus the whole system was self-supporting. I was able to keep my kitchen lit with a string of 200 LED lights for 3 1/2 hours before the battery needed recharging. (The lights drew 7 watts from the 8 amp hour battery.)

I took my road show to my neighborhood networking meeting and in five minutes persuaded six women of the beauty of this system. Being organizers they were already well schooled in the virtues of emergency preparation and as traveling consultants were familiar with inverters and car chargers for their mobile devices. My colleagues immediately recognized the usefulness of the jumpstarter. But I was also gratified that they made the connection with how easy it was to create and use an off grid system.

Of course there is a bit more to a kitchen than just lights. I had my propane camp stove, barbecue and solar oven, but the achilles heel was the fridge. This led to a little side trip underground.

Musings From The Man-da Cave

I was feeling so geeky with my obsession with LED lights, that when I came across an interior design book at the library about Man Caves I realized that a piece of me had been waiting to be identified and named. I laughed with recognition at sentiments expressed in the introduction. Wives taking over the house and rendering husbands uncomfortable in their own home. College trophies, sports paraphernalia, outdoor signs, Christmas lights and beer bottle collections exiled to the basement or garage.

I wanted a man cave of my own or perhaps more to the point, a Man-da Cave.

The real stories behind these thematically male spaces revealed a devotion to civility and a responsibility to wives and family that was quite endearing. The man of such integrity needs a man cave to get away from his responsibilities. I recognized this to be exactly why I cultivated my obsessions with expedition camping gear, alternative vehicles, off grid systems and tiny houses. These obsessions gave me a place to go to get away from an increasingly complex world.

I did in fact already have such a space. One that wasn't considered an actual part of the house. It was already cave like. You had to be stooped over to walk around in it like cro magnon man or like the office space between floors in the movie Being John Malcovich. It was the space under the house, which being on the side of a hill, afforded more height in parts of it than the usual crawl space.

I started taking it over when I moved in 17 years ago, because with four adults in residence at the time, we were very short on storage space. The man of the house had already stashed stuff on the shelves that had been affixed to the supporting pillars of the house. So I put in more shelves, lots more, for my boxes of love letters, and newspaper clippings from when I had my ten minutes of fame riding my unicycle to work. And collection of early hand drawn Banana Republic catalogs from when they were cool and had an old jeep in the store and actually sold vintage stuff. And stamp albums, Pride day button collection, vacation slides, a manual Olivetti typewriter, karate trophy, rolled up posters, a hood ornament I meant to make into a lamp, art projects and materials for art projects.

The floor, like most crawl spaces, was originally bare earth and got quite damp in the winter and muddy in parts. In fact I kept my worm bin down there and the worms were so happy they reproduced in amazing quantities and looked like flowing lava when I piled them up to collect the vermicompost. But I decided that the damp made the house cold, so I painstakingly leveled the dirt, laid sand over the damp part and covered it with very wide thick sheets of plastic. To protect the plastic, I lay tarpaper over it. I cut both right up to the footing for the posts using a stencil so there would be no gaps. When we got new vinyl flooring in the kitchen, I put the leftovers over the tarpaper. The white vinyl transformed the space into an actual room. Unfortunately the worms died from dehydration since I didn't realize the climate had changed so radically and didn't water their bedding enough. After that I didn't come down so often since there were no living beings to bring food to and take care of. Then it just became a storage space.

After reading the man cave book I went down to the space. I unfolded a camp chair to sit in because, in the bent over position needed to navigate this catacomb, frequent rest was warranted. I took a picture of myself in the chair sitting next to shelves of old paint and the chainsaw resting on a milk crate. Posted to flickr with the above description, it soon became my most popular shot of the quarter. Apparently others found the idea of a woman creating a man cave just as endearing.

I didn't put up any Christmas lights but I did cover the pink insulation overhead with flattened cardboard from empty boxes of Cheerios, stapled to the joists; (a client liked to save the boxes for me to recycle). It gave the place a cheery op art feel. I found pictures of Queen Elizabeth the First from a presentation I had given at a class on cultivating peace and put one up on the hatch that was the entrance to the cave. The space was already well lit with bare bulbs in old lamps.

At Home Depot, looking at lights again, I discovered LED light bulbs. I brought one home to test in the Man-da cave. The new technology was a fine improvement over compact fluorescents. Better color, more solidly built, lasts 23 years and leaves no hazardous waste to dispose of. Also dimmable and uses less energy. I gave one to a client as a gift and she was enthralled by it.

Into my freshly swept out and spruced up Man-da Cave, I surreptitiously dragged in my latest object of interest—a diminutive chest freezer. I got it off Craigslist for $50. I wanted to see if I could make it into a low energy fridge like the guy in Australia living on the side of a mountain powered by a few solar panels. Such a workaround wouldn't suck up more power than a 100 watt bulb, he promised in his online report. You do it by plugging the freezer into an external thermometer that keeps it from turning on so much thus raising the temperature to fridge like conditions and cutting the energy used. Beer makers had discovered the same thing since chest freezers were the ideal size and shape for a beer keg. Beer making was a very man cave thing to do. This kept me from feeling too much like a survivalist nut job outfitting my bunker.

I sat in my camp chair admiring the still unplugged freezer. Maybe next month I would buy the $60 thermometer thingie. It was time to join the family above for the holidays. (Family having now comfortably integrated Catherine's middle brother Steven as a member of the household. This would be our second Christmas together.)

Discovering Pluto

On Christmas day, during a rare period of blissful inactivity, I lay on the couch reading a book, by an astrologer, that I had requested as a gift. I discovered that my astrological chart revealed a voracious and irrational interest in acquiring knowledge. This was driven by subconscious forces on account of Pluto being so dominant in the 8th house of my chart. I was struck by this explanation. I had believed my pursuit of information was driven by feelings of inadequacy, but this explained why I never got around to actually becoming an overwhelming success. Success apparently wasn't my goal. In fact there was no actual point to my reading so much at all. I was just addicted to those ah ha moments of understanding. What a revelation.

The author, Jessica Murray a San Francisco based astrologist, advised the mature reader to embrace the dark obsessive side of Pluto's influence, in order to transcend it and transform it. Having recently brought to light the mementos of my past, hidden in the subconscious underground of the house, I figured that, metaphorically speaking, I was getting a good start. Especially since I was augmenting the space with innovative attempts to live lightly on the planet.

The actual point of her self-published book Soul-Sick Nation: An Astrologer's View of America, was to invite readers to help transform the subconscious dark side of America's obsession with power in order to save this materialistic, over-militarized and self centered nation from destroying the planet. Her analysis of the political landscape of said nation was so right on that I fully accepted her advice and found her astrological analysis of recent U.S. history fascinating. The book had been written in 2006, but it was absolutely fitting for the portentous upcoming year of 2012.

The End Of The World

On New Year's Eve Catherine, Steven and I watched the hollywood disaster movie 2012, just for kicks, and found it rather exhilarating to see the entire planet break up into disaster movie compendium of earthquake, flood, hurricane and what all, as the self appointed survivors (an obscure American writer and a Russian millionaire and their respective families, plus token minorities) competed with each other to board secret government arks built to weather the flood Noah style.

The next day as the new year pealed out on a clear sunny day, it did feel different. 2012 was not so much pregnant with promise which implies certainty, but strangely giddy with the uncertainty of it; the hope and expectation that dramatic change is afoot. After all we have already ended 2011 with Occupy and the clamor for change in the United States which had for so long preferred business as usual. While on the other side of the world a mega flood had threatened my relatives in Bangkok in a year notable for excessive catastrophic climate events and earthquakes. The new year seemed positively brimming with end of the world material.

Of course the world is not ending on the winter solstice of this year, per the predictions of the Mayan calendar (misinterpreted by an apocalypse obsessed culture), any more than Santa Claus is expected down the chimney every Christmas. But that doesn't mean we're ready to give up Santa Claus. An opportunity for cataclysmic change, especially within our collective psyche, is too good to pass up. The anticipation of it is potent with power as we climb on board the appointed year. For apocalypse or not I still believed in the potential for events of cultural consciousness to shift quite suddenly just as all those ah ha moments had flooded my mind with new, liberating, understanding. The stars were aligned for it.

Meanwhile on the other side of the earth the Buddhist calendar brings us the year 2555. This, to a Thai, must seem to be mocking them with laughter because 555 is Thai internet slang for LOL. When you say the number 5 repeatedly in Thai it sounds as if you are laughing cartoon style—ha, ha, ha. Given all that my Thai contacts have put up with, of late, with the flood and crazy making incompetent politics, there hasn't been a lot to laugh about save for the cartoons and photos of escaped crocodiles my contacts posted of their shared dilemma. To laugh, I realized when I put the year 2555 together with 2012, was an appropriate response given the irony of governments attempting to dominate nature by investing so heavily in manmade systems only to smother the natural systems that ultimately supported life. (The Thai flood was not only caused by climate change, but made worse by deforestation and the paving over of swamp land, with industrial parks, that would have absorbed much of the water as it flowed to the sea; so much like Katrina.) Laughing was a response that affirmed my non-complicity with the craziness of it.

The world as we know it—especially the world as Americans know it and that everyone else is trying to copy—should come to an end. And if we can't wrestle our deluded leaders into addressing the situation at hand, we will just have to laugh at the absurdity of it and do what we can to wrestle free and find sanity.

Occupying Myself

2011-11-16T20:59:00.000-08:00

Sometime last year I read an article by a psychologist about the historical impact of a recession job market on college graduates and how the government needed to do something about jobs now because otherwise we would create a whole generation of young people who would break off from the mainstream and stop believing in the system. My first thought was "Why on earth do we want yet another batch of young people who believe in the system when things are so bad already. This, after all, is the exploitive, growth oriented system that was fleecing us all for every last dollar and natural resource."

Then I realized, with a flash of recognition, that I was in college during one of the worse recession years of the'70s and the slim pickings in jobs was something I would never forget. Here then, was an explanation for why I grew up to be such a malcontent!

Of course, there was more to it for me, my birthright and sexual orientation having landed me in a precarious geography of amorphous identity. There were, however, two distinct and conflicting sentiments that led to my awakening. The first was the idea that a college education would match my appetite for knowledge with meaningful work that would result in a respectful career as a professional of some sort and a respectable income. This was how it had happened for my parents. The problem was that I didn't believe in most of what was being taught in school even at the very liberal, no grades campus of U.C. Santa Cruz. All I could discern was that each discipline held a narrow view of the world and not one of those world views had a place for a cross cultural, non-Western, gender bending, female empowered perspective. The knowledge I was being exposed to simply wasn't relevant to me.

So I asked my mother why did I even need to get a college degree?

"So, you can live in the manner to which you have become accustomed," she said pleased to quote this witty truism.

My mother's answer led to my second revelation. Obviously I needed to become accustomed to a lifestyle that was a whole lot less pricey. My parents worked hard in their fields. Too hard I felt. We also worked hard at the leisure end of it too, driving to the mountains in the winter for the rush of downhill skiing, maintaining a boat so we could sail in the summer, keeping the pool and the house clean so we could entertain at our own home. I didn't want to work that hard just to get to the point of working harder, especially since none of those professions looked kindly on homosexuals in their ranks. And the closeted ones already there were trading self-oppression for privileges. I had already spent three years in the closet in high school and the constant vigilance at so young an age made me long for freedom. Freedom from these Faustian bargains. I dropped out of college.

(I did eventually finish a college degree, a queer friendly one in graphic design; one I could afford on my own at a state university, while working nights at a movie theatre and living at home. I didn't want to be branded a loser just for not finishing school.)

If It's Already Broken...

For the crop of students who have now become a phenomenal people's movement called Occupy Wall Street, the above psychologist's warning was quite prophetic. When OWS burst on the scene in a way that could no longer be ignored, it confounded the mainstream media. What were these privileged kids on about? I too wondered. Was it just about jobs, given those crippling college loans? But too many jobs were Faustian bargains with the environment.

From early articles about what OWS, I was pleased to see how quickly they were learning to be an inclusive movement. On Facebook, contacts began to post edifying charts and graphics about who were the 1% and who were the 99% and how it got that way. (Wow our gap between rich and poor is bigger than nearly everyone in the world!) In a matter of weeks all the old lefty radicals were coming out of the closet, daring to voice anti-capitalist sentiments that had long been suppressed for the sake of corporate funding to their pet environmental and social justice non-profits. Our top speakers and writers paid visits to New York to give teach-ins through the human megaphone. Every lefty cause jumped on the Occupy wagon with its agenda; we all understood that the system was broken. That no serious demands could be addressed through the usual democratic process. Obama had been our hope, but he too, was completely beholden to moneyed interests (just as Clinton had been).

"I told you that people needed to get in the streets," said Catherine. Yes we'd been needing to get in the streets forever, but had long been too comfortable and too amused by our many toys. The planet being destroyed wasn't enough. Polar bear starvation and whales tortured by sonic discharges not enough. Islands of plastic in the ocean not enough (and still largely a well kept secret). Entire villages in the developing world poisoned by corporate pollution not enough. Jobs sent overseas to exploited cheap labor not enough. Healthcare only for the healthy not enough. Poisoned food not enough. Tap water made flammable by frakking not enough. Oil spills not enough. Unjust wars not enough. Just plain moral outrage not enough.

And besides marching didn't seem to do anything. It was just a way to show the international community that we weren't all asleep. It never occurred to me that we would have to camp out. We weren't homeless. But here we had a group of largely white, middle-class, college graduates fed up enough to live in tents. I never in my wildest hopes saw it coming. I believed that such youth lived in the safety of a virtual world, were too absorbed to go outside, let alone sleep in it. They were digital natives as one colleague calls them.

Camp Occupy

As an aficionado of urban camping, I had to see how it was being done. I contacted, Stacy, my fellow camper and we zipped downtown on Muni. As we entered the Justin Herman Park near downtown San Francisco, a man in a motorcycle jacket came out of his sizable tent to greet us. He was a troubadour he told us and it was his aim to be of benefit to the celebratory atmosphere of the camp, entertain tourists and add to the general bonhomie, he said. As Stacy humored him I stood watching a man in a polo shirt and chinos, pulling a rolling suitcase. He asked me if I knew who Geng was. I had no idea, naturally, and pointed to campers he could ask—white guys like him, but dressed as though for combat at a music festival.

Stacy and I took a circuit of the camp, We noted the many porta potties reeking of pinesol, the garden of vegetable plants and the catering tent busy with volunteers. Outside a white board offered classes in making sauerkraut and chinese noodles. I was particularly heartened by the talk on urban homesteading. A dog sat on a white pouf outside a tent; inside his mistress lay reading a hardback book. Rounding the corner we came upon a man listening to tunes from his laptop with portable speakers. He told us about the lamppost where you could plug into an outlet. We explored the communication tent that supported the camp's website and Facebook page. Inside sat a bearded man at a laptop. Next to him an Asian man peddling the bicycle powered generator connected to a sealed lead acid battery. As we left I saw the newcomer, his rolling suitcase in the care of a handsome multi-racial man with long black hair. They were working their way to a tent bearing a sign that said "bag check".

As we walked back up Market Street to catch the bus, we came upon the original Occupy encampment in front of the Federal Reserve building and noted the many political placards in the planter boxes. "Living Unsustainably is Self-Destruction", said one. "Tax the Rich," said another.

Two days later I had a client in Oakland. My client and her partner were pleased to report having been part of the march two days ago. After finishing my work for the day, I took the opportunity to visit Oakland Occupy, now famous for their run-in with police followed by the very successful general strike and the aforementioned march.

I emerged from the BART station a block from Frank Ogawa plaza. The entrance was marked by an altar to the marine who lay in the hospital following the blow to his head from a canister thrown by police, the night of the recent raid. At the front of the camp sat several white guys next to a sign that read "Tobacco donations here". I stopped at a pop-up shelter at the entrance to the plaza and spoke to two women, one black one white, sitting at a table under a sign that encouraged people to volunteer for services. Apparently no services were in demand, but something of an educational or self-care nature was encouraged. They offered me a free paper from an organization working for housing and racial justice.

As I walked into the camp on the newly laid hay (the original lawn having turned to mud), I noted the very different atmosphere from Occupy SF. Where SF had a familiar Green Festival atmosphere, Oakland had something fresh and edgy about it as if a village had sprung up of newly empowered people who were now busy helping themselves. I walked past a group of black men putting up a tent. At the library tent a white board had a long list of requested lefty authors. In the back corner, someone had built a hexayurt, a structure popular at Burning Man festivals, made from insulation board taped together with extra wide strapping tape. A sign on it said it was "A Red Tent" to honor the sacred feminine. A white woman in a sweater and boots stepped out of it. She invited me to come inside explaining that it was a woman only space; she showed me her pile of bedding. She had been there a week, was likely homeless before; she was accompanied by her chihuahua Elvis. I did not ask why Elvis was permitted in a woman-only space.

On the other side of the camp was a childcare tent where two children and their mother played with the toys laid out on a living room size rug. A gender-bending musician sang to a small crowd at a PA system on the steps of the city hall. Down the stairs on the right, a kitchen crew was busy preparing food for a line that was already forming. Before I left I stopped at a table loaded with donated clothes. A white woman in a bicycle helmet was busy folding and putting the clothes into categories. I stopped to lend a hand, wanting to participate in some way. She told me she lived nearby and came everyday because it was such a happening place. Yes it was magical in a Brigadoon sort of way, for the threat of eviction was a constant tension at the Occupy camps.

Oakland police had a recent history of acting rashly in a city fraught with problems and starved for cash. Later I would read that desirable public space in Oakland and other cities was now in the control of absentee corporate real estate interests. These interests feed the city with a specialized tax money earmarked to maintain a downtown area conducive to business. They were also given the power to specify how that tax money was used. (Don't we all wish we had that right?) And now they were demanding the police clear the camp. They also had the power to hire private security forces called Block by Block, a sort of Blackwater force for urban security. Mayor Quan was taking the blame for weak leadership. She may have supported Occupy, but her hands were already tied.

Change In The Air

For Americans the Occupy Movement has transformed the national dialogue dramatically. No longer will the notion of lowering taxes on the rich to raise all boats be the accepted wisdom. But the biggest crime of our financial system is still to be understood. For it is not just that the 1% refuses to share their wealth with the other 99%, it is that they have created a financial system that gives the illusion that there is so much wealth to be had in the first place. So focused are we on the power of invested money to make money that our financial system has completely lost touch with reality—with the actual physical world.

Societies used to survive hard times—wars, famine, et al—by setting aside enough grain to feed the population for the duration. The appetite of investors for real world resources has taken such food reserves, through international treaties like GATT, and thrown them on the table to play with. As with other "commodities" like forests, oil and clean water, all are bid up and made into trash as fast as possible with no sense of how long it takes to renew those resources (if they are renewable) and no back-up plan if they aren't. And that is scary. Not only are we leaving nothing for future generations, we don't even know if we are leaving enough for ourselves.

We have a system with no feedback loop to warn us when we are doing irrevocable harm to the planet. Investors are positively rewarded by rising prices to buy until a bubble bursts. And when the bubble does burst we have more of something than we know what to do with. (I know I help people throw it away. And bigger stuff like the empty condos in Bangkok that I saw on my last trip.) This overproduction of everything, making trash out of resources as fast as the market will bear, plus the pollution and carbon footprint it took to produce these items, is planned obsolescence on a planet threatening scale.

As the Occupy camps are evicted, the movement has declared that they are an idea whose time has come. Indeed there is astrological precedence for such a vetting of corporations, government, and other patriarchal institutions. The last time the planets and stars were aligned thus was during that other era of protest—the Sixties. Already the comparisons are being made. Occupy has set a mood for stripping away falsehoods and testing the viability of all our social system. There is no end to the things we could examine. I can hardly wait.

A Tale of Two Sculptures

2011-10-07T07:32:00.000-07:00

At a recent conference with the Institute Challenging Disorganization, speakers offer insights on shopping that further explain my search for a cosmic connection. Hint: It's not shopping.

A Tale of Two Sculptures

While in Raleigh, North Carolina for a conference with the Institute Challenging Disorganization, I arrived a day early to take in the sights. Diane, a fellow organizer and historian, invited me to join a few other colleagues on a tour of the town. She had rented a car and scheduled a full itinerary.

My plane came in later than all the others, so I did a bit of my own research and found a public bus going into town that would allow me to catch up with my friends. And through the miracle of cell phones and good timing, I met them on the sidewalk just as they were walking up to the capital building which I had just had time to tour on my own. The group was headed for lunch at a local vegan restaurant discovered by Margaret, our organizing colleague and vegan blogger. (The presence of vegan dishes in any town is a good indication of how hip it is and Raleigh was very accommodating on that score.)

After lunch we headed to the Executive Mansion where we were to enjoy a tour that could only be had if reservations were made at least a week in advance. Since we were so well organized, courtesy of Diane, we were admitted as promised and were welcomed by ladies of a certain era, eager to show off the Southern charm of the mansion. The four rooms we were permitted to see were decorated in the lush manner of stately homes with pastel blue drapes and pale yellow wall paper. But at the top of the stairs, back lit by a tall window, stood a large, modern glass sculpture that looked about as out of place as the slab from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It was of a translucent aqua glass; the top was rounded like a tombstone and there was a square hole in the middle of it on a rakish angle. A narrow space split the piece down the middle from the tilted opening to the floor.

The docent took her time telling us about each of the rooms pointing out the high quality of the crystal chandeliers, the cut glass punch bowl, the needlepoint done by local ladies, the china engraved with the state seal and the portraits of all the wives who had lived at the mansion. So it was not until the end that Diane asked about the unmentioned sculpture at the top of the stairs.

"Well that's a very controversial piece," said our docent. "I don't really understand it," she added. She then brought over a lady of authority who told us everything she knew about it. It was a gift we learned. Obviously one of those awkward gifts from an important relative so had to be displayed. It was created by a Czech artist and was made from lead crystal. It was worth half a million dollars. The back was completely flat, she told us, as if this was a deception that should have rendered it half the price. And, as a clue as to its burden on them, she concluded that it took eight men to move it into position. So no putting it away when the important relative had gone. She remembered one more detail. It was not always blue. At night it turned to a deep grey. For the ladies, this last feature seemed to add further deception, but gave it a mysteriousness that hooked me. It made the sculpture seem alive.

I thought no more of it until the next day when we toured the very modern North Carolina Museum of Art. This eco building had been a prison and was now remodeled with a climate controlling sheath that filled it with natural lighting and kept it cool, plus it had a water catchment system that emptied into a garden. It was at the cultural opposite end of the spectrum from the mansion downtown. Inside I perused the paintings in the modern collection and the found-art metal sculpture from South Africa, then came to a large, bottle green, glass sculpture the shape of a triangle. It had the same worked edge as the blue one at the mansion. Chipped like a flint arrowhead. Was this another piece by the same artist?

A museum docent helped me find the name of the artist. There were two artists and they were indeed Czech. She did not know about the one at the Executive Mansion so asked another woman on the staff who came over and told me it was a temporary exhibit. She seemed not to have been to the Executive Mansion, but when I described the blue glass sculpture she asked me if it was called Vestment. I didn't know. The name of the piece and the name of the artist was not given by the ladies at the Executive mansion.

"Did it look like a vest, a garment?" she asked. Well, yes, it could be a vest. This being modern art you never really know.

"I think I know it", she said and was satisfied. But I was not content for the story to end there.

"You really should go and ask for it. They wouldn't miss it," I told her. "They think it's controversial." That such a benign piece would be considered controversial seemed to startle her, but I could see that it was not her place to go across town to ask for a sculpture at the governor's mansion, however misplaced.

I couldn't leave it alone though, and when I returned to the conference I told the story to a few friends. Margaret, seeing my passion for this story urged me to write to the newspaper suggesting that it should be moved to the more appropriate setting of the museum. But I was not looking for a project. I had done my job. In my mind the younger woman from the museum would venture to take a tour of the Executive Mansion so she could see for herself how misplaced the Vestment sculpture was. And then she might bring it to the attention of someone of higher authority who would eventually manage to have the statue gifted to the museum.

I had done my part. I had made myself available as a messenger, a molecule of connection in the larger scheme of things. I was a part of something larger that may or may not be meant to happen.

That night, I described to my conference roommate Kim, that when I was traveling through England over the summer, I had the sense that everywhere I went everything was happening exactly as it was supposed to happen and everyone I sat down next to was exactly the person I was supposed to have a conversation with.

'I've had that happen," she said. But what was it?, I wondered. This sense of being a part of something, but not having to try very hard to make it work. For I wished to remain a cosmic slacker and appreciated things even more when they came easily.

What is Shopping?

Last year at the same conference I had been fingered in one of the coaching surveys for possessing an anti-social element in my character. I was guilty of too much independence. I was not contributing to my community.

"You might want to change that", said the coach who had offered the survey, "for you could be perceived as uncooperative".

And so I found myself, while choosing a desert at lunch, saying something to the conference chair about the next conference which was on materialism. This prompted her to beg me to join the conference committee. And so we named the conference "Acquiring Minds: How We Think Act and Feel About Our Possessions". As a result of my participation and rather little effort on my part, an old friend of mine from a writing group I belonged to some 20 years ago, was going to speak on the topic of world cultural habits regarding shopping. And I would join her on the stage as part of an ad hoc international panel made up of our foreign organizers from the Netherlands, Australia, Canada and Japan, with me representing Thailand.

As I spoke, to the 140 conference attendees, of my shopping experiences in Bangkok, I felt myself describing a sort of shopping Shanghri La. I evoked visions of marble palaces filled with politely bowing, costumed staff welcoming customers into acres of the finest goods the world had to offer. (That is if you were looking for the latest status items from European designers and could pay the luxury tax.) Only the organizer from Japan could come close to such a customer oriented experience. Asia had fully grasped and exploited this ritual of modern materialism.

The next day, in keeping with the conference theme, a speaker, who was an expert on point of sales marketing, gave a humorous presentation on the tactics used in his profession to make the public buy more, especially of things they don't need.

"Need is a four letter word," he told us. (If people only bought what they needed profits would stabilize, i.e. stagnate which was worse than death in a growth oriented capitalist system.) As I listened to him I realized that he was the high priest of this shopping religion.

"Mark it up, mark it down, move it out," he said making the sign of the cross in reference to his Catholic background. The phrase summed up his entire thesis. In-store marketing was designed to create an experience that made the shopper feel they were a part of something bigger, that they were having an interaction with a community, be it a brand or an event. The emphasis on novelty and change, competition with others, how you felt about your role in life and the perceived value of items when on sale or discounted, were all part of creating a dynamic setting that made you want to return to the store to see what was new. And that was the whole point.

For the shopper's perspective we had a very special speaker, who swore us all to confidentiality as to her station in public life, then generously presented photos and details of her secret life as a compulsive shopper and hoarder. She was used to her cluttered house, she told us, because she did not see the excess of things in it. After all she could still move around. She swung her arms around to demonstrate. Take a picture and show it to your client she advised. A picture makes you see. And see we did, all the clutter sprawling across her living room to her kitchen.

She spoke of the thrills of ownership, of her delight in things. Her sense of power to be able to buy anything that caught her eye. How the bidding on e-bay made her ever more competitive. How easy it was to pick up the phone and buy what she saw on QVC (a TV shopping channel). How she had grown up poor and didn't have the pleasure of owning stuff. Shopping was an itch she had to scratch—a lot. But with the help of her professional organizer she had begun a program of reform and had devised a way to scratch that itch without actually buying anything. This was done by looking at catalogs. And here she acted out how she carefully circled the things she liked, folded down the corners of the page and set it aside. Then she diligently worked to give away what filled her house.

To be addicted to shopping is the acceptable addiction pointed out a third speaker. Our society and economic system wants us to buy more than we need. This speaker, a psychotherapist, had devised a treatment for compulsive buying disorder. It included an arduous, record keeping cure that involved writing down everything bought that day with the price. This daily "weigh-in" is then analyzed and each item ranked as to necessity. The money spent on unnecessary items is added up; the patient then sees how much money she has spent on what she didn't need. The patient is coached to change her conversation from "how can I use this attractive thing" to "do I really need this, how will I pay for it and where am I going to put it".

My hoarding clients bring home things they find left in bags and boxes on the sidewalk with signs marked "free", put there by their neighbors. The opportunity to rescue and possibly make use of free things (usually by giving them to someone else) gave these clients the same feelings of discovery, novelty, self-worth and interaction with a dynamic world.

"It was just there on the sidewalk like God had put it there for me to find," said one of my clients about a blue plastic box she had picked up that turned out to be just right for something she kept on her cluttered desk. (I forget what. Rubber bands maybe.)

Dancing With The Cosmos

Marketing experts aim to recreate that feeling of being in the right place at the right time, receiving if not a message from God, then at least an inspiration to buy.

"Logic makes you shop, but emotions make you buy" said our guy in marketing. Whether free or paid for, the emphasis is on things. In a material world what is it that can replace things? My experience of everything happening exactly as it was supposed to happen, gave me an inkling. A series of experiences that are satisfying just as they are. A conversation with the cosmos. The universe answering in coincidences.

It was a coincidence that I had seen the two glass sculptures by Czech artists. No one else in the group had seen that. It spoke only to me. Perhaps, as an organizer, I simply wanted to put a like item with a like item. Or, on a psychological level, I had identified with the sculpture being trapped in the wrong culture and wanted to find it a more suitable home where it would be appreciated. Or on a cosmic level the sculpture was appealing to me to send a message. "Help me Amanda Kovattana, you are my only hope."

The psychotherapist, left us with a final thought. "You can never really get enough of what you don't need."

When everything seems to happen exactly as it is supposed to happen you are content and do have all you need. But more than that. And I cannot seem to name it. There is a mystery involved, partly planned, partly luck. Co-creating with the universe is a popular way of putting it. All I can offer is that it won't clutter your house and it won't take eight men to move, but it will be dynamic, require a more subtle receptivity and the sense that the conversation is ongoing wherever you are.

The Once And Future Ley Line

2011-09-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

Part two of my report on the ancient sites tour of Southwest England with Freddy Silva and the Prophets Conference.

The Prophets

Our group traveled in not one, but two large coaches. The word Avalon was inscribed across the side in foot high letters announcing our mythical trek. But we were not on the trail of Arthurian legend, we were going further back in time to uncover the mysteries of ancient sites.

I sat in the back of the bus with an astrologer and a conspiracist, both English women. I met Stella the astrologist, walking from our B & B to the coach parking lot. She plied her profession in Australia and had her own magazine column and radio show. She looked athletic in her biking shorts and sports shoes, but complained that I walked too fast. Too much success had usurped her exercise time, she told me.

I met the conspiracist when we stopped at Silbury Hill, a man made mound.

"Silbury Hill was built to monitor human progress", Freddy was saying, neglecting to mention who was doing the monitoring.

"It's like trying to talk to people about conspiracy theories," I said to the conspiracist, coincidentally picking up on her pet obsession. Giants, levitation, healing stones—it all came under the category of alternative realities not readily accepted by the mainstream.

"I just don't say anything to people," said the conspiracist whose name was Elizabeth. I realized then, that she had probably indexed the whole kit and caboodle of conspiracy theories.

"It's the Virgo in you that is so attracted to conspiracy theories," I heard Stella telling Elizabeth on the coach. "When I come across a conspiracy theory I just read it once then leave it, but you're obsessed with them," she explained. I was relieved to hear that there was a reason why the idea of conspiracy itself was so addictive. Rather than analyze the usefulness of the content, people gave in to the intrigue and paranoia of uncovering secret information. Fond as I was of certain conspiracy theories that had fundamentally changed my view of government, there were plenty of egregious things wrong with our exploitive capitalist system that was no secret at all. But I stayed out of it. I was absorbed by Freddy's book drawn by material I had never come across before. His information stimulated my mind, keeping it pliable and allowing new thoughts to arise. Serendipitously enough, just as we arrived at a new site I would be reading about it.

We were at St Catherine's, a chapel high up on the top of a hill, sitting all by itself above the little village of Abbotsbury. Freddy called our attention to the placement of the chapel.

"If you want to encourage a congregation to come to church you would build it in a much more accessible place. So there must have been a different reason to put a chapel half a mile up a steep hill. There was; it was to take advantage of the telluric energies." I had to look this word up when I read it in his book. Telluric energies referred to earth energies. They could be currents traversing the landscape or ley lines as they were named by Alan Watkins, a Welshman who discovered the phenomena in 1921.

The chapel of St. Catherine's, a building of light colored stones and a lovely peaked doorway was situated on the Mary ley line, the feminine current. Once inside the heavy wooden door we found an empty room, no pews or an altar; nothing at all inside just light from the clear glass window. Freddy asked Peachie, a woman on staff with the tour planners, to lead us in ceremony. We did the same toning exercise as we had done in Stonehenge and found the note to be much higher. It was indeed a feminine energy.

Outside a stiff wind blew which Freddy attributed to the masculine energy of St. Michael. While we were inside, a rainstorm came upon us. It lessened when we departed from the little chapel. This was no accident Freddy commented; with this many people we were a force interacting with the land, thus rainstorms would wait until we were sheltered.

I was glad to have on my heavy waxed cotton raincoat, anyway, along with my water shedding leather hat. I had decided to bring the coat, instead of just a windbreaker, because of a shamanic journey in which a cockatoo showed me what the weather would be like for our trip. When my friend Gail in Henley read about my journey with the white bird, she said it must have been their cockatoo Tallulah who had guided me. I'm sure it was I replied, excited at having seen something with an actual connection to my trip. I had been wondering, since cockatoos were not native to England. When I met Tallulah she was indeed white with a yellow crest, but much smaller in person. Or perhaps it was I who was bigger. At any rate, in shamanic tradition, I had scoped out my trip beforehand and was thus prepared. None of the Europeans had brought rain jackets.

Having explored the divine feminine, the following day was devoted to becoming acquainted with the masculine energies. We began the day with another chapel on a hill, St. Michael's of Brentor near Dartmoor, built in the 12th century on a volcanic plug. With its dark stone and squared off tower, it looked aggressively masculine. The hill itself was ragged and spiky with weeds. Four thousand years ago, a mound had stood on the site. We dutifully climbed up to the chapel.

"All of you taking the steeper path must have Capricorn in your chart," Freddy joked watching the handful who were on a goat track straight up the rock face.

Inside the chapel were pews facing a stained glass window depicting the Archangel Michael, sword in hand held vertically. Behind us a workman was fixing something behind a metal grate. We did not attempt a ceremony, but listened to Freddy tell us how the sword of St. Michael pierced the telluric forces represented by a serpent or dragon. This piercing was done to prevent the geomagnetic force from moving away. The telluric energy was then captured inside the church where it was enhanced by the design of the building.

Once Upon A Ley Line

For the ancients, the land was all about power spots, places where the veil between the worlds was thin allowing a connection to the divine and guidance to what future lay ahead. Currents of geomagnetic forces connected these power spots along straight lines aka ley lines. Freddy explained that temple builders aimed to tame the currents of earth energies and keep it from moving. The cornerstone of the building pierced the current just as an acupuncturist pierced a meridian with a needle. The altar was then placed directly over the current. The altar was the spot where initiates experienced enhanced shamanic journeys. Or as Freddy put it, you went to the altar to be altered.

I already knew from my year studying the earth based feminine tradition, that the snake was a symbol of the goddess and the story of St. Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland represented the Catholic church taking dominion over the earlier pagan religion. So I was a little alarmed that, in Freddy's version, the snake was being pierced, but he was telling us that this was necessary to insure that humans could access its powers within a temple designed for the purpose. Then the Catholic priesthood took control by positioning themselves at the altar as the middle man. They kept the people from this direct access, denounced the symbol of the snake as evil, claimed the divine knowledge (direct access) was forbidden to man and made St. George a hero for slaying the dragon. It all amounted to the same thing. The control and dumbing down of the populace.

In the foyer of the little chapel of St. Michael, I was surprised that I felt a definite physical sensation. Long upright rods of pressure were stabbing through me into the ground almost pinning me in place much as the sword might pierce the dragon. I sat down next to one of my tour mates and told her how "stabby" the energy felt. She agreed.

While we were in the chapel it again began to rain. It lessened a bit as we climbed down the hill to board our coaches. Freddy knew of a good pub in a nearby village, but when we got there the cook said he couldn't accommodate so many people so our coach drivers took us to the nearest big town where we stopped at a market square and fanned out to all the local eateries. I joined one of the prophet conference speakers, invited by his girlfriend who had shared with me the stabbiness of the energy at St. Michaels. Geoff Stray, a Brit whose day job was driving a bus, had written a half dozen books on the Mayan prophecy. He and his girlfriend were more interested in my work as an organizer than prophecy, but at the end of our lunch I couldn't resist asking how they were preparing for 2012. They weren't. It was a non-starter of a question. What exactly did one prepare for? Nor did they seem worried. (Like Freddy they would probably advise putting a case of champagne aside and inviting some friends.)

By afternoon our luck was running out. As we headed up the narrow little country lane to St. Clether's Well, we were thwarted by a bridge that was out of commission. Then when we decided to head for our third destination we were faced with a road that was closed. This meant turning the bus around; a seemingly impossible task. The driver, an older man experienced with country roads found a "T" intersection where he hoped to make the turn, but the back wheels started to dig into the soft shoulder and we appeared to be stuck. We asked him to let us out so the bus would be lighter. The drama of the stuck bus continued on for some time as everyone tried to help. Finally with enough traction from rocks borrowed from a neighbor's landscaping and handfuls of gravel several of the prophets threw under the wheel, half a dozen men in the group managed to push the coach to solid ground.

Freddy commented on how troublesome the male energy had become, referencing the state of the world, unbalanced as it was by female energy, but how we had managed with some grace to avert disaster. We were too late to make it to our third destination, but Freddy found another St. Michael's chapel on the Michael line. This was a ruin at Barrow Mump just off the motorway with easy access for a coach. A perfect save. On the hill the wind whipped around us as Freddy bid us all imagine archangel Michael delivering into our hands a sword of light. Afterwards, I realized the wind had taken my prized turkey feather right off my hat. It was nowhere to be found. I was upset that this insatiable masculine energy had run off with it, but all things considered it was a fair price for so many days of awesomeness. (There would be other more modest English feathers to adorn my hat.)

So it was with eagerness that we looked forward to our final day when the masculine and feminine energies would be expressed in perfect balance. For this experience we headed to nearby Wells Cathedral. This medieval example of architectural perfection stood in the middle of the town surrounded by green lawns. Stepping into a medieval church felt downright modern after all the ancient stone circles and neglected chapels. The Cathedral was teaming with life. A youth orchestra occupied the main hall rehearsing for a concert. Men and women in clergy robes strode purposely about.

Freddy pointed out the structure built to support the walls in the transept. After it was found that the walls were bowing outward from the weight, a builder had been called in to fix the problem. He neatly designed a double arch shape that happened to incorporate the shape of the vesica piscis, a symbol of sacred geometry discovered by the ancients and first recorded by Pythagoras. Freddy felt that this was on purpose claiming that builders were a subversive lot and were still faithful to the old pagan ways. The word pagan, he noted, is French for someone who lives in the country. Here a division of city and country culture was implied. The city culture being about centralized control and thus more authoritarian while the pagan culture followed the old ways of individualized access to the divine. (This rather reminded me of the city states of Asia aggressively courting the globalized market and sucking up all the resources of the nation while the peasant cultures in the country continued with the remnants of a localized sustainable economy while they still had access to the land.)

In the chapter house stairwell of Wells Cathedral, Freddy pointed out more subversive activity in a small decorative statue of a monk piercing the dragon. (Actually the monk has a stick in the dragon's mouth and is smiling so no struggle seems to have ensued.) This, he explained, indicated the builders understanding that there were telluric energies present. There were other dragon motifs at Wells showing dragon heads with beams coming out of their mouths very similar to the Chinese way of depicting dragons. The Chinese were aware of earth energies too, and put them to use in their study of Feng Shui.

Pilgrims Purpose

Skeptics, Freddy told us, would not be able to experience a site as designed for they are pre-programmed not to feel anything, defiantly waiting for proof, for the some feat of magic to be performed. Yes, skeptics, are by definition non-participants. And human participation was the final element needed to bring alive the power of a site. We were entering these sites as pilgrims, Freddy told us, not as tourists and that made all the difference. The quality of our attention and awareness are expressed as electromagnetic impulses and such impulses react with the forces held within the temple, fusing into a sympathetic resonance that then allowed for an interactive experience.

The stairwell where the dragon was pierced led to the chapter house, a large round room with an arched ceiling. The large space easily accommodated all 50 plus of us and we spread around the perimeter sitting on the bench. Here again we toned the room with sound and were rewarded with the heavenly acoustics characteristic of cathedral space. The proportions of the room were so pleasing that we perceived it to be in perfect balance by whatever criteria, whether masculine with feminine, yin with yang or architectural ratio. None of us wanted to leave. The place opened us to reflection and memories, filling me with a sense of connection to the distant past that commanded my undying loyalty more appropriate to an age of faith than of doubt and bringing tears to my eyes. In real time, the room made me feel in balance, finely tuned, strong and agile. I wanted to dance the space despite the hard stone floor. I waited for everyone to leave, before leaping across the floor and turning a few cartwheels.

Wells was built over an ancient site as most medieval cathedrals were, whether to convert the local pagans to the new religion or to continue to capitalize on the earth energies is open to interpretation. We visited the garden courtyard where the foundation of the original chapel can still be seen. Across the lawn was a small window in the wall looking into the garden where the original well head emerged as a lovely pond.

Water in the form of underground streams, as well as electromagnetic energies were the first two elements required for placing sacred sites. Next came sacred measure and geometry. The entire cosmos of the planets studied and taken down in numeric form, then embodied into the measurements and architecture of the temple building, recorded there for posterity. Thus when we visited Glastonbury, that afternoon, we heard the story of how King Henry the VIII came to Glastonbury to demand the treasure (taxes collected) and not being given any blew up the cathedral, not realizing that the cathedral itself was known as The Treasure, a farmer's almanac of information about the movement of the planets, eclipses, seasonal events. All that was left was a few buttresses and a piece of the chapel ceiling.

For our final event together we climbed up the side of the hill just beneath the Tor. The Tor was the iconic symbol of Glastonbury. It was the tower on top of a hill; said hill was once surrounded by water and was the island known as Avalon. Freddy got out his dowsers and found an energy vortex in the ground, counting out nine spirals. He then directed us to form two intersecting lines like a celtic cross. Thus joined we ran together in a counter clockwise direction to insert our energy into the vortex. After three or four turns we ran the other direction to release the energy. Freddy counted the spirals again and there were 23. This was to show us that in interacting with the land we were able to increase the energies and keep them potent.

Thus the purpose of the pilgrim was revealed. To bring to the earth our energy, keep alive the fecundity of the land and keep the planet happy so both would thrive for another year. Not a bad practice considering our current relationship to the planet.

The Prophets Tour

2011-08-21T19:43:00.000-07:00

Part one of my report on the tour of ancient sites in southwest England. In which I learn how the visitor's participation animates the power of the sites in their role as temples.

Stonehenge

Of all the iconic landmarks that could represent England, I was most attached to Stonehenge. Its mystery kept alive something that history hadn't managed to categorize and box up. It dominated the landscape, despite being bound on two sides by noisy highways. To the average visitor it was cordoned off and had to be viewed from a distance, but Freddy Silva, our tour leader, had promised that we would have complete access to the stones. And though there were so many of us that we had to enter in two groups of 26, we would all have an hour at sunset to absorb the mystery held within the circle of stones.

Catherine and I were in the second group. We stood on the path feeling the stones from afar. And we could feel it too. I hadn't known to do this on previous visits, but having practiced feeling for energy forces emanating from individuals in my Shamanic healing workshop, I was enthralled that this sensation was so defined against my palms, like a wall of buoyant energy. I was too hard of hearing to hear the high pitch sound given off by the stones, but Catherine could hear it. Both of these phenomena Freddy had mentioned we might sense.

Since this tour was a part of my Shamanic exploration, I came prepared to dance my spirit animals at the site. I had my iPod with me and began to do a jig of sorts, much to the amusement of Catherine who was taking video pictures of me (and listening to her own iPod—to a Buddhist dharma talk). Then we hung out on the grass, on this clear evening, watching the first group mingle about among the stones. After a while, I lay on the ground to attempt a shamanic journey, but I couldn't do it; the site appeared to be protected underground by a rigid replica of the stones and I was unable to proceed. Just at that moment Catherine was telling me to get up. It was time to go in.

As we entered through the gateway stones, Freddy told us to hold an intention for something we wanted to ask the stones. Ask the stones! I was surprised by this New Age speak for I had joined the tour because of his knowledge of geomancy. At the same time his charming manner told us not to hold him accountable for any of this woo woo stuff. (I often used such charm myself just to see how far people would humor me. To charm was, after all, a casting of a spell to remove you from ordinary reality.)

And so he told us the story he espoused, about how Stonehenge came to be built by a race of Egyptian builders—giants who were some twelve feet tall—who came to Britain circa 8,000 B.C. as part of a temple building boom after a global flood. Said builders had levitated the stones into place. In England this levitation story is popularly attributed to Merlin. I was familiar with discussions of levitation from other New Age literature, but giants—not so much—apart from Jack and the Beanstalk and Haggard in Harry Potter.

These builders were "dedicated to the preservation and transmission to the future, of a body of spiritual knowledge from the remote past," Freddy says in his book Common Wealth. They wanted to "maintain an unbroken chain of self-help centers in the face of potential chaos…because temples are living organisms that amplify human potential". It was the part about amplifying human potential that had excited me enough to make this journey across ocean and continent to see for myself.

Curiously, once inside the circle, I could no longer feel the electromagnetic force. The stones seemed quiet and protective. Later I would learn that the site was designed in such a way that an electromagnetic field was created around the perimeter to protect it and to alert those who knew how to use such sites. Perhaps that was why I couldn't journey outside of the site. And why I was seeing a picture of it all locked up. Duh.

Stonehenge was originally intended to be a lunar calendar, Freddy told us, which was why the blue stones used to be outside the circle of larger stones, but when the climate changed, the ancients moved the stones inside to adapt to the new solar oriented climate. Thus mankind went from a feminine culture (governed by the moon) to a masculine culture (governed by the sun). That's for sure, I thought, but I'd not heard it attributed to a change in climate.

Even more interesting was the healing properties that Freddy mentioned was associated with the stones through sound. Sound was a method healers used to put the human body back into alignment. This coincided with recent information I had learned about the use of sound to open the chakras for healing.

Sound was a tool we would use to raise the level of energy within the site; this would make it easier for us to access what the site had to offer, Freddy told us. He then instructed us to find a note that we felt emanated from the stones and sing it. This was called toning. I'm not much of a singer, but I did indeed feel that the note I picked was true to the stones; it was also in harmony with the rest of the group.

He then suggested we look around and find the stone that was calling to us, go to it and see what it had to offer. He encouraged us to "go with the faeries" as we did this. In his own way, he was speaking in shamanic terms.

The best way I knew to access knowledge from an "inanimate" object was to use a fluid mind—enter the dreamscape with my spirit animals. Standing before a large stone on the perimeter, I meshed with Mongoose, climbed up to the top and asked for a vision of the future. I saw a man in a horse drawn cart coming down a dirt road. He looked like Igor from the movie Young Frankenstein.

"You've been reading too many peak oil books", I said to Mongoose, and climbed down again.

At the next stone I meshed with Bear, climbed up to the top, looked at the sky and saw a space ship by twilight. Well now, this was more fun. I stayed there waiting and a hatch opened. A humanoid alien walked down the gang plank, put out a finger and touched me then returned to his ship and took off.
Having got the obvious visions out of the way, my mind was emptier of expectation. I approached a small stone about waist high. I had Mongoose touch it. (We were not allowed to touch the stones; it made the guards anxious.) The pint size stone started to dance and reminded me of Silly Putty, a favorite toy I made my parents buy me when I was ten. What had entranced me about Silly Putty was that you could press it onto a newspaper and take from it an imprint. The stone was telling me it was a publishing stone. Good enough; I had friends telling me to publish and now a stone too.

Behind it was a taller stone with a tiny hole where an eye might be. It told me it was a reporter stone and received massive amounts of information through his one eye. This visual amused me so intensely, I was satisfied that I had found the right message. I sat back and watched a crow fly to the top of the lichen encrusted stones. He caught a wasp buzzing about there and ate it.

The sun was setting. It was time to go. As we left the site, a woman in our group came up to me.

"I love your energy", she said. This is New Age speak for I think you're hot—on a cosmic level.

"Are you Native American?" she asked me. Ah, she was fooled by the feather in my hat. I told her my background and asked her where she was from.

"Jerusalem," she said.

The Hat, The Shirt, The Feather

My outfit for Stonehenge was purposefully flamboyant. For the trip, I had sewn a shirt from fabric so full of colors it looked like a Rousseau jungle. The shirt had a floppy collar and wide medieval sleeves ending in elastic clown ruffles at the wrist. (Very useful for pushing up the elbow when the day turns warm.) To the open V neck collar, I could add my white aviator scarf when the nights got chilly. I wore the shirt like a tunic with my black belt with the sun ray brass buckle (made by a craftsman in San Gimignano from our visit to Italy). Worn with black pants, it was, all in all, a swashbuckling effect. When you can't blend in, you might as well stand out. It makes people consider twice before pigeonholing you.

To complete the outfit I had to have a hat. If I was not to be English (for I knew the English did not hear my accent as English), then I might as well be American. This called for a baseball cap or a cowboy hat. The closest I had to a cowboy hat was my leather Australian Bahmah (also perfect for rainstorms).

My mother noticed the feather poked into the hatband when she came to take us to the airport. She commented on it being shaman like. Indeed, it was the final shamanic touch. It was a turkey feather, often used by Native Americans in their ritual ornamentation. I found the big, brown and white striped feather on a recent camping trip to Henry W. Coe State Park. There you can hear the wild turkeys gobble as you wake up. They left me the feather on the trail near the campsite.

"It's all about the hat," I told my mother as I put it on my head for the ride to the airport.

The Prophets

In the next few days I would get to know the tour members. Many were professional intuitive counselors, astrologers, channelers, healers, Reike practitioners, massage therapists plus an accountant. The tour leaders referred to us as prophets after the name of their conference. It was not altogether a misnomer. I had been "prophesying" doom for some years now.

At Avebury we gathered at the very long procession of what was originally 600 stones standing in two lines about 20 feet apart. The pairs of rocks were designed to wake up the entering initiate as electromagnetic energy bounced between them.

The site was on two ley lines known as the Michael and Mary line (or in pre-Christian times as the Apollo and Athena line). The stones on the left guarded the female line and the ones on the right, the male line. Several of the prophets said they could feel the pulsing between the pairs of stones. I couldn't feel it, but I was used to being the dumb one in the group.

To show us where these energy fields began and ended Freddy asked for a pair of dowsers and sure enough one of the prophets produced a pair. As he walked across the field in front of the stones, with the L shaped metal rods in his fists, the dowsers turned just as he reached the edge of the stone and turned again when he reached the other edge. I was dumbstruck. Now I was going to have to learn about dowsing. (It is not unlike the pendulum with which I already have a familiarity.)

For his next demonstration Freddy called for a volunteer. We had, by then, entered the main field where the stone circle lay. We were at a very large female rock at the entrance of the circle. It had a seat in it where the volunteer would sit. Once she did so, Freddy scanned her with his hand to discover the site of the ailment (as I had learned in my extraction healing workshop). He held his hand there and toned the appropriate note into the rock face. At the top of the "sound" chamber the rock jutted out capturing the sound and sending it back down to the patient.

"I can see her chakra expanding," said one of the prophets with a North American accent.

"Ah good so it's working," Freddy said.

Later I spoke to the woman who could see chakras and asked if she was an intuitive. She said she had been able to see auras since quite young and was giving classes when she was thirteen, but there was not much money in intuitive work so now she was a coach. Hmm, yes, join the club.

On the third day, of the tour, we followed just the Mary line for we were devoting the day to getting a feel for the feminine energy. And what a lovely day it was for taking in the sites. First a fertility site where the Cerne Giant with his impressive phallus was etched in the hillside with lines of white chalk. Then a visit to the Cerne Well in a quiet walled garden behind a church.

As we sat in the dappled light under the trees, Freddy encouraged us to enjoy the contemplative environment and to drink from the stone basin in the ground at our feet. The water was full of iron and was good for us, he said. We would also be drinking the memories of all those who came before us which would connect us to the past and future. The water was cool and thick. It had been a long time since I could drink water directly from nature.

This, I thought, was the perfect place for a shamanic journey and just as I picked my intention for the journey (to help me further bond with my two power animals), a German woman, not from our group, spoke up and announced that she was going to lead a shamanic journey and anyone who wanted to could join her. I looked up to see a large, bespectacled woman in a poncho and a hat much like mine. In her hand she held a handmade skin drum.

How serendipitous was that? I put my face in my hat to block the light and she began to drum exactly the beat that I was accustomed to.

And so we three spirit friends, Bear, Mongoose and I set off on a fast ride in a dinghy up the Cerne spring. We were enjoying the open countryside when the spring led us into an underground tunnel behind the Cerne Giant. We then came to a large wooden door. The drum bid us enter and we walked into a sun filled village peopled with celebrants. Following the path we came to a rock face from which water poured forth. A pretty woman in period dress and flowers in her hair stood beside it. She handed us each a crystal goblet and bid us drink. This we did and were thus refreshed and bonded in this ceremonial pilgrimage to the wellhead. Just then the drum sounded the beat of return and we hurried back the way we came, boat and all. It was such an invigorating journey it filled me with magic. Afterwards I got up and introduced myself to the German shaman, exchanging a few words about our shamanic traditions.

A Prophets Advice

For lunch there were two pubs to pick from, The Royal Oak and The Giant Inn. Naturally I picked the Giant. Soon other prophets joined me, ones I recognized for their high level of intuitive skills. When they asked what I did for a living they were fascinated that I went into people's home to do actual clutter clearing. How funny, I thought, for their work was equally exotic to me.

Another prophet, an Englishwoman, sat down next to me and bid me tell her about the feather in my hat, asking if it was an eagle feather. She also wanted to know what was up with the red rock lobsters on my bright yellow shirt. I explained about the turkey feather and told her how I had made the shirt from a vintage Hawaiian sarong (in the same style as the Rousseau jungle shirt). This seemed to past muster and she proceeded to speak to me as a peer.

She was a channeler, she said, as if describing an ordinary job. (I love that down-to-earth quality of the New Age Brits.) I asked her how that was different from a medium. She said mediums just work with dead people. She used to do that, but dead people weren't any wiser for being on the Other Side and she was tired of them leaving footprints on her psyche. Channelers, she told me, work with the energy of the earth, Gaia for instance, to ask her to be gentle with her back cracking which we experienced as earthquakes.

She asked how San Francisco had managed to avoid having an earthquake, because from where she stood, one was due, what with all the earthquakes happening in Japan and all.

"I don't know", I said, "all of us who live there are nuts." For living in earthquake country, I was thinking.

"It probably feels good living there", she said, "because of all the negative ions coming out of the cracks in the earth". I hadn't thought of that.

"We'll you must be doing something right," she concluded. Yes, according to Gaia relationship theory, we must be in her good graces. I liked to think so with all the weekend events I went to to improve things with the planet.

She told me about brokering deals with unfriendly spirits that harmed the environment. It sounded so much like what I'd been reading about possession by unwanted entities, I told her about my hoarding clients. She said I should do space clearing after I decluttered my clients' homes.

"I'm not really trained in space clearing", I told her. "It's more the department of my Feng Shui colleagues."

"I'm giving you a hint," she said adamantly, not put off by a lack of credentials. "And you should change your name to Ananda," she added. This was a Sanskrit name also used in Thailand. Perhaps she had changed her name too, I wondered later. She had a Celtic one with a handful of vowels. I heard it as Elfa.

When I told Catherine, that evening about Elfa's suggestion, she reminded me that Ananda was also the companion to the Buddha. Yes, I remembered. He was the dumb one who didn't get what the Buddha was going on about, asked a lot of questions and wrote everything down.

"Well, that sounds about right," I said.

The Queens English

2011-07-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

A report from my trip to England in which I fall in love with England through my mother tongue and must promptly extricate myself for fear of losing my edge.

The Queens English

It was Freddy who started it; this journey quest to England in search of the next step, not that I knew what that was exactly. I was aiming for spiritual advancement, but it could just as easily have amounted to a rabbit hole of arcane, academically dubious material. New Age types are not given to vigorous, intellectual analysis, but when I heard Freddy's English accent, I felt in the hands of someone who was educated.

Americans are apt to attribute an education to nearly any kind of English accent. I benefit from this mythology all the time, but Freddy spoke the Queens English as it is heard on BBC (and at Harry Potter's Hogwarts). Freddy had been the opening act of The Prophets Conference on 2012, which I attended in Palm Springs last March. I was so intrigued by the sacred geometry of ancient sites in his presentation, that I examined the 5 day tour he was giving to see if it would justify the peak season airfare to England. I decided I could manage it, if I slept in a tent.

At this point Catherine got interested, said she would come along for the ride, wherever it was I wanted to go as long as I planned it. Catherine was not the vagabond, tent-traveling type, so I wrote friends in England who might be pressed into putting us up. With only three months to prepare I plotted out a two week trip that linked visits with friends, inexpensive B & Bs and rail travel (offered at a discount if booked exactly to the day and time of travel). This coordination tested the limits of my event planning skills, but I was satisfied that it was feasible.

I had not been to England since 1993 (for the funeral of my English grandmother). My English contacts assured me that England had not changed. I am pleased to report that it has been improved upon. Restaurant food, for instance, was so improved it could have been a different country. Part California cuisine, part European slow food movement boasting regional British specialties. American style customer service had also been embraced in shops so no longer did I have to fear the grumpy, put-upon sales matron. Pay telephones worked when you put the coin in first instead of after dialing and toilet paper came in soft rolls instead of glassine sheets. (I exaggerate a wee bit. Those strange waxy sheets were no longer in use by 1993.)

But it was true, England had not really changed. There was the rolling sheep studded countryside still unspoiled, the pubs and villages, public footpaths and miles of train transport. I was reminded, again, of how the built environment can affect a way of life. The British, on the whole, knew enough not to spoil it. It seemed to go hand in hand with their uber politeness as they waved thank-you to the motorist who paused to let them pass on those tiny country roads.

A far cry from the competitive Bay Area traffic and soul, sucking concrete business parks of Silicon Valley. Even San Francisco, beautiful as it is, was said to be the least friendly to visitors in the entire country. When I read this, I vowed to personally change this attitude, along with the snarky online presence that had somehow spawned out of our geek speak. But then, last summer I nearly ran over, with my bicycle, some annoyed Midwesterners in a cross walk, while attempting to beat out the car traffic along the San Francisco waterfront. Given a little wider road, I could see that British drivers easily picked up speed, too, leaving pedestrians at their peril.

This England:
Henley-On-Thames

Our first landing, in England, would be the home of my American friend Gail and her English husband, Clive. When they met us at the airport, she hugged me for dear life and burst into tears. She was lonely in England. The English had not quite embraced her as one of their own even after 22 years; her emotional style overwhelmed them I could see. The British reserve had not changed and Gail was at a loss to penetrate it with her New Jersey born, American Italian exuberance. Even with the help of her English Sheepdog (for the English go completely soft with their dogs). Gail was intuitive based and not the least bit cerebral so had no irony or deftness with words; she liked to call it like it was and wear her heart on her sleeve. All, so not English. She did, however, match the British in understatement.

"Our spare room is not much, but it does have a nice view," she had written me. The view was a stunner—rolling, sheep-studded, countryside as far as the eye could see and not a building on it, just classic hedgerows dividing up the fields. Catherine spent everyday sitting in a chair basking in the late evening glow as though at the beach. It was so quiet we got the rest we needed too. In the morning we could hear, through our bedroom window, sheep bleating.

Gail and I had worked together back when I still had a day job. She met Clive when he came to California seeking a business opportunity. When the deal fell through, Gail and her youngest daughter Courtney, moved to England with Clive. Courtney also married a Brit and now had a little girl whom Gail doted upon. All three saw each other everyday while selling their Nirvana Natural line of herbal shampoos out of the home office. Clive drove around to clients cutting hair. In the evening he treated us to home cooked meals and brought out his cockatoo to do tricks for us after dinner.

Clive was a character in the truest British sense, eccentric, passionate about topics of interest and devoted to his hobby of making models of English villages from scrap materials, recycling the styrofoam that meat was packed in. Built to a 4mm scale they were uncannily accurate. Having an absorbing hobby, he told us, was the key to mental health.

It was Clive, who happily filled us in on his home town of Henley, plus various opinions on the Royals and politics. He was proud to show all his favorite spots telling us the literary and movie making trivia of each destination. There was also, on top of his patter, another layer for me to tune into. That of self reflection—of seeing oneself in the context of a larger world. His perspective automatically included the countries of Europe and the States. The UK was, Clive told us, the bridge between Europe and the West—the US. He commented on how speech patterns tied in with identity. "The British answer a question with a question, don't you see?" he explained.

As I listened to him I realized that he, too, had constructed in his mind a big picture of how the world worked. The whole world. We probably wouldn't agree on everything, but at least he had such a world view. At home my mind was too often corralled by the high fences of the American point of view, seemingly unable to picture anything beyond the two coasts (while Mexico was blocked off by a real wall and Canada seen as part of our English-only North American identity). Because of this, I felt it was difficult for Americans to see themselves in the international arena as the heavies in a world empire. Public discourse often framed the US as the underdog, vulnerable to attack at any moment from savages who didn't understand our "freedoms" (and our economic free market rightness), while conveniently ignoring Europe, an already democratized entity (with civilized social services like health care). Meanwhile, context in America was so sorely muddled by the shouting heads on right wing Fox News and wordy liberal ideologues on the left, rendering the average American delusional. (Most Americans would agree with me as long as I was talking about the opposing political party.) As it stands, nothing sensible can be discussed to address real problems. It was this polarization that would make me itch, periodically, to leave the US and seek an alternative view.

On our last day in Henley, I found that I had the wrong train ticket for the station we would depart from. Clive roll played for me how to be thoroughly indignant at the ticket office while stating my case as having made every attempt to play by the rules of the system.

"Shut up, Clive," said Gail when he repeated this performance for the third time. It was so well thought out, it could have been a Monty Python skit. If I could just drum up such a head of steam. (Thankfully no one even asked to see the ticket at the station and once we got on the train the ticket matched the train.) We bid our adieus vowing to come back much sooner than my 18 year hiatus.

We would spend the weekend in the lovely high end town of Bath and then head to Glastonbury, the curious tiny town that had become a mecca for all things New Age. Friends at home followed along on flickr as I uploaded pictures each night. Narrating the photos also kept my trip data in order for future reference. This was a working vacation. I wanted to get my money's worth, though it meant I slept about 5 hours a night, and napped so much during the day, that Catherine said I was missing half the scenery.

The Ancient Sites Tour not only fulfilled my expectations, but confirmed my path. Freddy so consciously used the English language to reveal layers of meaning that I'm saving the experience for an essay of its own.

After the tour, we journeyed to the home of old family friends in Cornwall.

This Other Eden: Cornwall

Arriving late in Penzance, we were thankfully met by Aidan (whom I had first met when he was ten or so and I was 18). He drove us to the family farm where he lived with his husband Patrick, a prolific novelist. We offered to take Aidan out to dinner, but he told us they were having a dinner party at home with a few friends and he hoped we wouldn't mind joining them. He had cooked for it too.

When he took us into the dining room to meet everybody it was clear that everyone was gay. How delightful. We couldn't have felt more at home. There was even a lesbian couple, Carol and Jo. They each gave me the universal, gripping handshake of the tribe. While the men gently pressed my hand, towering over me in flowing linen garments. Two were professional artists. A third guest, of this illustrious crew, was an actor.

We were on review, I realized; the guests of honor by dint of having come so far and being related through my mother who was Aidan's mother's best friend when they were ten.

I explained how our train had developed a malfunctioning whistle so, due to safety requirements, we had to get off and catch another. When asked how many days we had been in England, I said it seemed like three times as long because we had crammed so much into our schedule.

"You must be knackered," said Jo which made me laugh at such a word. Her loose blond hair fell to her shoulders, while her girlfriend Carol had hers short. Jo collected up her barking terrier and offered me a seat on the couch with her, while Patrick took Catherine into his care at the other side of the room with everyone else. Jo was soon asking me questions, just the two of us.

Her diction was so distinct that, with each precise spacing and tightening of consonants, I felt my own diction bumped up a notch and my brain getting smarter as a result. Despite the seven hour train ride and half empty glass of champagne in my hand, my mind was seeking out all the layers of information in the conversation. She was asking me questions about how I talked to clients as a professional organizer. She knew enough about psychological terms to be a therapist, but not quite enough to confirm it. Later I found out she was a lawyer. No a barrister, she corrected me. (In England this means with robes and wigs and all.) Well no wonder. I could imagine hearing such diction ringing out in a courtroom drama from the 40s.

But there was something else that was entering my head like a drug. Jo had a style that was so charming it flirted with flirting if you get my meaning. It was harmless enough; just a fun way to connect, but it was allowed. At home I spent so much energy trying not to flirt in this manner with straight colleagues at networking functions that I had to give up drink—and take up combative argument. I inherited the flirting gene from my English mother for by the time I was ending high school, my best friend (and first lover) was accusing me of flirting with her boyfriend adding the comment "And you didn't even know you were doing it." Americans don't often mix charm with inquiry. American lesbians, once they learned to flirt, did it broadly with low brow humor so was unmistakably flirting. How did I get this lucky to have entered the British reserve so delightfully? I was asking myself.

Jo told me she had read one of my essays that Aidan forwarded to her; the one about building a composting toilet which, she said was verging on "barkers". "Barkers" is a word I've only heard once in a movie with Meryl Streep and I was beside myself laughing at the Britishness of it. Its meaning could not be mistaken, as in barking mad, "mad dogs and Englishman" i.e. just plain crazy. It made me laugh to hear it again. It cost Jo something to offer this assessment so I knew she meant it. (Doubtless, others of my readers thought the whole composting toilet project was barkers too. Catherine wasn't too keen on it at all, but it earned me rank with the eco living crowd.) What Jo really wanted to know, I felt, was how attached I was to the character I represented in that piece. By this hour, I was so not attached to anything I ever stood for, I was in danger of trading it all in for a life in England. So in love was I with the beauty of the land, the language and the life there.

"I've always wanted to have that adjective applied to me," I replied laughing. And so felt accepted.

In contrast to Jo's charm, Carol was self-deprecatingly witty. The next evening as we set out to dinner at Aidan's parent's house, two fields away Carol said "I've had too much to drink. I'd best be kept on a short leash." This was so brilliant a use of self for own joke, my mind reeled at the implications. I might have quite a lot in common with Carol, I thought. As a landlord, she worked with tools and houses. She would offer what she knew if asked and I sensed that that was a fair amount.

Everyone was so smart, we were beginning to feel intimidated. They were well educated, too—Patrick at Oxford even. Oxford was such a mythological place of highbrow learning, Catherine wanted to go there to experience it. We did go our first day out from Henley and had the mythology confirmed by the over-the-top architecture and the history. I secretly realized that if I had gone to Oxford it would have been even more difficult to escape. I would have had to have as much conviction as, say, Oscar Wilde (an Oxford graduate). Reporting from The Barking Edge takes gumption (and dang it someone has to do it).

Aidan's mother, June, welcomed us into her home with such goodwill and down to earth commentary, we immediately felt at ease. But it was too late, for I had already internalized the British sense of modesty and was beginning to pull up on the reins. I was watching myself choke the emotion from all my stories and redirecting them to some other subject besides me. I could no longer use myself as a foil because it just seemed too self-indulgent to even be in the picture at all. I felt apologetic. Soon I would have to get a real job.

Even Patrick, the natural leader of the conversation, as a professional story teller, asked questions that didn't require emotional content, so careful was he to protect your privacy for you. Not like our lot in California who don't think something is real until you tell them how it personally made you feel. I needed that reflected back to me so I would know that people were interested. In retrospect the British probably needed that too.

Next time I visited, I vowed, I would come armed with a bigger bark.

Lost In San Bernardino

2011-06-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend of May 21st, the date given for those who were to be raptured up to heaven, it was confirmed that one of my tenants had gone missing.

"I'm going in," Mike my manager in the front house told me after noting that there had been no activity in the back house for several days. Mike feared the worse; he'd known that our tenant was seriously depressed. Mike had checked on him recently, woken him up late one morning. Tenant came to the door rumpled, then started crying about something. So Mike took him out to breakfast, talked to him, but he remained in a funk.

My tenant impersonated Elvis. He sent me songs he'd recorded in his bedroom and called me every month to tell me when his check was coming. Told me how grateful he was that I had rented to him. Then a check bounced. His disability check had been stopped without him knowing it. He got it started again, but he was behind and short on cash two weeks into the next month.

I had rented to him because he was gainfully employed, but the long haul trucking job was hard on his back and when he got disability for a year, he took it as his chance to build up his act, doing gigs for a nightclub and parties here and there. He was in New York for a while visiting family and doing his act, which was why he missed his doctor's appointment, which was why they stopped the disability checks with no warning. Last I heard, he told me he was selling his motorbike and would send me the rent when he got the money for it.

His son, recently graduated from high school, lived with him. Soon a friend of his son's was sleeping on the couch. The two guys partied a great deal when Dad was gone. Neither appeared to have jobs. I liked my Elvis tenant immensely, but his son couldn't be bothered to impress me, nodded hello from the couch, shirtless. Father and son used to live in an apartment, but the apartment wouldn't allow the puppy his son brought home. He couldn't deny the son his dog he told me. Last time I visited four months ago, the one dog was now two. They had not informed me that she had had puppies—twice in fact we found out later.

I had called our Elvis for days, listened to his song impersonation that answered his phone and left messages to no avail. Mike entered the house, his heart racing, afraid he would find a body, a suicide. No one was there. He sent pictures. Clothes lay strewn about. Unwashed dishes on the dresser. The TV and couch gone. No vehicles, no dogs. Door left unlocked. A window broken. The place filthy. They had skipped. The money from the motorbike had been getaway money. Mike himself had bought it, in fact, (though he too owed us rent). I called again, left a message, joking about how he had been Raptured up; how I didn't think he was the Rapture type. How he had been like family and hadn't even said goodbye and we wanted to know what had happened to him. Please wouldn't he call and tell us? He did respond, but not to me. He was too ashamed. He called Mike, said he was sorry, he would pay what he owed, but he had moved to New York. He left a forwarding address in Yonkers.

Well I thought, maybe it was for the best. San Bernardino was not a good place in which to be depressed and his son's activities didn't make him the best neighbor. There had been an arrest for underaged drinking. San Bernardino had lost its luster for me too. Our property was likely underwater. Our new financial advisor seemed to be laughing at us, told us we were working too hard for what we were getting out of it, told us that the time to buy property was not when it was bottoming out, but when it was going up. You never knew with real estate if it would ever recover. He was likely right; the area continued to be hit hard by the recession. Was, in fact, the hardest hit area in the nation for foreclosures. At least we had cash flow as long as we had tenants.

The Road Less Perfect

When I first discovered San Bernardino in 2009, it had been a little Shangri-La like. A place that time had forgotten, where people were nice to each if you just got through the day. Those in the Bay Area had faced the recession with a determined competitive edge that increased the divide between the savvy and talented and those not quite up to snuff one way or the other. I was not sure yet which it would be for me. Talented I was; savvy not so much.

A colleague, whose talent lacked in education, but who was guided by determination, called me to tell me she could no longer find work as an organizer and would I like to join her at an inspiring seminar that would help us sell a miracle health cure? She had already signed up with this outfit, was convinced that it worked for all manner of ailments and was giving me the patter. I scanned the website she gave me and told her she was pushing vitamin supplements through a pyramid scheme. She e-mailed me asking me to just give it a chance. Geesh. Was this all that was left?

Entrepreneurs in the Bay Area retooled, marketed more aggressively, spruced up their offices and their online presence as they angled for business. This brought me work, but I was not doing the same retooling. I was sitting at home in a paralyzed funk; I hated marketing and was convinced that it wouldn't do much good anyway judging from my peers. As the work stopped I had just stumbled on San Bernardino. I jumped on those two little houses to stay busy. I happily drove the seven hours there to retreat to it, to get away from the competitive glut of talent looking for work. It wasn't hard to feel on top of my game in San Bernardino. My literacy skills and organizational ability were all it took to come in with the energy of a mover and shaker, someone who made things happen. Backed by the home equity loan, Catherine had taken out in response to the recession, I could attack the project of restoring this property with gusto, bringing in jobs to hungry vendors. Have a talent like Mike eager to show me what he could do. Have a place to try out my design skills.

Thus energized I would return to the Bay Area where I managed to stay in business as an organizer due chiefly to my skill working with hoarders. With all the hoarding shows on TV, hoarders were coming out of the closet (or their family were). It took a certain psychological perseverance to stick with hoarders, both because the work seemed as endless and futile as Sisyphus pushing his rock up that hill and because hoarders had so many questions that seemed to have nothing to do with anything. This confounded most of my peers eager to attack the mess. They ran out of things to say. But I loved nothing better than to answer questions. I had answers I could quote wholesale from all the books I had read explaining how the world worked. I could see how it all connected in my clients' minds and why they needed to know these things. I distilled for them these answers into little bite size packets that kept their interest in the tedious work at hand.

Because these were not the tidy perfectionist jobs typical of high end clients, I thought of myself as something of a slob. My car, for instance. Catherine called it a piece of junk. It was a 23 year old Honda Wagon with dings and green stuff growing on the weatherstripping, but it suited me. It didn't attract thieves or project an attitude. In childhood I had often been warned not to attract thieves. My relatives in Thailand had a taste for gemstones. My grandmother wanted to hand down to me beautiful heirloom pieces as soon as I was old enough to walk. My favorite was a pendent, a checkerboard grid with diamonds and sapphires alternatively dangling in each square. When I was a teenager, my aunt warned me not to wear the piece to the Sunday Market for fear that someone would pull it from my very neck. This alarmed me. I realized how much these nice things made me a target. I didn't want to be watched like that. It would disturb my ability to blend in, to be an observer. Life was easier unencumbered. As a biracial kid, I already stood out. I saved the pieces for special occasions. By day I would go undercover like a spy.

My Hobo Wagon was good cover. It was perpetually filled with client cast-offs going to Goodwill, recyclables to drop off, salvaged building material and tools. I kept the back seat covered with a painters drop cloth. The hatch back I propped up with a broom stick because I couldn't get the replacement strut. I taped the top of the back seat with fabric tape to keep the sun from blistering the fabric further. I worried about the crack on the tail light letting water in and rusting the body from the inside. When I started driving the 420 miles to San Bernardino, I feared that it was only a matter of time before it was scrap. Every time I returned something needed fixing. Last time it was a clutch job.

But I was comfortable in the car. It was the right size, not overwhelming like the bloaters on the road now. It drove like a compact car and could still carry a serious load. Fifteen bankers boxes for instance, eight foot lengths of lumber, a full sheet of plywood strapped to a luggage rack on the roof. It got 33 miles per gallon and I didn't need a footstool to get in it. I could see over the hood. The visibility to the side and back was better than any other car I'd driven.

It did not, however, have air conditioning and the stretch of highway through the central valley, known as I-5, would be unbearable without one. I found an outfit online that made swamp coolers for cars. It plugged into the cigarette lighter. You filled it with water and a fan blew air across a damp filter. This was such an intriguing idea I had to buy one to test it out despite the $338 price tag. A little white box arrived. I strapped it to my portable car desk in the passenger seat and angled it to face me. It had dual vents like a pair of giant eyes. It looked like R2D2 sitting next to me. I named him Swampy. Swampy delivered a waft of cool humid air reminiscent of a San Francisco fog rolling in on a summer's day. It kept me just comfortable enough to bear the summer heat.

With the cooling problem solved, I grew even more fond of my eccentric car. But when the engine gave out on a local trip to Oakland three months later, I knew that judgement day had come. I managed to drive my car home on the overheating engine and then to my mechanics the next day. My same mechanic since 1984. I trusted his opinion. We would grow old together. He offered to look for a replacement used engine, but I had to decide soon.

I looked at all the options over the weekend. Other similar size wagons, the Toyota Matrix for instance, was still too new to afford at $7,000. Nostalgically, I looked for my Honda Wagon. I discovered the car had its own club, was being restored and souped up by enthusiasts because it was different they said, because it wasn't an SUV. One was available on Craigslist for $3,000 boasting a new paint job, perfect interior and though it had less mileage than the 230,000 miles on mine it was still high. Did I dare buy the exact same car? No one returned my call. I gave my mechanic the go ahead. In a week I had my car back. The engine he found, was so clean, it probably only had 50,000 miles on it he said. It was from a Honda CRX. It sounded different, younger, more energetic. It drove a little sportier got better mileage. And cost me only $1650 all told. This secret new engine under the hood bolstered my confidence. I tackled I-5 like a veteran.

Expedition Clean-Up

I rolled into our property to find Mike mowing the lawn. He was devoted to the yard, rolling it with a roller and trimming it to the smoothness of a putting green with his vintage rotary blade gas lawn mower. I had given up commenting that the high dessert was no place for a lawn. And somehow we had ended up paying for the entire water bill for both houses every month, but he did so much work keeping up the house that we didn't complain. The green expanse of fine grass did tidy up the place, making the homes look loved and cared for, an icon of retro suburban sensibilities, an American flag hanging over the garage.

I went into the empty back house. It didn't look too bad. Mike and his wife had already started the clean-up and cleared out the remaining clothes and furniture. There was just some touch up painting to do and the broken window in the back door to replace. It was a mystery why it was broken. It was plexiglass. Had someone lost their keys or just been drunk at a party. There was also a curtain missing, an even bigger mystery. Why would someone take a single curtain? Did they accidentally burn a hole in it?

I had brought the paint for the kitchen cabinets and more cereal boxes with which to line shelves. The linseed oil paint I used on the cabinets was hardened now and had held up under scrubbing; I noted that a backplate under the knobs would cover where fingernails had nicked it (and we found some at the nearby Ace Hardware.) The cereal boxes made into shelf liners were mostly still good. I replaced the stained pieces. Mike commented that they had startled him. He'd never seen such a shelf liner pattern, but when he saw what they were he thought it was a good idea. The cardboard was nice and thick he said. He asked if he could have a flattened box to use as a surface on which to mix up some Bondo. The tenants' puppies had chewed on the corners of the baseboards leaving large ragged gaps. In half an hour Mike had applied the Bondo, shaped it and sanded it smooth. Bondo was a filler used for car repair. It dried too fast for me to work with it.

Mike fixed cars too and was fixing an old Saab he had seen in someone's yard, got it cheap. He already had a buyer wanting him to finish the restoration. He had a boat in the yard too, a fiberglass shell someone was giving away with a trailer. He only wanted the trailer. It seemed a waste to throw away the boat so he told me he had decided to drive it to his parents place in Lake Havasu, Arizona. They had no lawns at all, only rocks, so had developed a local culture of recycling large items into planters. This would be the first boat planter. I was amused.

In the evening I was invited to a chicken dinner Jennifer had cooked. Their son Addison, of the kidney transplant, returned from down the street where he had been visiting a neighbor kid. He was a very active boy now, going everywhere on his bike.

"He's a good kid," Jennifer told me when he went to his room. I agreed. I could see it in his face, his seriousness. I offered her my theory of how the trials of his kidney disfunction, the daily dialysis, the frequent doctor visits and medical procedures requiring careful compliance had built, in this boy, patience and perseverance. I imagined his future, saw him going the college route. At times our whole adventure in San Bernardino had come down to giving this boy a safe, stable place to live.

On Sunday I met a family that wanted to rent the house. Mike had told me about them. They had heard from their aunt across the street that the house was up for rent. How lucky was that? They had already filled out an application and were eager to move in right away as they were living at his mother's house. The application showed an income so small it was less than the rent. How was that going to work Catherine asked? Other sources of income were shown me including state assistance for the children. Together it would cover the rent with barely enough to live on. I listened to their hard luck story. He had had his own business, owned three trucks, had to sell them, go to work for his brother's landscaping business. He just got a job at a chain grocery store. They couldn't afford to stay at the townhouse where they were living even though the landlord brought down the rent. Credit not so good either, but he wanted to get it back again, buy his own house. He had goals, he assured me and would take good care of the property, landscape it even. Their small children needed a yard to play in.

"I don't know what happened to the economy," he lamented. I did not offer an explanation to this eager, hard working, immigrant family. Didn't want to tell him the middle had fallen out of the American Dream. I wanted to rent to them, got Catherine's okay when I called her later. He was so happy he came back late that night to put down his money. It was then that we realized there had been a miscommunication about the amount of rent. Mike had given a "guestimate" that was $100 to $200 lower than what we had been getting and they had hoped for the lower of the two, could, at most afford $850.

"No one is asking a thousand," he told me incredulous. I believed him, but I couldn't bring it down that much. Not just yet; I stayed up late making calculations to show Catherine; I asked the advice of the friend who sold us the property, asked about rents in the area. We were going on vacation before the next month rolled around. Chances were we wouldn't get the place rented until we got back, thus another month's delay. Less rent now would make up for a higher rent received later I was thinking. $850 sounded like a lot lower than what we were getting, but it would do. Everyone could live with it.

I packed the one curtain, sewed another when I got home. Mailed it. The family was already happily moved in by then. "They are very social," Jennifer reported. I was satisfied. Order had been restored in our little neighborhood.

Extract This!

2011-05-21T15:19:00.001-07:00

In this piece I attend a workshop on Shamanic Extraction Healing and find myself adding a new dimension to my client work.

Extract This!

Californians are used to Wu Wu concepts, but there is a point where even these natives begin to balk at what they are being asked to believe. Extraction Healing is possibly one of those things. I was not particularly interested in this out-there concept myself, but it was a required class for further work on the Shamanic path and it was being offered nearby at a hotel by the airport. Michael Harner, the grand Poobah of Shamanic study, himself, would be there. His book "The Way of the Shaman" was still the basic study guide of Western shamanic practice.

When I arrived, I noted that the hotel was simultaneously hosting a meeting of chiropractors and was amused that this formerly alternative medical practice was, in comparison, ordinary and mainstream. My workshop in Extraction Healing was tucked away on the second floor of the hotel, hopefully far enough away to keep the drumming from disturbing the bone crackers. There were fifty people or so, more than at my previous workshops. And unlike the previous gigs where we were on the floor, we sat in chairs. I chose one in the circle close to the middle of the room. Next to me sat a teacher of young children. She told me that she had recently attended a session with shamans from other countries who were working with an autistic child. It would take several more sessions before they were done. She went on to talk about Temple Grandon, the autistic visionary, and various techniques that could be used effectively on autistic children. My mother had specialized in autistic children in her years as a therapist and I, myself, had lived with an autistic child, so was skeptical. What were these shaman's hoping to accomplish? A complete cure or just better treatment?

I was to meet many other alternative healers and counselors over the weekend so it had a business like feel to it. Michael Harner opened the workshop by explaining, that in healing work, we would be partnering with the spirits and allowing ourselves to be used as a connection for the spirits to enter and effect ordinary reality. We would also merge with the patient in order to better understand the situation. Some indigenous shamans would exchange clothes with the patient to complete this knowing. I've always liked this empathic approach.

Our first exercise would be to ask for power from a spirit entity to enter us and then pass this power onto a partner. For this it was helpful to have a song to call in the spirit so I made one up. Accompanied by the drums, I asked for power from an ancestor in the upper world and, in the rush of energy that entered me as a result of that visualization, I felt that power as the responding spirit entity. We were, then, to touch our partner on the shoulders with that power; they were to describe the sensation they felt at receiving this input.

We all felt something. I did not argue if this something was a result of power entering me from my partner. It did not serve me to be skeptical. I just focused on what physical sensations I was feeling and was able to report movement crisscrossing my body. My partner felt my touch as a cooling sensation. Another partner felt it as a movement of energy going into her appendix. Michael cautioned us to use the power wisely and not keep it on all the time like a flashlight running down the batteries. We were to return it to where we got it from, thank it, honor it and release it. Then Michael retired for the day and his assistant teacher (who was my first teacher at the basic workshop) took over. It had been hard to hear his gravelly voice so I was relieved.

For the healing extraction part of the workshop we learned to scan our partner's body with a hand with the intention of looking for spiritual intrusions that might be causing problems, ill health or discomfort. We were to look for a hotspot or stickiness, a blockage or magnetic pull. The intrusions could be the ghosts of other life forms looking for a host, an unwanted spirit entity. Such intrusions may enter when someone is angry and wishes ill will on another. Their angry invocations called up these spirits that then enter the person cursed. A person who is themselves stuck in anger or grief are also vulnerable to intrusions.

After we had located such a spot (I felt hotspots), we were to look with our "visual sense" and see an image (an imagination) of the intrusion. That was easy. I saw a little snake with needle sharp teeth and in another spot worms eating flesh. The images were meant to repulse us personally; that's how we would know it didn't belong there.

To perform the extraction we called on our helping spirits and with their paws or wings, as the case may be, we picked up the nastiness, stood up and flung the stuff towards the nearest body of water. It was quite a physical act. (I was just glad we didn't have to do it the way Michael described in his book and suck out the mess and "dry vomit" it into a gourd.) It took me three times to clear out what I found in my patient's gut and on his hip. When the extraction was done we passed the healing power of the spirits into a cup of water and asked our patient to drink it with words of instruction about how the water would cleanse them. And finally we were to seal the healing in by shocking them with a splash of water. This got us laughing as the water hit us.

My "patient" at the workshop identified his gut as harboring an angriness that he wanted removed. He lay on the ground on my blanket before me and when I removed the mess I had identified in his gut, I felt angry myself and flung it away hard. This exercise was very different from the journeying I had done in the other workshops, but there was something familiar about it.

Helping Hoarders

After two days of these exercises I kept seeing similarities with my own work with hoarders. I became convinced that hoarders were manifesting their spiritual ailments in the physical stuff they accumulated. As in the shamanic cases, often a trauma, such as grief for a departed loved one, a war or other historical upheaval kicked off the hoarding; sometimes I suspected childhood molestation or other family abuse. The things that hoarders kept appeared to others to be a wrongness that needed to be cleared away. When in a hoarder's house I would find the hotspots of blocked energy— usually a result of some ill placed furniture that was causing a build-up of stuff. I would set about to remove the clutter and rearrange the area to promote flow, then leave instructions on how to maintain the area.

I felt, though, that there must be more I could do. Retrieve their power animal perhaps. For they were missing something; their stories reflected as much. At the Annual Conference on Hoarding and Cluttering, psychologists studying hoarders and searching for effective treatment admitted that they were no closer to finding a cure. Cognitive therapy was slow. Depression and anxiety often accompanied the hoarding. The most effective treatment involved in-home visits to sort through stuff. And grad students were just as effective if not more so than professional therapists because they added a social rather than authoritarian element. No mention made of organizers, because we do not offer our services to such research. Although one therapist did advocate for us in his session because he knew clients were more open to working with the hoarding problem from an organizing perspective than a mental health perspective. No mention is ever made of a spiritual component. Therapists rarely mention the spiritual except as an aberration from their scientific bias. They had noted, for instance, that hoarders often had an animistic perspective.

One of my long term hoarding clients does have an animistic relationship with things. They were familiar friends to her and she didn't like to say goodbye to them. They had meaning and stories. She described to me how she found a blue plastic box in the street that would be perfect for holding cutlery on her kitchen table and there it was laying at her feet. "It was as if God was sending this to me," she told me. I admitted that it was a very nice box, much like one would find at Ikea. But everything that came her way had something to offer. She loved nothing better than to think of something she could do with an empty cardboard box. We had a conversation about a collection of empty tissue boxes that filled a garbage bag. She couldn't remember what she was going to do with them so I smashed them all down and recycled them. The next week she told me she had remembered that she had saved them to organize her cassette tapes. I asked what the cassette tapes had on them. She said everything. She had recorded whatever came into her life, the birds that chirped in her yard, the toilet flushing. It was as if she was looking to her environment for signs from God. Which was, actually, what I was learning to do on the shamanic path. I just didn't have to keep all the communications.

I was so struck by the metaphorical similarities of the psychic extraction healing I had learned in the workshop and the physical extraction of extraneous stuff I did to heal my clients and their homes, that I found myself trying to discover a connection, a possible alternative healing for hoarders. At lunch during the workshop, I had met an allergist who had been trained in a medical model, but soon went in search of alternative methods beginning with hypnosis and muscle testing until she discovered the spirit world and started coming to shamanic workshops. "It just works better if my spirit helpers and their spirit helpers sort it out," she commented.

"Have your spirits call my spirits," I pictured myself saying to a client. I needed more context. I checked out the book the allergist had recommended, "Healing Lost Souls: Releasing Unwanted Energy Spirits From Your Energy Body". I learned about the troublesome spirits of the deceased and how they could attach themselves to humans. All these misplaced and ill begotten spirits needed managing and we had ignored them at our peril. Maybe that's what ailed the modern world. I was not, however, going to perform extraction healing on my existing clients. That was just too out there. I'd have to market to a whole different niche. But I continued to talk to open minded friends about the parallels between shamanic extraction healing and the metaphorical connection I saw with hoarders, if only to find a way to bridge the two in my mind.

"I'm sure you'll figure out a way," said my colleague Susan when she came to dinner. "With all the remote healing that's been proven to work there must be something."

Talk To The Animals

I should ask my power animals, I thought. That was the default advice from all my Shamanic teachers. I had not, however, had the confidence to journey alone and had yet to download the drumming CD. When my friend Christine, an art professor in Minneapolis I consulted, sent me a rattle from her travels to the Amazon, I decided to honor her gift by asking my power animals what it was good for. That was innocuous enough. The drumming CD, I downloaded to my i-Pod sounded flat and lifeless, but it would do.

I ran down to the Lower world and showed the rattle to Mongoose. Christine was very fond of birds and the rattle had the head of a bird etched on it. Mongoose looked at the rattle, walked into the middle of a clearing with it and shook it purposefully a few times. Suddenly the forest was filled with birds of all varieties. I understood that each species of bird represented a foreign country and would fly there and tell me what the weather was going to be in that country.

I knew that traditional Shamans would journey into the future on behalf of a traveler and find out how their trip would go so I summoned the bird representing England. A large white bird with a lumpy head of yellow feathers flew out. We flew together into the night across the oceans. It was daytime when we arrived and I watched as he settled on a white building. It was possibly the pub I had been e-mailing in Bath to book the rooms over their restaurant for our trip in July. I noted that the weather was slightly cloudy then sunny, followed by a light rain that soon stopped. I directed the bird to fly to Stonehenge and off we went. In contrast the weather there looked quite threatening as if it would soon rain, but it held back. I made a note to remember to verify this on the trip then we returned to the forest clearing. The white bird departed and I summoned the bird for Thailand. A crow came forward and told me it was warm as usual in Bangkok. When I called for California I got a blue jay. My stomach rumbled contently, but the blue jay didn't tell me anything about the future except that it would be well digested. I could see that these weather forecasting birds would certainly come in handy, but I didn't want to test it too hard just yet. I just enjoyed the journey.

I was getting to know the ropes. To keep my spirit helpers happy, it was best to dance them before journeying, at least the animals. This was a relationship of give and take. If I allowed my power animals to express themselves using my body, then they were much more animated about helping me answer my questions. I was, however, still stumped about the extraction healing. I decided to move on to the nature spirits workshop; it sounded more fun. As I was researching the workshop venue, I came across an article by a Michael Harner student who was a counselor working with clients. She, too, thought her clients might be suffering from spirit intrusions, but her situation didn't lend itself to shamanic work, either, so she just asked her spirit helpers to remove any intrusions found in her clients. Her clients felt better after seeing her and the staff joked about depossession. I decided to try it using the same words of request.

I journeyed to the Upper World and found my Ancestor Spirit in her garden, her long silver hair hanging wildly. I had met her before at the dream workshop. She greeted me affectionally as a daughter and I returned the greeting. Then I asked her what I could do or say to help my client to clear any unwanted spirits or entities that had attached themselves to her. Ancestor Spirit said nothing about clearing out spiritual intrusions and I felt no energy around a response to that request. I was glad for that later because it didn't seem right to enter a client's psychic "home" and touch their stuff without asking for permission. (Ethical considerations are covered in this succinct paper on the topic by one of my teachers which I later thought to reread.)

Ancestor Spirit told me to listen for the client to say the word "mother" then look at her and Ancestor Spirit herself, would help the client by sorting things out for us. That shouldn't be hard, I thought, since I was planning on working with my client in the room where most of her long deceased mother's paperwork had ended up.

But we didn't end up working in that room. We spent most of the session in the garage and I was prepared to give up on the spirit work, but I kept my ears open for the word "mother". As I set about flattening empty boxes I came to a large box at the bottom of the pile full of old clothes from the 80s plus two plastic tubs of men's clothes probably from an ex-husband.

"Do you ever go to the Goodwill?" I asked my client.

"No I don't like the Goodwill," she said.

When I asked her why, she told me that her step-mother had put a box of things on the sidewalk for the Goodwill and next to it, her aquarium. I was pleased by the word "step mother". It was close enough. I looked at her and had my usual flash of insight into what was left of the story.

"Ah, I see," I said, "she threw something of yours away without asking your permission."

"Yes," said the client appreciating my summation. "Maybe that's why I'm a hoarder," she added in a moment of rare insight and humor.

"Could be," I agreed non-committedly, smiling to myself. "Maybe I should give you this box of clothes to sort after I'm gone as homework," I said. I never gave this client homework.

"No I'll never do it," she lamented, "when you're not here my mind can't focus at all. It's better if you go through it with me." So we sorted through the three boxes of clothes and all she wanted to keep was one polo shirt that looked like it would fit.

I would never know if any spirit help had been with me. Maybe, as Kung Fu Panda discovered in the movie of the same name, there was no Secret Sauce. But then again the work I did with my spirit helpers added a lot to my end by giving me an added sense of having help from a source of all knowing wisdom. This had been one of my better sessions with this client. And I could still do my part in the extraction of unneeded possessions. I loaded the big box of clothes into my car and set off for the Goodwill.

The Dream of the Colored Underpants

2011-04-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

In which I report on my second venture into my Shamanic education. Working with dreams.

Shamanic Dreamwork

In preparation for the second day of the two day dream workshop at Still Meadows Retreat Center near Portland, I went to sleep intent on remembering a dream. I had learned about Big Dreams and Little Dreams and how dreams were used in Shamanic practice. Big Dreams came to the dreamer much like a vision and imbued the dreamer with power. Often the dream was a turning point and changed the dreamer's life as it did for one workshop attendee. Little Dreams were of no consequence; the processing of day to day flotsam and jetsam including sexual desire. I didn't ask for a Big Dream, just a coherent dream. I did have a fleeting request that perhaps I would have one that would confirm something of what I was doing on this path and what direction my career would take.

No dream woke me so I slept on, surfacing to consciousness then sleeping again, dreaming that I was typing up my dream. When I finally did wake I feared that I had only these fragments, but then boom, there it was, an entire dream full of symbols and undercurrents of meaning. I didn't know if it was a Big Dream or a Little Dream, but it was revealing and somewhat embarrassing. I nearly laughed out loud. Clearly this provocative dream was meant to be told to the workshop.

I imagined that some of the participants must have psychic powers or guides from childhood or been struck by a shamanic vision late in life. For to be called to this work, in this decidedly non-animistic Western culture, one might have to have something that inexplicable happen. To hold my own during the brief introductions, I told the group I was raised in South East Asia in an animistic culture. This gave me credibility, but also made me an enigma, an invitation for people's projections. I had a hard time integrating enough of myself to feel at home. I feared that my first workshop had been a fluke, beginner's luck and that the visions had flowed too easily.

On this second day I had my dream to offer and felt justified putting on my latest magical shirt. This one had eggplant colored sleeves and a bright turquoise body covered in neon peace symbols. (I had played it safe the first day with a preppie pastel stripped shirt from L.L. Bean and beige pants.) I tucked the turquoise peace shirt into black denim jeans and slipped on my Doc Martins. As soon as I got in the door of the retreat center, the shirt prompted admiring remarks from several of the women. Usually my magical shirts struck people as somewhat of an embarrassment and not appropriate to comment on, so closely did it remind them of children's sleepwear. This was obviously my crowd. And I was ready to tell them my dream of the colored underpants.

But first we would dance our power animals. We had not done this on the first day and my power animals had been rather anemic the whole day, so I welcomed the drumming and dancing. It always put a silly, happy smile on my face to dance one of my animals in particular and I was pleased to have both back supporting me.

We had learned, on the first day, that we could dance a dream (in order to discover its power), but if we didn't have a big dream we could dance a significant past event, since the past was a dream anyway and so was the future. Only the present was not a dream. (This was very Buddhist of these animists our teacher noted.) So I danced my power animal's Big Life Event. The one where he saves his people from death by Cobra. (With the help of youtube I had seen how this was done.)

My drum was too big to shlep all the way to Portland on the train, so I had made myself rattles from two plastic boxes, the kind knee high stockings are packaged in at Walgreens. I had two lying around from a project. Slightly egg shaped, they fit nicely in each hand. I had filled one with lentils and the other with black beans. I liked that people could see through them. I had too many layers of identity already. I needed a little transparency.

After we danced, we sat in the circle of the lovely meditation room, waking up together; Leslie, our teacher asked if we had had any dreams the night before and if anyone would like to share. A handful volunteered. I told mine last.

The Dream Of The Colored Underpants

In the dream I am in my house, but it isn't really my house. It is a show house, modern with very high ceilings, vast white walls and long open hallways. It was filled with activity; people moving purposefully about concentrating on jobs they had to do in the house. I knew they were working for me and not for someone else (as in last week's dream when I visited my childhood house in Menlo Park).

I was expecting a colleague to come and help me organize so I headed down the long hallway to the closet. I opened the door into a brightly lit white closet. It was virtually empty save for three low shelves stocked with neatly folded clothes. (The shelves I noticed were my signature thick white shelves made from salvaged doors). On the top shelf, at waist height, were piles of colored underpants in a perfect row. Enough colors for every day of the week. All the same style—men's jockey briefs. On the waistband I could see my name printed in black—my full name.

The only time I ever see my entire name on display by itself and not on an address label or something, is at at the top of my blog. I felt apprehensive. Was the underwear a symbol of the intimate things I chose to reveal on my blog or would reveal? Then again maybe they weren't my underpants at all, but something I should throw out like so much unsolicited junk mail. Before I decided to throw them out I thought I should try them on first and I pulled a pair off the top of a pile. The underpants had cargo pockets. When I put them on I saw that the pockets were padded and stuck out from my body. These pockets were so bulky I wondered how I was supposed to pull my pants on over them. Maybe I could just wear them by themselves. I checked in the mirror to see how they looked. Though they fit me snugly, they still looked like underpants from the back.

Meanwhile someone was at the door, so I stopped thinking about the underpants and went to the door. My organizing colleague greeted me cheerfully and stepped over the threshold ready to begin work. We did not go to the closet, but went to a sitting room which also had very little in it to organize. This didn't seem to phase my colleague at all and she continued to chat on about the things we could do.

I didn't know her well enough to be a friend, but I had admired how devoted she was to building her business and perfecting her filing techniques. Still I was beginning to be annoyed that she was there when I had nothing for her to organize. I was mad at myself for trading my shelf building skills for organizing I didn't need. Then I realized that the purple daybed we were sitting on was at the edge of a platform and was a precipice with nothing to keep us from falling to the floor below. I warned her about it and she calmly moved to the other side of the room still talking, while I held onto the edge wondering if my entire career was at risk of falling over the precipice because I was rejecting her help as a model organizer and displaying my underpants on my blog. This was enough to wake me up.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

My fellow workshop dreamers were suitably amused by my dream, laughing at the funny parts. Although some parts were funnier to them than had been for me, especially the part about having my underpants labeled with my name, but I enjoyed their laughter and acceptance for I had milked it for entertainment value.

We spent the day learning various methods of dream interpretation and dream culture including the Australian Dreamtime. In our first exercise for dream interpretation, we were to merge with our power animal and journey back into our dream to see what we could learn from literally looking through their eyes. My power animals ran through the halls of my dream like rambunctious children; they wanted to show me what I could do in my dreamscape, changing the shape of the house and creating new rooms. They jumped over the balcony railing from the second story and floated down into the living room where we sat in three upholstered chairs surrounded by the tastefully decorated show house decor.

"You see," one said, "you can do anything you want with your dreamscape just as you can in your career or your life." I knew this, but it didn't really empower me.

I hadn't quite merged as instructed, but sat with them and discussed the dream, the symbolism of color. If there were enough colors of underpants for every day of the week, then they likely corresponded to the colors of the days of the week, I thought. This reference to Thai culture was a good sign for an animistic/shamanic path. It occurred to me to ask what color underpants I was wearing. Ochre colored almost orange. Yellow we decided—for Monday. Monday is the day I was born (though my grandmother said it was Tuesday since it was already Tuesday in Thailand). Monday had been what day it was in England, my actual birthplace. I took that as confirmation that I was to look to my English ancestors for guidance. This was a happy sign since I was already planning on taking a trip to England this summer for an ancient sites tour.

In the next exercise we partnered with another person and each told our dream in turn as we would if we lived in a Malaysian village where everyone shared their dreams at breakfast and asked guidance from each other. At this point the village shaman might be consulted for an interpretation. Thus we were to play the role of the village shaman for our partner each in turn and journey to ask our guides to help interpret our partner's dream. My animal came through as asked. I told my partner the details of how he ran about looking at the cabin in her dream and checking to make sure it was sound and well situated. It was a cabin she had owned in real life. Before I finished I remembered my animal showing me an enlargement of the cabin wall as in a science diagram. I could see the bark of a birch tree. When I told her this, she confirmed that much of the cabin was indeed made from birch trees.

"Good for you for catching that," she added for she had not mentioned that detail.

"Wow that's astonishing," I said.

We then moved to another partner and played the role of a professional shaman. This time the interpreter would not be told any details of the dream. In this role of the professional shaman we were to journey again, ask for an interpretation from our guides and deliver this interpretation in two or three sentences. I sat down on my partners rug alongside her altar. She was a playful young woman. At breakfast we had shared an interest in the movie Dr. Zhivago so felt comfortable with each other.

"Welcome to my house," she said, playing the role of client. In my journey my animal was spare in his communication, but did give me some good basic mime. At the end of it a crow flew in and I and my animal waited for it to speak, but it just sat on the fencepost grooming bits of white meat from its feathers.

"This dream is about your future," I told my partner client, "You will be taking a trip. There will be food there that is satisfying to digest. Be sure to leave plenty of air between meals." It sounded so ridiculous that I burst into laughter. I couldn't help myself. She stared at me bemused, then thankfully she burst into laughter too.

"Now did any of that have anything to do with your dream," I asked suppressing my mirth.

"It worked for me," she said though I was not to know why.

I was still laughing when we switched partners again. Had I been more experienced I might have worded my interpretation using the crow's meal to indicate a metaphor for a satisfying experience, but being still a Baby Mystic, I had been more literal than necessary.

The woman who would interpret my dream as the professional Shaman was indeed very professional. I had learned at lunch that she was practiced in the realm of dream interpretation. After journeying, she spoke confidently of my dream, wrapping it up neatly. At first her words seemed to have nothing to do with the dream of the colored underpants, but when I thought about it, it did fall into place quite nicely with the interpretation I had discussed with my power animals.

"You are a woman of these times," she said, "but your roots are ancient. When you offer your gifts, these ancient teachings will be the source of your power."

I thanked her and offered her two imaginary chickens.

When we gathered together for our final circle, the Qi Gong practitioner told me my hands felt much softer now. At the beginning of the workshop she had commented that my hand had felt like steel, so rigid were they as we grasped hands in the circle. She had felt compelled to comment on it though I didn't know if being like steel was good or bad. I told her I was a long time martial artist.

"That's obvious," she said. I had just been reading about using chi and wanted to learn more so I asked her about it. "Kill or cure," she said explaining to me that chi could be used either way and gave me the name of her teacher who lived in Berkeley.

My partner who had received my dream interpretation when I burst out laughing gave me a warm goodbye hug.

"I sure am glad to have met YOU," she said.

Spirits are Real

I was happy, not only to have successfully followed through with the exercises and been able to participate so thoroughly, but to have a piece of myself restored that I didn't know was missing.

At the beginning of the workshop we had been handed a sheet of ten core principles of Shamanic Theory of Dreams. The first was "spirits are real". I never thought I'd hear that said in the West. As the implications dawned on me, my ten year old self wanted to run through the halls with my hands waving in the air shouting "spirits are real; spirits are real".

One of the greatest losses of my coming to this country was that it appeared to have no spirits; there were no signs of them. No cloths wrapped around trees where spirits had been sighted, no spirit houses or shrines unexpectedly popping up everywhere whether to honor the ocean or a mountain top. As I spoke of this over lunch a woman who worked with nature spirits assured me that there were indeed spirits on the American continent.

We were to learn that spirits have two ways to communicate with us. One was through dreams and the other was through the mini-miracles of synchronicity. This concept of synchronicity having significant meaning, in the sense that there are no accidents, is popularly embraced by those who believe the universe will send them whatever it is they are looking for. It is not, however, anything at all like having it stated that spirits are real and communicating to you through synchronicity. The concept of a responding universe as interpreted by a monotheistic culture is apt to default to a divine force or God, if you will. And when you do not get what you visualized in all your exacting details, the interpretation tends to be a slippery slope back to an angry, all-powerful, punishing god who has not seen fit to give you what you wanted because you didn't do it right.

The animistic view of a world inhabited by spirits is of a universe filled with relationships as unique as a relationship with a real person and possibly capricious and unexpected as well. Principle four on this handout stated that spirits have a variety of characteristics, along with different kinds of power, different degrees of power and differing preoccupations. They could be helping spirits or non-helping spirits much like people.

The "communication" of spirits through dreams and synchronicity delivered results that were tailor made to speak to you in metaphors only you would find significant. And, in the Shamanic journey, you could ask the spirit helpers directly for answers to your questions. These spirits were not wish granters in the manner of an omniscient god; they were helpers and emissaries. If things didn't turn out so well that was just stuff happening that had nothing to do with you and was possibly the work of non-helping spirits. Your personal helpers would guide you through events by showing you what was going to happen in dreams and visions so you could be prepared. They could also offer sustenance and creative workarounds. This was a reality that made sense to me and reflected what I knew from growing up. I was, now, ready to meet more inhabitants of non-ordinary reality. This could, however, get expensive with all the workshops I was signing up for.

I had already asked my pendulum, if I could afford this trip and all the workshops. I knew I would have to dip into dwindling savings to do it. It said yes. I had been taught to use a pendulum by a Fung Shui colleague at a workshop last fall and was just acquiring some confidence with it. It is similar to the muscle testing used by chiropractors, she told us, and could be thought of as a way to access our higher consciousness. I had asked the pendulum if I should take each of these workshops. I was afraid to ask it if it was any good at finances, but one should check these things too.

The day I got home from my dream workshop, I received a phone call from my good friend and organizing colleague, Kim, asking if I could work on a job with her the next day. It was a big job so would be good money, she said. By coincidence, a client I had scheduled that day had had other business that week which left me completely freed up. When Kim walked me through the house I was only mildly surprised and just a little disconcerted to see that it was an ultra modern house with very high ceilings and white gallery like walls. And that I would be working in the closets making sure that everything was perfectly laid out in chromatically ordered colors and nice straight rows. And though no colored underpants were involved, I did wear my painter's pants(men's pants) because of all the pockets since I wouldn't have a bag with me in the house. I was ecstatic to have the work.

By the end of the job all three Shamanic workshops to date were paid for including travel, parking and meals plus enough left over for a deposit on another one.

On Watching Japan

2011-03-28T07:00:00.000-07:00

An astonishingly short piece. Written, as usual to save own life, but in this instance I have help.

On the way to visiting my family in Thailand, I often travel on Japan Airlines and stop at Narita airport. Thus Japan is a part of going home for me. In studying Asian culture and modern development, I have read much about life in Japan so felt a kinship with her people. I had respect for their education system, public healthcare system (the best in the world) and the high quality of public transportation was enviable. So to watch such organization and well thought out systems turn to piles of splinters filled me with compassion. Astonishing really to see such an exemplary example of modern living so easily destroyed. Yet how familiar it was to the precariousness of my home in earthquake country here in the Bay Area.

Natural disasters will strike. We know that. We also know that the human population is such that we are densely packed everywhere especially in coastal regions. We know that these densely packed regions are built to resist nature not flow with it, but there is only so much resistance we can build into concrete structures. When natural forces overcome them, the washing away of entire cities has the haunting inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Add to that the even greater hubris of nuclear power plants sitting on unstable fault lines and it is all too clear what a folly our manmade systems are. Thus I felt that Japan was bearing such suffering for all of us really.

When the shelter in place orders were given for those within 20 miles of the broken nuclear power plant, I felt trapped. Looking around the house I wondered if we would have enough food for the length of time it was going to take for the Japanese people to weather this ordeal. Would they have clean water? Clean food? Not likely. What was this karma Japan had with radiation? I felt this power plant disaster would render the country a closed nation. We would want nothing to do with Japan if that would keep the disaster from affecting our lives. These thoughts haunted me for days.

I searched the faces of others in my day to day travels looking for the shell shocked gravity I felt at this folding up of a country. I couldn't quite trust myself not to break into a rant at the slightest opening, with clients, with other Asian faces. I tried to hold the story lightly, but it only made me feel more isolated. At home my partner and brother-in-law, tuned into CNN kept me updated with breaking news. I joined them sparingly subjecting myself to the fever of impending nuclear meltdown. Where was the transformation in this story? Would this just be another terror of the week and then we go back to what we were doing?

Nearly a week after the tsunami, a contact passed along a letter from an American woman in Sendai describing how the people were coping. It was such a beautiful picture of cooperation and neighborly kindness that I took to heart this little bit of humanity in the face of such overwhelming devastation. The writer reported all the things people were doing to make sure everyone had food and water; how she found food left on her doorstep when she came home; how men in green caps walked around checking that everyone was safe; how people said this was just like the old days when everyone helped each other.

That Japan was still able to remember its humanity and the old way of doing things comforted me greatly. In a BBC account of old people sheltering in a school where there were inadequate supplies, an elderly man said "We're okay. We sit together and talk or read. Everyone has the same as everyone else now. Nothing." I was very moved by those sentiments.

The American woman's letter soon popped up elsewhere, on Facebook, passed along in e-mails and now Ode magazine hosts her ongoing letters on their blog, so much do her accounts help to heal the overwhelm. (Look for her name in the byline: Anne Thomas.) She spoke so directly and so articulately to my search for transformation that I offer her words, from the closing paragraph of her first letter, rather than paraphrase her:

"Somehow at this time I realize from direct experience that there is indeed an enormous Cosmic evolutionary step that is occurring all over the world right at this moment. And somehow as I experience the events happening now in Japan, I can feel my heart opening very wide. My brother asked me if I felt so small because of all that is happening. I don't. Rather, I feel as part of something happening that is much larger than myself. This wave of birthing (worldwide) is hard, and yet magnificent."

How amazing that she spoke of a Cosmic shift, a worldwide birthing. I knew nothing about this woman, why she was living in Japan, what her life was about, yet she seemed to have tapped into exactly the same vein of thought that I had just discovered using almost the same words. And she was describing her days with such a vulnerability and simple power, that I found not only her words to be a balm and a comfort, but the very idea of words themselves to be a comfort. Here just one woman offering her own experience and observation was enough to bring comfort to so many; it poured into me an intense appreciation for the power of words.

I went about my day looking for places where I could work similar magic with words—to comfort a friend who was having a hard time, or to further a message of compassion, humor or mutual experience. This woman who had become an accidental writer for so many, filling in a needed void, had made my own meandering writer's life meaningful, had reminded me that the observations of one person could be just exactly the medicine the world was looking for. And, that what we did mattered, whether in the simple kindnesses of the events she described or the witnessing and reporting of it.

I took comfort in this cosmic evolution of one corner of the world. When I woke from sleeping, even if just a nap, I felt such a sweetness at still being alive and safe that every day became a gift.

Then I went out to buy cans of food to stock our emergency supplies box.

What Color Is Your Prophecy?

2011-03-12T10:17:00.000-08:00

In light of the unfolding disaster in Japan, it seems in bad taste to speak of prophecies (too much like those endtime blogs). This piece was intended to be a light-hearted chapter of my personal journey at a 2012 event two weeks ago. That being said, the lens I was gazing through does have an uncanny perspective on such catastrophic disasters.

As I entered the Fred Flinstone structure that characterizes the convention center in Palm Springs, I was intensely curious about what kind of people would come to The Prophet's Conference on 2012. It was odd enough that I was there. Such an expedition into the high dessert for a weekend of lectures by speakers dispensing insight into the Mayan prophecy required serious wu wu credentials.

I did have a journalist's curiosity and, having reported mostly from the doomer's corner concerning planetary demise, I thought there might be interesting parallels in the prophecy corner.

I discovered the event because a teacher I was following was speaking at the conference—Alberto Villoldo. (How serendipitous that it wasn't far away; I could make it a business trip and visit our renters.) Catherine had introduced me to Villoldo with his book "The Four Insights: Wisdom, Power, and Grace of the Earthkeepers". Since she had not managed to make a Buddhist scholar of me, she decided I should follow a spiritual path of some sort so we would have something heart based to talk about. She thought a path of shamanism might do. The book did indeed resonate with my pagan leanings and introduced to me the Shamanic path of co-creation with the universe.

I had abhorred other "create your own reality" books, especially "The Secret", which had dumbed down the message into a materialistic 24/7 cosmic shopping channel. Villoldo's book reached beyond wants and goals to a place where I could find an underlying motivation that had meaning for me. His techniques took the co-creation part far from vision boards and affirmations on post-it notes. He allowed me to tell my own story, not only in terms of the present, but into the future. I found this approach to be a powerful focusing tool.

It was the other less academic speakers who gave the conference a particularly wu wu flavor. One, James Gililand, would be presenting information about his contact with extra terrestrials, UFOs and other paranormal appearances. There was also Little Grandmother, a young white woman who had garnered a following via the internet with youtube videos of herself dressed in buckskin sitting with her Tribe of Many Colors and delivering a prophecy that she claimed was being told to her by spirits. I found her presentation strangely compelling.

"We were not going to be allowed to destroy the planet", she told her viewers. Spirits of the ancients from the Other Side and extra terrestrials were standing by to help. To invite this help she was asking us to shift into our intuitive feminine nature and make our decisions from our heart and not our minds. We would then recognize the proper helping spirits. (If not we would presumably be sloughed off like so much head lice.)

These were the speakers who would get me into trouble with my reality-based community. Having built my reputation on a scientific, fact based approach to generating solutions to our planetary problems, this sudden switch to such fantastical material appears a bit psychotic. Plus a group of Native Americans were quite unhappy with the borrowing of their ceremonial traditions and misrepresentation of their teachings in Little Grandmother's presentation, adding a decidedly politically incorrect component to the event I was supporting with my money.

The friend who alerted me to these cultural complaints had sent me a link denouncing Little Grandmother as a fraud. We had a heated discussion in which he told me that to entertain such dubious material was as addictive as drugs, possibly resulting in permanent loss of sanity as had happened to a friend of his when he was young.

I was 52 not 22. The bigger danger for my soul was to become so skeptical that I could no longer believe in anything at all.

All that my study of known reality had done for me was root me in despair that the momentum of our exploitative social and financial systems would doom the human race while our attempts to save ourselves with our brains would continue to bury us in technological hubris. I wanted to believe in something else for a change. Or everything. Believing in everything would at least cover all the possibilities. 2012 would soon be upon us; this would be my last chance to entertain any of the 2012 prophecies and wonder what to make of it.

Plus my mother wanted to know.

Family Prophecies

Readers of my memoir of Thailand are familiar with my family story of a psychic American friend who would spend the evening summoning spirits to entertain my parents. My mother had seen her own coffee table move across the room—and back—during one such session. It left a lifetime impression that tempted her beyond her science based education. She was fond of books describing alternate narratives i.e. Chariots of the Gods (evidence of aliens helping us build civilization). We both read the Shirley Maclaine books. As a family, one of the few movies we saw together was 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Every so often, she would recount the story of the coffee table to new friends. One of the spirits had predicted that my family would emigrate to the United States and since we did end up here, it added punch to the story.

My father being Thai had no reason to discount any of the spirit information and neither would I, having been similarly raised with a family fortune teller, a healthy respect for spirits and a personal history explained by past lives that outranked any psychological explanations when it came to sexual preference. Reincarnation was a given throughout my life though it had faded from view somewhat in the face of Western culture and Western Buddhists who had stripped such "faith-based" belief from the teachings. (Nor did I protest too much this borrowing and neutering of my native traditions once I realized that American Buddhism was what was keeping it alive.)

2012: The Optimist's Club

I came late to the party. The first time I heard about 2012 was only 4 years ago. An intense young Canadian traveling with me through Northeast Thailand on a tour of sustainable, organic farms showed me a hefty book called "Return of Quetzalcoatl". The book was driving the decisions he was making in his life (for the better). Thus I came to sense that an increasing number of young people were taking 2012 seriously.

Apocalypse type stories had no appeal to me, but I was to discover through Alberto Villoldo that there were teachers who took 2012 seriously as a passage of transformation, of rebirthing.

The first time I heard the concept of a cultural paradigm shift was from Joanna Macy, a well respected American Buddhist teacher whom I had seen giving a presentation, alongside peak oil guru Richard Heinberg, on preparing for peak oil on a psychological level. She was convinced that the culture had already made significant strides towards The Great Turning, as she called it, as more people than ever were aware of how our lifestyles impacted the planet and had jumped on board the path to sustainable technology.

The teachers speaking at The Prophet's Conference were doing the same positive transformation work, some more certain than others that the 2012 paradigm shift would include extra curricular events on the actual date. Most thought the prophecy was already underway.

Geoff Stray, a Brit who spoke the first day of the conference, spent an hour reeling off a couple dozen prophecies both ancient and modern. Not only the Mayan calendar, but the Hopi, South African, Maori, Hindu and Tibetan all had 2012 prophecies. So did the Judeo Christian Islamic religions; he showed how the date was calculated. He also described the contemporary reports of individuals who had undergone near death experiences, drug induced shamanic journeys, out of body experiences, remote viewing, lucid dreaming and alien abductions all naming 2012 as the time of their prophecy, completely unaware of the date before.

There was the prophesy about the reversing of the earth's polarity causing serious planetary catastrophe that I'd already heard described on the history channel episode on 2012, plus increased earthquakes and disasters. More fun was the simultaneous triggering of a dormant enzyme in every human brain caused by a reduction of the geomagnetic field brought on by increased solar flares. Also predicted was increased psychic ability. (I could have seen that coming.) And for the UFO crowd, the switching on of alien implants in previously abducted humans. I bought his pocket guide to keep track of them all.

Geoff's presentation was tempered by Daniel Pinchbeck, a journalist and author of Return of Queztacoatl (the book my traveling companion was hauling around). Daniel was a thirty something journalist, who found his path through the use of hallucinogenic plants guided by South American shamans. He slouched deeply into his chair and habitually cocked his head to one side when standing at the podium. I nicknamed him The Pinchbeck of 2012, but his cerebral intensity was comforting. He was my bridge between the peak oil and climate change doomers and these intuitive based Paradigm Shifters.

Pinchbeck claimed that a balance between head and heart was the best approach for helping to shift the physical world from destructive, monolithic systems to sustainable, local, regenerative ones. His 2012 movie interviewed innovators I had already heard at Bioneers. He said we were undergoing a wisdom revolution. The agriculture revolution had taken 3,000 years, the industrial one 300 years, the information revolution only 30 years so it was entirely possible that a wisdom revolution would take a mere 3 years. I was totally behind this idea given the Internet and social networking. He was working on a social networking site to connect people to planet saving projects and invited us to join it.

Of the nearly 200 attendees, most were middle-aged women not social networking sorts. They were on the shy side, but friendly enough when approached; many women friends together, many lesbians. As a way of chatting people up, I asked individual attendees which speaker had brought them to the conference. I made friends with a Pinchbeck fan sitting near me, intently reading a 2012 book. Many said they came for Keisha Crowther the young woman prophet who had been given the name Little Grandmother by a Native American shaman (though he turned out not to have permission from the proper authorities). When I posted my pictures to flickr her picture got the most hits by a large margin; clearly she was the celebrity of the 2012 party.

She barely made it to the stage. I was afraid she might collapse like Sissy Spacek playing Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter. But Keisha stayed upright, gaining strength as the connection with the audience poured energy into her. She talked about being violently ill that morning as a result of being the target of hatred. (A small group of Native American protestors had greeted us that morning.) She explained the misunderstanding surrounding her initiation as a shaman, how it had tested her ego (and helped her dispense with ego), how she had agreed not to do any more Native American ceremonies. There is a statement to this affect on her website. (She also shut down her Tribe of Many Colors online forum the day before this appearance.)

Stripped of the buckskin and ceremonial paraphernalia, Keisha appeared in chinos and an argyle sweater vest. She was still passionate about saving "our mother earth" and inspiring others to do so. Her vulnerability was genuine and I had no reason to doubt that she was internally driven and was speaking from an intuitive based knowledge though she emphasized that she was just an ordinary person like us. Apart from earnestly telling us to love ourselves first, and how wrong it was to hate people just for whom they loved (no wonder she had a lesbian following), she added a little extra bit.

"You know those hunches you have about things, that you then talk yourselves out of. Stop doing that," she said. I put that in my pocket.

I would meet other intuitive based people as I continued to make eye contact and ask people questions. One told me she was a grief counselor; When I asked her what kinds of therapies she used, she told me about sound therapy. How a crystal bowl played close to the solar plexus really opened her clients up to working with her. She pointed to one about the right size that was sitting on the display stand of the crystal bowls booth. She thought sound therapy would totally work with hoarders and urged me to try it. There I thought; I just justified my continuing education deduction.

Another, a lesbian Rabi, told me how her guides had directed her to take a certain workshop over another, thus normalizing for me the use of personal spirit guides. When I told her I wrote reports of my journey to my readers, she asked me if they were real people. Oh yes I assured her. Some even write back.

The Visionary Road

On Sunday Barbara Marx Hubbard, a veteran New Age thinker since 1966, described a scenario that I had already begun to formulate. This would be a media generated phenomena since so many of us are globally connected by instant access to breaking news. Witnessing a catastrophe such as might be prompted by a natural disaster or act of injustice, would create a moment of shared global pain leading to mass empathy, mass revelation and mass introspection which would then open our collective eyes. We would see that we weren't alone and that would create receptivity for a simultaneous, synchronization of technology and social systems that work.

I had felt that way about the Arizona shooting of Gabrielle Glifford and others. Glifford was such an attractive woman and rational, someone we could relate to. An archived news interview of her went viral; it showed her cheerful determination to continue the work of democracy despite threats of violence from Palin supporters. This quickly made her into a symbol of democracy. As the story continued with the moment-by-moment coverage of her recovery, her character achieved heroic proportions. The morning she was moved to the rehabilitation center the newsmedia followed with helicopter shots of the lengthy motorcade accompanying her ambulance. The message was clear—we are not letting anything else happen to this woman or to our fragile democracy. We will not let the country be run by thugs directed by vitriolic talking heads. Glenn Beck lost a million viewers that month.

Barbara called the newsmedia our collective nervous system raising our sense of connectivity and our vibration quotient and offering a feedback loop for our awakening. Thus she saw 2012 as reason for celebration of a birthday of this new sensibility. The name of the conference "2013: Day One" reflected this invitation. She warned us that crisis precedes innovation, that there would be no awakening to the desire to create a higher order without a period of disorder. She pointed out that it was easy to see everything that was wrong with the world, but much harder to see the emerging New Paradigm because it has never existed before. Hmmm. Seeing the positive emerging paradigm was actually a subversive act! It was in defiance of the dominant doomer perspective.

I took notes furiously. The material from these speakers was so dense that I was glad to have Swami Beyondananda simplify it for me.

"The Shift is hitting the fan," he punned. "You may be asking why is this Shift happening to me, but Shift happens." In his more serious incarnation as Steve Bahrain, he explained that because people have not connected to the divine it had allowed the 3Ms to take over—money, materialism and machines (and Monsanto). Pinchbeck, too, had said that because we had no cosmology we hung onto ego. Now he was witnessing a lifting of the veils with so many mystery schools opened and ancient systems liberated from secrecy. In order to develop this evolutionary awareness, he advised, we had to be aware of both the old story and the new and program in the new.

At the end of the day, several speakers assembled for a panel to discuss alien intervention. James talked about how, as more people became able to receive help from extraterrestrials, the ETs would reveal themselves. His videos showed the lights of UFOs flying in; one had seemed to greet the camera with a flashing of their high beams and two had a playful crossing. He said that he had told newsmedia when to come to photograph them and the UFOs had indeed shown up. People came to his ranch to learn how to meditate and put out good vibrations to invite the ETs to show themselves. (The friendly ones sensitive to good vibrations.) Alberto said he and his indigenous friends had seen UFOs but his friends said they were waiting for the ones that didn't come in "buses". Barbara (who had no experience of UFOs) agreed that it made sense that in order to welcome ETs we had to give off a friendly vibration. All agreed that a critical mass of aware people creating receptivity would allow ETs (and other helping spirits) to penetrate our neo-sphere, the thinking layer of the earth.

Before I left the conference I stopped to talk to Freddy Silva (a crop circle expert), who had given an amazing slide show of ancient sites and power spots all over the world, showing how they created electromagnetic forces with the placement of their pillars or their placement of stones on power spots. This archeological technology of the ancients was designed to enhance human potential, he said; a heightened psychic or creative ability say. I was terrifically drawn to this Feng Shui on steroids and the relationship between these temples.

He was leading a tour of Stonehenge and other sites near Glastonbury in July. I asked him if I would be able to touch the stones at Stonehenge. (They are roped off 100 feet out.) He assured me that we would have complete access to the site for our sunset visit. That alone was worth the price of admission, he added. I was sorely tempted. I hadn't been to England in 20 years and I had been looking for a good excuse.

As I drove out of Palm Springs, I felt the fog of doubt burn from my mind and my normal equanimity replaced by an emotion I rarely felt—impatience, impatience with my own lack of narrative with no particular goal (no prophecy of my own) pulling me. All I needed was a good story. I could see myself creating the new paradigm, now, just from what I could observe and intuit.
Contemplating such a reality made me feel slightly unstable and giddy as though I should carry a warning label:
"Caution I am making this Shift up."
I had, however, tasted a new sensibility and was eager to see how I could make it stick.

Also posted to the Energy Bulletin

Magical Shirts: A Wardrobe Journey

2011-02-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

What starts out as one sewing project becomes a wardrobe makeover and a doorway to intuitive opportunity. I started sewing and couldn't stop. It is the Red Shoes of my sewing career. Happy Chinese New Year!

During Christmas season I was out shopping for pajama bottoms for Catherine. Finding none that would do, I went to the fabric store and browsed the section devoted to flannels. I lingered taking my fill of the various novelty prints and swirling colors. Since my shamanism workshop, my eyes were open to color, animal representation and symbolism. I found none that looked like the swirling rust colors my spirit animal had produced when I asked him to dress me. Most of the flannels were too garish and representational to be suitable for anything but children's pajamas.

Finally, in the quilting section of decorator prints, I picked a paisley pattern on a cream background for Catherine's pajama bottoms. Still, I kept coming back to the "snuggle" flannels with their novelty prints, drawn to one print in particular—of multi-colored pop art daisies overlaid with blue peace symbols on a background of mint green. The last time I recall wearing a floral print was to a formal dance in high school in 1975. But somehow these op art daisies reflected my feelings of having been on a mind altering experience within nature. As for the peace symbols, how could I resist that direct symbolism. But I did not buy the fabric despite it being on sale at only $2.49 a yard.

Buying materials on sale, is how my clients fill their houses full of craft materials they never use. And I still had three yards of purple flannel I had bought on sale two months ago that I had not sewed into the shirt I had still to pick a pattern for. (I was out buying purple ribbon to put in my hair for Spirit Day to show solidarity with LGBT youth following the spate of gay teen suicides.) Plus I already had four boxes of fabric I had collected over the years stored at home.

Serendipitous Sewing Space

I no longer had a sewing room, now that Catherine's brother Steven had come to live with us in our guest room. (Nor did I regret the loss for Steven was happy to look after the dogs when we went out of town and our dog sitter had just retired. He was also an amiable housemate who didn't mind doing dishes if we cooked and he added a companionable element to our lives without being too intrusive.)

I found a small table in the garage I used for sorting, cleared it off, put it in my home office and set my sewing machine on it. I soon discovered that the arrangement had the serendipitous benefit of allowing me to multi-task as I remembered things. I could now check e-mail, answer the phone, post pictures and listen to teleclasses while twirling myself around on my desk chair between computer and sewing machine. And because my sewing project was sitting in front of me all the time, I spent less time browsing online.

I cut the paisley fabric on what was left of the floor space and had the pants sewn up in two days. But I couldn't stop thinking about the daisy peace pattern fabric. It kept me awake thinking about it. The daisies kept dancing in my head with the peace symbols. I returned to the fabric store, pulled the bolt from the shelf and had it measured up. Alas, there wasn't enough left for pants or a shirt, so popular were those daisies. I chose a blue shirting plaid to make another pair of pajama bottoms for Catherine, but I knew I couldn't go home without the daisies. I didn't want to spend another night thinking about it. I could make it into a shirt I reasoned if I chose a solid flannel for the sleeves. I definitely needed shirts. My favorite winter shirt, now 15 years old, was so worn, it was threadbare at the cuffs and another had torn at the shoulder.

I already had the purple flannel and the only other color I liked was shocking pink. I held the pink up to the daisies. It pulled up the colors quite nicely.

I would make up the shirt using my Folkwear pattern for a Russian shirt with the classic asymmetrical closure I so loved ever since the movie Dr. Zhivago. That way I could see if I liked the pattern enough to use it for my purple shirt. And I'd have something new to wear at our New Year's Day party. My friends were used to me wearing wild outfits.

Western Chromophobia

I sewed up the shirt with contrasting sleeves and contrasting placket and collar, buttoned up with translucent green buttons from Catherine's grandmother's button box. On New Year's Day I wore the shirt with a ski hat that sported numerous bright colored spikes. The hat was a big hit; the shirt festive.

"That pattern just says peace pajamas to me," said my buddy Stacy. Our friend Dave thought it looked fine. Last time I had seen Dave, he had made a point of telling me that he had just read an article about how Westerners were afraid of color. He recommended a book called Chromophobia. I was amused by the term and remembered a day some twenty years ago when I walked through downtown Palo Alto wearing an emerald green catsuit with my hot pink turtleneck. At a cross walk I heard a man's voice speaking out in disgust.

"What a combination," he said loudly, "I can't believe it, pink and green!" I realized he was commenting on my outfit. Nor did he seem to expect me to be able to understand English. He simply walked past me shaking his head. I was amused by his reaction, but I never wore the outfit again.

In Thailand I had been taught the colors of the days of the week in kindergarten. Monday yellow, Tuesday pink, Wednesday green, Thursday orange, Friday navy blue, Saturday purple, Sunday red. My birthday color was pink, though technically I had been born on a Monday (in England). Since it was already Tuesday in Thailand, my grandmother deemed pink to be my color and filled my childhood with pink dresses. While my mother had a knock-off Channel suit made for me in shocking pink.

"It's called Siamese pink," she told. When I related this story to my writer's group, a Southern lady in her 80s told me that, in her day, the color had been known as Nigger Pink.

Being able to affix the label chromophobia to Western attitudes towards color emboldened me to create my wild shirt. I did not, however, intend to actually wear it on the street. But then one of my regular clients called and I found myself telling her I had spent the holidays sewing and offered to wear one of my creations to her house to show her. She wanted me to take down her Christmas tree, fix a lamp and put a few things away, so I wore my Handymanda white painter's pants with my New Year's Day shirt. I grabbed my Australian cowboy hat as I went out the door since it looked like rain.

My client had been out of a job for sometime. I was hoping to cheer her up with the silliness of my shirt. I showed it off to her apologizing for its pajama-ness. She assured me it didn't look like pajamas; she liked the brightness of it. I was surprised since she mostly dressed in black, but she had had an interior designer arrange her collection of red Asian boxes and artifacts on glass shelves (that I had installed) and I admired her taste.

Given her approval, I felt it was safe to go out on the street wearing the shirt and threw a black fleece vest over it to fend off the cold. I drove to the bank and felt so silly I was smiling to myself which made me feel good in a subversive sort of way and I thought I would look for parking on the street instead of going around to the parking lot. I passed rows of cars, but there right in front of the bank was an open space. Such was my good fortune in the wearing of this magical shirt.

As soon as I got out of the car with my cowboy hat and this bright pink shirt with the floral print and the men's work pants with hammer loops, I felt everyone smiling at the ridiculousness of this outfit. Perhaps it was just because I was smiling myself or because I looked like I had rushed out in my pajamas. At any rate there is nothing threatening about a floral pattern. And a cowboy hat is such an American symbol that the combination transported me, from my usual cube farm uniform of khaki pants and buttoned down shirts, into a fantastical character, a public commodity much like street art.

Magical Shirt Mind

The following week I was scheduled to work with a client who had been so stressed out about digging herself out of a serious hoarding habit, that I suspected she would try to cancel at the last minute. I wrote her a playful note. "Ready or not, here I come," I said. She wrote back equally playful and said she still had until noon to cancel within my 24hour cancellation policy. Fortified by the thought of cheering up this anxious client with my silly shirt, I told her that I would be so disappointed if she cancelled because I was looking forward to coming to her adventure playground house to play. She was a pre-school teacher and had things scattered all over her house that she had saved to amuse children.

"You can come over and play," she wrote back, "but I will probably cry."

She had indeed felt unready and had been minutes away from canceling, she told me when we met, but my note made her feel that I knew her so well that she was encouraged to continue to trust the process, especially when I framed the session as a play date. I told her it was my New Year's resolution to lighten up and indeed I had stepped into a much more playful and intuitive part of my brain.

I continued my sewing, making my purple spirit shirt and designing another with purple sleeves (to use up the left over material) paired with a pretty turquoise and blue fabric from the quilters flannel section. Only clowns wear shirts with contrasting colors I was thinking, but this shirt was actually beautiful. I would have to change directions to remain clown-ful. I had a piece of material in one of my boxes that I had bought at a swap table because it cried out to be made into a summer BBQ party outfit. It was a sarong in traffic-sign yellow covered with red lobsters laid out in a grid. Now that my work was play, I would make it into a work shirt.

From my perspective as a seamstress, tailored button down shirts represented to me the over-complexity of modern life. I wanted to make a shirt so simple anybody could make one. My do-it-yourself ethic would prevail in defiance of a consumer society and save us in hard times. (Though, in truth, it was TV that had prompted a revival of home sewing following the popular show, Project Runway, a contest show for would-be fashion designers.)

My simplified shirt would have no need of a pattern. All the parts were rectangles measured to fit. This was how shirts had been made during the Renaissance. Once I figured out the dimensions of the hole for the collar (by tracing it from another shirt), it only took an afternoon to sew. I made the shirt long so I could take advantage of the original hem of the sarong. When I put it on I discovered I had made a dress with wide choir robe sleeves. Just in time for Chinese New Year.

The joke was on me as dresses are rarely a part of my wardrobe, but I could still wear it as a shirt under red overalls. I put rubber bands over the wide sleeves so they wouldn't catch on doorknobs. That made the cuffs flare out in a very clown like manner. I wore the outfit to my play-school client's house. She loved it.

"Where did you get a rock lobster shirt," she asked and wanted to accessories the bib pocket of my overalls with a lobster cracker.

Following our productive session, I headed to the San Francisco public library. Nobody on BART gave me a second look. Perhaps they thought I worked at a sea food franchise (despite the cowboy hat). In the station elevator, a young black man wearing nicely pressed baggy pants and a cap broke into friendly conversation telling my why he took the elevator instead of the stairs. In the library I ran to get in the door of the elevator just as it was closing. The two women already on board both started talking to me about elevator doors. No one stared at my outfit; they all just wanted to reach out and share common space. This rarely happens to me.

I checked out more books on costume design and a copy of Chromophobia.

In it, I read that besides being vulgar and working class, color was associated with the feminine, the foreign, the primitive, the infantile, the queer, the pathological and the Orient. I was intrigued. Not only did this description cover something of the Otherness I embodied, but the power given color was intuitive, emotional and anti-intellectual. If used too liberally in art, critics warned, it was liable to bring about a fall from the higher values of the mind. Like Eve, color was so powerful it had to be repressed along with the divine feminine.

There was no denying the power of color. The colorful fabrics were addictive. I had returned to the fabric store weekly and already had enough material to replace all my threadbare shirts, as well as a growing bag of scraps. (I could make hats!) Would my closet be in danger of unsustainable growth headed for collapse? I could not tell yet whether my new obsession, despite having been a doorway to my intuitive self, would prove to be a distraction from serious spiritual work or money making endeavors. Sometimes you just get what you need.

Eyes of a Shaman

2010-12-28T16:14:00.000-08:00

A report of my experiences with a local weekend workshop in basic core shamanism. "Core" refers to universal or common principles derived from traditional practices as researched by Michael Harner, author of "The Way of the Shaman" (first published in 1979) and founder of The Foundation for Shamanic Studies.

Monday after my beginning workshop in core shamanism, the world was freshly washed after a storm. A blue sky set off the many cumulus clouds. And I wanted to sit and watch them. I'm not normally given to a desire to commune with nature, nor was this impulse an awakened interest in natural beauty. It was more that I had learned a new language and everything now looked like it had something riveting to say. Not in that trippy way of having spent the day on LSD with your synapses jammed open with a pry bar providing the effect of everything seeming to breath, calling out for attention. This was a more subtle knowing, a realization that I could pay attention to the physical world and have it tell me things. Nothing dramatic, just a lively conversation with unique friends interested in what was on my mind.

Object Divination

In order to put us in such a metaphorical frame of reference Lesson One, at our small workshop of 11 people, was Object Divination. Here we were to use a rock for the purpose of mapping out an answer to a question. Not a yes or no question, but a who, what, why or how question. A partner would record our session.

"How can I improve my ability as a professional organizer with my clients?" I asked.

We were then told to look at the rock and point to four different things we saw. I immediately saw a face taking up a large part of the rock. To the right an arrow pointing upward in a zig zag. Across the face a path of stepping stones. In the distance and visible from the path was a distinct star.

We were then to interpret what each of these things was telling us in answer to our query. The face was obviously a forlorn client as full of suffering as the painting of the Scream by Munch. What the face was trying to tell me was how much this emotional and existential suffering was also about a need for meaning in the context of the clients cluttered life. The arrow showed that progress with the client would be uplifting, but not in a linear fashion. The first two stepping stones were very visible thus the first steps of our work would be obvious, then the path seemed to take two paths, both would work, but one would seem to me to be the better path because it was better positioned to see the distant star representing a focal point for our work. The star was telling me that the goal was as yet unobtainable, but was a powerful motivator.

We were then to flip the rock either towards us or away from us and repeat the process.

I immediately saw a smaller, but happier face with a deep hole next to it where an ear might be, marked by a triangle. On the other side of the face I saw another, larger, cat-like face. Down low and to the side, a set of three indentations.

Obviously the client was happier plus she had companionship either from an animal, a supportive family member or some kind of relationship involving other people. The hole was for me to speak into and suggest ideas for further progress. The 3 indentations were a set of portals integrated into the client's life for the removal of items not useful to their life. (Organizers often think in threes when dividing up items for removal.)

This was a pretty accurate narrative of the work that I do with clients, but because of the format, I was pushed to see just a little bit more about the work and introduce some elements that are not usually part of my repertoire. It was in effect, a map, but because it was a map I had made myself in a relationship with a natural object it had an added dimension that made it stick in my mind in a meaningful way. It also reminded me which part of the process I needed to work on.

I had essentially been coached by a rock and with better results. If I got nothing else out of the workshop the rock had already won me over.

Port of Entry

Having learned to see messages in nature, we wasted no time getting to the meat of Shamanistic technique—visions. I knew that no drugs were used, in this school, for the conjuring of visions, so was intrigued to learn that drumming prompted a dream state. At 3 to 7 beats per second, the brain would produce theta waves much like those observed during dreaming.

Our teacher, a woman not given to inflections of awe or wonder, taught class as though it were a hands-on technology, much like any computer tech class except that her tools were handmade. A rawhide drum, several rattles and a beater for the drum were laid out on a striped woven blanket at her feet. She wore an unusual pendant around her neck, but was otherwise dressed in ordinary slacks and attractive blouse. I appreciated her no nonsense style. It made the material feel accessible especially when she told us that a box of Tic Tacs would do fine as a rattle.

She gave a brief introduction to shamanism as a system of knowledge found all over the world—humankind's oldest spiritual practice. The Foundation's purpose in teaching shamanism was to bring back spiritual democracy so everyone could personally access the sacred. Thus we were not borrowing another culture's religion, but bringing back our birthright through our own practice.

To start the journey we needed a portal into the lower world. A place we had actually visited, a tree stump, the bottom of a lake or a burrow in the ground. We were given only a minute to come up with such a portal so I went with the first one that came to mind, a ring of tall Redwoods where I had once thought to build a tree house.

Whatever we chose it should provide a barrier between this world and the imaginary world of the journey. For it was the imagination, she told us, that provided the visions. She left it to us to believe (or not) that there actually was a Spirit World being accessed by the vision journey. She then assured us that the Lower World, to which we would go, was populated with compassionate beings who would do us no harm. Indeed they wanted to help us. The same was true of the Upper World, which we would visit later. It was the Middle World, the reality we lived in, that was tricky to journey into, containing as it did both benign and harmful beings.

The drumming would begin as we descended. Once we reached the lower world we were to look for an animal that would guide us and see what unfolded. After 15 minutes, the drum would stop. That was our signal to come back; the drumming would resume again to guide us home.

Shaman Journeying

The assistant teacher started drumming and off we went. Down into the soil I scrambled, following the twisted roots, watching for a light at the end of the tunnel. When I emerged there were trees overhead and a black furry creature dropped into my arms.

"Oh no", I thought recognizing the animal, "did it have to be a simian?" I was somehow disappointed, but the urgent beat of the drum did not let me remain argumentative. I accepted the gibbon guide (I'd had several gibbons as a child) and he dropped to the ground leading me by the hand, across a meadow to another grove of trees. There a tall indigenous man waved me down the path, the drums seeming to summon us. All around were people in celebration.

Soon we reached an amphitheatre filling up with people. I could see them far up into the stands. A leadership figure, another tall indigenous man in a long tunic came to the center of the stage. For a lesbian, I thought, this vision sure was filled with a lot of handsome men. It was a diverse crowd of many nationalities. I looked for the animal guides and saw them appear, sitting with their people—lions, cheetahs, birds—each surrounded by a glowing light.

The man welcomed us and spoke of what we were to expect during this day how we would be well taken care of. There were things we would be shown. Eager to see what technologies might be on display, I stood up and made my way outside towards a sandy beach where I saw several sailing vessels moored on the water. How perfect for a sustainable lifestyle, I thought. They were catamarans only with more hulls, about five hulls per vessel.

I was invited on board by the men already seated and given a place at a tiller, my gibbon pal tucked inside my jacket. We set off at a brisk pace, my feet braced on the sides. I was energized by the speed we were going and could feel the water spray, the wind and the pull of the boat. Everyone was working in sink together. After some time we landed at an island where I stepped onto the beach, as did the gibbon. We walked into the forest to drink from a stream with our hands and eat fruit from vines overhead.

"What's your name," I asked my gibbon friend.

"Panda," he said into my mind and added "I know you like jokes." Ha, yes, a gibbon named Panda, an animal by another's name. And the name of a college friend with hippie parents.

Climbing up a bluff I asked if there was a Tarzan swing.

And soon one came to hand. I grabbed one as Panda Gibbon grabbed another and we swung across the forest floor.

Then the drum stopped and I was far from my portal of entry, but I knew from reading The Way of the Shaman that I could go back through another one; there was a tree stump not far off that would do. I ran to it and jumped in through the top, climbing up the tree roots to the quickening beat of the drum, exhilarated with all I had experienced especially the sailing.

Talk To The Animals

The next exercise was more daunting. We were now to partner up, return to our animal guides and ask a question on behalf of our partner.

"The Spirits respond to altruistic intentions," our teacher told us. I was liking this world of compassionate beings more and more.

"Form your question," carefully said our teacher, "the question changes the future as it is being asked." She did not offer an explanation of why this was so. It was part of intention making I surmised. These were not lighthearted questions being asked either. Some in the room had cancer diagnosis or relatives who were ill.

Getting my new gibbon friend to give a straight-forward answer or any answer at all was not an easy task. When I asked him my partner's question, he spun around in circles for quite a bit before he would calm down and sit quietly beside me. I asked him again and he started grooming himself. Then I started putting words in his mouth. "Do you mean this?" I would ask. "How about this?" "What else should he do?" He mimed playing cards with me without looking at me. I asked the question again and he formed words into my head. "And how should he do that?" I asked. The gibbon mimed painting a picture. Then he ate some nearby grapes and sat quietly watching the horizon.

Well it would have to do. The drum was calling me back.

The journey having ended I sat up and composed my notes, then faced my partner with my answer. "Stop looking for solutions in a state of turmoil," I said."Find a quiet place in yourself. Nurture yourself away from your parents. Then return to them and listen with your other mind, your objective mind. Do something companionable and non-confrontational with them. When they are ready, tell them what you see is their future and paint a picture for them. Then nurture yourself again and let things unfold."

I was not used to giving people advice so boldly which added to the sense that I was delivering a message. My partner nodded in agreement to most of what I said.

"It's pretty much the same as what the rock said," he told me. Whew.

In turn the question I had asked my partner came back with an answer that gave me a new perspective into my question though the actions of her animal guide had much more meaning for her than for me. I was beginning to see how this worked.

"The Spirits arrange things that have some meaning for us," our teacher told us. With practice we would get more adept at communicating with this spirit world and interpreting the answers.

We ended our first day with a dance. We were to dance our animal guides and let them express themselves.

The Healers

The next day we journeyed to the Upper World. We were to ask the first person we met if they were our guide and ask for a healing. If the answer was no we were to go in search of another person.

I entered the Upper World via a tree and found myself in a white room similar to a doctor's office. A woman in white robes came toward me. She had long dark hair covering her face completely. When I searched for a face I saw almond eyes that were closed and a very wrinkled face smiling up at me. She looked not quite human, her skin being the color of paper, but she worked with me nonetheless, passing her hand over my sore hip and shoulder joints. Nothing seemed to work. Healing was not going to be my strong point I could see.

When I came back, on the second journey, with a question on behalf of a partner, the guide beckoned me down the hall to a garden full of patients healing. She spoke words into my mind and showed me things to make her point, a fountain full of coins, water over flowing.

New Animal Friends

By the end of the day I was feeling taxed by both thinking up questions and the retrieving of answers. Thus the final exercise was a welcome replenishing of our spirits.

We were to return to the Lower world on behalf of a partner and call for their power animal. We were not to bring back any insects, menacing reptiles or fish showing teeth. The animal was to show itself four times and then we were to gather it up, feel it in our arms and carry it back. On our return we were to blow the animal into our partners chest with great intention and then into the back of their heads whatever was left. Only then would we tell our partner what the animal was. If it was not the right animal for them it would just evaporate in time.

My partner journeyed first; I lay quietly next to him our knees and ankles touching as instructed. As the minutes went by, I grew eager with anticipation as though awaiting a gift. Then I saw my partner rise, his arms wide. After he blew into my chest and head, he told me there were two animals that wanted to come. While he gathered up one, another had insisted on coming too and had hopped on.

It was fitting. Two was my lot in life, two countries, two languages, two races, two spiritual philosophies east and west.

The first animal was a bear, as big as any you could find. The second a mongoose. I liked them both. I had just been calling for the emergence of my inner bigger self. And the mongoose was indeed a versatile character, Rikki Tikki Tavi having been a favorite childhood story.

A Birthing

In our final journey of the workshop, we met with our power animals to get to know them and ask how they could help us. The Bear was indeed filled with power and the Mongoose very talkative and busy. I asked how I would tell this story, overwhelmed as I was by all the new material and philosophical implications. Bear put his paw on my head, patting so hard that I felt like a basketball being dribbled.

"Hey I thought you weren't supposed to hurt me," I said; (it didn't really hurt) and I got the message that these were very big concepts I was trying to cram into my head. Then he lifted me to face the open landscape. Mongoose came along to interpret.

"Give an overview, then tell your story from the heart," said Mongoose, at which point I turned my head to the Bear's chest and pressed my way into his body, through his heart, descending through the internal cavity and finding myself in a birth canal as Mongoose assisted in my being born. He wiped me off after I emerged and I asked him to dress me. After all, perhaps what I was really in search of was a new wardrobe.

He put a flowing shirt of a swirling, red and ochre pattern over my head, then adorned me with brass pendants. Could this be kosher I wondered, this asking for fashion advice? They seemed okay with it; it was all part of the presentation. Then the drum summoned me to return.

We danced our new power animals; this gave them the joy of being alive, manifested in our body. Then the lights were turned on. Our workshop was done. We lingered, saying our goodbyes, everyone smiling happily.

Integration

In the days ensuing, I was stumped by how I was going to integrate this new experiential information into my daily life. Who would take seriously that I was seeking wisdom from animals? It was so childlike. Buddhism was so much more elegant and dignified.

My first day out I had lunch at an outdoor café with Bart, my editor at the Energy Bulletin. He was eager to hear what I learned at my workshop and I was hesitant to tell him. He was more a man of science than an enthusiast of the occult.

I turned to the sky to take in a pair of large cumulus clouds on that fresh, storm washed morning. One cloud had an in-y and one had an out-y. And as they moved towards each I could see that the out-y was lined up to slide into the cavity of the in-y.

I began to explain, to Bart, the metaphorical techniques, the Rorschach test-like interpretations. It would take me a while to get to the animals.

My pair of clouds were sliding into each other and I sensed that Bart was, after all, quite receptive to this intuitive based seeking. We certainly needed all solution seeking on board. Why not the pre-industrial techniques of medicine men?

I turned to him smiling, daring him, "Don't you think Peak Oil could use a Shaman?"

"Oh yes," he said enthusiastically, and we left it at that.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

2010-12-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

In which I uncover the most compelling reason to stay put in my California home, track my about face from a knowledge driven quest for truth to an intuitively informed one, and contact the dead.

Recently a peak oil blogger I follow, the Russian born US based Dimitry Orlov, published a guest post by a writer urging us to leave the United States for a country more conducive to good living. Or at least not so frustrating, given our perverse, denial ridden, but nevertheless failing empire politics. And because I do have that option open to me I had to give serious thought to why I chose to stay put. The post had even suggested Thailand as a viable option.

It is certainly true that the US government consistently favors the rich and fleeces the rest of us while our economy sits on the unstable specter of printed money. Our education system, healthcare system, pension plan and infrastructure all fail to offer us the amenities expected by our first world counterparts (not to mention those enviable five-week vacations).

None of these reasons are new revelations. Nor were they ever motivating factors. The prevailing reason for me staying in the US (specifically California), is because of what I am easily able to think while living here. California is the most conducive place for believing, as Lewis Carroll put it, six impossible things before breakfast.

Not that I can't believe impossible things in Thailand. The population is, after all, obsessed with ghost stories. Reincarnation is a given and every homeowner offers a comparable tiny home for the spirits while other spirits of the land are also honored where they make their presence known. Technological wonders are equally embraced. In Thailand I can express whatever impossible things I might want to believe playing both sides of the cultural fence (given my foreign born mother); most will nod in agreement or listen in wonder. Thus unchallenged, my new thoughts slip away in favor of the next congenial social event. And being from a wealthy family I had fewer material and social limitations to act as a whip. What impossible thing would I strive for when all is provided?

I occasionally think of living in England, my birthplace. Europe, we all know is more enlightened as far as social welfare, walkable cities and culture. The level of intellectual discussion I've experienced is refreshing. However it is much harder to get away with verbalizing six impossible things before breakfast. Despite the UK being the land of Stonehenge, table-rapping spiritualists and crop circles, the way one speaks is so important that nearly all my effort is devoted to shoring up evidence that I am properly educated and not given to unscientific notions or fits of grandiosity that might lead to life-changing experiments.

Given the eternal politeness of the British, barbed as it is with an ever-judging wit, everyone is allowed their say uninterrupted. This slows the pace of conversation way down and I become quite self-conscious. It is not an atmosphere conducive to off-the-cuff suggestions that might rapidly marshal a meeting of the minds. I can't really get up a good head of steam unless I get to interrupt someone.

In the US we have proven that being well-educated does not necessarily result in logical beliefs, given the absurdities of our politics. In the Bay Area, however, the tension between intellectual vigor favoring technological innovation and the diversity of spiritual practice managing to co-exist with equal determination, make Northern California a haven for far out thought and activity. One can partake in all manner of healing modalities and alternative medicine, several flavors of Buddhist meditation, Taiko drumming, a gathering of Queer Pagan Faeries, Qigong, sex-positive masturbation workshops and spiritual environmental activism without having to drive more than an hour or two if that.

Unimpaired by inclement weather, California is a place of perpetual intentions—the perpetual pursuit of health, individual sports, spiritual enlightenment and entrepreneurial wealth. Any of six impossible things I might think up before breakfast can manifest itself into full-blown immersion by evening with a book from the library. Thus last month, when I became interested in Shamanism, I went from book to weekend workshop in a matter of weeks.

I had been practicing meditation with Catherine who is a more serious enthusiast of Theravada Buddhism than I. Meditation was a good tool for identifying, then dispelling my mind of my many intellectual arguments. But lately, I began to hanker after the vividness of the guided meditations that I had experienced when I spent a year studying the earth-based religion of the European Goddess tradition aka witches, the medicine women of the times, burned at the stake to make way for the Christian Church. I had studied with an engaging teacher on the coast in Moss Beach who focused on using the Tarot.

The last time I had entered the pastoral landscape of those guided meditations was 15 years ago. I went to see my cat who had just died, killed by a car. I wanted to say goodbye and make sure he had found his place with the witches, being a very fine black cat. He greeted me with such familiarity that I was immediately comforted by the warmth and feel of his fur and his face pushing into mine. We spent some time together as he showed me his new home among the welcoming wise women. Buddhism does not encourage such telling of stories, favoring the stripping of illusion from the mind to enhance a dispassionate perspective (and thus free ourselves from the sufferings brought on by clinging and grasping). It is a stark discipline. I lacked enough intention to get on with it. I was a zafu potato.

Chronic Disaster Fatigue

Over the last decade, I have been immersed in the concerns of the environment, from climate change to peak oil. And in between, the discovery of plastic islands in the ocean, the depletion of natural resources, globalism replacing colonialism and all the rest of it. It has been a very grim decade indeed, but not without its rewards. I felt less like a Cassandra over the years and gained a modicum of respect. I am even part of a movement (claimed by name, even, by one of the Peak Oil brethren—published author Sharon Astyk, the academic turned domestic diva of sustainable living and farming).

In recent years, given the dire economy that sucker punched us all, I didn't feel like haranguing my readers with how bad it was and have mainly amused myself by reporting on projects I have undertaken to teach myself skills for the deindustrialization of the world (as the pragmatic John Michael Greer, the Archdruid describes it). I got a lot of mileage out of imagining a life simplified enough to fit into a tiny home that I could then build.

And then suddenly I was done with it. There is something rather pathological (and boring) about the accounts of one who is preparing for the end of the world as we know it especially since I am part of a metropolitan area that is thriving, relatively speaking, and I live in a fairly luxurious suburban house, while making a living helping people cope with the expectations of a standard lifestyle.

My peak oil colleagues, having carefully persuaded their readers of the particular flavor of future doom to prepare for, were now in lock-down mode, inventorying their skills, writing how-to manuals and haranguing anyone who disagreed with them. They were so sure of themselves that I felt they were damn well going to live the future they entertained whether it happened that way or not. Talk about intentions.

I will continue to read them because we share an interest in educating the public. But in the context of this community, I was no longer able to believe six impossible things before breakfast; the scientific mindset didn't take into account the built-in features of the world I had grown up with—the world of Spirits, the communication between this world and the next; the possibility that the earth was fully alive and capable of reacting in a different way than science predicted; not to mention what science was proving—that human intention, focused in a disciplined way was able to do seemingly impossible things.

I was even in the mood to believe in the assistance of beings waiting to help us, whether those on the Other Side or alien life forms from outer space.

There was one peak oil writer, the cantankerous James Kunstler, who entertained the idea of people with psychic talents coming to the forefront as advisors, as well as children raised to exceed the capabilities of today's expectations. But given his Western tradition, he was doing it with fiction (in his recent novel The Witch of Hebron). Still, that was enough encouragement for me to open myself to alternative sources of knowledge. That same week I saw Clint Eastwood's movie The Hereafter which made contact with the dead seem more possible than not, so I decided to make an appointment with a psychic so as not to bypass such an opportunity. Catherine had contacted one after her mother's passing last Spring.

A Visit From The Other Side

My father, having been dead for 8 years now, had waited a long time to talk to me, but it had given him time to become wise and patient. The psychic, a Mexican American named Rachel,with a young and vibrant voice, said he had rushed to see me. He seemed used to this kind of work with mediums, she said. Though a scientist, my father was completely accepting of the Spirit world and had consulted psychics throughout his life, as did his mother who would send a yearly reading.

When he approached, Rachel described him as a generous soul and asked if that's how I remembered him.

"He was hardly able to express it," I said, giving her the benefit of the doubt. My father could never have been described as generous, preferring to use money and possessions to control and manipulate people.

He was offering an apology, she said. She went on to explain that he had had a social disorder that caused him a great deal of frustration and pain. (Here he transmitted the pain to her to illustrate his point; she didn't need pain she told him and thanked him when he stopped.)

"Like Aspergers," I said recognizing the social disorder part immediately.

"Yes, things didn't make sense to him. It was a puzzle that he couldn't piece together; he withdrew because he was afraid of making mistakes especially with family and as a parent—he did make mistakes, but work helped a lot because of the structure." (My father loved his work and held a patent for a piece of engineering he did for the heads-up helmets now used by military pilots.)

And here he was leveling with me from the Other Side, much as he used to explain science to me. He said he had damaged me with respect to trust levels due to his lack of closeness. That, because both my parents put up a wall to me, I had had to become self-sustaining. That was certainly true of me; I was a self-contained unit endlessly able to amuse myself. That's why, he said, I sought out nurturing partners, but she was not able to right now. He counseled me not to try to fix the relationship, that was "putting the cart before the horse", but to nurture myself. I was too isolated and it was going against my nature. I needed to focus on myself. Whole people make good relationships, he said. I was later amused that my father, who had had three problematic marriages and was clueless about women, was giving relationship advice. (Rachel reported that the Life Review process he had gone through after passing had helped a lot.)

Then he proceeded to give me business advice, told me not to panic, that it would all work out—he was arranging contracts and negotiations for me. He was paving the way and here Rachel said he was showing his hand as though smoothing a path. So I should surrender and let the worry go. That watching over me was his greatest pleasure. Then before he left he said, "I offer you the greatest love." Rachel described the emotional message as one given not out of regret or guilt, but because of a missed opportunity.

"Thank-you," I said, completely dumbstruck. "Yeah" Rachel agreed. This would take time to sink in, but I accepted his love and more so his apology. I liked his use of language. It was spare and grand in an antiquated, but formal Thai way that fit him had he been able to express such sentiments in life. He liked the title Father, Rachel had reported, as though he just now was becoming a parent.

Part of the reason I had decided to contact him was because I had come to suspect he was helping me when I took on the property in San Bernardino. Things reminded me of him and I had a sense that everything about the project would be serendipitous and intuitive. Every time I went down there I had a sense of wellbeing.

Just before booking with Rachel I got a client whose husband was working on the very same heads-up project my father had a hand in. The coincidence gave my client goosebumps. I just acknowledged it as another gift. There is no word for coincidence in Thai.

Thus armed with a guardian angel it was difficult to look at the future with quite the doomer perspective I had been operating under. At least I didn't have to figure it all out. I would have help.

An ADD Thing Happened On The Way To The NSGCD Conference

2010-10-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

Recently I received a call from a young woman looking for an organizer for her parents who were hoarders. I took the job and it turned out to be a good fit. When I realized that I had been referred by two other organizers (who were already booked), I asked the daughter where she had found them. Like most of the younger generation she had done an Internet search and had come across the database of the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization, the NSGCD, an organization I had joined at its inception nearly ten years ago. I called them up to find out why I wasn't listed in the database.

"Your membership hasn't been paid up since 2003", I was told.

"What?" I was stunned. Could I seriously be so disorganized that I didn't even realize I was no longer a member of an organization that was so vital to my development as a professional organizer? In fact I had, only a few weeks before been a speaker on a panel recommending the educational benefits of the organization. True, I did belong to four other organizations that required yearly dues and it was easy to lose track, but the irony of this particular oversight kept coming up in my mind, rubber stamped with the label ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).

No one in the organization had once questioned my status, despite my having attended the annual conference every year professing to be a long-standing member. This I attributed to my ability to project such confidence that people assumed I knew what I was doing. After all I hung out with the upper echelon of leadership. But maybe that was because I was raised to rub elbows with royalty, I mused, thinking of my Thai grandmother. (Though, of course, one is not actually allowed to touch Thai royalty.)

When the NSGCD was still a special interest group within the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO), I was rooming with Judith Kohlberg at the annual conference. She had founded the NSGCD to talk about these interesting clients.

"I'm the rebel in the outfit," she informed me.

At the time, organizers were intent on setting up systems and training clients to use them. Judith was suggesting that disorganized clients see the world differently and needed different systems they would be more inclined to use. She coined the term chronic disorganization to describe clients who did not claim a medical diagnosis.

This alternative approach appealed to me. I, too, would be a rebel organizer and learn from my clients. A few years later the study group was formalized into its own entity holding an annual conference to train organizers on how to work with different brain styles. In the meantime time another of my leadership angels, Denslow Brown (originally introduced to me by a mutual friend), had undertaken in-depth testing to confirm that she did indeed have ADD. She began to give workshops on what systems best worked with this learning style.

This additional information was tricky. When I first learned about ADD, I recognized that I could easily claim many of the symptoms, but as soon as l embraced the diagnosis it just allowed me to fall apart altogether. Better to continue to perform as expected and take the heat for the usual mistakes that came from getting distracted. It was only recently that I realized that I simply performed better under a certain amount of stress because it focused my mind. And the advantage of ADD is that this hyper-focus will deliver. The rest of the time I was held together by coping techniques devised from experience. Having a roommate at conference, for instance, helped tremendously.

Kim Anker-Paddon, my conference roommate, for the last several years, always booked the hotel room long in advance. For this I was immensely grateful. It was hard enough for me to book my flight since dates unnerved me, due to frequent crossing of the international dateline. I had more than once had to rebook flights because I hadn't calculated correctly when I was supposed to be somewhere.

Kim joined NAPO when I was program chair of our local chapter meetings. At the time I was convinced that professional organizers took themselves far too seriously especially regarding our image as business people, thus I was intent on imbuing every meeting with a certain level of theatrics, which usually required that I design a costume for the event pertaining to the topic of the evening. Thus when we had a speaker on finances I made a vest covered with coins and wore a bowler hat in the tradition of British bankers. And when the topic was marketing I made a headpiece with letters cut from blue cardboard so that on one side of my head the letters WWW appeared and on the other side the letters COM. (Having a website was very cutting edge at the time.) My colleagues loved this little bit of entertainment. They were a very forgiving audience and laughed at all my jokes; this endeared them to me for life.

Kim was without a roommate because she was afraid of keeping a colleague awake with her snoring, but I persuaded her that that wouldn't be a problem since I was hard of hearing. Besides we shared a common perspective, having lived outside of the US as children, and we would need this support when traveling to the middle of the country. This time it was Texas, but luckily Austin, Texas, which I had heard more resembled a suburb of San Francisco and bore very little relation to the home state of the Bush family.

When I told Kim how I'd discovered I had failed to pay my membership since 2003 and would have to fess up to my ADD even though it hadn't really been a problem before, she explained that ADD was a continuum. Some were worse off than others. She was well versed on the subject as she had a brother and a daughter with ADD and had certified as an ADD specialist. That was another thing I had neglected to do, but now that I had moved into performance mode, I was going to jump in with both feet and do two levels of certification in the space of a few weeks. This would get me listed higher up on the database.

"You'll want to do the certificate on hoarding too", Kim told me when I announced my plans. It was being offered for the first time. I signed up for two exams because you couldn't get the hoarding certificate without first getting one on chronic disorganization. I had long ago read the books for the first so prior to conference managed to read three and two halves of the five required books for the second. I was confident that I would perform my way through both exams if I just managed to get there.

An hour before the exam I got dressed and sat looking apprehensively at the sun setting over our splendid view of Austin from our hotel room, while Kim did some last minute review. Getting places on time made me nervous. The previous month I had, as usual, been perfectly punctual to a client's house only to find that I was at the wrong house. I had mixed up addresses with another new client. (Fortunately the second client was used to disorganization and didn't give it a second thought when I showed up half an hour later.)

Not many organizers purposely seek out what we loosely call the CD population—the chronically disorganized. Organizers, on the whole, liked to see results and working with the CD population took patience as far as visible results were concerned, especially with hoarders. Often my colleagues were puzzled by those afflicted with chronic disorganization, but even more so by their ambiguity about getting things done. As one organizer put it, "They are so illogical."

"But that's why they are so interesting," Kim said when I relayed this sentiment. Exactly.

My hyper organized colleagues were more ambitious than I was, eventually gravitating towards mega projects involving moving large households, or estate jobs (liquidating the households of dead people), or setting up complex business filing systems, or various event-planning jobs with non-negotiable deadlines. These jobs paid better, filled up a workweek nicely and tended to follow schedules according to carefully laid out plans. Plus they had less chance of a cancellation.

The NSGCD attracted organizers who were process oriented as well as results oriented. Plenty had relatives with ADD or hoarding issues (or were secretly disorganized themselves). Psych majors turned professional organizers and a handful of psychologists, collaborating with organizers, rounded out the group. Mental health specialists were often engaged as speakers.

Not too long ago a handful of psychologist discovered hoarders and left the sanctity of their offices to enter the "field" to categorize and label extreme cases for which they then devised "treatments". We at the NSGCD eagerly listened and watched as the research evolved. These clinicians borrowed liberally from our organizing techniques, then proceeded to apply cognitive therapy techniques as they talked to their subjects about their stuff. They wrote papers and entered a new diagnosis in the DSM, the guide to pathologizing the known universe of the human experience.

I happily absorbed all the new information and just as happily ignored it when working with clients. It was not my responsibility to diagnose clients and the corresponding treatments only added to my brain clutter; I feared it would impair my ability to listen, not only to my clients, but my intuition. (If a client volunteered a diagnosis that was different. My learning could then provide that vocabulary too and we could discuss it openly).

One psychologist, on a panel at conference, complained that our lack of training could make clients worse. With OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) cases, for instance, when we enabled their perfectionist compulsions. But we were often the first responders for these clients; and if they didn't like what we were doing out we'd go and along with us a possibility of improvement.

I did have an OCD client, but once she came to trust me I rather enjoyed torturing her by theatrically destroying valueless things she wanted to hang onto. After I stomped down a pile of empty Kleenex boxes, she asked why I had to smash them (which would prevent her from retrieving them once put in the recycle bin). "I have to have some fun on this job," I told her. I didn't get a laugh, but I did get acceptance.

My clients were not extreme hardcore cases; they just wanted to get organized. Many kept me coming back because I was an adept conversationalist able to both field and introduce topics to pique their interest. Like them, I was in search of the larger meaning of everything (no topic was taboo from politics to God). And somehow, as we talked, whether it was a little or a lot, while working through their stuff, the larger meaning of everything also managed to prioritize and clear a room. (It helped that I was a speed paper sorter and adept at visualizing space. Plus I had figured out how to set-up my environment to save my butt rather than sabotage it.)

I put a lot of stock in this conversational glue. It generated energy, put the mundane tasks in perspective, side stepped a lot of emotional issues and bonded us as a team. But it was not something I could teach in a workshop. Nor could it be formalized as a treatment. And that is the difference between an entrepreneur and a clinical practitioner. We get to try anything we think will work; we can set boundaries wherever we see fit and because we are paid directly by clients we are driven to learn—quickly. By definition we defy any consistency of standards. It is our hard won experience that develops us and we start with incredibly diverse abilities and skill sets.

Live Coaching Session

Just putting all these organizers in a room created a rapid-fire exchange of ideas, opinionated personal dynamics, a myriad of brain styles coupled with a high level of confidence and a broad spectrum of belief systems. If there was anything we were willing to agree on it was that all our meetings be run on time. It was downright intimidating—which just brought out the best in me.

Kim and I got up to take our exam(s). She asked my fashion advice.

"Which shoes should I wear red or black?"

We would both pass easily and spend the rest of conference heatedly examining all the new information, each speaker and what it all meant. We stretched each other.

"Curtains opened or closed?" she asked when she returned to the room to find the drapes partially closed on one side. (I was blocking neon light from a building.)

"Is that the only option?" I teased. "What if the window was actually only that big?

"Oh all right," she conceded.

Food Frugality Freedom

2010-09-08T16:17:00.000-07:00

In which I jump on the bandwagon of three word titles and embody worldly travels with meaning fueled by eating, spiritual reflection and a search.

FOOD

I am not a foodie, but I am very good at eating. Put a hamburger and plate of fries in front of me and I am an eating machine. I eat mostly for the satisfaction of not having to eat again for another four hours. This, as one of my writing teachers suggested, is how a dog views food, bypassing all the delights of the human senses for the sake of a satisfied stomach.

She was attempting to point out something about noticing details through our senses. She asked me what my tropical childhood home smelled like. After a moment of intense remembering, via my nose, I said, "wet cement". She made a face and I saw that I simply had not evoked the fantasy of the tropics her Austrian mountain home had projected for her. But it was, nevertheless, my truth. Wet cement was the smell of my hometown on the eve of globalization. And the satisfaction of having eaten is how I mostly view food.

Food For The Road

Half way up the steep gravel road to our Angel Island campsite, pushing my bike fully loaded with all my gear, my feet were slipping and I calculated that my bike, together with the gear weighed nearly 100 lbs and I may have been a bit cavalier about packing. Would I actually be able to get this bike up the hill? I was strong enough certainly, but I didn't have the leverage. I had only about 15lbs on the loaded bike and I was a meal short calorie wise, having only had a minor lunch of a few slices of bread, salami and cheese, a home baked oatmeal cookie and a handful of chocolate almonds. Breakfast before that was light too, just a bowl of steel cut oatmeal (with raisins, yogurt, nuts and wheat germ). I had not had my usual second breakfast—an English muffin with butter and that condiment of the British Empire—Marmite. The second breakfast is what carries me through to lunch. Stopped on this hill, I was wishing that the baked potato and sausages we would have for dinner were already eaten.

A memory came to me of a meal that got me through an entire afternoon and some of the evening, all the way through my 90 minute martial art class. A friend had treated me to lunch at a French restaurant. I ordered the croque monsieur because I had heard the name before and it sounded very traditional.

"Is it good?" I asked my friend. He said it was, but added cautiously. "It's just a lot of calories." It was massive.

I looked back down the hill at Stacy, my camping buddy, pushing her bike which was not quite as loaded as mine, being absent a 10lb tent and carrying a cooler a third the size of mine. The memory of the croque monsieur fortified me. I aimed my bike to traverse the hill and thus regained my footing. One more steep bit after a curve and we reached the frontage road and were able to ride all the way to the campsite.

The whole point of camping is to test one's self-sufficiency, which for me came down to how to feed myself for seven meals straight. Feeding myself is the food challenge of my American life. Home, to me, is where they have to feed you.

My Thai father, who had been through the transition from a home staffed with a cook, to an indifferent college cafeteria, an English one at that, understood what I would face and took it upon himself to teach me to cook the summer before I left for college. I still, to this day, make his salt and pepper fried chicken and can quickly serve an omelet over rice cooked using the joint of the index finger to measure water level. (Even in this age of rice cookers, I still prefer this method.) I have, however, progressed beyond using ketchup and soy sauce to make spaghetti sauce.

Being a foodie is not a prerequisite to teaching oneself to cook. I cook more like a carpenter measuring carefully and following a plan. I am differently inspired—by ideas of self-sufficiency, social justice and alternative tools. On my bookshelf, between Jackknife Cookery and Cooking With the Sun (for solar oven recipes), my most widely cooked from books are Diet From A Small Planet, Sunset's Vegetarian Cooking and The 99 Cents A Meal Cookbook by self-sufficiency advocate Bill Kaysing.

I am not a vegetarian (too limiting for an opportunistic eater), but I prefer to cook vegetarian fare. When in season, vegetables are plentiful and cheap, while grains are good for long lasting fuel. For our expedition, I made vegetable soup, snipping some basil leaves from the garden for it. Eating from a kitchen garden is not just self-sufficient. It delights my eye to watch plants transform and present something edible. To pop this thing into my mouth directly is magical. And the taste of such fresh food wakes up even my senses.

FRUGALITY

Frugality is tolerated in a recession, but it is not something our consumer culture teaches us to aspire to. The word implies deprivation and in a land where we buy into the dream that we can have everything, a frugal life is seen as one diminished in possibilities.

My clients, who call themselves frugal, are often operating from a place of deprivation and may have experienced deprivation at one time, both emotional and material. They fill their houses with stuff, free stuff, things on sale they don't need now, packaging, plastic bags, slightly used paper napkins, take-out packets of condiments, things people gave them that they didn't have a use for either.

"Free stuff isn't free" I tell them. There are storage costs, costs to your time to manage so much stuff, the cost to the environment of producing said stuff that is going unused, the cost of turning your expensive living space into a storage unit, the health cost of living in a hazardous environment. It is harder to clean around piles of stuff I politely decline from mentioning, as I dust my way through the piles.

True frugality is mindful of limits, the limits of time, space, money and resources. The limits of ones body, the planetary body, the lives of others. The frugal life is one that is lived consciously in a spiritual sense. I don't believe that we can have it all or that a high-octane life is available to everyone who wants it. Because somewhere someone is going to pay, already is paying, for all these lives lived without consciousness of limits.

Camping is a test of these limits. A symphony of give and take between how much you can carry and how comfortable you can be once you arrive. A trade-off between the time needed to feed yourself, house yourself and the part you would actually call a vacation. It is often done close to home. (If not it's called an expedition, usually involves extreme terrain and is no longer inexpensive.)

At $30 a night plus boat and train fare, camping on Angel Island isn't exactly cheap by camping standards, but we didn't have to go far to get there. I came up to San Francisco by train, met Stacy and we carpooled across the Golden Gate to catch the ferry in Tiburon (where parking and access is preferable).

FREEDOM

Frugality helps keep my overhead low, as does self-sufficiency in that I can clothes myself stylishly for very little money, eat well by cooking from scratch and use tools to fix or make things. But it is for freedom that I strive or rather I strive to stay free. The freedom to have time to reflect, question, read, find stimulating conversation and participate in the world through my writing. In a culture that trades entertainment for reflection, staying free takes conscious effort.

The bicycle is an apt symbol of such freedom. I just get on it and I am traveling at the fastest, most efficiently possible human speed (plus I am far less likely to be ticketed). I am using no fossil fuels and have no ties to an energy generating system other than my own body. This off grid freedom allows my mind to relax and enjoy the ride. The gyroscopic motion of balancing and moving at the same time fills me with a kinetic, effortless awe. On this trip the heavy load challenges me a bit, but I am happy that I can ride it at all.

The ferry is much easier to board by bike than the train and we arrive at Angel Island cove in about twelve minutes surrounded by Sunday visitors and moored sailboats. The day is sunny, beautifully clear and just cool enough to be pleasant. As we ride up the perimeter road we stop to admire the view.

"It sure is purrty," I drawl watching the returning ferry and the tiny sailboats dotting the deep blue green water between the landmasses of Tiburon. It brought to mind the islands of Hawaii.

"Yes it's good to be reminded of it," Stacy replied.

"No wonder we're a world class tourist destination," I said (for technically speaking we hadn't left home being still in the Bay Area). No wonder all the best and the brightest wanted to live here. (Our housing prices had hardly dropped at all compared to other parts of the state.) Those who managed to stay didn't give up easily. I had watched colleagues (and clients too), take the downtime of the recession to reinvent themselves. No idle dreaming here. We would reinvent ourselves until there was nothing left to reinvent with. (And after that we will really find out what we're made of.)

Once we arrived at our campsite I set up house. With Stacy's help it took all of five minutes.

"It's looking quite vintage this tent," I commented. My 3 person tent is now some 20 years old and has faded to a pale greenish blue. The rest of my gear is also old, improvised or used.

The carrier on my semi-recumbent commuter bike has a section of metal shelving bolted to it. To this platform I had bungeed a metal basket that looks like it came from a fridge. The panniers hanging from the side of the basket are German army surplus bags. The canvas bags came with vinyl liners. I cut them out to make more room inside then saw that the liners would make perfect wash basins if the sides were rolled down, thus I had packed even the kitchen sink!

After the last ferry left, we had the island to ourselves apart from a handful of fellow campers who didn't have bikes. The early evening light allowed us to ride around the island and stop at the historical buildings as if we were touring our own private estate. The 360° views of the city skylines were all familiar sites, yet seen from a perspective so unexpected I felt inside out and had to re-orient myself.

I knew all these cities, had clients and friends in many of them and long ago memories lingered, including a trip with my father to Angel Island itself some 37 years ago. Stacy and I made note of the sites where guns had once been installed to protect the Bay from enemies beginning with the Civil War and ending with the Cold War, but no enemies ever came. It is easy to feel now that we live in a bubble and no harm will come to us.

Returning to camp after sunset, the first night, I find that a gang of raccoons had gotten into my cooler and stolen the loaf of Acme bread plus a packet of Halva cheese. Naughty beasts. Now I was one meal down, but luckily the eatery at the cove was open for lunch even though the state cutbacks had closed most of the buildings two of the days we were there.

At night the lights of the shoreline could be seen through the trees against a deep purple sky just beyond the black silhouette of pine trees. All night the engines of ships and the relentless dinging of a buoy narrated this busy-ness. Luckily Stacy brought earplugs.
On our last day, the fog finally cleared enough to see San Francisco. Looking head on like this, she appeared as a woman lying down. The Twin Peaks tower adorning her head like a tiara. Her right arm the Golden Gate Bridge. Her left the Bay Bridge. Her body draped in a filmy wisp of fog.

On the return trip home, I took the ferry directly to the city, took a seat and remembered the comfort of upholstery.

The Virtual Salon: My Home Away From Home

2010-08-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

I was reluctant to write this piece documenting my process as a writer because I would then reveal that I actually take myself seriously and it is my wish to be taken for a naïf, an innocent abroad, to borrow from Mark Twain. However, my mentor/editor at the Energy Bulletin was intrigued by the way I was using flickr and thought those wishing to dispense important, planet-saving information, would find it interesting to learn how social networking can be used to further the cause.

The Writer's Studio: flickr

It might seem odd that the most fertile ground for me as a writer is a site for photographs. I joined flickr in order to post pictures to my blog. (I started my first blog so I could write about owning and driving an electric car and pictures were integral.) At the time, flickr was still a Canadian start-up populated by liberal minded artists, inventors, cooks, gardeners and oddly enough cyclists.

Most important for me, flickr was friendly. Those who joined tended to be older (in their 30s and 40s) and were showing pictures from their actual lives which often included their own creations and their own face so the tone tended to be supportive and inquisitive, rather than snarky and critical as was the case in the world of bloggers where writers were often faceless and commentators anonymous.

The social networking features of flickr were all about linking you with people interested in the same pictorial subject. By tagging your photos with descriptive category words, others who were interested in looking at pictures of bicycles, for instance, could find your picture. You could also join a group with a common theme such as "things I carried on my bicycle". And with the caption option you could tell a story about why you were carrying this on your bicycle and what you rigged up to make it possible.

It was a flickr ethic to share information for non-commercial purposes. Tips and resources were freely offered. This attracted a lively community of DIY hobbyists looking for the fellowship offered by this informal peer review. I was able to compare techniques for using solar ovens, learn about blacksmithing and glean ideas from thrift shop fashions, DIY electronics and permaculture. And because of flickr I am much more likely to finish a project just so I can show it off.

This practical and highly visual blogging form began to have an influence on my writing. Captioning a photo demanded that I explain things appearing in the photo that I thought unimportant to my narrative. It kept me honest and unveiled any tendency to romanticize my experience by anchoring me to the visible evidence. The process used a different part of my brain. And because the picture and the bare bones of the story were already being looked at by my flickr community, I spent a longer time absorbing the face value of actual events and objects before allowing my intellectual analysis to kick in. From comments I received and the number of hits a photo got, I could get an idea of the level of interest in a topic and how the story was being processed by my readers. Guided by these comments, questions and sometimes misunderstandings, I would develop the story further if I chose to.

One flickr contact, who happened to be a librarian, came to my aid in the role of research assistant, posting helpful links to explain or identify what my picture had captured. Thus I learned how knives were forged by hand and the name of a sculptor of public art I had photographed. The same contact also directed me to a new museum while I was traveling (and posting pictures en route). Thus relationships with my regular flickr contacts are quite influential to my life. My relationships with real life friends, who participated with me on flickr, were intellectually deepened.

And because non-profits sought out my photos of solar ovens, mud houses, herb drying racks and compost bins, my work ended up being published in printed work aiming to inform readers of sustainable living practices thus furthering my message.

A Virtual Library

I also used flickr for something it was never intended to do and that was to post book reviews (mostly non-fiction books pertaining to my journey to understanding sustainability or lack thereof). I took pictures of the books I read against the background of my red desk, titled it with the book title and jotted down all the pertinent things I had learned that added to my body of knowledge as well as my opinions on the author's presentation. My virtual library served me well for fact checking and referencing when writing my pieces. It laid to rest my vague memory when trying to recall something I'd read somewhere. I felt less of a need to keep the actual books once I had given it this treatment, plus the information was more firmly integrated into my mind.

Curiously enough a picture of a shelf worn book with library markings seemed to have an appeal all of its own for some of my flickr contacts, plus many wanted to read what I had to say about a book given our shared interests in bicycles and what all. Interesting discussions ensued, adding to my understanding of the topic and how this information was being received by others. This in turn affected how I used the material in my essays.

I added to this set I called Brain Food, notes on documentaries I had watched and notes from talks I attended with pictures of the speaker. Where once I would write essays about these events, I now tended to leave most of those reports in their truncated note form on flickr. This seemed to give them a broader appeal. These notes and reviews became one of the most popular features of my flickr photostream, both within my flickr community and from outside searches.

Fashion: Sartorial Opiate or Shamanistic Magic?

In fact a short summation I wrote to go with a picture of books I had borrowed from the library on fashion design and the history of fashion has enjoyed over 4,000 views and been bookmarked by 39 people just within flickr. This gave me pause. It seems that the insights I had gleaned from the books in terms of consumerism, planned obsolescence, economics, cheap labor, and the allure of fashion as a tool of cultural change had somehow struck a chord with readers.

It was not my most polished writing and, at less than 700 words, not an in depth or carefully thought out piece. I was surprised that someone searching under the word "fashion" would bother reading such an exploration. I realized then that, given the right lead-in, it was possible to introduce an audience to my pet issues in a manner they could absorb. This meant that almost any topic could be a vehicle. Was no one else doing this?

The Blog: Opening Night

Where flickr was my back room studio, not searchable under my real name, my blog was the most public of venues that easily pinpointed exactly who I was because it bore my name (a name that was currently unique in the world). Thus, in contrast to the casual style of most bloggers, this was the venue where I published my most polished, most developed work of some length, sometimes drawing the not so gentle criticism of anonymous commentators.

Electric cars, in particular, seemed to bring passionate naysayers. Thai politics were also, more understandably, a volatile subject. To brace myself for this exposure I send out my essay in e-mail form, as a dress rehearsal, hoping someone will catch my most flagrant blunders before I go live. (This direct offering to my friends and colleagues is so unnerving, anything a stranger can say pales, but luckily the handful of comments my gentle beta testers do send are filled with love and encouragement.)

I learned to dodge the ire generated by hot topics by writing from a more personal perspective. It would seem counterintuitive to become more open when undergoing personal attacks, but taking the "objective" view of traditional journalism was anathema to me, so clearly did this approach give the upper hand to the very status quo I was trying to sidestep. Nor did I have the chutzpah to position myself as a leader of a movement urging like-minded followers to adopt my set of best practices. I did not want to create an alternate reality when I myself might want to escape from it.

But I did not run completely from controversy. When I felt that it was necessary to take a stand on a hot topic, I picked my battles and prepared to fight. The art of responding to a comment is to understand what it is that motivates the commentator to attack your particular stand. Are they attached to a certain ideology? Are they biased against a special interest group, class status, gender or an idea itself? Is their language pompous, deluded, condescending, arrogant, academic or all of the above? If so, I allude to the position they are projecting in a professorial manner, careful not to add fuel to the argument by further defending my position (unless to clarify). No one has, as yet, tried to come back from this approach. Sometimes they just wanted a place to post their own parallel spiel.

Facebook: The Neighborhood Bar

When Facebook came on the scene offering an amusement arcade of options in the social networking genre, it took me a while to figure out how I could use it to further my journey. The space offered on Facebook to write a few lines of text invited the same sort of inane chattering that habitual cell phone users had inflicted on public space, but the ability of viewers to click the "like" button or make a comment effectively trained participants to post more interesting content in the hope of eliciting this positive feedback. The links to youtube, news articles, photos, recommended websites, and whatever else caught the interest of my network increased my exposure to content I would not normally see. This gave me an idea of what my friends were interested in and the cultural landscape of my network.

Facebook showed thumbnails of my photos on flickr and my blog posts were also visible thus allowing my contacts to see all the content I was posting and easily pass it along if they wanted to, thus increasing my impact as an artist and a writer.

I came to see that the synergistic, cross-pollination offered by Facebook made it a powerful communications portal that has yet to be fully appreciated. Conversations with like-minded contacts raised the level of exposure of not so like-minded contacts to issues they cared about. I discovered who my allies were among people I had met, but hadn't had a chance to get to know.

News travels on Facebook with such speed that several contacts have mentioned it is more reliable than CNN and, as with my experience with the rioting in Thailand, offered a better opportunity to figure out what was going on. And as more and more people gathered on it, more joined so as not to be out of the loop.

My Thai friends entered Facebook en masse and immediately took to the extended family, open conversation style, unhampered by the performance anxiety and lack of privacy that gave Westerners pause (especially the Brits). I was not used to having to face all the different sectors of my social life from gay friends, to business colleagues, to family in Thailand, ex-lovers, high-school buddies and all that long forgotten past. I had to give up compartmentalization in favor of lessening the isolation that has for so long been a feature of modern life (especially when self-employed).

I still retreat to flickr to try out fresh material (or if I really need privacy I take out my fountain pen and the welcome silence of my journal). The strangers who became friends through our online interaction have become such a valuable component of my life it is odd that I cannot think of any other means by which we would have met. It is a phenomenon of our time. Meanwhile, through my writing, people I saw very little in real life came to know me much more deeply, enhancing the time we did spend together. (Oddly enough all the content I was providing also made me viable in the eyes of potential clients, especially green minded ones thus I was, after a fashion, participating in the new online marketing strategies.)

As a writer it is important to my process to know who my readers are, what they respond to and how they can be engaged. The compendium of flickr, Blogger and Facebook allowed me to both know and be known. In this era of untrustworthy mega news media, people seem to prefer to receive their information passed along from warm hand to warm hand (to borrow a concept from Buddhism)—from sources they can get to know and trust. Being the village blogger has its appeal in this sense.

The Art and Science of Urban Camping

2010-06-18T15:36:00.000-07:00

Once our two rental houses were homes for other people, they were no longer mine in the sense that I could occupy them as I had done when I traveled to San Bernardino to work on the houses. My thoughts thus turned to the little fenced off area between the homes that the former owner had used as a utility yard and warehouse for scavenged building material.

Give Me Shelter

That little 16' by 20' living room size plot of land offered me months of entertainment as I looked into various ways I could think of to erect some form of shelter in it for my visits south.

I considered a vintage travel trailer, but didn't have a car that could pull it or space to store it. I became a regular reader of the Tiny House blog and bought plans to build myself a micro cabin.

While searching for earthen building activities in the area, I discovered the Cal Earth Institute in Hesperia an hour away from San Bernardino. Their sandbag houses fascinated me especially since they were earthquake proof, but I couldn’t imagine how one would fit in with two normal suburban houses. I planned to visit Cal Earth on my next trip. This would be a good cover story for my expedition.

Building a sandbag house would definitely take up much more time than I could spend in one trip, likewise a micro cabin, but I was itching to build something. Finally I found a shelter that wouldn't take more than a day to erect. It was called a hexayurt and had been developed by an enthusiast of the Burning Man festival so was designed for the desert.

I was so sure that this was the shelter for me that I ordered the specialized 3" wide industrial fiberglass tape needed to put it together. After much study I could build the whole thing in my head; that was when I realized that the panels were simply too large to both hold up and tape together by myself. All the hexayurt people worked with crews of four or more.

I did have a fall back plan. The Tiny House blog had introduced me to the tent cot, basically a tent on stilts. I was so charmed by the concept that I ordered one. As a house it would do perfectly for this trip. Still there was something else I had to have to make a go of it without having to rely too much on my tenants, and that was a toilet.

Liquid Gold

I had been wanting to make my own composting toilet ever since I discovered the book The Humanure Handbook. I saw the folly of using good drinking water to dispose of human waste which, being full of essential minerals, had value for agriculture. Our centralized sewage system made processing this "waste" one of the most flawed technologies of modern life. Copious amounts of energy, water, chemicals and tracts of high value land were involved, but after a few good rains the tanks would flood and excrement float into the bay, not to mention the ongoing disposal of the toxic sludge.

The humanure toilet is basically a five gallon bucket used with sawdust to cover each deposit; then when full, the contents were hauled out to a hot compost pile to process. The tiny house culture had embraced the sawdust toilet because it solved the big pipe, plumbing problem of disposing of raw sewage. I was squeamish about working the necessary compost pile in our small yard, but wanted to build such a toilet for emergencies.

There was still another route to explore—the pee toilet I had used at the sustainable living farm I visited in Thailand. There I had learned that since urine is rich in nitrogen it can be used immediately to fertilize plants when diluted with five parts water. Adding sugar or molasses also helps to "ferment" the urine and make it more accessible to plants. I learned all I needed to know from the book Liquid Gold.

My challenge was to build a urine-diverting toilet that could be easily packed and transported. A funnel welded inside a 5 gallon bucket was one DIY suggestion, but that was too bulky once a gallon bottle for the pee was included.

I had a large funnel. All I needed was a container that would lay flat. Eventually I thought of one—an oil drain pan. Pep Boys had a two and a half gallon one that fit perfectly lying flat inside a Bankers box. For poop, I repurposed a gallon size kitchen scraps bucket that the city of San Carlos had issued for compost collection. Even had its own lid and logo, "Rethink Waste". The funnel and the compost bucket fit side by side in the box. A rubber tube easily connected the funnel to the oil pan opening.

For a seat, I grabbed a wooden wine box from my stash; it fit perfectly over the bankers box with room to add legs and why make four legs when two boards would do? I made slots to hold the boards in place and cut a hole for the seat. I had seen a plastic one at Ikea that would keep the weight down.

Six hours and three days later I had my completed toilet, varnished and posted to flickr for feedback. I was very pleased with its modern lines and the black toilet seat. It was an immediate hit with off grid survivalists.

Urban Camping

My head was so filled with working out the details of my off-grid expedition that I hardly slept the entire week. I filled my car with all manner of untested gear plus my faithful solar oven. Then there was the menu. Part of my challenge was to feed not only myself but treat my tenants to a home cooked meal. I bought a new flat bottomed wok that would work with my portable wood burning stove.

I arrived as promised just before sunset. Addison and his little friend Tika from next door were on hand to help me park inside the utility yard enclosure. Their excitement mounted as I pulled out my various folding chairs and unfolded the tent cot. As soon as it was up they were all over it asking me to zip them up inside and let them use a lantern. Their squeals of delight brought out Tally my new tentant. Addison's mother Jennifer joined us, too and we all sat in the folding chairs.

It was in part to meet Tally that I had come to visit. He was a small man with the sideburns and '50s bubble hair he groomed for his Elvis act. He looked at my tent cot and told me I had to be kidding. I could not possibly be thinking of spending the night in it. He offered me his house although his couch was already occupied by a friend of his grown son, staying indefinitely.

"You can sleep with me. I wouldn't do nothing," he said. He had but a single bed so was kidding. Jennifer chuckled. Addison offered to let me sleep in his room so he could sleep in the tent cot.

I earnestly explained that part of my whole purpose was to get away from the comforts of home to test my equipment. Tally said you couldn't get him to sleep in a tent, no way. Jennifer was being bitten by mosquitoes. They left me to set up the rest of my outfit. Mike came by and asked after the hexayurt I'd told him about, then laughed when I said I had abandoned the idea largely because it entailed a roof rack. He showed me his vegetable beds and pumpkin starts.

For privacy, I moved the tent inside the fenced enclosure, lay a painter's drop cloth on the ground in front of it and put my toilet in the metal shed. The yard was cluttered with various projects. Mike had also dug a large hole for composting. I reorganized a few things and settled in happy, finally able to get some sleep now that my expedition was under way.
The next morning I put up my sunshade from fence to fence. Tally came out to offer me coffee and help me string it up. He persuaded me to come into his kitchen with offers of an English muffin toasted. I didn't have any means of toasting so accepted.

"I feel like we've been friends for years," he said. I was content with this status and was careful not to interrupt his narrative with mine. It is good camouflage. He told me details of his divorce and later sang for me in his room where he had his recording equipment. And he did sound just like Elvis.

Spotting Mike in the yard, Tally beckoned to him.

"Get in here," he said, "I got cawfee." I rarely saw Mike sit down. They joshed each other like old friends. I discussed the menu with them. Tally had never had Thai food, but he liked fried rice.

"I call it Chin food," he said, "you know for Chinese". Mike suggested vegetables cooked soft because his teeth didn't work right. This I could handle and set out to walk to the nearest grocery store, a Mexican chain two blocks away. It had everything I needed including nice cuts of pork all for less than $8.

Cooking for more than four people made me nervous, so I sat in my reclining chair and thought it through. It was such a luxury to do just one thing at a time that I reveled in just sitting there making a blow by blow schedule to execute my plan. I wondered why it wasn't possible to do just one thing at a time at home.

I set up my solar oven and made five cookies at a time, five times. Next I put in the rice; it cooked to perfection after two hours. When it came time to light up my woodgas stove the wood I brought wouldn't light, but no matter I could use the gas stove inside. I had already cut everything up at Tally's house, so took everything into Mike's house where the family was already gathered with Jennifer's visiting Aunt Becky.

"I'm ready to wok and woll," I said. This old joke on my ethnicity always gets a laugh.

Addison came by, saw me using the stove, and said, "You're cheating." I lamented to him that I couldn't light my outdoor stove, but soon had dinner on the table.

"Hope you like it," I said to everyone.

"Mike won't complain if it's a home cooked meal," said Jennifer and asked if I minded paper plates. They are the minimal kind that go on basket weave trays so I didn't mind. (Tally used paper plates at his house too; this was perhaps the downside of my not installing dishwashers.) The women sat at the table chatting while Mike and the boys ate in front of the drag race on TV. Tally joined us and was soon entertaining everyone with his story of the day Mike shut off the water while he was still in the shower. It was exactly the kind of situational, funny story on oneself, that my Thai relatives like to tell at dinner and made me feel at home.

More visitors stopped by—a black family—mother and two children; Addison calls the boy his brother. Jennifer notes, with a chuckle to me, that race does not stand in the way of Addison's definition of brother. I invite the mother to eat. She turns down my invitation, but later, as the evening draws out and her kids have eaten, she does and makes it a point to tell me the food was very good. In all I managed to feed 6 adults and 4 children for less than $10 plus there were leftovers.

Performance Art

I joined the children outside. At the curb was parked Aunt Becky's truck. It was a monster truck just this side of a semi and had two steps to climb into it. Shiny and black, it looked new; the front grill towered over my head. On the back was a sticker. "Silly, big trucks are for girls" it said. I had to admire this sentiment.

When I returned to the house with my solar baked cookies, Aunt Becky commented that I liked to be Green.

"I just like the gadgets," I said. It was not my agenda to speak of being Green, especially with monster truck drivers. I have had little success persuading anybody to be Green beyond a little recycling. Nor have I had success persuading people to put together a viable earthquake kit. Fear quickly leads to overwhelm and helplessness. Thus I now present my off grid living solutions as Art, my Design For Living.

With this in mind, I had decorated my tent with a string of flags, the triangular kind you see at gas stations. I had considered hanging my rainbow 'peace' flag, but even that seemed too liberal an agenda. I did have a wall hanging a client had off loaded—a reproduction 18th century tapestry depicting a pastoral theme of aristocrats on a picnic, fishing. I hung it on the outside of the utility yard fence with binder clips suspended from clamps. The irony of the scene amused me, but no one else seemed to get it. Probably thought I was putting on airs.

The children got a ride in the monster truck; I could hear the sound of the air horn as it rumbled down the street. The Ford 650 gets 20 mpg on a very efficient diesel engine, Mike told me. After their ride the children came to my camp to try out the tent, inspect my gear and pull out all the parts of my Swiss Army knife.

"You’re the only girl I know who likes this sort of thing," said the girl.

"I'm the only girl I know who likes this sort of thing, too," I responded. She wasn't interested in the tent or the knife, but she looked at the rest of the gear and sat in one of my chairs.

"I love learning about this survival stuff," her brother told me politely.

"Yes it's fun," I agreed, completely won over by his interest, glad to have presented a viable alternative to the next generation.

Later when I was brushing my teeth his mother came by, said her children couldn't stop talking about my camp, so she had come to see for herself. I picked up my LED lantern and gave her the tour. She took everything in, withholding any judgment, even commenting about the practicality of the tent being off the ground.

Not one person had asked me what I used for a bathroom. I did borrow a shower at Mike's after a hot day driving to Hesperia. I also took the opportunity to use both tenants bathroom on two occasions thus saving myself having to dig a hole for disposal of poop, but otherwise my homemade toilet was key and worked perfectly as designed with a squirt from my water bottle as a chaser (in lieu of toilet paper). On the last day, before I packed it, I showed it to Mike (after assuring him that it had not been used for poop). He was very intrigued by the use of urine as free fertilizer and perused my copy of Liquid Gold on the spot.

Satisfied that my off grid performance art had been properly appreciated I got on the road wondering what my next project would be (apart from fertilizing all my plants).

We Interrupt This Program….

2010-05-25T06:23:00.000-07:00

I had no intention of writing about the political situation in Bangkok. I had nothing to add to what I had written last year and was deeply engrossed in creating a retreat space for myself in which to contemplate my fifty-second birthday and reassess my ongoing apocalyptic perspective of the future, further informed as it was by my utter dread that the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico had no means of being stopped.

The day before my birthday I was immersed in these thoughts, in a tiny used bookstore on the coast, when I asked myself this question "Does this future mean the end of dreams?"

And up surfaced a little revelation that went something like this. If the future is filled with environmental disasters, diminishing resources and financial mayhem, that will indeed limit certain soon-to-be obsolete dreams, by the same token the present that I am now living is a pre-disaster time of abundance filled with potential. How liberating. What would people do differently if they knew that?

I then promptly set out to build a project that would embody my apocalyptic perspective in a kind of performance art exhibit that I would report on in my next essay. Then along comes a political apocalypse that leaves the city of my childhood burning and a whole sector of my social network in emotional upheaval all over my Facebook page. I could not ignore it. I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning trying to make sense of all the commentary and imagery as it was uploaded. I was even able to "chat" with a close friend in real time, as I commented on her photos, which she happened to be uploading just at that moment.

Facebook As Single Serving News Portal

My Thai contacts were using Facebook to express their concerns for each other's safety, their horror, their rage and finally their eloquence when those who turned to writing their feelings and analysis did so in English, allowing me to pick up the thread of information they were sharing among themselves and that the Western newsmedia had missed.

And this was that the Red Shirt protestors were not peaceful, the city was under siege. This was not a question of democracy; democracy had not gone missing despite the coup that ousted Thaksin, the former Prime Minister, a demagogue who happened to be democratically elected—twice. (Hate when that happens.)

It was commonly understood among Thais in Bangkok, that the now exiled Thaksin was funding these protests, coaching their disruptive actions in hopes of regaining power. He could be seen on youtube speaking to his followers with affectionate honorifics reserved for family, assuring them that he would be with them in spirit as they rode into Bangkok. He also gave interviews on CNN in English, sweetly proclaiming that he was an honest man and denying that he was a red shirt leader. I was enraged listening to him and his lies.

I still must be, at my core, a Thai, because I felt so viscerally that there was something terribly wrong with these Red Shirts. Once I saw their tactics unfold in their demonstration at the ASEAN summit, last year, I understood how intensely rabid they were. They knew nothing about the democratic process of compromise and negotiation. It was all about getting in your face and disrupting things in an adolescent gang like manner, leaving a trail of destruction.

When Is A Protester A Terrorist?

I was now in the interesting position of defending my feelings about these protesters to my own history of street marching, slogan shouting, in-your-face activism that was my youth and my coming of age as a Gay rights advocate in America and later as a peace activist in anti-war marches.

My American friends would certainly question and did question my desire to rid Thailand of these demonstrators by the usual police state means. Unable to read Thai, all I could do was chalk my feelings up to my birthright as a member of the wealthy elite in Thailand, the very group that was, now, under siege in the tony shopping district of Bangkok two miles or so up the main drag from my family home.

In our globalized world of video driven news, all a dissenting group has to do, now, to get the sympathy of the West, is to write their own headlines in English on banners large enough for the TV cameras to see it and the celebrity journalists would take the bait. The banner at the Red Shirt encampment had two feet high letters that said "Welcome to Thailand; We Just Want Democracy" hanging over a stage rigged with a sound system.

The cadence of voices booming through microphones was not unlike the ones I had listened to coming from the main stage at my own protests at city hall in San Francisco. I have felt some of that same frustrated rage and have not forgotten that the political movement that I cut my teeth on, had, at one time, spent a night burning police cars in San Francisco and trashing city hall (following the Dan White verdict in the shooting of Harvey Milk). The footage reported on the TV, of police cars burning, remains with me, as does my Thai father's comment. "That will be the end of it for the Gays".

Who Were These People Anyway?

Meanwhile nothing would be reported in English of the rhetoric actually coming from the main stage in Bangkok; the hate filled, vile goading by protest leaders to their followers to fight for their cause. A sort of "fascist populism" as one university professor, familiar with Thai politics, put it. "Tea baggers" said my friend Martine, who had heard an interview on our non-mainstream, progressive radio. Yes, radical wingnuts similar in spirit to our own gun toting, anti-Gay, anti-immigrant, anti-Obama, Sarah Palin supporters.

Encamped together behind barricades of tires, barbed wire and bamboo poles, they were building on their energy, fueled by alcohol (reported my housekeeper) and a martyr's sense of purpose, egged on by provocateur leaders at the microphone. They were that classic bogeyman of democratic process—a mob. Their angry rallies uploaded on youtube, only it's all in Thai. So simply did this language barrier keep the West from the truth.

Our national security would not, for a moment have tolerated such protestors actually camping out on public plazas let alone assembling on the private property of shopping malls. I know this, not because I agree with this stringency, but because a protest I had a part in orchestrating (demanding electric cars) ran into a little skirmish with police when The Raging Grannies assembled at the Santana Row shopping mall. (The Grannies with their characteristic humorous presentation, charmed their way onto the 10 0'clock news.)

So why did the Thai police and military stay back so long? Probably it feared that a show of military force would make them look bad in light of past history suppressing the student democracy movement of the 70s or, more fresh in the minds of image saturated TV audiences, Myanamar and the spectacular show of Buddhist monks marching in protest there.

One Facebook contact reported that Thailand had been warned by Amnesty International and other NGO's that they were in danger of violating human rights should they try to send these protestors on their way. And yes, there was a presence of monks in the Thai demonstration too. But all is not what it looks like in this land of contradictions.

Confusing the matter for me, further, was the snarky responses of my peers in the besieged city (shared on Facebook by a childhood friend I hadn't talked to in 42 years). Amusing photoshopped posters showing the head of Thaksin on the body of a primitive warrior and his wife's head on the body of a lizard. We had such cartoons during our Bush years, but the lizard had a visceral sting of disrespect I reacted to as a Thai. One of the posted signs, simple enough for me to sound out with my first grade Thai, read "We're Bored Already". Hardly a mature analysis of the conflict plus many references to buffalos appeared to add the insult of classicism.

Democracy As Weapon of Mass Muddling

As the news evolved and the word "democracy", that sacred cow word of Western discourse, surfaced in every report from the Western news media, I saw that I was now a link in the chain of information from the front lines to my American friends and sometimes back again and even between sets of friends across Bangkok. All from the comfort of my own home 3,000 miles away. Such is the nature of this social-networking phenomena, that we can now report our own news to our tapestry of intersecting interest groups. How cool is that?

I felt I was witnessing the disillusionment and outrage of an emerging political consciousness on the part of the Thais, who were discovering, for the first time, that the news on CNN, the one that had before been taken as the gospel truth, was not in actuality any sort of truth at all but a biased storytelling looking for corresponding pictures. So outraged were my contacts at the one sided reporting by CNN that some were now speaking out, in English, outside of their own circle of friends and circulating a petition to CNN, demanding that reporter Dan Rivers, be replaced with someone who would actually bother to understand what was going on.

I once had a fellow Gay activist instruct me on how to handle a news interview. You prepare what message it is that you want to deliver and whatever question the reporter asks you, you deflect the question so that you can give your prepared statement. This has served me well through the years, from Gay rights to electric cars to global warming and peak oil. I am a walking, talking protest movement all by myself, the constant research to back up my views taking up most of my reading time. My immediate family has requested that I not get up on my soapbox quite so early in the morning to practice my outrage. At least not before proper coffee intake. Ironically, part of the reason I found my visits to Thailand so restful was that I was assured no one would ask my opinion about anything.

In the end, the Red Shirt leaders, as reported on youtube (and finally captioned in English after the fact), could be heard instructing their followers to kill soldiers and their leader, assuring them it was perfectly legal to do so because the present government was criminal. At large rallies pre-dating the Bangkok demonstration, their leaders instructed the demonstrators to each bring a liter of gasoline in glass bottles, urging them to burn the city down if they were met with force. And so they did even as their leaders were stepping down.

With Bangkok on fire, I felt a deep sadness and an underlying rage at what this mob had done, not only to my city, but to the goodwill of public protest, as well as the shredding of Thai custom that had upheld a sacrosanct respect for life and each other. Where once loyalty to king and country had insured that peace would prevail, this new political sensibility demanded a serious reassessment.

I was surprised to feel regret for shopping malls being destroyed—those palaces of fashion and consumerism, beautiful sterile refuges of imported designer goods—what a waste. I knew they would be rebuilt as quickly as possible now that they had become a symbol of a lifestyle in need of protection. The destroyed shopping mall, Central World, was Bangkok's largest, taking up a full block. Ironically it was first named the World Trade Center until 9/11. Now it could become Bangkok's own martyr building of terrorism.

A Singapore style, vigilant monitoring of public behavior will probably follow, while those in the rural areas who thought they found a voice with the Red Shirts, may well remain disenfranchised.

Between late nights spent looking at pictures of smoke filling the sky over Bangkok and Catherine following the oil spill on TV, it was strange to step out into our quiet, normal neighborhood, sunny now after a season of unprecedented rainstorms (likely caused by global warming of the oceans). And as I was helping my mother take a load of items to the Goodwill, she included her old cassette tape deck. I took it home and plugged my headset into it. Immediately, I felt an enormous sense of peace, listening to a music tape made by a friend in the 90s, for this box could not give me the latest news or Facebook update. How I longed for the peace of such isolation. But I could not turn away. It was better to see than not see even as it shredded my peace of mind. Our interconnectivity was here to stay and by the same token our ability to participate.

A Renting We Go

2010-03-26T17:54:00.000-07:00

In this saga and a half I conclude my venture into home renovation and landlording following the California real estate collapse.

While in Home Depot shopping for mini blinds and towel bars I get a call on my cell which was now dedicated to calls from potential renters. Our second house on our lot was nearly ready to go and I had timed the ads in the paper to coincide with my third solo trip to San Bernardino. There were three Home Depots near the property; I choose the one with the same layout as the one at home. It seemed to lessen the culture shock.

"Hi this is Joe," said the caller then paused as if he was beginning a long term relationship. He tells me his story. Most callers don't tell me a story; they just want to know how much and how big. The story is about how he had just moved back to California after a spell in Georgia where he was working on a job with his uncle and now he and his wife and three little kids were back living in his mother's house, but his mother wasn't going to be able to keep the house so they all had to move. The upshot of the story was that he was discovering that he was picky about the kind of house he was willing to live in and he was interested in my ad boasting that we had newly renovated. He promised to come by and see the place.

I wondered if my modest interior design choices for the little house would pass muster. The kitchen with its butter yellow cabinets, Formica counter top in caramel tones of faux stone and the floor tile of swirled mocha and pond scum green looked surprisingly okay. All the colors went together quite nicely against the bright white enamel walls; the floor tiles tying chromatically into the chocolate brown of the new carpets in the bedroom.

I had struggled to find window coverings that would span the over-wide ranch house windows of the living room and, after studying the Ikea catalog for two hours, had found the only ones that would do. Their top of the line Kvartal system was very modern looking and a marvel of Swedish engineering. The curtains I made by cutting in half pairs of Ikea drapes and piecing them together side by side. The kitchen windows sported a pair of Kvartal panels with a trendy curved design cut into the stiff white material.

They looked quite nice from the outside, matching the white trim on the newly painted exterior which was now a minty blue green. The choice of color for each house had been a subject of much discussion with Catherine and photographing of houses while dog walking. In the end, to fit into the San Bernardino vernacular of neon yellow and terra cotta orange, I migrated from the tasteful palette of Bay Area earth tones to the color chart from the paint department targeting the Spanish speaking population.

Susan and Anne Visiting House They Sold Me

Thus the house, transformed from vintage bubble gum pink to Aqua Tequila, was almost breathtaking in its cheerfulness, evoking beach houses and holidays in the Caribbean.

For the front house I chose a more traditional white with a dark teal trim. In part to impress Mike with something a bit more masculine that would evoke a grander house. He was, after all, going to live in it and be master of the lot, as my manager as well as contractor. I was pleased when he noted that the teal trim would go well with the mint green of the back house.

There was very little left to do once the curtains were ironed and hung up. Without an actual client it was hard to know quite how the space would be used. There were clues. Everywhere that an angled nail had been pounded into the woodwork, by a previous tenant, I put a hook; likewise the backs of bedroom doors. In the one bathroom I replaced a single towel bar with two and a ring. And in lieu of a hall closet two sets of hooks on the back of the front door.

And since I had time, I lined the shelves. The old vinyl had left sticky residue on the wood. But here I parted from the norm and went in search of an eco alternative. I didn't like the off-gassed chemical smell of vinyl, plus it was made of PVC, which was now considered toxic.

I turned to my collection of cereal boxes, which I had been using to construct book mailers. I lined the drawers of our new bathroom at home with sections of Raisin Bran and Cheerio boxes. Pleased with their resilient surface and op art affect, I took the boxes to San Bernardino and with my corporate size paper cutter, spent a fun evening trimming boxes and thumb-tacking them to the shelves.

My "picky" client, arrived in a white t-shirt, with a tattoo on his upper arm, carrying what looked like a man purse, but turned out to be a camera case. So he could show his wife the place, he told me. When he described to me the squalor that he had seen in the local rental housing market, I realized that new investors, having snapped up all these foreclosed properties, had simply left them in the condition that they had found them, putting them up for rent right away. Yuck, I thought, remembering the condition that we had found our houses in. We couldn't have lived with ourselves.

Joe was eager to rent our house, but as a self-employed carpenter, he didn't have an employer and with no current landlord the only rental history I could check was from two years ago. Plus his credit wasn't too good and he was "between bank accounts" he told me. I already had a contractor and was nervous about having both tenants relying on the same collapsed housing industry. Now, it was my turn to be picky. Still he was my only contender. I gave him an application.

Old Time Values

I walked to the front house where Mike was working on prepping the stucco and woodwork for painting.

"You know," he said, "I could just slap on the paint like most people would, but I want to do it right and patch this woodwork." He pointed his putty knife at the sill, which had a corner that was broken off and painted over.

"And these window panes need to be re-puttied", he added as I took in the cracked dried, up bits. "But it's going to take me a while." He was asking us for more time, but not more money; he had already bid the paint job and was putting in his own time for his own satisfaction.

"I know," I said, "it's exactly what I would do only I knew I'd have to live here for about six months."

One of the first things I had asked Mike, when I met him, was if he thought the sash windows could be saved. I had spent many hours searching the "This Old House" website reading about how original windows were what gave the house historical interest; they could be rebuilt with a few hand tools, even made energy efficient with storm windows.

In high rent areas like Pasadena, where I had stopped to visit a colleague, such historical elements had been kept in good repair. Down here in rent-it-cheap-ville they were being held together with silicone caulking and you were lucky if they opened. If a house was being flipped, out would go the old windows to be replaced with cheap vinyl sliders. Traditionalists claimed that vinyl windows had too many plastic parts inside that would soon break, not to mention that they were a factory manufactured product of the petroleum industry.

I marveled that I'd found a man who shared my values. On my first day back, this trip, he had pointed out the satellite dish on the roof that he had just installed.

"We got TV now," he said. TV? When would such a man have time to watch TV?

"I get the feeling you didn't miss it much," I said. He paused collecting his words.

"Well you know, we've been having Addison read to us at night," he said knowing this would be a choice I would appreciate. Ah, you gotta love these second-chance dads. I knew he had other sons. When we first met him, he told us, that he hadn't spent enough time with them because he was working too hard, thus his retirement from full-blown contractor to handyman.

Addison had found a friend from down the street. They came riding down the driveway on their bikes. (The day he arrived Addison was already over at the neighbors sharing his truck with the little boy there.) This friend was a bigger, white boy. They had come to bide the time while Addison underwent his daily home dialysis treatment.

Mike had shown me the equipment for it—a machine about the size of a tabletop copier plus stacks of boxes of plastic bags filled with saline solution. It was the same treatment we had administered to our cat for her kidney problems. Only Addison didn't get poked with a needle, he had a port in his belly.

I'm not usually taken by children with birth defects, those sappy, inspirational stories that make good copy for Sunday magazines; they make me long for ancient Rome where a baby born horribly wrong was exposed—left on a cold hilltop to die. But Addison impressed me. He had survived this far. Plus all that medical attention had made him adept at talking to adults; he had established a rapport with me right away. For a ten year old, he had a depth born of patience and an enthusiasm for physical activity that spoke of resilience. I admired his pluckiness.

An Auspicious Event

My phone rang as I was installing a paper towel holder in the back house.

"Do you have a weight limit on pets?" said a young female voice. What? Oh right, some landlords do, I remembered.

"Oh I see," I said, "you have a large dog. Or is it a pony?" This being my hotdog stand I could afford to joke. The girl laughed, said she had a Chow who was a sweetheart. When she showed up with her parents a tiny little dog peaked out from inside her jacket. The tour didn't take long.

"It's very basic, but that's what we want," said mom. Their house had just been foreclosed upon and an injury had put her husband, a tow truck driver, on disability thus the need to downsize on this diminished income. Their credit wasn't too good either.

"But we don't have any evictions though," the dad added.

We wrapped up in the garage and they talked about wanting to rent it.

"There's just one thing we want to be up front about," said dad, "we have three dogs and three cats". Oy. And we had new carpets.

"We'll find homes for our pets if we need to," said mom firmly. "We love them, but we need a home, first." I felt like I was coming to that pivotal scene in Sophie's Choice where Meryl Streep is asked to choose which of her two children she wanted to keep. I told them I had someone who wanted it already, but would let them know.

I walked back over to see Mike about a good time to take his family out to dinner.

"We might not be able to go," he said, "we just got a call from the hospital that they've got a kidney for Addison." I knew they'd been waiting since before Christmas.

"But I'm not getting my hopes up because this is the third time we've been called," he added. I remembered the last time they couldn't do it because Addison was catching a cold. The kidney was being screened to see if it was a match. I went on my errand for window blinds for the front house. When I came back Mike said it was a go.

My brain started to unravel at double speed. I popped off to Home Depot again to get a blind I thought I had forgotten, but I had actually misplaced it behind another one. Then I discovered I had left my binder somewhere, probably on the roof of my car to have it fall into the street. In fact every time I came down to San Bernardino, my mind started to unravel. The drama of my story took up too much brain space; I kept forgetting what I was doing and there was nothing in place to ground me as there was at home. Now I knew how my overwhelmed clients felt.

I had to have people there to keep me on task. And my people were vanishing, going on a mission. I succumbed and joined in the proceedings inside the front house. Mike was wolfing down his dinner and Jennifer was combing Addison's washed hair and packing. I asked Addison if I could get a picture of him with his dog, Cupcake. He sportingly obliged. He was as excited as if he were going on vacation.

At nightfall, Jennifer came home. (No family were allowed during shift changes.) She told me the kidney donor was a 24 year old who had died in childbirth.

"How 19th century," I said pausing to take this in.

"They said Addison would grow into the kidneys," she explained since I was part of the family now. I questioned her about her confidence in his doctor. I didn't want the kid to die on me now that I was invested. She had complete confidence in him; didn't seem worried at all.

I was so struck by my happening to be there for this momentous occasion that I felt somehow powerful as if I had brought them this good luck. I mean what were the chances that I would be there just when they got the kidney? Such is the hubris of a writer living inside a story. After a while, I felt like a bystander again and went back to lining shelves.

In the morning I got news that it had all gone well. Whew. He would come home in three weeks, then had to be kept germ free in isolation for three months, so no school. I packed my car and Mike and I settled up our accounts.

Build Your Own Family

In the days following, my work helping a hoarder client sort through ten-year-old copies of People magazine couldn't have seemed more meaningless. My mind was with a boy struggling to accept a major organ transplant. And I still had to rent the second house. The applicants I had were not quite right. They didn't really feel like they were part of the story.

Yet, this was my target market. Having positioned myself just to the sidelines of the foreclosure epicenter, I was poised to catch the falling middle class, complete with all their pets, amenity needs, oversize furniture and big appliances and yes, their shaky credit rating. Otherwise I was getting a lot of calls from people looking for the rock bottom price. Or they were young with much to learn about taking care of property. One man spoke only Spanish, but all I could say was "si, casa" and the price in English numbers. $1000 a month was too high for him. Low prices hovered around $750. Down the street a newly renovated house was selling for $45K. That was about what we had put in to renovate. Real estate gurus were telling their investors to flip not hold for there would soon be more bargains.

Though I was prepared to lower the rent, I thought I'd wait a bit. There were plenty of landlords lowering their rent steeply as the glut of foreclosed properties turned around and were up for rent again. Soon they'd be gone. We had put a lot of work into our houses. I wanted people who wanted a nice home over a cheap dump.

I called Mike. Told him that what I really wanted was for the tenants in the back house to be okay with him and right for the situation he had there. Would he interview these candidates? He was glad to. Called back, said Joe was probably not the right guy and besides he had let slip that he would move on soon; the second family with the 6 pets, he couldn't reach. Was that going to be it for the month?

I tried to think of ways to advertise. The population didn't seem to go much by Craigslist. A digital divide perhaps. I discovered Rent.com; none of the many houses I had seen for rent were even listed there. I posted ours. Three days and four leads later, a man called me up moments after I left him a message.

"Amanda, I want to rent your house, but I'm afraid you will have rented it before I even get to see it," he said as if we were best friends already. "My name is Italo, but everyone calls me Tally," he continued in a familiar drawl. I felt like I was listening to a character in a movie. Well no wonder— he was from the Bronx—an Italian. He went on to tell me how a friend had suggested he go onto Rent.com "and there you were, the only house in town". He liked the pictures of it, but he had to leave for two days for his work. The man had a job!

Yes, for UPS for 18 years. His wife had divorced him; he'd given her nearly everything, plus the house had an underwater mortgage and now the apartment complex where he was living was kicking him out because his 19-year-old son had brought home a dog.

He just wanted to get his life back together again, he told me. I hoped he wouldn't be put off by the seediness of the neighborhood. I e-mailed Mike and Jennifer telling them how nice he was.

He saw it, he liked it, his kid liked it. He didn't mind the seediness, after all he was from the Bronx. He knew that people looked out for each other in these poorer neighborhoods. He even remembered an outdoor clothes line same as the one out back. Mike had liked him so much he gave him a hug and told him he belonged there. By the end of the weekend Tally was wooing me with recordings of his impressions of Elvis, pictures included. If Catherine was okay with his obliterated credit rating it was a go.

"Let's give him a chance," she e-mailed me. I had gotten a terrific reference from his boss ("wish all my guys were like him") and his credit history was the norm now.

Finally, I could lay my story to rest. My new extended family had attained a harmonious configuration and the little homestead would give us all a chance for resurrection. Tally was so grateful he said I was an angel. Well I wouldn't go that far, but after just six months of this odyssey my story was closing with just the happy ending I had been looking for.

Tale of Two Houses

2010-02-17T21:19:00.000-08:00

The kitchen cabinets I had so carefully painted with low emission, all natural ingredient, linseed oil paint were changing color from off white to a pale yellow. That wouldn't be so bad except that it clashed with the Rustoleum paint that Mike had used to paint the doors. That paint was drying to the color of a dolphin skin grey. While the walls were a high gloss bright white latex that just emphasized the difference.

I had not wanted to ask Mike to use the linseed oil paint. This paint was an experiment I had only intended to subject myself to and so far had proven to have a few hurdles. For one thing it took forever to dry. At least 24 hours at the optimum temperature of 74°. And if you ordered the wrong color, as I was beginning to think I had, or needed more, you had to wait over a week for it to be mailed from New York because the paint was manufactured by a family owned company in Sweden and only one American company handled it. That's what too much Internet searching will do to you.

We had both agreed that oil paint was the way to go on woodwork for durability, but the law had phased out oil based house paints leaving only paints formulated for metal readily available. Rustoleum was what Home Depot stocked. (Contractors have also taken to spraying cabinets with automobile paints Mike told me.)

I despaired at the whole project. Part of the point of cleaning up these houses was to make things look consistent. I took a walk around the block to clear my head, but only noticed the many inconsistencies in the neighborhood, walls half repaired, different materials used, broken fences, junk furnishings. My project was just reflecting the general mélange. Where was the charm that had first attracted me? Was I being sucked into the undertow of delaminating suburbia?

Then I saw something that reminded me that this neighborhood had more in common with Mexico than American suburbia. Lying in the yard of one of the more run down houses was a full size piebald pig, fast asleep while a pit bull looked at me from the porch. The occupants would very likely eat the pig using some old family recipe that was not from a celebrity chef at Chez Panisse as happened in Farm City (the latest locavore book by a protégé of Micheal Pollan, who was keeping livestock in an empty lot next to her Oakland apartment). These San Bernardino pig owners would probably never suspect that growing your own meat was the latest hot trend of the eco food movement.

My perspective thus adjusted, I returned to the house and set about to paint the doors to match the cabinets. I was soon joined by Mike's assistant, Rudy, a short bald man with a goatee and his much taller, large son. Mike had found Rudy in the mix of Mexican laborers looking for work outside of Home Depot. He told me he'd gone through a few before he found someone who had the work ethics he was looking for. Rudy was our recycler, I discovered, when I asked why the old aluminum framed windows had not been taken away. He would take the scrap to sell Mike told me. How familiar to my own third world neighborhood ways.

An hour later Mike showed up looking his usual buoyant self, but with his entire family in tow. I had met his wife, Jennifer, once briefly. She wasn't looking her best this morning. In fact she looked like she'd been in a fight and was teary eyed. His son, of whom I'd heard a great deal about on account of his impending kidney transplant, had his arm wrapped around his mother and looked quite forlorn. I didn't want to ask what was up in case I was prying into some family dispute I wasn't supposed to notice. We exchanged pleasantries and when I looked puzzled, Mike said he needed to talk to me.

"We want to rent one of your houses," he said.

"Really, which one?" I asked, conversationally.

"The front one," he said. He then told me they had just had a run in with the owner of the house where they were currently renting two rooms and needed to move out right away. The man had hit his son in a moment that had gone beyond rough housing and then he socked Jennifer in the eye. Mike had called the police to file a report and told the man and his wife that they were moving out. His wife did admit that her husband had a tendency to go off. It was at this point that I realized I had entered a reality quite unfamiliar to my own. At least I could offer one that was more congenial. They had, I remembered, just moved from another house because it was going into foreclosure, so probably hadn't even unpacked.

The front house was in no condition to live in, filled as it was with spackle dust and not yet painted. I was staying in the back house, now transformed from greasy pit to freshly painted, newly carpeted, brand new house. The new vinyl windows making it snug and quiet. The toilet wasn't hooked to water and the sink didn't have a drain, nor the bathroom a door, but it was quite habitable and there was a room going empty.

"You're welcome to stay here," I invited them, indicating the smaller empty room. "Or maybe you should stay in this room since you're bigger," I offered. The small one would be fine Mike said and I wondered if I sounded a little goofy.

"And I haven't met you," I said to his boy who brightened up a bit at being addressed. His name was Addison.

"You'll have roommates, now," Mike said in case I wasn't quite apprised of the situation. I nodded smiling. This whole house adventure was full of serendipitous outcomes, I told him and went outside to collect my wits and ponder my new role as landlord. Then I left Catherine a message apprising her of the situation. It was probably a good thing that Catherine had decided, at the last minute, not to come on this trip since we had our two dogs to manage and the house would have been quite full.

When I came back Addison asked me if I liked cats then brought his rather unnerved Persian cat over to meet me. I also met Mike's dog, a tiny Jack Russell Terrier named Cupcake. Thus properly equipped with a family for my compound living, I set about cutting and fitting closet poles so they would have a place to hang their clothes.

The next day was Saturday and I was alone in the house, which gave me a chance to concentrate on installing the shelves I had made for the kitchen. By evening a moving van rolled up to the garage and soon Rudy and his son were helping the family unload. They had volunteered their time to help them, Mike told me and I was duly impressed, but not entirely surprised that help was being offered. I tended to believe that people would help each other out when things got bad. Mike had also expressed his gratefulness to me for allowing his family to move in on such short notice. I did suspect that if I were to run a background check on my new tenants there would be a bankruptcy or some other red flag to consider, but having observed the high standard of his work and watching his integrity with his crew, I felt I knew Mike on his own terms and saw that he valued family, was knowledgeable about old houses, had the patience to explain things and wasn't at all patronizing. By the same token he knew me.

We took pains not to step on any toes conversationally, but he liked to tease me about my eco choices while I refrained from mentioning his smoking or his humongous late model truck. He brought me food, a Breakfast Jack from MacDonald's one morning, a sloppy joe he made on white bread in the evening. He reminded me of my father, offering sustenance on the one hand and challenges to my worldview on the other. My father, who had spent his career in the defense industry, took a perverse pleasure in teasing me about going to peace marches. If my dad was helping me from the grave, it would be just his sense of humor to send a man who was here to keep me in my place while offering practical knowledge and assistance that would have me in his debt. Nevertheless I valued Mike's opinion.

"I wouldn't worry about it," he would say calmly if I voiced concern about being able to rent the place. He offered simple solutions when I got overwhelmed and kept his word if it was important. I also knew his flaws— that he had a tendency to run late, was forgetful unless under stress, refused to get on a computer anymore, had had a head injury from falling off a roof, had retired after a heart attack during a big job in New York and was, by his own assessment, somewhat ADD, relying on his wife to keep his appointments together.

He was also an artist. He brought one of his oil paintings over one night the week Mark and I were working at the property. He thought it would add something to the place. Then said his wife wouldn't have it in the house so I could do what I wanted with it. The painting showed a Native American brave brandishing a tomahawk at the sky. I was charmed by it in a log cabin sort of way.

Throughout this adventure of two houses, I had the sense that I was in a parallel universe of fortuitous circumstances, guided by genuinely helpful people. Through a path of intuitive choices I was creating a narrative that was more fable than business anecdote. This cosmically guided sensibility had its own logic based on building authentic relationships that would be marred, I felt, by too much distrust and control. I was perhaps being naïve, but I was willing to offer my trust; if I was betrayed it would likely not be personal, but if it went well then I had increased my personal power and extended my family ties to strangers with the ultimate end of improving things for all of us. I asked Mike if he would be our property manager too. He was happy to. He didn't want anyone messing up the walls after all the work we put in. Later we would put it all in writing.

In the enterprise of renting property, the endeavor is generally considered one of the most potentially litigious in America. Many friends had warned me as much. The previous owner was, in fact, being sued by a friend of a recent tenant, who claimed she had injured herself after falling from the front porch which was devoid of a handrail. That she hadn't filed this suit until a year after the property was vacant was suspect enough. That she was asking hundreds of thousands because said injury did not allow her husband conjugal visits tipped it into the absurd. These legal shenanigans were expressions of human relationships gone awry, of desperate people protecting themselves in lieu of their human obligation to do the decent thing. That's what liability insurance was for.

Not that we had insurance—of any kind. Couldn't get it because there were so many houses going empty across the country and being vandalized that insurance companies would not write a policy for income property until you could show them a rental agreement and your tenants had moved in. Having no insurance made me quite nervous at first, but then it just became a part of this narrative of faith. Or was it fate? At any rate no one had disturbed the properties so far. There were so many dogs in the neighborhood that just walking down the street created a ruckus. Now the property would be occupied and this would certainly help. As Mike started up his gas mower to trim down the newly re-grown lawn, I realized that, soon, I would have to look for another project on which to direct my eco sensibilities.

The Town The Boom Forgot

2010-01-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

On the way to my claim in what is grandly known as the Inland Empire, I had ill timed my departure and was neatly waylaid by rush hour traffic swarming out of Los Angeles, hours of it. Looking for a bathroom I pulled off the 210 into a suburban shopping mall sporting all the usual chain stores. I picked Target and found one near the entrance.

This was the town of Upland. On our last trip we had been informed by a local, that Rancho Cuchamonga, the town next door, was the jewel of the Inland Empire. Newly spiffed out by the housing boom, this was the town that had perfected the art of upwardly mobile suburban living in brand new McMansions and all the amenities of convenience shopping. Naturally it held no appeal for me. As I fought my way out of the mall through Christmas shopping traffic, I was relieved to leave the bright lights behind for the town I had invested my hopes in. The town the boom had bypassed.

San Bernardino was known for riff raff and gang activity plus all the amenities of a poorer population—liquor stores, run down churches and paycheck cashing storefronts. As I pulled onto Waterman street, my heart rate went up for I was arriving alone after dark. All seemed calm. Turning off 9th street into my new neighborhood I was cheered by the many houses decorated with Christmas lights. I pulled up to our padlocked gate, let myself in and was further cheered by a night light our contractor had left on in the kitchen.

After locking the gate, then the iron security door, then the deadbolt, I surveyed the living room and was amused by a number of potted ferns in their black plastic nursery pots set out at the edges of the room, in the middle of which was a lone plastic patio chair and end table. Also left for me was an old space heater for the gas had not yet been turned on. I had been surprised to learn that this part of Southern California was as cold as it was 400 miles north, with every morning producing frost and a hankering for long underwear (which I had foreseen to pack.)

Pleased, I set up my plug-in kettle and a toaster oven and warmed up my all-organic TV dinner. Looking for something to do I took out a razor blade and set to scraping the latex paint off the vintage black tile of this original 1939 kitchen.

The beauty of a town that has been bypassed by the boom (apart from the original post war one that created these suburbs) is that no one has had any aspirations to improve on the existing housing stock. The draw for those who held investment property here was a rental market that could be managed on the cheap, for a population that had no where else to turn. The building boom in the neighboring towns had all but eliminated affordable rentals.

"I'm having a hard time picturing you as a landlord," said one of my colleagues used to perceiving me as a political leftist fighting to reverse development and save the planet. I, too, was adjusting to my new role as a land baron. An eco land baron for, with less than 1,000 square feet, my renters would automatically have a lighter footprint. And they would have to make do with the barest essentials in appliances, no dryer, tiny kitchens, retro one-fixture-per-room lighting and vintage décor. They would also have to endure my homemade organizational devices, experimental eco materials and a landscape that would never intentionally include a lawn. I was heady with the power of it.

Only a few of my friends understood why I might be charmed by a town of such bypassed prospects. Most ended the conversation as soon as I told them about the chain link fences or showed pictures of the houses we had bought. I tried to wow them, to no avail, with the statistic that a population of 200,000 could only support one Starbucks; that here was a town unspoiled by shopping malls and chain restaurants. I didn't get a chance to reveal how at peace I felt in it and how I had a curious desire to live there (but probably not in the searing heat of summer). Living small while protected by a grand mountain range, I felt contained and complete in this town.

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

The locals however did not feel they had been bypassed, but that their time was still to come. The nearby air force base, having been decommissioned, was now designated an international airport complete with new 80 million dollar passenger terminal and signage. Everybody mentioned how the airport would make San Bernardino the new boom town. It was less than two miles from our property, but I was not worried. If you want to make a peak oil activist laugh just talk about your investment in air travel.

Said airport had yet to entice a single passenger airline despite lower landing fees. Airlines still looking for growth preferred to base themselves at the more established airport in Ontario, 25 miles away. Having also been bypassed by DHL, Federal Express and UPS, the only customers were second-string cargo planes and firefighting planes. But it did play a distinguishing role as a set for the film industry, the X-files and such.

The last time San Bernardino thrived was during the Cold War when the military bases were fully active. When the bases closed, shipping and warehousing for imported goods took up the slack. (80% of imported goods entering California come through the Inland Empire.) Already diminished by the recession, the shipping industry will likely suffer the same future as air travel as fuel costs rise. Once a fuel deprived de-globalization overcomes us, a resurgence of local manufacturing could fill the empty warehouses, contingent on existing rail transport and later perhaps sailing ships up and down the coast. There was still substantial agriculture in the area—a viable long term industry (drought permitting).

I did not bring up my analysis with local residents. Far be it for me to dash anyone's hopes, invested as they were in obsolete dreams. The recent housing boom wasn't based on industry at all, but was more a refurbishing, fueled by easy credit and the McMansion trend. Mike our contractor, described the housing development planned for downtown where several old residences had been condemned. The new development would have a man-made lake, he told me, impressed by the vision.

Of all the things to put in the dessert, I thought, but did not protest. I was lucky to have a man with extensive experience rehabbing. His Craigslist ad told of how he was retired, but loved what he did and that he needed money for his 10 year old boy who was awaiting a kidney transplant.

Also on hand to help was Mark, a friend from the Bay Area. Mark had bought, at the age of 23, his own house in a little town called Snowshoe, in Pennsylvania, where he had made a living as a handyman. Twenty years later the house had become more albatross than liberator so Mark set himself free by donating it to a local charity, driving off in his live-in van with iPhone. He arrived two days after I did.

I met Mark through my friend Dave who was my housemate at the time. Mark was in the habit of asking a new friend to cut his hair each time he was in need of a trim. I was next in line. Luckily it was very forgiving curly hair. I noted that it was a bit longer now. Looking dapper in his vintage thrift store clothing and brimmed hat, he had brought with him his iPod-driven homemade boom box and a stack of DVDs — independent films from the library that we watched on our laptops.

The Kindness of Strangers

On the first night, after a full days work, Mark persuaded me to walk down the street to find our dinner. I was dubious that we would find more than a liquor store, but we did eventually happen on a Thai restaurant in what looked like an old drive-in. The food wasn't bad; the décor improvised with travel posters and a TV tuned to the sports channel. On the wall was a flyer for a Thai real estate agent showing a house similar to one of ours for $80,000. (After what we spent to rehab our two houses we would come out a bit ahead of that.)

Despite the low budget decor of the town, I was reassured that the community was viable mostly because the people were so nice. Mark remarked on this too and we started asking ourselves if it wasn't so much that people were nice here, but that they were not so nice in the Bay Area. Perhaps the need to be a contender in the land of innovation had set the tone. Overwork and outsized expectations hung in the air; everyone needed to be a star to compete. In San Bernardino, just getting through the day was enough. Ordinariness seemed to foster kindness.

We spent much of the week on the project scraping away the sins of previous tenants—packing tape residue on the walls, countless nail holes, slopped on latex paint that melted when scrubbed, grease covered dust webs. Not to mention the negligence and outright incompetence of the previous owner. Apart from ignoring virtually all maintenance, his contribution as a tile layer was soon found out. The tile in the shower was so skimpily adhered, it only took 40 minutes to pull it off. And water was seeping so far under the windowsill in this shower it was wearing a hole through the wall.

We heard more about him from a passing neighbor who told Mark that the owner would come to the property stinking drunk and yell at his tenants. "At least you should pretend you're not drunk," the neighbor concluded. This amused Mark and me greatly—that allowances could be made if you at least pretended you weren't behaving badly.

No wonder the neighbors were smiling at us. We were bringing a hope of decency. The houses had been on the market for over a year. Just to have someone buy the property was a vote of confidence that the neighborhood was worth the effort and things were turning around.

Back To The Future

I hoped so, too, since we had to eventually pay for the work being done here, but the draw for me was more personal. In part nostalgia—an attempt to roll back time to a sensibility when lifestyles still seemed reasonable. According to US census data, the average house size in 1982 was 1,520 square feet. In 2002 it was 2,114 square feet. Human need did not grow larger houses; the conceptualizing of the family home as an investment vehicle did. And then, of course, increasing amounts of stuff made it seem necessary. All that turned out to be the downfall of more than just our economy. People's lives and communities changed too.

A neighborhood of small houses was manageable. I could see that neighbors looked out for each other. The kid next door thanked me for throwing his Frisbee back over the wall then stayed to chat. His playmate lived across the street. At 12, sitting atop the wall between us, he was master of his domain.

A complaint of one of my clients was that she had to drive her kids to their playmates; they were stranded otherwise. I also heard of a manager who described his new hires as suffering from a lifetime of scheduled playdates. Though bright, they lacked the ability to organize their teams to get things done. Isolated like this, kids had been deprived of the opportunity to manage their own lives and work out their own problems. Ah the irony of wealth.

In a community where home sizes were frozen at 1950 averages (983 sq. ft), I had a chance to envision a different future without having to undo the bloated built environment of a lifestyle seriously out of wack with what resources we had left. I wanted these small houses to be nice so the tenants would be happy living there and wouldn't associate small with grungy, broken down and poor. Rather they would be efficient, cozy and organized, easy to keep clean and with less space for junk to accumulate. Plus each yard had enough land for a substantial kitchen garden—a component of sustainable living. Working on these houses felt real for rather than creating a fantasy life to guide my pursuits, my play was now affecting a real environment, a real future.

On the last day, as I was packed ready to leave and the roof was being torn off on the front house, a young couple came by asking Mike if the houses were for rent. Word had got out. They told him the going rate for what they had looked at already. It was a couple hundred more than what we were asking. That was great news. We were keeping the rent at what it had been (which was probably all the previous owner could get for his wretchedness). With property values slipping so badly we had thought we would have to drop even that rent. Now we could feel good about cleaning up the place and still being under market. I was beginning to enjoy this future.

Land Ho!

2009-11-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

Informed by the flip flopped perspective of Asia, I see a new purpose and direction as I re-asses the changed landscape at home following the economic meltdown in the wake of the housing bubble.

Meltdown Case Study

A client called me to refer me to a woman who desperately needed my help. We went to see her together since she was working with the lady through the social services agency where she was a volunteer. We found the door ajar, knocked and waited a good15 minutes. When she finally did come to the door she was gracious and willing, invited us in and introduced us to her bedridden husband in the back bedroom, then seated us in the living room to tell her story.

"We used to be millionaires, but now we're negative $1500," she didn't mind telling me. Her husband had made those millions investing in real estate. Now she was mad at him because he made one deal too many with no safety margins to protect what they needed to live on and, of course, their stocks were down too. And then he had hip surgery that went awry and when her son lost his job at Circuit City, said son decided it was a sign from God to give him the time to save his father. He moved into their two-bedroom condo to look after him then proceeded to order his mother to do his bidding. He was able to claim this role because he was liquidating his 401K to keep them afloat.

Since he had made himself scarce for this appointment with me, I knew there was little chance that he would agree to hire me to help his mother organize the many boxes in the shower that had to be put somewhere when he insisted that they close out one of their storage units.

Getting organized was not this family's biggest problem, I realized. They needed family therapy.

"Everyone just needs to be kinder to each other," I commented sympathetically. She nodded, grateful that I understood the situation.

I was seeing America's real estate meltdown, up close and personal, for this was just one example of many such stories of lost wealth, only instead of being on paper, as in the last boom/bust, now the losses were striking closer to home, at the home itself. For the home was the last asset to be played.

Inspired by the belief that housing prices could only go up, husbands had made deals that had taken them beyond a threshold normally considered safe. And just as with other bubbles, investors were refusing to call it quits because they had lost so much already and were blind to the new reality. Pride turned into bad judgment and humiliation turned into abuse of those closest to them. Wives, in turn, were mad at their husbands for not telling them they had hocked the house. Like Napoleon, refusing to retreat, these investors would play out this loosing battle until they ran out of resources.

My prospective client had been informed by social services that she had the option of putting her husband in a public subsidized nursing home, should caring for him become too much for her, but the state would take away all their assets leaving her with a $600 a month social security check to live on. Did she have any relatives who would take her in?

In this genteel lady's eyes, asking for such help was unthinkable. She had for so long been the generous one. She told us of her struggle to keep her faith and her love for her husband, rather than toss him to the state. All I could tell her was that if she felt that my help would insure her sanity, she would have to prevail upon her son to let her hire me.

When it was way past time to go, I let her give me a big hug for coming by. Then she pressed a handful of candy in my hands from a dish by the door. I knew I would never see her again unless I too became a volunteer.

Taking Stock

Transitions are all about changing one's roles, relationships, routines and assumptions I was to learn, the following week, at a talk given by a dynamic woman old enough to have seen a few. I was already looking at changing mine. My business-networking group booked speakers who were telling us to market harder, that the best would survive. I found this to be as useful as the report from Wall Street that the nation was experiencing a jobless recovery. I was not going to beat a dead horse with more marketing. If there were too few jobs for organizers maybe it was time to do something else. But it was also time to assess my own assumptions.

When I returned from my three-week trip to Asia my perspective sat on shifting ground. My last project had been to build a small boat, chiefly for recreational purposes, but also because I felt it might be a useful skill to have. When food shortages made fishing useful, a boat would be sought after, not to mention when the sea level rose. As a dedicated doomster, this was in keeping with doomster culture thinking. But after traveling, for three weeks by plane in the undeniable reality of Asia's urban pursuit of development, ten years after it's own economic collapse, this guiding principle of preparing for the end of the world as we know it seemed a trifle silly or at least ahead of itself.

Asia had experienced a temporary halting after their economic disaster and I was gratified to see proof of this on the outskirts of the city. Blocks upon blocks of empty condos stretched down what was supposed to have been a busy downtown center never realized. Not even the homeless wanted to squat in them without electricity to power air conditioners. Oddly enough, across the street, businesses continued, shop fronts were occupied and customers were going in and out. The end of the world had not managed to reach across the street. In the rest of the city things had definitely moved on.

There was no such thing as "the end of the world as we know it," I concluded. That implied an event forcing change that everyone agreed upon, much as we would respond (or not respond) to a hurricane. We could not even recognize the changes already upon us, so who exactly was going to name "the end of the world as we know it," in order to respond to it appropriately? We were still playing by the old rules.

The End of the World Postponed

I decided to abandon my preparations for the end of the world as inspired by thoughts of eco apocalypse. This left me somewhat at sea as to where to focus my life, and I was sifting through suggestions waiting for one to stick. My only requirement was that it would involve the help of others and would connect me to community. Even better, if it was a paying gig.

I considered writing another book—tales from the life of an organizer. I would try out the idea at my next conference with my organizing colleagues. I loved conferences—the extended family atmosphere of all of us living together in a hotel, eating every meal together discussing our adventures of that year and new ventures for the next.

Two weeks before conference an old friend from high school posted, to her Facebook wall, a real estate listing for a property in San Bernadino. Anne and her lover had left their careers as university professors and remade themselves into investment property gurus two years ago. Investment property, unlike the internet stocks I had lost my shirt on 8 years ago, still had brick and board value even after a bubble. San Bernardino was within driving distance of my conference hotel. Why not have a look?

The two met me at the airport. I had not seen Anne in 21 years; we had, in our college years, had quite an intense correspondence by mail, picked up again last year when she Googled me. It was enough of a history that I could trust her to help me with something I knew nothing about and didn't want to fathom i.e.: the bureaucratic legalese of owning property. I asked them how they had come to wrap their minds around the responsibilities involved. They told me of classes offered. Then Susan plunged in, set it up.

"It's not something you should over think," Anne said finally. This was comforting coming from Anne, an inveterate over thinker last I knew her.

Falling In Love Again

And thus I found myself in a not unfamiliar California town outside of LA looking at two houses on a lot with a mountain range behind it that made me feel a modicum of certainty I hadn't felt in a long time. I was sizing up the landscape the way I used to size up a potential lover. A minimum of criteria fulfilled, a pleasing arrangement of features, some homely aspects that hijacked outright beauty but introduced quirky interest and a stimulating element of risk and danger that would make the journey interesting and transformative.

And she was available; made available to me by a very low price ($100,000) and a line of credit, not mine, but Catherine's. Catherine, who thinks of these things, while I just try to get by day to day. She had long wanted us to strengthen our relationship by staking out an income producing future. She had taken out the line of credit because it seemed like a good idea in uncertain times. I had ignored the move. To me, borrowing money was not a viable solution; being debt free with savings was the way to go. Luckily we had been improving our communication skills with an intelligent therapist so could broach the topic without fear. When Catherine saw how interested I was in this property as a rental, she offered to help me. Borrowing to buy something that produced income did make sense to me.

I had experience with fixing up property and had managed property, of a similar low-income nature, for a client. Catherine was tenacious at follow through and had an appetite for financial strategy. It was the right time. And we would be smart about it, think things through, play to our strengths. She trusted my judgment. She was willing to put her money down just on my assessment alone. It would be my baby.

I had first been attracted to the property because of the two houses on a large lot, much like a compound in Thailand. And the houses were small with two bedrooms, not the super-sized, cathedral ceilinged houses, of the last decade that would soon prove an energy sucking liability. And though the location seemed quite rural, it had the one enviable municipal service in a suburb—a rail system. You could get to downtown LA in 90 minutes, 60 minutes to outlying industry.

We got out at a quiet street lined with cyclone fencing. The agent, in her high heels and black Lexus, was already there to meet us . Stepping over the threshold into the first house on the property, I stooped to touch the new ceramic tile floor, surprised that it was not vinyl. Otherwise, the stucco house was much the same as when it was built in 1939. It was, in fact, exactly the same vintage as one I had lived in with friends 20 years ago, where I had, in fact, last seen Anne. But I was not thinking about those years now. I was struck by how shabby the house was. It had been a long time since I had lived in a rental.

"Do people really like this," I asked Anne. "I mean I like it, but do other people?" Yeah they did, enough to want to live in it.

The small kitchen had the same tile on the counter as the one I had lived in only with cream tiles and a black border plus a thin line of red across the back. It was, I would later find out, a classic American Bungalow kitchen.

The second house had a kitchen with the metal edged Formica counters of the 40s. The wood cabinets would need painting. There was a drawer missing. This house, too, had a floor newly tiled, but otherwise no other improvements thus none of the improvements I had grown to despise. No garbage disposals to break down when it wasn't robbing the compost heap. No recessed lighting to vent heated air wastefully into the attic while swallowing up half the light of the bulb. No laminated particle board cabinets with overbuilt European hinges. No dishwasher. In fact no appliances at all, for they had gone missing along with the outdoor light fixtures.

It was, I could see, from the iron security gates on the doors, a moderately high crime area. That was the dangerous part though I did not see any young men cruising by in low riders that I had come to expect while driving through low rent areas in the Bay Area. There was no one on the street at all, just parked vans and pick-up trucks in better condition than the housing—a classic working class California neighborhood. The cyclone fencing was the homely part. The burned out lawn, awaiting my transformation to something more sustainable. Behind the town, the natural beauty of those majestic mountains crisp against a blue sky. That they would always be there comforted me.

I asked the questions Catherine had me write down. Were there any major repairs to be done such as a roof in need of replacement? Nope. Updated electrical? Check. Plumbing? Adequate. Industrial pollution. No. Was there graffiti? Well, only if you counted what was expertly riffed on the cement wall inside the garage. An ad hoc practice studio for a young gang member perhaps.

Was it likely that the property would be rented again? Yes.

It was something of a no brainer. We could improve it without even trying. The last time it had been sold it had been for nearly four times the price. Each house had more land than we had at our own house. The area had once been farmland. I told the agent to write it up. By evening I would be in love with my quirky, homely, beauty, eager to begin her transformation.

Old Money Gone Not Getting Any Younger

2009-10-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

In my final piece on my return to Asia, I come to understand the depth of community and family as I take possession of my Thai identity and see my American life anew.

While I was in Bangkok I made a second attempt at establishing my status as a Thai national. In order to have the legal right to own land, specifically the family land left to me in my father's will, I had to be a Thai national. Foreigners could own land, but only if a Thai person owned a controlling interest in it. And this could change at any time with the whims of each new government.

Last year the clerk at the registry office said there was not enough evidence that I was the same person as the child whose name was written into the registry 47 years ago (and then lined out when we immigrated to the US). Though I had been born in England I was entitled to Thai citizenship through my father. Had my father been there he could have vouched for me, but he had neglected to finish this piece of paperwork before he died 8 years ago.

In my father's will (which was read in Aunty Lily's room with all of us present) I learned that he had left nearly everything to his third wife. Said wife sat in the room with us looking downcast. She now owned a quarter interest in all the family land holdings in Thailand, shared with each of Ah Padt's two children and me, as well as two houses in the US. It was all I could do not to run screaming from the room. His Bay Area house, alone, would have assured me a comfortable retirement. There was also a two-bedroom rental, in Colorado that my father had been in the process of gifting to me, but that too was left to her.

"It's not right," said my Aunty Lily to me in private after the will was read. Yes, it was so not right that I was beside myself for a year, but there was nothing I could do about it. "Your father was very stubborn", my Aunty Lily continued, "He never listened to anybody." Aunty Lily explained that my grandmother was already going to split the land between my Aunty Ah Padt, my father and me. Ah Padt's piece had already been formally registered as a separate property; my father had only been married to his third wife for 5 years. What right did she have to the family land?

Had he been afraid his wife would leave him and so had promised her so much? That was the only sense we could make of it. He was also intent on denying his half sister, my Aunty Ah Padt, the right to ownership of the land, convinced that the reason my grandmother was no longer wealthy was because Ah Padt had finagled a controlling interest in the venetian blind company his family had created, and thus the profit. That my aunt had saved the company from bankruptcy through her dedicated hands-on management did not figure into the equation.

Before our trip, I called my stepmother to ask her about accommodations in my father's house since my mother would also be with me. It felt more like her house than mine. She had picked out the furnishings, the artwork and nick knacks that filled the built-in bookcase. Since she was my senior, and a Thai woman of equal class standing to my father, I deferred to her out of respect. She had kept her word on the Colorado house and continued to gift it to me. I had just received it in full this year and was grateful for the little rent it received; it was what was keeping me in the black in this recession year.

She gave me permission to sleep on the couch, preferring not to let me have the use of her bedroom, which she kept locked. My mother would sleep in my room (also used as a guest room by my stepmother). I felt slighted, but the couch turned out to be quite comfortable and I liked the living room. It had windows that allowed me to see into the servant's quarters in one direction and out towards the driveway and Ah Padt's house in the other. I was able to watch all the comings and goings of the compound. Despite the development around us on this now highly desirable and valuable land, very little had changed on our compound largely because of our family disintegration.

The upshot of my father's legacy was that we were all disempowered to do anything with the land to further our own wealth. Ah Padt couldn't build the condo she envisioned, I couldn't rent out my father's house which stood empty most of the year, and my stepmother complained to me that she was being asked to pay bills that should be paid by the profits of the venetian blind company. We were frozen in time gathering cobwebs. In the end, it might be our saving grace that it was not developed. This garden living was so pleasant and the fate of high tech urban living uneasy.

Through the un-curtained windows of the living room, Pryoon, our cook, could see when I was awake and bring us breakfast. (I had brought my fanciest pair of pajamas, an emerald green Chinese pair for just such exposure.) Everyday she asked me what we would like to eat and whether we would be home for dinner. When my mother asked for eggs every morning, she asked if she wasn't concerned about her cholesterol. No, but I was, and so Pryoon suggested that she would bring me the traditional rice soup breakfast which she knew I loved. (I had not wanted to trouble her to make two different meals.)

It was Pryoon who worried most about my status as the rightful heir to my family's land. She had worked and lived on the compound since I was 9 and she was 15. She had looked after my grandmother until her death, raised her daughter to cook for us too and looked after the household. She herself was a landowner, now that her mother had passed away. She owned a farm just outside of Bangkok that her mother had tended her entire life. Last year I joked that I could work for her, farming it. I was half serious, too, and it must have made her wonder about my state of affairs.

My Aunty Lily's maid, Wel, was also looking out for my interest and would counsel me on how to talk to my stepmother so I would remain in her favor. Where Pryoon was modest and humble, Wel was vivacious, talked loudly and was a dramatic storyteller. Capable and energetic, she was the perfect caretaker to keep an elderly lady entertained. She was also our chauffeur.

Accompanied by both Pryoon and Wel, I sat waiting at the office while the two translated for me and worked on my strategy. After three hours of waiting we went back another day and waited another three hours. I had no confidence that this would come together. I was just going to be tortured by the waiting, but because Wel and Pryoon were on a mission I was obliged to go along. On the third day my Ah Padt came and waited with me, as a witness. When I was finally approved to proceed, I was sent to the next desk, where I was confronted by a ruthless senior clerk who refused to process my ID card without a Thai passport. Again we would have to come back. I updated my Facebook page that I was ready to shoot myself.

Pryoon and Wel assured me that I need only be patient. My Thai friends sympathized with me. They had all been through this business of getting ID cards. Americans fought against such identification, against a too powerful government ready to arrest and strip citizens of their rights, followed by torture and concentration camps; why give them another tool? But I was not concerned that the Thai government would strip me of my rights; I just wanted them to acknowledge them.

I began to feel a shared identity with my Thai peers that I had not felt as a naturalized American citizen where anti-immigrant sentiments taunted me whenever conservatives voiced their opinions. And though I had once been proud to be British (and part of the Empire where the sun never set), the only time I felt accepted as a British citizen was when I was in the dentist chair benefiting from the national health program as a child.

I felt myself succumbing to the draw of Bangkok. We spent our evenings being wined and dined by friends, swallowed up by the round the clock offerings of entertainment and food. To succumb seemed the only sane response. I met a celebrity runway model who had been a childhood friend; she had 2,468 Facebook contacts, but she still wanted to see me.

I saw myself rolling back the years on my face with plastic surgery, hanging out in high end night clubs where I would be an attaché to my well connected friends, become a character of intrigue myself, leading a double life, escaping to a country getaway whenever it got too much. In my head I was constructing a tawdry novel filled with mysterious high society characters of hidden political affiliations, chasing sexual intrigues against a backdrop of a city ready to pop with civic unrest.

There was just one problem. I could no longer afford to live in Bangkok. While my peers had created businesses and income streams using their inherited land as leverage, they had also created an expensive lifestyle frequenting the latest restaurants and shows. It was a problem that had frustrated my father, who would return from a visit home complaining of how expensive it was to take people out to dinner. To live frugally would be to be found lacking, unable to keep up with my class obligations. Not to mention the travel back and forth from my home in the States. (This trip financed as it was by my publisher.) I was momentarily angry at this impotence to live out the status of my class standing and at my peers for having created this high end life. To fight it I would be setting myself apart again.

On the final day at the registry office even my mother came, the only foreigner in the entire building. My grandmother's government friend, summoned by Wel, showed up and vouched for me (though we had never laid eyes on each other before). I was asked to state my religion (Buddhist) and profession (writer prompted Ah Padt), I didn't know my blood type. My fingerprints were taken and photographed. I signed my name in Thai, in triplicate (in front of the stern senior clerk), which I could only do by copying what my Ah Padt wrote for me. Then a short wait to be photographed next to a height chart and finally, with fingers still purple from the ink, I had my prize—a brand new laminated card with a gold emblem containing a microchip holding all of the above information. Pryoon was ecstatic, Wel was triumphant and my Ah Padt pleased that something had gone well. My Aunty Lily was relieved and happy.

"You can do whatever you want, now, buy whatever you want," Pryoon said, meaning property. I thanked her for her perseverance. Had I waited much longer all the witnesses might well have been dead. My newly confirmed identity began to heal the pain of severance from my childhood roots. I could come home again and stay as long as I wanted. And I owned this home too. There was some security in this.

The community effort that went into getting me this status of citizenship filled me with a sense of connection and family. When I looked at my life in the US I saw an existence so lonely that I dreaded my return and was depressed for three weeks when I did return. What kind of life had I created here? I prided myself in being independent, able to do everything alone. Rarely did anyone help me as much as in this ordeal with the ID card. Rarely did I let them, even my partner, for fear of feeling clueless and helpless, dependent on the kindness of others.

I was used to spending my days filled with righteousness at the global issues I touted, a sense of purpose informing my activities. Now it all felt like nothing more than a shield against intense loneliness in the world's loneliest country. What exactly was the point? There was the belief in the States that it was up to us, the ordinary citizens, to do something about our deteriorating planet, yet our efforts continued to seem futile; a mere cultural exercise, while others in the world had far different priorities. And by aiming to reduce my carbon footprint I shortchanged my visits to see my aging relatives. I wanted to continue flying back and forth and more often, even if I had to give up my status as a tree hugging doomer (and make more money to fund the trips). What then would I have to inform my life? I decided to float for a while and find out. Let serendipity guide me. Beef up my Facebook presence.

Return To Asia III: The Conundrum of Thailand

2009-09-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

Having seen Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, I had a much better idea of how Bangkok fit into the context of its urban neighbors and what future it was seeking. Asian cities, I could see, were committed heart and soul to development, the kind of development that would embrace its citizens in a sort of universal standard of modern design.

Bangkok was cleaner and more upscale than I remembered it being. The old grimy cement block shop fronts of the 50s and 60s that had sold sundries, made-to-order garments and locally made house wares had been remodeled into brightly lit modern stores—a 7/11, a copy shop, a hair salon. On my street a store front was being finished with reflection pools set between squares of granite. The glass front allowed the office to be seen with all of its artwork and black leather and chrome furniture. Soon it would sell condominiums not yet built, but slated for development on the empty lot behind the new office.

The message was clear. The old would make way for the new and it would all be good. This growth was the way to raise all boats. The endless supply of raw materials transformed into chrome and glass enclosed buildings, full of cool air and new furnishings, blended right into the better living commercials playing endlessly on the Sky Train. I was stymied by this growth driven sensibility in Asia, but here in Thailand there was a pause, as the recession ate away at this message and the political winds shifted, battering the country in civic unrest.

Protestors in Thailand had shut down the airport for a week last November, then in April a counter group supporting Thaksin, the deposed prime minister, had trashed the hotel of the ASEAN Summit meeting and shut it down. The coup, two years ago that had deposed said prime minister, still raised the question in the eyes of Western journalists of whether Thailand would hold onto democracy. When Thaksin was mentioned, in the Western press, he was described with the phrase "democratically elected populist" which ostensibly made him the good guy while his crimes of corruption were minimized. I knew about the vote buying and the empty populist promises Thaksin Shinawatra had made to the poor. His economic policies had earned the nickname Thaksinomics. His plans for massive development projects would have further robbed the poor of their land rights, sending more to seek employment in the city (and yes more girls to the sex trade). What I didn't get was why the poor spoke of Thaksin with such affection even after he was ousted from power.

I took the opportunity to ask one of my contacts in Bangkok. Teng a business owner and dentist, had opened her own clinic offering plastic surgery and other beauty enhancement services for the face. Her clientele were largely Japanese ladies traveling to Thailand for the comparatively inexpensive procedures. My mother was quite curious to see what they offered and sought out a consultation. This was easily arranged through the school friends network. Teng sent her driver the short distance to pick us up at my house. As I sat waiting in the lobby of the clinic store front I asked Teng if she supported Thaksin.

"I don't like people who cheat," she said simply. Yes, he had cheated to such an extent that the term corruption was not enough to describe the heights to which he had used his position for his own monetary gain. His people had been blatant about offering government contracts on the condition that they got half the money budgeted for any single project. Companies whose income relied on government contracts were sucked in. When the coup came, the business class was suddenly divided and individuals who would normally trust each other found they had to walk on eggshells, unsure of who was on what side until the courts sorted it out.

There were still supporters of Thaksin in Thailand, said to be the rural poor, who were behind the recent protests. I asked Teng why he was so popular with the poor. She only took a moment to answer as if something unusual had happened.

"He let people touch him," she said, "no political candidate allowed poor people to touch them before. Thaksin did like a movie star and that made him popular. Even now the leaders won't let people touch them" she added as if they should have learned something.

This explanation neatly filled my curiosity. It explained the odd sentiment I had heard reported from one senior lady when Thaksin returned to Bangkok last year for his trial. She said she loved Thaksin because he was so cute. Cute had never been a word associated with political leaders before; it just cut too deeply into class taboos.

Thaksin was still in contact with his supporters while in exile, sending them video links pleading with them to fight for his pardon; he addressed them as peers and even sang to them. His supporters wore red, an angry color that filled the streets when they protested. Having inspired them to assemble, he called in on cell phones during the rallies to egg them on. You can see it all on YouTube. Thaksin had indeed made like a movie star. The rural poor were usually loyal to the King who was extremely revered all over the country.

The counter protestors wore yellow, the King's color. They were said to be a group comprised of royalists. Western reporters could not seem to get past this term to actually discuss what they stood for. Royalists were automatically suspect as if they were plotting to bring back an absolute monarchy, which even the King did not want. A writer for the Economist railed against the law of lese majesty that forbids citizens from openly criticizing members of the royal family, claiming that this seriously hampered democratic proceedings. I was annoyed by his tone. He did not seem to know anything about what the King stands for in Thailand.

During our trip I came across a posted sign that illuminated my own feelings about the King and his relationship to Thailand. We were visiting Pattaya, a seaside resort not far from Bangkok. My family had often spent weekends there when I was a child. It had been a quiet one-hotel town full of beach houses belonging to the wealthy. Now it was a densely developed strip of shoulder-to-shoulder, high rise hotels and sleazy, pick-up bars. The beach, however was still open to the public. I remembered, as a child, that no house, no matter how wealthy the owners, was allowed to be built directly on the beach. The reason given was that the beach belonged to the King. How lovely that the King liked the beach so much, I thought, and that he let everybody use it.

While walking the boardwalk at Pattaya, that weekend, I noticed a sign posted in a police sentry box, urging people not to throw garbage or cigarette butts on the beach. The sign was in Thai and English and the words "Keep it clean for the King," caught my eye. Underneath in smaller type was added "and safe for children and wildlife". Suddenly it came to me. The King was not coming to the beach anytime soon. He was a symbol representing the commons. He supported the interests of the people so the people returned the favor and called themselves supporters of the King because he supported them. Didn't anybody get it? Did the West even have a symbol of the commons? I wondered.

I was intrigued by the return to royalist sentiments. What were they after that the King in turn would support? The royal family denied any connection with the group. The King himself was quite feeble now and did not often leave his residence in Hua Hin (another beach resort). How his successor would do and if he would garner the same respect as his father was a question on all our minds. There was some talk, said a friend, of not having a royal family at all. But that, I thought, was getting a little ahead of ourselves.

The royalists protestors were for a "reasonable society" I read in wickipedia. They wanted a nation with less consumer debt and less concern with material goods. They opposed foreign investment and privatization of state enterprises. No wonder they were a threat to the writers of the Economist. It sounded like they were against the very underpinnings of globalization.

Western democracy, as I saw it being used today, was a platform for the elected wealthy of countries like Thailand to negotiate deals with the big players of the global market while making themselves even more rich. Americans, too, have wrestled with this question of corruption. In a recent poll a majority said that they would be more likely to trust representatives that were randomly selected from the phone book than those currently in Congress now.

I knew from Nor and Raja that there was sympathy for the royalists, but it was difficult to embrace them since they were somewhat extreme. They were asking for leaders to be royally appointed in an attempt to sidestep the corruption of democratically elected officials. Their takeover of the airport was an amazing show of power that had gone unpunished. It was hard to tell where their now bolstered confidence might lead them.

I did not press Teng for any more information and instead took a picture of her. She gave me her best side then surveyed my face suggesting that one of her doctors could easily zap that large freckle off my upper cheek. Yes, it looks like some kind of cancer my mother said and there was another one nearly as big on the other cheek. Teng named her price for two freckles—only $18. Done, I said, wondering what the US might learn here about lowering the cost of medical services. (Prescription drugs, too, were half the price my mother discovered when she went to buy her blood pressure medicine.)

In the end I was left wondering how this ultra modern, luxury oriented urban population would reconcile their needs with those of the nation and the poor. My mother and I did see children and adults begging at the foot of the escalator to the Sky Train station. We saw one small boy by himself, hardly moving. In front of him a plastic water bottle cut in half for coins offered. He was still there when we returned after dark. It brought to mind the movie Slumdog Millionaire which I had liked so much because it affirmed my reality by showcasing, so unapologetically, the poverty I witnessed growing up.

These destitute, in the context of an Asian city, would easily clean up per the Asian commitment to growth. Just park them in tenements and press them for cheap labor in factories. (Factories are, of course, dependent on consumer demand and many had closed this year.)

I preferred another picture of the poor. I recently discovered the classic Foxfire series of books produced in the 70s by American high school students in the state of Georgia. In them students interviewed "old timers" who still lived in the Appalachian Mountains and survived by methods of self-sufficiency duly recorded by the students in photographs. In the context of modern life these Appalachians owned very little and nothing that could be called modern i.e.: a TV or electricity for lights. Their way of life was dependent on the land around them just as were the Thais I met last year, on my trip to visit examples of sustainable solutions in rural Thailand. Both could not live without the land. Neither had asked to be modernized. Both favored self-sufficiency.

I would not forget meeting, on that trip, three men who had joined the Assembly of the Poor to demand compensation for the drowning of their land by the Pak Man dam project. They were forest dwellers who made a living foraging and caring for the forests. I came to understand how protest follows development because access to land is stolen from the poor.

I was also taken by the Buddhist group known as the Santi Asoke who taught skills of self-sufficiency after the economic collapse of '97, to anyone who came to them. The Santi Asoke Buddhists had originally protested Thaksin on moral grounds leading to more widespread protests until finally the military stepped in to oust Thaksin, ostensibly to prevent further unrest and complete chaos. The Santi Asoke Buddhists now supported the royalists, a more well heeled version of the original group that led to the ousting of Thaksin. (Along with the royalists were members of the middle class and business elite.) I was glad to see my narrative thread had not been broken. It just needed a resolution.

Would the rich relinquish some of their hold on the resources milked from the lands of the poor? Would Thailand stand up to the destructive forces of globalization stripping resources for profit? Would it morph itself a government that could actually temper development while promoting self-sufficiency and creativity? What kind of society would come out of this grass roots activism and civil unrest? Though each bit of news from Thailand now filled me with dread I couldn't wait for the next installment.

Return to Asia Part II: The Riddle of Singapore

2009-09-06T07:19:00.000-07:00

After our book launch in Kuala Lumpur, my publisher, Raja, invited us to meet his family at a local Indian restaurant. His sister Gowri, in a peach sari, stood to welcome us as we entered the Bombay Palace restaurant comfortably situated in an old house. We were introduced to his mother who greeted us with the prayer hands held to the face as we do in Thailand. She was dressed in a blue sari and looked about as stern as my grandmother had been. We were soon joined by Han and his father, an economist and long time friend of Raja's.

Conversation drifted from organizational business and social theory to occasional reference to popular movies. My mother was enjoying herself immensely, stimulated by references to cities she had visited and a shared English education, while I fended for myself. Meena, another sister and author, had already been compelled to correct me on the ranking of California as the 8th largest economy in the world, not third. Tut, tut.

I asked Raja what we should see in Singapore. We would not have a book launch in Singapore this time around, but my mother and I still wanted to see it since it was so close. Friends and relatives in Thailand had always told me Singapore was boring (and expensive), but friends in the States rhapsodized about the little city state as one would over San Francisco. Raja wrote down a list of things we shouldn't miss.
The first notable difference about Singapore was that the water was drinkable from the tap. I pointed to the sign over a drinking fountain at the airport upon our arrival. While still in KL, I had caught my mother filling her water bottle from the tap and suspected that it was no more safe to drink than the water in Thailand.

"Even in this luxury hotel?" she asked.

"It's all an illusion," I answered. If Malaysia was anything like the rest of South East Asia, I knew that development had prioritized exports for world trade and disregarded civic niceties. Plus corporate bottling lobbies would probably make sure the water remained unsafe (or if, as in Thailand, the situation improved no one knew about it). I suggested my mother call the front desk.

"Yes you can drink after boiling for ten minutes," said the operator hanging up abruptly.

Singapore was going to be an easy city, I sensed, and upon reaching the hotel promptly crashed. I was sleep deprived from the excitement of preparing for my book launch and we hadn't eaten a proper lunch that day. I could hardly navigate my way out the hotel door to find food and had become brisk and cranky. Luckily a whole block of restaurants awaited us just around the corner. My mother picked one and shepherded me into a seat for pizza and Pellegrino. Pellegrino, she decided, would be her drink of choice in Asia. She also sensed the ease of Singapore and immediately wanted to live there stimulated by the mix of cultures and the stylish blending of old colonial charm with modern amenities.

Refreshed, we set out the next day to explore. The Singaporeans were very friendly and eager to show off their English, which was the language of business, although most spoke Chinese or Malay at home. (The Chinese are the majority of the population with an Indian and Malay minority.) A Chinese lady going to church showed us which bus to catch and what coins to use and soon we were on a double-decker bus headed into the Indian part of town.

After walking briefly we came to Mustafa's, a huge department store which Raja had mentioned because it was crammed with goods that ordinary people actually buy. I was confident that we would escape designer label boutiques and catch a glimpse of real people.

I was immediately dazzled by the fabric section, which overwhelmed even my mother, stacked as it was to the ceiling with batik and saris. I picked out several sarongs before heading to other floors. The luggage department was bigger than any I'd ever seen and I offered my mother my professional services, as an organizer, to help her pick-out a travel handbag and carry-on. The ones she had traveled with so far were clearly inadequate and seeing her rummage through them looking for things was driving me crazy. (I had already offered to take charge of her passport and boarding pass as my travel shirt was basically a filing cabinet.)

It did not take us long to find a knock-off designer suitcase with wheels in an adorable size, then a smart looking purse that had pockets for every item. I showed her how to dangle the leash of her camera outside of the zippered compartment for easy access. Then we headed for the department of international chocolates.

We rolled around the rest of the city filling the little case with our purchases from the tourist bazaars in Chinatown. My map was worn to shreds by the end of the day, but I managed to get us to the riverside by the late afternoon where we enjoyed a delightful (but expensive) pedicab ride from an old guy who described to us all the notable monuments in brisk English before taking us to the famous Raffles hotel.

The charming statues that were distributed along the riverbank depicted scenes from the early days of colonization. I was struck by one showing a white man seated and pontificating to two men standing, one a Chinese man with a queue and the other a Malay in his pill box hat and sarong. The white man was identified by his name and was a Scotsman. He was described as mediating between the other two who were only identified by race. There was a smugness to this scene of a white man telling brown people how to behave that irked me just as there was a smugness to Singapore in all its tidiness.

I could see what my Asian based friends meant when they said that the city lacked sex appeal. Singapore felt more like an arranged marriage between the British sense of orderliness and the Asian entrepreneurial exuberance.

I had had some experience of this British directed sensibility. My book had been produced by an award-winning design firm, based in Singapore. The art director, Andrew, was a personable Englishman who charmed me immediately by complementing me on my writing ability. Our conference calls were accompanied by a staff of Chinese sounding names, women mostly who rarely spoke. We were getting along swimmingly until the day we set out to discuss what scenes of the book should be illustrated.

The most dramatic part of the book involved a séance with a homemade Quijia board, which was how my mother had described it. The game also had a Thai name which translates roughly to Spirit of the Glass in which a spirit is summoned and questions are asked. It was a pivotal scene and, I felt, an obvious one to illustrate. As I described the event Andrew stopped me and said that, as a Christian, he objected to the use of the occult and he wouldn't want to subject his staff, some of whom were Muslim, to having to work with such material either. Nor did he recommend that his clients use any symbols that might be found objectionable by religious groups.

I was so stunned by the raising of religious issues in a business context, not to mention an artistic one, I felt out of my depth to defend myself. I had no feel for what it was like to live with such clear divisions of ethnic and religious boundaries. If the way to maintain peace in Malaysia was to carefully erase anything that might offend, then I would have to live with it. In the end, the illustration we settled on was a lie. It substituted the homemade letters and glass for a table flying over the heads of the participants. This never actually occurred (though it did seem to capture the spirit of the event).

The discussion raised an obvious question for me. How did such easily offended religious people, including this art director, feel about an author who was openly gay? No one on the design committee seemed to care about that or any text I penned as long as the graphics weren't controversial, so I never brought it up.

When I was interviewed, by the two reporters in KL, I did wonder if an openly gay author was unusual in Malaysia if less so in Singapore. When the piece came out in the Sun, it pointedly mentioned my homosexuality as one of the skeletons in my family closet, even though my book had almost no gay content and what was there was about identity and was hardly a revelation.

"It makes the book seem racier than it is," commented Han when he sent me the article.

I chuckled the whole way through reading it feeling a bit scandalized myself seeing how I looked in the context of Asia. I had been sensationalized into a passionate truth-telling, lesbian doomer, describing how being gay was the source of my motivation to write freely while nothing at all was mentioned about my quest to understand my biracial and cultural heritage—the real motivation for my writing the book. The reporter did seem to admire my determination to be my own person so I forgave him missing the story of the book.

The Muslim presence in KL and Singapore, graphically illustrated by the head to toe black burkah, did speak volumes about the choices some Malaysian women had made regarding freedom of expression. The reporter had picked out the most "American" aspects of my life from my non-academic career as a professional organizer and handywoman to my desire to be "free of societies expectations" by coming out so young as a gay person. In the context of the goal of Asian people to blend into the identity of the group, preferably at the highest status possible, my quest to tell all, despite possibly bringing shame to my family, would be as exotic as their burkahs were to me. My quest to understand cultural differences and learn where I belonged in the world was not nearly as compelling even as a person of a mixed marriage.

Our taxi driver to the airport was eager to expound on how there was no racism in Singapore because they had all gone to school together. I had heard the same from a Chinese friend from high school now living in Singapore.

Walking through the city I could see why it would be such a pleasure for my American friends doing business here. All the rules were cut and dry and well enforced. Much effort had been put into a homogenous and well-run infrastructure. Civic life and public space blended seamlessly into private enterprise. Plus Singapore was considered one of the safest cities in Asia.
Economic stability for the majority, I felt, was the key to such civility. Journalists, eager to pinpoint ethnic violence inspired by religious fundamentalism, all but ignore details of economic injustice. I had learned to be suspicious of any headline calling attention to ethnic strife. If the journalist had any integrity at all, deep in his article I would find references to a factory closure causing a strike that pitted one group against another or government mismanagement leading to one ethnicity being favored over another.

Singapore had attempted to raise all boats with government subsidized housing wiping out old neighborhoods that might be considered poor. Gone with them were the old communities in favor of high-rise "pigeon hole" apartments.

The emphasis on public civility has been made famous by the caning incident. There were even tourist T-shirts sharing the joke along the lines of "I went to Singapore and all I got was a lousy caning".

When I came upon a sign forbidding the riding of a bicycle through a pedestrian underpass with a fine of 1,000 Singapore dollars I understood the effectiveness of stiff punishment. It made me nervous that I might inadvertently trigger some fine, jaywalking or something. I was happy to be returning to the relative chaos of Bangkok. There was something a little too perfect about Singapore.

Singapore set an example that Bangkok seemed to aspire to. The new underground train in Bangkok was exactly the same design as the one in Singapore and I saw signs promising stiff fines for smoking in restaurants and drinking alcohol in the civil registry office, but somehow those prohibitions seemed appropriate. Bangkok needed a few more restrictions while Singapore gave me the sense that nothing unexpected could be allowed to happen.
That, perhaps, was it's missing sex appeal.