East Grove Blues

Thoughts float around in my head as I only dream of sleeping. Laying in my room, listening to the fan attempt to be a part of the outside world. Together wondering if we will ever get to here true quiet. Finally wresting my body from the floor and stumbling to my computer to spew out the words that won’t quite in my mind. May you rest in piece here and now and give me some rest before I attempt once again to sleep.

Companionship has left me as soon as it arrived. I feel like the innocent child who has created a sand castle. I admired its beauty until the first rain washed it away. I understood why it left, but it doesn’t make its disintegration any easier. Now I am left in my sand box feeling rather alone and a little vulnerable. I expressly tried to avoid this situation, but fell into my own trap. A simple crush, to joyful understanding and finally a fleeting good bye. What would the wind do? Shall I listen to it cry, because that is as close as I can get to tears about it.

Poison ivy is crawling up my ankles, begging for my attention as I try fitfully for peace. Slowly it wins over and I desperately try to find its answer. I ask for solace but it forces my hand. I dared to play with it this afternoon and now is showing its terrible anger at its own destruction. It waited seven hours before bringing its cold vengeance to bear. Waiting patiently like a spider for my mind to rush and then my feat to itch.

My pale thoughts swirl in my mind seeking retribution for my own ignorance. Old friends surface in my dreams bringing back emotions I had long since buried and forgotten. I have attached too much significance to some people and when my heart is open things that never die grow like weeds in the bright opening. I’ll stitch the pieces back together and smother what I can, if only to be able to let my mind stop shouting at me.

Does everyone lay awake at night questioning the entire fiber of their being? Do they doubt the white moon as it glides across the stars? Do they think the next twist will bring the position that will bring enough comfort to sleep another night? I had hoped to go to bed early, but here I am again feeling wistful and silly as my mind wanders across the sky.

Trust no words, for words are nothing but air. Their meaning is twisted and flies away at the first breeze. We make words so we can communicate, but we end up confusing ourselves even further. We loose ourselves in our words and believe it is truth. The only truth Is. You can ask the trees if you know how. They can tell you without words. If only we could do that.

Time seems to fly by, and my ability to write seems to have flown as well. In my typical fashion I have gone from writing to much to not enough. These gaps in my life are hard to recreate, and I will defer the job to some sad angel in heaven who might have that task. In short, my life is up and down, and perhaps even a little side to side.

I have found tremendous joy in the act of scything. I couldn’t explain it all to you, but I can at least give a try. Imagine moving your whole body in a single fluid motion, while swinging a beautiful piece of steel, iron and ash to the soft sounds of it cutting blades of grass. It is the same joy I get from running, swimming and yoga. It is body, breath and no mind. You are just there, with the task before you and all that you have accomplished behind you, and yet there is only the cut. It is a work in spiritual attainment that I can never reach when I try to meditate or pray. When your done you feel like you have done something worth while. The smell of fresh cut grass and clover reach your nose in the most pleasant of fashions. You are sweaty, happy and tired.

I have thrown all cation to the wind and started running again. My internal bits be damned. I am tired of being careful, fearful and all around lethargic. Can you tell a dog not to chase a rabbit? And if that dog is trained how happy is it truly? I have chosen the only way I know how to get better. I choose to will it into existence. It could just be an act of futility, but at this point I have little to loose. I will just get better, there is no other choice. I will be me and nothing else.

Family keeps me awake at night in a futile sort of way. I know things will get better, but it will take time. All I can do is hope, hope for all of us for something better than what we have. Family has also made me intensely happy as well. Future plans are coming together and decisions are being made. I have spent too much time looking far down the road and not towards next year. I sincerely believe things will fall into the place they need to. They always have in the past…

Which leaves me in a sort of bewildered befuddlement. If only I could explain it better. The moment right now while I wait for dinner and have done my chores for the day.

This last couple of weeks have been interesting to say the least.

I won’t go into much details but a Grandfather of mine passed away. It made for a tough weekend and some very sad days. I never ‘lost it’ but I wasn’t in a good place. There is this tangled ball of emotion that I just don’t know how to deal with very well. I know it is there, but it is hard to access. Emotions like that like to hide on me. Africa, Van Allen and even some frustrations from Japan just sit inside me with no where to go. I don’t think they fester or get worse and in fact time seems to help a lot.

On top of that I still have medical issues I am dealing with. It is such a pain and so frustrating. I eat well and I don’t sit all day. I am usually moving most of the time these days, just not with the intensity of last year. I should be in great shape but there is this thing holding me back and so far the doctors have been baffled. I have another appointment tomorrow. Let’s hope they find out at least something this time.

So this leads me to have both sorrow and frustration in my life. Which is mixed with a lot of joy, because I am working outside and surrounded by really good people. I am having so much fun at Sandhill and learning so much. Nothing like feeling a dozen different emotions at once to really confuse the old mind up something fierce.

The good news is that I am bursting with music. I have written three songs with another melody line that needs a little more work. So far one of the songs has words and it is just an awesome song. I can’t wait to play it for my brother and dad tomorrow when I stop by the farm for the afternoon. I think I will keep one of the songs as an instrumental and see if I can’t find some words for the other ones.

I laugh when I think about when all my music comes to me at the moment. There has been a lot of rain so I have been doing work inside. One of the tasks I have taken on is to fill bottles with Sorghum. Well it takes a minute or two, depending on the jar, to fill up. At first I listened to my ipod but then I brought my banjo out and have been playing that while I fill jars. I took a tedious job and turned it into my music time. I think I will call my first album Sorghum Muse. I also have some other titles, Dreams of Africa and Japanese Backbeat. Now I just need to write some more songs.

My my last day of work has come and gone, and while I am sad to say good bye to my students and fellow teachers, I am very happy to be done with teaching for the moment. Teaching is a lot of fun, but it is also exhausting. I came away almost everyday drained and tired. That means that I put my all into what I was doing, which made me a fairly decent teacher I believe, but I didn’t have enough time to recuperate. By the end of the week I would wake and drag myself out of bed. Not because I hated what I was doing, but because I was still tired and wanted more sleep.

Some people are gifted with boundless energy. Some people can feed of the energy of others. I draw my energy from myself. I can get a boost from an energetic class, but only while I am around the kids. As soon as it ends I crash. On friday I got out of class and shamelessly fell asleep in a chair in the teacher’s room. A lot of time all I need is that nap. When I woke up a half hour later I was ready to go and play again. I just needed that time to recharge.

It has been a great time. I have learned that I do love to teach, but I want to do it on my own terms and by my own schedule. I somehow need to figure out how I can teach Yoga part time and work with trees on the farm. If I can do that than I could perhaps have found a little heaven on earth. So that is what I am working on right now.

Today is my last day of teaching Yoga here in Japan. I asked my students if they wanted to have a party or do yoga. They all said they wanted to do Yoga. That made me ridiculously happy. It seems most everyone’s favorite pose is happy baby pose. I could speculate as to why that is, but I will let your imagination fill it in. It will be hard to say good bye to my Yoga students. I feel bad leaving them without a teacher. I hope they continue on their own or move over to the Tai Style Yoga class on friday.

Wednesday will be hard as well. It is my last music night in Miyako. I have had a great time playing with the Ramblers and my voice has noticeably improved over the last year. I am starting to find my own voice, the one that is unique to everyone. I will keep singing until I have it down and being the lead singer in a band has been invaluable to me. In some ways it will be the hardest to say good bye to the Ramblers. They are like family to me.

I have been a bit hesitant lately to write much after my last debacle. For a while I was posting changes/feelings and everything under the sun every single day. I feel like I was taking it too far so I have scaled back to safer things like dreams. Last nights dreams were wild though and I would not post them on the internet for casual reading.

I am waiting right now before I report in detail on my health and my sleeping patterns. In short they are slowly improving. I don’t want to say much more than that in case something horrible happens. I find that if I report one day that things are fine, than the next day they will go to hell and then I will feel like a liar. That makes me feel worse.

Mostly though I just spent to much time obsessing about myself and it’s every detail and not really enjoying life very much. I have said that before so I will leave it at that.

I really like food and I missed it greatly.

I have desided to stop trying any more diets for the moment. They are just not for me. I like food, real food, too much and to give anything up just seems silly to me now. It was a good experience, if anything to get me eating meat again, and so I can’t rail against it. In fact the paleo diet did exactly as promised in many ways. I felt stronger and fitter than ever before, I lost fat and my exercise program improved greatly. The down side was the cost of my mental stability. The diet made me moody and rather depressed. Not because of the food, but the lack of it. I couldn’t eat the things that I love to eat and I had to watch everything that I did eat to make sure it was ’safe’. That stressed me out more often than not and that can make a person more unhealthy than the food.

So here I am, back to square one. Hopefully a little wiser, but more likely not. I have to tack this on to all the other things I have tried and ended up discarding after obsessing about them. The list now stands at: Politics, religion (multiple times), exercise and diet (twice). I have to apologize to all the folks that I preached to about the evils of this and that. If it gets bad again someone has to tell me shut up!

I am blessed to have a family that has been their for me and has done just that several times. They always seem to say the right thing at the right time to shake me out of my stupor. I really do need people to help me come back to reality. Sometimes I start taking the world I create in my head and move it into the world that I am living in. That is not a good thing and leaves me and others hurt. I think I have said it before, but I get lost in my head.

This time I need to be weary of the internet. I tried finding solutions to my problems and ended wandering down a rabbit hole. The hole always had a solution, but it was far away and you kept having to give things up to get there. I feel like I have come out of the maze of roses just in time to head home and begin new things.

There are some positive changes that have occurred because of my little journey. I am no longer exercising like a crazy man for three or four hours a day. I am taking time off and relaxing more. I am eating more meat. When I am eating a balanced meal I don’t feel hungry afterwards. During my trek into vegetarian/vegan land I was always hungry, and paleo world caused the same thing. Now I am eating and when I am done I am full and happy. This also means that I probably eat a bit less and that is ok as well. (That might be wishful thinking though)

The point of this rambling is two fold. Don’t trust any diet with a name and if I am acting stupid I need people to tell me I am stupid.

I have been using this website as a sounding board for all that goes on in my head, what I believe at the moment, and a way to express myself without having to send gobs of e-mails to everyone. If you want to read it, you know where to find it. I like that approach to things because it doesn’t bog down people with e-mails they feel that they should read or feel guilty for not reading.

I find it amusing that I say that I hate it when I rant, and yet I feel like that is all I have done. Talking about one subject or another, it all comes back to my wholly uneducated opinion. I have felt rather foolish the last few days really. Mostly because I like to make broad statements about my intentions that I am completely incapable of doing. I know my limits, but I can also be blinded by idea’s.

Honestly I think I have spent too much time bottled up with my own thoughts and those of the internet that I have lost sight on something as simple as my own happiness. The internet can be amazing, but you can find anything to support an idea that you have. That can be gratifying for yourself, but it might not be the best thing for you to do. I have spent to much time worried about health and food that I ended up most likely making myself unhealthy. Much like last year when I spent so much time trying to run more that I made it impossible to run at all by hurting myself.

To keep this from becoming a rambling on all the things that I have done poorly I will try to condense it to one sentence. “I have spent too much time doing and not enough time just being.” Time to myself the last few weekends has really shown me that I need some time for more reflection to keep myself from going down the crazy slippery path that I was heading down. As always though, I’ll just have to see what will happen.

It is around sixty degrees today and sunny. It feels like spring and that is happiness. It has been a rather long and cold winter so far and any hint at spring makes me feel better. It could still snow in march, or even as late as april, but god willing it won’t. It is supposed to be warm for the rest of the week. The best part is that tomorrow I only have one class and the rest of the day I can spend walking around my middle school. I plan to hike up a mountain and enjoy the fantastic weather.

I hope spring brings with it better feelings. It has been a dark winter with a lot of dark thoughts. I have been on an emotional streak since november and I am ready for a level playing field. Feeling better is just a hope though, but sometimes that is all a person needs to get better. There is some truth to positive thinking and the body can do some pretty amazing things. I will wait and see as patiently as I can, and continue to hope for some better days and happier feelings.

I lost my appetite for a couple of days. That is a strange thing for me. I am used to being hungry, in fact, it feels odd when I am not. I thought about putting more food in my belly, but there was no desire, so I resisted the thought. My brain kept telling me it was time to eat more, but my body just kept saying no. I regained my appetite last night and today it has been going strong again. I almost wonder if I haven’t been sick or something. I don’t feel sick in any way and haven’t had a cold in over in a year.  My body likes to do strange things at times though. I feel like a spectator just waiting to see what will happen next.

So I keep doing research on the internet. It is so weird. I will read one report and then read a different one that says the exact opposite thing. For example one will say eat tofu and then another will cast it as the devil and must be avoided. I really do think there is something for everyone. The most important thing I have learned is to just experiment and see what works and what does not. The other day I tried some fatty pork and that was a huge mistake. It was badness for several hours. On the hand lean pork heart is fine. I wish I could get my hands on some grass fed beef from the farm and see how that works in my GI track. Hopefully I will find out soon enough.

In four weeks I will be getting on a plane and heading for home. Perhaps by then it will have stopped snowing in Iowa as well and spring will be following. I can’t wait to see the progression of flowers in the timber again. It is such a beautiful thing and the best part is that after/during the flowers there are mushrooms to eat. Glorious mushrooms! It is truly spring when I start thinking about a ‘mess a’ rooms’ in the skillet.

So monday night is typically movie night for me. Tonight’s showing was No Impact Man. It was a really well done and informal movie about a family trying to leave as little as possible for an entire year. You can read about it yourself and I would recommend the movie.

I have a lot of thoughts on it at the moment. I think the biggest thing for me is to shop as locally as you can, eat seasonally and responsibly.  Those are terribly broad statements and just saying them doesn’t change anything about anyone. They make a really good point in the movie though, if you can change yourself than perhaps others will follow your example. Just be sure that your being a good example. Which I am not seemingly more times than not. I am learning that slowly at the moment. I get on my rants, but who is to say that I am right. I think I am, but I am often not and as frustrating as that is for me, it must be even more so for my friends and family. Who wants to listen to some kid talk about health and make them feel horrible about themselves. It’s better just to do and let others make up their own minds. I know I learned that in the Peace Corps, but here I am relearning it again. I am not sure why I don’t learn these lessons better, or why I have to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. One of these days I will get it right.

I think in the end of the movie they really learned to balance their lives between modernity and green living. I honestly believe that to move forward as people we need to find that balance like they did. If we can then there is hope yet and I choose to believe in that hope.

The food looked so good. I miss cheese and I would love a loaf of bread right now. I’ve been having mixed results on my current experiment. Some days I feel really good and some days I feel awful. Like most people I want results right away, but I know it can takes months for real change to occur. I have to remember to be patient. The hardest thing for me right now is the quality of food that I can get. Food in Japan is amazing, and while I am fairly sure it is grown close by, I am not sure what they put on it. I know where the fish is coming from, but I don’t know where any other meat is, or what they are feeding it. That is frustrating. I could be switching my diet around to eat better, only to find out that I am eating worse things because of what they put in/on it. They also wrap everything in plastic. I hate plastics, it’s such a huge waste. What ever happened to clothe bags?

I am looking forward to getting home and being able to grow my own food and to talk to the other farmers about how they raise their crops/animals. I am just looking forward to coming home.

I will end on something I rarely will ever mention. Wisdom from the TV. Yes I said the TV.  A long time ago when I spent hours in front of the idiot box I saw an episode of King of the Hill where Hank, the main character, had some trouble with passing his food. He went to the doctor and they tried all sorts of different diets and medications and nothing worked. Eventually he got fed up and went back to his normal eating habits and everything went back to normal. He didn’t have any more problems. I feel like Hank at the moment. I keep trying different things to make myself better, but perhaps I am just causing more problems.

I’ll just have to see how it goes.

I was staring out of my window when three large crows attacked a hawk. The hawk flew away out of site. One crow returned and then so did the hawk. It flew around in my field of vision for several seconds then disappeared off to the right. For the next minute the hawk, now alone, flew in and out of my field of view.