Right now I am in a hotel next to Portland International Airport, or PDX, as we call it. I have been a bit silent about my plans, because its better to surprise with success than disappoint with failure. I flew into Portland Monday, spent three days here, and am leaving tomorrow. Updates on that will be happening soon.
I am forty five years old. Part of the reason for doing things now is that I am afraid that in the coming years, I will hit a wall where my body will be seriously too tired for travelling. As opposed to now, where I complain about being old, but still feel basically as functional as I did twenty years ago, if not more so. I don't feel any older. The stairs just feel more painful. And as it is, I can still chase the liminal state of chasing new things. I was in this same hotel a year ago, by the airport, and when I reentered, I wondered what I had done in the past year. One thing about liminal states is they always have an air of the very normal, next to an air of everything changing. There is nothing more standard than an airport Super 8, but every time I am in one, things are going to change.
In the past few days, I was staying with a friend, who I started studying martial arts with in 1997. Also the friend who, four years later, in May of 2001, would seriously start me on the road to E2. (I had started an account a few months before but had given up on it). It helped me remember how the initial elation of things like martial arts and the internet, that had seemed so transcendental in my teens and twenties, that had given me the idea that I was going to find the key to life, the universe and everything have, over the years, aged and mellowed into a deeper understanding of how awareness has grown us as a community. Also an awareness of what all the "old timers" were talking about, back in the day. Being able to finally be part of a network of deep connections. I do have deep connections with certain communities in Portland. Two ironic things about that: I actually haven't lived in Portland since 2009, and have, by necessity, been removed from that community. While I've lived in Corvallis, Oregon for some of that time, I spent a lot of it far afield, from Montana to Chile. I never pictured myself a nomad, it just kind of happened. And the second ironic thing: while I have felt myself and those around me growing in wisdom, and I have seen in some ways the fruits of the philosophies I embraced so enthusiastically as a young person come true, I have also seen the very opposite of wisdom. To see so much personal wisdom and richness interposed with a society that has shamelessly rejected those things is beyond confusing to me. But right now, that doesn't bear talking about.