A little is a lot better than none

And it is this philosophy (the title) that makes me write something, thought I don't have time for anything long, well planned, or properly edited. Hello dear friends, Romans, and countrymen. I think of many of you often with love, and wish I could sit and have tea and crumpets with you in person.

Graduate school is (and this should come as no surprise) a huge quantity of reading and homework. I was behind and am now finally almost caught up. However I'm saying goodbye to my Manhatten SSE students, which means about 10 hours of driving and taking the train, all told, to get there from Keene, New Hampshire and back again. 

I also needed to switch out the car I was using (my dad's Subaru) for my car (my mom's old car) and pick up any stuff that I'd wished I'd had over the last few weeks. In any case, travel is not just a lot of time, it's also a lot of energy, so I've got to make good use of this trip, since I don't know how often I'll be able to make it. Especially since this crazy semester is going to be the LIGHTEST one. It will be fine, I just need to reacquaint and refine my somewhat disused academic skills and get better at doing a 'good enough' job on projects that are less important. Without a time-turner it is the only way I can figure out. I've been learning all this time, but the way you learn in school is different and much more paper heavy than the way you learn in real life.

Which is interesting and perhaps something I should note, as a future teacher.

Much love to you all. Here is a picture of a very cute cat in the bed of some friends I met in New York.

^_^

Isaac

Rain Day

This post is going to be longer than it should be. It needs to be super short, because I have MONDO amounts of work to do. In general, and in specific, tonight and tomorrow morning. Graduate school is a lot of work, especially until I find the right balance of skimming to comprehension.

Anyhoo, on to the story.

My old car (now in the hands of a good friend.) seemed to have a curse associated with it: Whenever I would forget to roll up the windows, it would rain. The frequency and correlation if this ended up making some of the inner paneling fall off, the glue molded away from all the times it got wet right by the windows.

At first I was angry, thinking the universe was taunting me, but I quickly decided to look at it more as a playful and harmless prank. The universe trying to make my life a little more interesting and funny. At some point, I realized it worked so well, that I would occasionally leave my windows open on purpose, when there was a bad drought going on, to tease the rain out, so to speak. It always made me laugh, of often and quickly it seemed to work. (though it would often wait just long enough that I was distracted and the car got nicely wet.

Eventually I learned my lesson and rarely to never left the windows down, even during hot days.

Just tonight though, I was thinking about this power my car seemed to have, and how where I'm living now has been going through a drought. Perhaps one of it's worst in recorded history. The tree's were starting to suffer and show bad signs. There was a newspaper article about the leaves turning for fall, more prematurely than ever before, because of the drought. So, I decided to bring the rain. Or at least give it a shot.

Kind of like some kind of modern rain dance ceremony, I purposefully left the car window down (not my old car anymore, one I was borrowing from my parents.) the fact that the car would get kind of wet seemed like the sacrifice made, the lowering of the window was the ritual. Then I forgot about it, and went to work on my massive pile of reading. And then,  just now, I heard rain, for the first time since I'd moved there. I quickly went down, to close the car window (don't worry dad, it was only open a little bit for a short time) and, with a prayer that it keep raining even though I was closing the windows, I rolled them back up. (generally, the longer my windows were down in the rain before I rolled them up, the heavier the rain.)

I don't have a good explanation for why that happened.

I'm kind of entertained at the thought that people who don't believe in a benevolent intelligence to the universe (which I call God) could probably do some math and prove that it was just probability and my brain seeing patterns where there weren't any.

It's amazing to me how flexible the universe seems to be. For the most part, you can have wildly different world views, and the universe allows you to keep believing the one you want.

In any case, as far as I'm concerned, It's magic, and it's the universe acting like a playful puppy, as it sometimes does. Though that still doesn't really describe the why. It feels like there is an underlying order to it, but what it is, I can't grasp, and don't have the tools to experiment and figure it out quickly. But it is one of my long-term goals.

OK, that's all I have time for and more. Graduate school is teaching me what it's like to repeatedly be unable to finish all my homework satisfactorily. Hopefully this next week will be better since I've got more time and more of an idea of how long it takes. (and more of an idea of what level of textual analysis is expected.)

See ya  ^_^
I

Packing

Lots of packing.



I'm moving to Keene New Hampshire tomorrow. There are explosions of my stuff everywhere throughout the house. There's barely room for me to walk across my own room. I desperately want to spend time discarding/donating stuff I do not need, now that everything is in one place so I can use the KonMari tidying-up method, but there's just not time.

Moving is stressful and time and energy intensive. And I do it alot. I'm trying to apply part of the advice an expert India traveler gave me about traveling through India successfully: "Don't think about it too hard."

So I'm fighting my desire to make everything neat and plan for every eventuality. Instead, I'm just making sure I have all the things I know I'll need plus plenty of extra pairs of underwear. If I want something and don't have it, I'll just make do until I've got a chance to go back home.

I hope to get back to some kind of normal posting routine soon. Heck, I hope to get back to some type of normal routine, period, soon. All this crazy traveling leads to disrupted routines and less work getting done. But that's just it's own set of lessons and challenges I suppose. It's easy to perform under the settings you practiced in, it's much more difficult to perform under substantially different settings, but the only way to learn how is to practice.

That's all and more for now. Originally I was just planning on having the title and the first sentence.

Take care, be well, remember to laugh.
Isaac

In the Interim

I'm sorry for the lack of posts. I'm in what I think of as nega time these day, wherein I have two or more things I should really be doing at any given moment. This is going to continue for a while. While it does, any posts that do happen will likely be very short. 

Thankfully I found some some amazing scratch graffiti on an air dryer in a rest stop bathroom on my drive out to Fairfield Iowa (and even as I write this I'm already another 12 hours away in Colorado, and 3 more to go this morning. After which I will likely be out of cell phone coverage and Internet access.)

Anyhoo, I hope this makes your day like it made mine:

(If you're having trouble reading that it says "push button, receive bacon."

FX

So much to do, so much to learn.

This evening, coming home from a walk, I saw what looked like some mystical humanoid figure squatting by the edge of a stone fence. It was hard to make out if it was more than just an unlikely stone or tree stump, but I got the distinct impression of someone intently watching in my direction, their face lit up by the setting sun. As I continued to walk up my driveway, I got my answer. A young fox hopped down from the end of the stone fence that it had been sitting on, watching the sun set, and danced across the lawn into deeper foliage.

I stood still and watched--but not too closely. You have to watch wild animals out of the corner of your eye or they get nervous and hide. It frolicked through the brush and then walked down the street for a bit, and I got to just stand there and watch a young red fox right out in the open for a minute or so. Then it seemed to be lying down, and though, again, it was too far away to see clearly, it looked like it was just begging to have its belly rubbed. And then, a second suspicion I'd had was confirmed. A second young fox burst out of the foliage, chasing the first one across the road and into more forest.

And this whole story starts many months back, when I saw a large, older red fox, from my upstairs window, walk right up to the side of my house. It seemed like it had an unusually big belly, and I wondered, and hoped, that it was a mother fox, pregnant with cubs (pups? I'm not sure the correct word.) But who was I to say? It's not like I'd seen any foxes up close like that before. Yet it seems my intuition was right.

It seems my intuition is right more and more often these days.

I'm happy. Foxes are rare. And they make me happy. It's a sign of a healthy forest. On the other hand, the thoughts in my head, as I was walking up towards my fateful fox encounter, were of how long the sleepy road my parent's house was on would remain sleepy. How long before it started getting more developed. How long before the bulldozers came. And it wasn't an idle thought either. My extended family owns land here. Is there anything I can do, anything I can say, to keep the land wild? To keep it from being made ugly and sterile?

And how silly, the idea of ownership of land. Who owns the land? Well, the foxes are living there right now. Doesn't that mean they own it? What gives us the right to kick them out? Can't we try living there--if we're going to live there--in a way that doesn't make the land inhospitable to the family of foxes?

Can't is the wrong word. I know it's possible. I know we can. Sustainable living plus primitive skills knowledge: it is possible. There are many examples in indigenous cultures. The real question is, will we? No, the real question is, what will I do?

It is a haunting question.

Sorry if this post is a bit janky folks. No time for a nice deep edit. As I said at the beginning (and this will have to serve as the bookend of this oddly shaped piece) I have much to do, and small time to do it in.

I will leave you with a cryptic observation that I currently classify under "speculative theory with strong supporting evidence.":

Good character is the doorway to miracles.


-IO

I'm Back!

Livin' it large in America again, the land of clean water and food and insanely excessive consumption and spending. I look forward to being about to eat uncooked food again, and not having to worry about being ripped off more than the standardized amount.

I shall miss the unbelievable natural beauty, and the main ashram I visited, who's genuine lack of interest in making money off me unfortunately makes it a remarkable anomaly.

I have had many an adventure and consider it my responsibility to share some of that with you guys, but for now I shall just say hello and send my love.

-I Out

India... Kicking My Butt

Perhaps I forgot to mention this: I'm in India from the 7th of this month until the 27th. Meaning yes, I've already been here for a while. This post will be short because I have no computer and am touch typing.

Minor heatstroke yesterday, general dehydration, almost constant mild stomach upset that threatens to become worse any time I don't eat carefully and lightly. Achy, hands beginning to flake and peal in what looks like a horrible skin disease but is probably just from washing my hands a lot.

During the two nights I was in Bangalore I was ripped off for taxi fare with smiling faces. Lesson: stay in medium nice hotels, not really nice hotels. The hotel had their own taxi service that was fine, but about twice as expensive as it should be. And they wouldn't recommend me a normal outside taxi service.

The ashram seems to be the only place without a clueless foreigner tax.

And my whole reason for staying the extra day in Bangalore was totally fruitless, I could have done it all from my computer at home, rather than the hours and hours of driving at double price to try and get a Nadi leaf reading in person.

Also, sore throat, probably from one of the many people coughing on me.

So, India 367, me 0

The ashram has been super nice though, spiritually and generally. Even the Bangalore excursion was full of learning lessons. But I dread the attempt to not be ripped off looking for a driver in Uttarkhand. I've tried to do research online ahead of time, I've tried asking people for any reliable people they know in the area. Nothing so far. I'm left at the mercy of the hotel I'm staying at when I get to Pantnagar. 

I'm rooming with a really cool 20 year old who's done tons of travel in India over his lifetime. And his advice was "just don't think about it too much, and do what the locals do."

I think this is a fascinating insight into him, but probably would get me hospitalized.

But I think it is a good idea to trust the journey and just stay open to whatever is coming my way. I had no plans to go to India at all this year, I was kind of strongly nudged into it all, I'm really just putting my trust in the universe like I always do when it nudges me strongly in a direction. My only concern is that I may not have listened carefully enough. 

Though the ashram part has definitely been worth the cost of admission. Phyisical debilitation included.