I did not come here to feel safe

Summer is the time for me to go around and learn, gain inspiration and make steps. This one was, again, fruitful, with the two main events being the NVC training in Germany in July and the Warrior of the Heart training in Belgium in August. And I guess it will take me months to really digest it all.

One of the strongest realizations for me from the Warrior of the Heart training came while we were practising with our swords and under guidance of our sensei Bob Wing. We were not only practising delivering a perfect cut with the sword, with full presence and centre, but also receiving a cut, a strike. It was about actively engaging rather than passively receiving. Actively meeting rather than hiding away in fear. Never be a victim but rather, with full presence, meet, engage, accept and co-create. Never be a victim of circumstances, of life. Which does not mean you want to win anybody over, of course.

Through the practice I have felt that something important was there to understand about my life, but it did not dawn on me until Bob shared a short story with us about an incident at one of his previous workshops. They were sitting and sharing in a circle and a conflict happened between a few of participants. Many harsh words were being said and finally a couple of participants said they did not feel safe enough in that environment and stated they were going to walk away from the workshop. At the moment of a heavy silence that occurred, a man stood up and said: “I do not know about you, but I know about me that I did not come here to feel safe! I came here to engage and to learn through experiences, be it nice or not so nice.”

At the moment of hearing this, the realization hit me so strongly that I had to gasp for air.

Yes, I also did not come here, to this life, to this existence of mine, in order to all the time seek shelter, to hide and to try to be safe, to feel safe. By no means! It would be a complete waste of my life. No way!

I am here to have a full intercourse with life, with the existence, and not to masturbate somewhere alone in a safe closet. I am here to experience it all, with all its aspects, all successes and failures, all ups and downs, all the good things and the bad things, all acceptances and rejections. I am here to experience it all fully, steadily, readily, actively. With full presence. This is what means being fully alive and this is what brings the meaning to it.

To hell with this search for safety; I know this would not be something to be proud of at the last hours of my life. But the fullness of my existence, the full life, yes, this is something that I feel will give me peace in my heart.

I am not sure whether I remember every word of the poem correctly, but this is what I can recollect and what inspires me tremendously.

I am proud of my scars,

because they show I have lived.

I am proud of my wounds,

because they prove I am still alive.

I am proud of the spaces between,

because they mean I still have a reason to live.

The Hunt for Mona Lisa

A few years back I carried out a small-scale ethnographic research on the question to what extent are tourists genuinely interested in historical monuments and art pieces, after they have made the effort to travel far to see them. My observations were rather entertaining, but also thought provoking.

While sitting for hours at a tourist historical attraction, I observed that most of the tourist seemed predominantly bored by the monuments and historical sites they were visited and lacked a genuine interest for what they were visiting. A tour guide on one site told me that the first questions at the beginnings of guided visits to the site was usually: “How long is this going to last?” It seemed that tourist felt they just had to do it, to tick it off the list so they could, without guilt, retreat back to their beers, hotels, shopping, beaches…

But the entertaining part was to observe the choreography of a typical visit, for instance at the archaeological site. Nearly all parties carried a photo or a video camera – in most cases men were using them, sometimes women, but never both. On the other hand, women were as a rule carrying and studying the map of the site. The standard procedure for the couple at the site was that, after reaching an individual monument, men would take couple of photographs or video shots while women would study the map and try to locate their position on it. After both, the photographer and the navigator, completed their tasks, a tiny satisfaction could be observed on their faces; they looked around for a moment, seemingly trying to figure out what more was there to do at the spot, and than continued to the next monument.

In extreme cases the camera person was continuously making video recordings throughout all the journey around the site, with the navigator quietly leading the way and briefly pausing at the monuments.

So, men definitely looked like hunters, shooting down every single trophy at least half a dozen times, while women supported and lead them, did some intellectual and parenting work… Pretty archetypical. And, oh boy, were there many nervous conflicts to be observed.

So, this time I visited Louvre in Paris because of my daughter mainly (I have visited it before, in a much less crowded time of the year) and while finding our way through the crowd…

…I was automatically continuing with my observations. So here are people worshipping the Mona Lisa…

…and then the Venus.

So, this leads me back to the question: “Why travel?”

A community?

Not long ago I was whining over a lack of a community, yet just this morning I realized that this interaction with beautiful people through blogging actualy does seems like a small community forming out. Over past months I have met and connected with wonderful and inspiring people that I otherwise would never know even existed. And if this process continues, and I see no reason why it wouldn’t, perhaps I will meet some of you sometime, in flesh, and, well, this is really great. And yes, it is a community.

I am packing my van again and will be off, this time with my daughter Lucija, to Paris and afterwards to Belgium for an Aikido training that we will take together. And though I am really looking forward to this special trip with my daughter, I am already missing you guys. Really.

So, be well and see you (khm!) in about two weeks.

Beautiful things still do happen

As I already have expressed many times in this blog, especially in The terrifying lightness of denial and Is life really all that beautiful?, I am gradually perceiving and facing the horrible amounts of pain and suffering in this world and along with this and with my age the eagerness to save the world I once had, is slowly dying out. And the depression and apathy are creeping in.

But, occasionally, there are strong sun rays that break through the clouds and this growing shell of my pessimism, and here is one of them.

This is something I was presented two days ago and no matter how many times I watch it, it keeps always opening up my heart and filling my eyes with tears. Yes, there are beautiful things that still do happen and yes, sometimes they are being brought about by a very commercial things as well.

As one of my fellow bloggers said, the producers of this show perhaps this one time went to sleep with a warm feeling that they have actually enabled something beautiful to occur.

Do not have children

Observing a family with two small kids, setting up a tent next to our camper during our short adrenaline vacation in Slovenian mountains (rafting, high ropes, canyoning, paragliding, bungee – verdict: canyoning most enjoyable, bungee most terrifying, paragliding possible future), I remembered a post by my blogging friend Robin Easton on how families with small children are often being looked down upon and avoided in camps, everybody fearing that their vacation is going to be disturbed. So, I immediately decided to not fall into this trap (as I actually even vowed to in my comment to Robin’s post) and be positive and open towards them.

But, oh boy, did that prove to be a difficult task in the next couple of days.

Kids were about 2 and 4 and they were crying ALL THE TIME. Parents were a young and completely depressed couple, just attempting to switch kids off in the evenings, in the mornings, during the days, just to park them somewhere and have some peace of mind. Unsuccessfully. I have not seen them smile at their kids even once, never giving them a single encouraging and gentle glance, let alone any sort of touch, hug, kiss. It was basically just ordering them around and rolling their eyes when the crying started again. They never unpacked their bicycles, never brought any ball or toy or anything from the tent. Kids seemed completely lost, helpless, unhappy, confused, and parents appeared to be at the edge of sanity, worn out, disillusioned, depressed.

It was so easy to have empathy for all four of them. Yet my knowledge of their language was not good enough to do anything really and I also did not feel like jumping into any sort of rescue missions here.

This was obviously not what these two people had imagined a family life to be like – well, this is not what any parent ever desires for. A constant mutual torturing. Yet, not every family scene in the camp was like that at all. There were extremely happy families around, with laughter, play, joy, hugs and kisses, expressions of love and beauty, everybody enjoying each other and life.

I guess I am a bit pissed off by this let’s-have-kids propaganda. Photos of happy mothers with happy babies everywhere, romantic images of loving families, all the celebrities – all delighted and mystically uplifted - speaking how having kids changed their life and brought meaning to them and all of that. And then, when young couples are all crazy about each other, when their brain is temporarily out of order because of being in love, when all families are hinting them to hurry up and produce some grandchildren, yes, it is then so easy to see only the bright part of it and jump into having kids.

Yet, all too often they have no clue about the reality behind it all, the one that was so lucidly expressed in my beloved film Lost in Translation, when Bob, telling Charlotte about life and having children, says: “The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born… …Your life, as you know it… is gone. Never to return.«

So, I would like to scream to all the young future parents, please, for everybody’s sake, DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN - unless you fully understand, that:

• you actually do not have to have children. It is perfectly fine to live your life with no kids. There’s plenty of children in this world and nobody will suffer if you simply choose to not have them because you do not feel like having them.
• yes, having kids is one of the most beautiful things that can happen in life, yet it is also a very, very, very, very hard work
• once you have kids, you have them for good. You cannot change your mind. Ever.
  
• you will be fully responsible for them and your relationship with them for many, many years. No time-outs, no excuses.
• raising children will demand huge amounts of your time and energy. Therefore you will have much less time and energy for yourself and for your relationships with your spouse. This will bring about conflicts, dilemmas, problems, that right now you do not even dream of.
• raising children will ever demand changes within yourself and the relationship with your spouse. Raising children is actually not doing work on children but rather working on yourself and all the stuff that keeps coming up. You can not do a good job with your gloves and asbestos suit on. You will need to get fully naked and be willing to be influenced on a daily basis. It will change you a great deal, whether you want it or not.

But, on the other hand, it is all about the unconditional love, the beauty of life and all the magical subtle joys that will bring about the best moments of your life. There are so many of your needs that will be met and you will have a honour and a pleasure to meet so many needs of your children. And the hugs you will be getting from them will be the warmest and most sincere hugs you will ever experience. And their tiny little fingers trustingly holding your tired hand on a late afternoon walk, while sharing some basic truths of life – well, this will keep you going for centuries.

Get the motor running

Honestly, my dear friends, I have so much of the universal wisdom and secrets of life to share with you, but I just don’t find time to do it !

OK, this sounded really cool and I just had to say it. Now I feel really great. Thank you.

But the truth of the matter is that since it has been so difficult to get our teenagers anywhere lately, at least with us, boring adults, I need to grab every possible opportunity that comes up on the horizon. So, right now I am frantically getting our van ready to drive off in an hour or so, for a short adrenalin vacation: rafting, high ropes, canyoning, bungee… In case we survive, I will be back.

Until than, my dear friends:

The Question of Fatalness

What makes a certain person in our lives fatal? What makes somebody so special that our hearts melt, our minds go blank, we feel overjoyed, overwhelmed, over-everything? Why is it this person and not that one?

There are many theories about that, from very spiritual ones about soul-mates and journeys of souls and reincarnations, to very depressing psychoanalytical theories that it is actually nothing but our subconscious mind searching for the compatible persona out there, the one that will represent our father as well as our mother, the good stuff as well as the bad one, and enable us to continue with acting out whatever games and roles we have learned to interact through. And, yes, there are even more down-to-earth theories, about the chemistry in our brain, about the neurons and hormones and synapses and all that stuff.

But, what really bothers me is the same questions as Forrest Gump attempted to answer: “I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.” So, it is the question whether there is an objective fatalness or am I myself making a certain relationship a fatal one in my life, by adding certain qualities to it, be it consciously or unconsciously. Is it me choosing to open up widely and deeply to a specific person and thus experience an intense fullness of our contact and connection, or is it that there actually is, objectively, something special between us, something that is becoming alive now, overwhelming us with its energy?

If it is an objective fatalness, than life on a planet with billions of individuals really sucks. It’s like searching for a needle in a hay stack. In this case I certainly hope we do communicate also on subtle and very spiritual levels, otherwise there’s no way to find each others in one life time. On the other way, if it is us who are, by shaping our perceptions, literally creating fatal people around us in our lives…, well in that case you can just grab the first one on a street, define him or her as the fatal one, and live happily ever after.

Oh, yeah, they will need to see you as a fatal one too, so this complicates things a bit.

Anyway, be it this way or the other, I can count myself as an extremely lucky guy since I have been living with my fatal one. It settles so many questions and brings so much peace and bliss. Having your goddess, your fatal one here, around, with me, I mean, isn’t that a paradise? I can look at her, smell her, touch her, hug her, interact with her in every way, every day…

Well, I guess tomorrow it is going to be a fatal day for me, when she comes home from her business trip and reads what kind of stuff I have been posting about her on my blog.

Sounds of Silence

Today I woke up with a headache and things got worse in next two hours, so I decided to go back to bed. Lying there with a fever-like dizziness, I started to get extremely sensitive to sounds around me and everything was so irritating; the distant sound of cars, the sound of refrigerator switching on somewhere far bellow, the sound of the roof getting warmer from the sun rays and expelling some sort of cracking sounds… It was driving me crazy, but somehow I managed to relax and fall asleep for another couple of hours.

Sitting later with a cup of tea in the kitchen, feeling much better, I grabbed the new issue of the Ode magazine, the magazine for intelligent optimists (the level of my intelligence is still OK, but my optimism is definitely going downhill), and realized that it was a special issue, The Silence Issue. Reading articles about the noise pollution and the importance and the meaning of silence in our lives, it dawned on me just how much I have been suffering from the lack of silence in my life.

I guess this is why I go to Zen seshins and actually enjoy them from the first until the last second (who cares about hurting knees, just give me some silence and I will not complain…). This is why I almost don’t even listen to music in my car anymore. This is why I tend to run away from people, sit in my room alone… I need silence. It is like air and water and food for me. When I do not get enough of it, I start biting.

There is less and less of silence in our lives. Shopping music everywhere, traffic noise, TV-s turned on 24/7, everybody walking around either talking over the cell phone or with their ears stuffed with i-pod music. Couple of weeks back me and Marjeta stopped in a tiny little Albanian town, sat on a bench and enjoyed the local scene, with people outside on the stools and benches, talking to each other. And I felt something was really weird, but couldn’t tell what it was, until I realized after about ten minutes that there was no background noise at all. No cars, no music, no nothing. NOTHING! Just voices of people speaking. In the middle of a town. It was a bit spooky, but it was great too. Being in a place where just interacting was perfectly good enough, no need to stuff in more noise. It was beautiful, so pristine and primal.

So, yes, I guess I need to seriously consider this need of mine for silence, and start planning how to bring more of it back into my life.

About five years ago I attended a seminar about awareness of the body and of the moves of the body and within the body. The seminar was held by a French ex-ballet dancer, deep among the sand dunes of Moroccan Sahara. We were sleeping in improvised nomad tents and haven’t seen, for about 10 days, nothing but the dunes around us, stretching out to the horizon. I don’t know if you have an experience of what the sand dunes do to the sound and human perception of the sound, but just having been surrounded with this sound of silence for days after days, with only being able to see endless dunes and nothing less, had a tremendous impact on my perception of my existence in this time and space. At least for a whole week it was so damn clearly obvious that this life was not what it seems to be. And I completely understood an old Tuareg proverb:

God created lands full of water so people can live in

and God created the desert so people can find their souls

Why travel?

While struggling with choosing, scanning and uploading photos to my newly created travel pages, many memories from various travels came back, making me think about what has actually been making travelling so meaningful for me through all those years. Yes, it was sometimes just to relax, or to see something, or to be with somebody, or to be alone, but I guess there is much more to it than just collecting photos and souvenirs in order to show off in front of friends.

Travelling means getting my butt out of the safety zone into the less controllable environment and circumstances and, along with that, letting the life have more influence on me. Yes, it is a choice to be willing to be influenced – just as they say what the real communication is all about. To be willing to be influenced. So, by travelling I could say I am stating my willingness to be influenced by life; so that my experiences and understandings may deepen and my horizons may widen.

But, of course, this only applies to the travel that is not organized so well that I would not have to move out of my safety zone – in other words, travelling in aircon vehicles with bodyguard-like travel guides with open umbrellas…, heh, that does not count.

Even more; the less my mind likes the travelling experiences on the very spot, the more my horizons are widening right there and than. And in case I like it and feel utterly comfortable, than I guess I am missing out a big opportunity and my perception of life remains untouched.

I am not trying to say that the best way to travel is to make it intentionally an ultimately suffering event, but I am pretty much sure that what works for me is to, while travelling, seek diversity rather than similarity. Diversity can enrich me, while similarity just makes me doze off.

So, how was Albania? A bit of dozing off in similarities and a lot of challenging, enriching and heart warming differences. In simple words: it was really great. Next year we are going back there.

Yearning for a community

Yesterday I came back from a 6-day NVC training with Robert Gonzales, an event that reached very deep within me, resolved many inner dilemmas, gave me enough clarity for many future steps and inspired me in many ways. Therefore I guess there is going to be a lot of my posts here inspired by this experience.

But, parallel to the inner work at the training, the longing to live in a true community was awoken within me once again. Since the training was taking place in an eco-village, an intentional community Lebensgarten in Germany, for a week I was embedded in a physical as well as social environment that brought back pleasant memories and nourishing feelings.

I have been twice a part of an intentional community. The first one did not function as a fully residential one, but we did have a community house in an isolated spot in nature and were spending a lot of time there, working, sharing, being together. This was a beautiful time of my life and some parts of me are still mourning over it.

The second one was a permacultural intentional community in Australia, where I have spent 9 months in 1990. I was still merely a long-term guest there, though sharing a work and community life. It was definitely one of those places where the fanciness of a car never mattered a bit – and all the rest did. So unlike the modern so-called communities

Anyway, the fact of the matter is that whenever I spend some time in an intentional community, be it a holistic like The Findhorn Foundation or a very light and down-on-earth one like the RCNUWC, a strong feeling starts to wake within me, a feeling that the way I am living my life is a tragic mistake. A feeling that every cell in my body and every part of my being actually yearns for a true community life.

A life where one is embedded in a supportive environment of people with shared values and visions, where children run all over the place as “our” children, enjoying the all-present safety, where people meet and share, laugh and cry together, connect and interact on a true level… Where life is fully alive and supported by life.

And, yes, where a pristine harmony with the nature and its forces is fully present. Where the nature slowly takes over (eating up the houses like in Lebensgarten) and everybody is happy with that. And everybody can sleep like a baby. Without hearing a car or any sort of pulsating modern-life city commotion.

Now, of course, things are not entirely romantic in intentional eco communities. Egos get in the way, conflicts remain unresolved and communities do fall apart, sometimes with a lot of pain involved. Just as relationships and human lives do fall apart. Not every single one of them and not always, but yes, they do.

But I still feel this is what a human life should look like. Not being locked in a dehumanised system of working for spending, running from one shop to another, from one meaningless encounter to another, gasping for some air in between, and spending the rest of the time plugged in a LCD screen, be it a TV or a computer. Holy crap, what an existence. As my dear John Lennon said: “Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.”

Being in a phase of my life when I am reconsidering its directions and ways, I will definitely include the option of joining an intentional community in my wonderings.

Anyway, our dear van is all ready, things are more or less packed and in a couple of hours me and Marjeta will be on our way to explore Albania, perhaps one of the last resorts of a more pristine life here in Europe, not yet fully commercialised and sold out. We are so happy to be connecting with the true spirit of our dear Balkans again.