To Each their Own...

Due in part to my years spend within the traditional academic system, I hold a deep value and reverence for knowledge, and those that possess and share it. I still derive some vague sense of pride from the fact that I received a catalog from Harvard my junior year of high school, never mind that I couldn't conceive of applying given the tuition fees.
I have respect for anyone who has hurdled the obstacle course called graduate school, and emerged from the other side, mental faculties intact. I went that route, dutifully working for various state and federal agencies through the 3 1/2 years it took me to complete my degree (just a Master's), and then, well, I went to Hawaii for 6 months and then to New Zealand for a year.
I worked at a lodge in the middle of the southern Alps and spent my afternoons, in between cleaning rooms and serving 4-course dinners, disappearing up slender zigzag trails with cleansing streams you could drink from with your bare hands (and I did). Those same trails, and the downed trees I hurdled over on the way down from the treeline, claimed more than a few tendrils of my lateral ankle ligaments over the months, but not without the reward of exquisite sunsets, freak September snowstorms, and the childlike glee in being followed to work by a pair of orphaned lambs awaiting their morning bottle.
New Zealand taught me a new meaning for a 'moderate' hike and an even greater respect for a country who held standing-room only community meetings debating whether the government should lift the ban on growing genetically modified foods - this in 2003. I also realized there that the great unknown that had loomed out in front of me after declining the two-year water quality position I was offered upon graduation was, frankly, still right there waiting for me upon my return to the States. So when a dream job doing research in the Grand Canyon fell through, I did what one often does in such situations, switched gears, and headed to a holistic retreat center in New York state, where I would work for two seasons and find the path that led to bodywork.
So closely tied to that path is one I stumbled onto years prior while in Hawaii - the path of yoga. Don't worry, I'm not one to start reciting chakras or chanting om. No, what latched onto my bones was the silence that I noticed in my mind when breathing through a 3-minute Virabadrasana 1. Or the focus that was required to notice what your little toe was doing in Tadasana - standing. Or, again, the respect for the knowledge that an Iyengar teacher in Rotorua had, whom I stayed with for two weeks, feeding his chickens and having my downward dog corrected time and time again, each instance instilling in me a new-found awareness of my own body. I wanted more, and found it in two more teachers who I was fortunate to study with while in New York - Glenn Black and Kofi Busia, each a master in their own right and in the minds of many of their devoted students.
And so my life shifted, from having professors whose textbooks I read and lectures I soaked up, to having teachers who taught directly and indirectly, who taught from experience, full of sports and television anecdotes relating back to that sensation in my hip, and stories about blue lycra leotards distracting the mind from the pungent reality of a 20-minute headstand.
Out of this journey into my own body I found the road to bodywork, and have since melded the two into a self-practice teaching about the external from within.
I was assisting a month-long Thai massage class in Laos two years ago and was trying to explain to a student who had just completed her PhD that I have no regrets about not continuing work in the field I studied in graduate school. I have no less desire for that type of work, but, for now, my life shifted currents, and so many incredible opportunities and experiences have resulted from that, from following that gentle nagging that there is something more, and that I'm not quite ready to stop searching.

yes, yes, I have returned....if anyone is out there, my apologies for not continuing after the near-pacaderym collisions in Chiang Mai...travels end and 'life', or so it seems, returns...and with it crowded neighborhoods, ghastly rents, double shifts filled with dreams of a far off land that doesn't really exist...everything exists everywhere...all of our problems, our challenges, our passions, our dislikes...all the emotional, mental, physical turmoil, pleasures and pain is not a figment of our situation, it is who we are...and we are who we choose to be...

everything changes and nothing stays the same, and the sun rises and the full moon sets on the horizon; the lizard bathes in the warm sun in the desert, and shit happens that is painful and transformation and healing (eventually, yes, it will) takes place...

hard drives crash and dvds filled with photos get scratched in transport and weeks worth of photos remain hidden...maybe next year...

many photos included in the slideshow at right...from misty forests in Castle Rock State Park in California to sunsets at Tokyo Narita airport, to Angkor Wat, islands and villages and hot, dusty streets of Thailand...enjoy, immerse, and share...

accept all, be attached to nothing...