Bye bye Rockie Mountains

Penny told me Saturday morning that she was gonna go snowboarding Sunday in Loveland, and offered to drop me off in Evergreen which was on her way, so I took off from Ft. Collins a day earlier than planned. It was another warmer than usual day, and we had a nice drive out of town, the mountains on our right side the whole way, a view I just never get tired of.

And so it is that I find myself back at Crystal's and her brother Chuck's place. Tomorrow I'll catch a ride "downstairs" [as Penny puts it] into Denver to catch an 18:25 bus to Washington, DC. Janet, I'm on my way, and I've got a special Colorado surprise in my bag for you! Amanda and Greg, I'll give you a call after I arrive in DC to see what's the haps out there in Columbia, Maryland.

While I got the attention of the 3 of you, I wanna warn you right from the git-go: I wanna do yoga, and I wanna do it wit-chew. Janet since you're a freakin' yoga instructor, I don't believe this will present a problem.

Amanda and Greg, it'd be awesome if you both wanted to check out the Bikram style of yoga that I was doing in Ft. Collins -- I've already located online a few locations in the DC metro area, and hope I'll have the pleasure of introducing you to it.

These Bikram yoga places all do a one-week introductory offer of $20 for all the yoga you'd care to do in a week, and I did 6 sessions in the last 6 days I was in Ft. Collins. In addition to the obvious benefit of getting in closer touch with my body .. does that sound ridiculous? .. I also found that wonderful and sometimes funny ideas would pop into my mind while I was stretched out on the floor and relaxing, either at the beginning or at the end of a session. Here are two examples.

1. I will be sending an email to a few friends one day soon, asking them to begin thinking about what 12 books they would take with them if they somehow knew that they were about to be stranded on a desert island. Or the 12 books that they would want everyone in the world to read. Since I have read some amazing books lately that I want everyone to know about, it was perhaps not so strange that as I lay on my mat panting one day, I would wonder what books my closest friends would want me to know about.

2. The other thing that popped into my brain as I lay on my mat one night turned out to be a joke, and I've just written it out for the first time. Here it is:

A seeker approaches his master, kneels down and humbly poses a question that has bothered him for several weeks.

"Master, is it not a mistake to regard the world as dualistic in nature? To regard Reality as right or wrong, as night or day, as good or evil?"

The master scratches his head, pulls at his beard, gives a great sigh and finally turns to his troubled student and says, "Well, yes and no ... "

Moving right along, I'd made brief mention of having met with a life coach last week, a woman named Irene Stein. Those of you who know me well will recognize this now-familiar pattern of my Talking about something rather than just Doing it.

However I must say that Irene was particulary helpful, in our first (free) consultational meeting, at assisting me to clarify the things which I am at this phase in my life attempting to focus on. And we are all I think familiar from experience with how much an outsider's perspective can be valuable to us.

She aided me in seeing how much I had already begun to integrate myself into the Ft. Collins community: through the Bean Cycle, through having begun yoga classes, and [the day after having met with her] through having met folks connected with the Heruka Buddhist Center. I feel now like my decision about where to settle to work and to make some money before enrolling in a massage program is about choosing between Ft. Collins and my hometown of Rochester. It'd be nice to get to know some of my relatives again!

I had mentioned in my last post wanting to attend the last of a series of lectures in a Buddhism 101 class called Learning to Love Purely. I was about 7 minutes late [having seriously underestimated how near the center was to where I was!], but was greeted at the door by a western monk in purple and saffron robes who smilingly requested me to remove my jacket and shoes before coming further into the house which served as the Buddhist center.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the 'living room' of this house had been converted into a temple, with beautiful paintings and golden statues, fresh flowers and bowls of fruit, etc. A Buddhist nun led a group of about 20 in a guided meditation, which went on for another 30 minutes or so. This was followed by the talk which had been advertised, and then a second meditation which lasted perhaps another 20 minutes. We then adjourned into the kitchen for fresh, hot cider.

It was pleasant to hear a Buddhist nun talk about different kinds of love. I agreed with her that most of us think of love from the perspective of a Mind of Attachment, not so different from lust I think.

But I thought she was just plain wrong when she was talking about other kinds of love. She said a number of times that people who had produced things in our lives from which we derived enjoyment or pleasure [such as things in our homes, our food, our clothes, our cars or bicycles, etc.] had done so out of Kindness, and that we were therefore obliged to love those people.

During the Q&A session which followed, another person had tried to get her to see that very often people were producing such items not out of love but out of the simple desire to get by, to take home a paycheck. But she didn't seem to grasp the thrust of the argument, and I didn't really feel it was vital to pursue it. Enough, for once, just to be around someone who was living the spiritual life.

I feel like after connecting with: (1) Janet and family in the DC area; and (2) with Best-Friend-since-1st-grade Martin, his wife Dana, and their two adorable daughters Lucy and Molly in the Bronx; bestest bud Matt Minkin doing Moliere in January someplace in the Apple; and my sister Eileen the sister in New Jersey; and (3) my brother Scott and his wife Kathy; and bestest buddy since high school days Mike, and his family, in our hometown of Rochester; and [if I head west again] with (4) bestest buddy from Amsterdam Liv back home in Amherst Jct, Wisconsin; that I will then be ready to make a decision about where to live for a few months to work and make some money before starting that massage program [probably somewhere in the west]. One school I'm looking at pretty closely at the moment is Heartwood, in Garberville, 200 miles north of San Francisco.