Encounters

Peep

Walter can be such a child sometimes. I love that twinkle in his eyes like at that time when I came home in the evening, just as it was getting dark, and he told me he had something to show me. Signaling for me to be very quiet, he took my hand and guided me to the avocado tree in the backyard. On a low branch there was a tiny bundle of feathers that looked pale against the shadows. We walked back into the house and he told me how he was sitting in the back deck and the little thing just flew and sat on that branch, apparently for the night.
“We cannot leave him there,” I protested immediately, “something will happen to him.”
“I don’t know if it’s a wild bird or someone’s lost pet.” Walter reasoned.
“That is clearly someone’s lost pet,” I responded, “it won’t survive out there!”

We weren’t in the least prepared to rescue a canary; we didn’t have a place to put it while we tried to find its owner; yet, with darkness falling quickly, we knew we had to act. We took Fiesta’s kennel, which is made of metal wires, put a blanket around it, a stick across through the center, and voila, we had our bird rescue site.

It was easy for Walter to grab the baby and bring it inside. He placed him on the stick, covered it with the blanket, and for added measure, we closed the door to the room where we had place the makeshift birdcage.

I accuse Walter of being a child, but I can be a big child myself sometimes also. With excitement, the next morning, I opened the door slowly, as soon as I woke up, to see how our guest had spent the night. I found him outside the “cage,” on top of the blanket. So much for keeping him contained!

I grabbed the smallest seeds from our bird seeds we kept handy and served him his breakfast. I expected him to sing with joy; instead, all I got was a couple of “peeps.” “Come on, little one,” I urged, “you can do better than that.” Typical of my human habit, I was expecting instant gratification for my efforts. The task at hand for the morning: try to find out if anyone in the neighborhood had lost a lovely bird.

We ask our immediate neighbors and people from further down the street walking their dogs, but nobody knew of anybody who’d lost a bird. We figured he could have the room for the day, and fiesta wouldn’t mind giving up her kennel one more night.

The next day, thinking this was to become a permanent resident, I went on Craig’s list and found a birdcage, with all the bell and whistles included, and bought it for ten dollars.
The bird was so happy in it, Walter joked that the guy I got the cage from was perhaps the one who’d lost the bird, and that was the bird’s original home. Something that was not possible given the fact there were spider webs on it when I picked it up. Then we had the task of finding an appropriate name for our new “child.”

“Peep” became the baby’s name. We decided it was a female since, to our knowledge, female canaries were the ones who didn’t sing.
I quickly grew fond and attached to that sound. “Peep, peep” I would hear every time I stepped into the room. In a couple of weeks, having another pet in the house had become routine. I changed the water every morning, along with the food. At night, I would cover with a blanket the cage, which had found it’s place in a corner by the window overlooking the backyard.

My grandmother loved birds. She said that it was a good omen to have birds nesting in one’s house or property. She said that birds are very sensitive to good, positive energy. A bird would never come near you if you were full of negativity; therefore I took it as a great sign that this baby would choose our avocado tree to spend the night when he had lost his original home. Someone’s loss had become our blessing and we welcomed it with open arms.

When I was in the house, I would take Peep in his cage outside. I would hang it from a branch under the avocado tree, believing it was the best treat for the little thing. I was aware there was a cat in the backyard, so I always kept a close eye on the baby when it was outside. One day, I came back to find the cage hanging askew, perfectly close, not a feather indicating a cat had gotten into it, and the baby forever gone.

I hated feeling like a failure. I had failed this creature and the universe’s trust in me that I could care for this baby. My grandmother was spinning in her grave pissed off at what she would consider her responsibility for not teaching me to be responsible for other life forms.

Ultimately, it was another reminder of a life lesson that seems to elude my understanding: Life is to be lived, with all its inglorious glory and terrific beauty. The lesson is not to be learned, it is to be received. Life is not about happiness, deliverance from sorrow, or creating anything. It is about experiencing it. Now you feel good, then bad, then good again. Today you receive a “good” omen, then a “bad” one, then a “good” one again.
Those who focus on being this vessel of “goodness,” of “positivity,” know nothing of the nature of the world.
It was Octavio Paz who wrote that the verb to be was the most meaningless verb in any language because it relies on what follows in order to have meaning.
That is the lesson I haven’t learned. I don’t know how to simply BE. I hang on to every feeling, experience and memory as if the rest of my life depended on it. My problem: I don’t think I wish to learn.

The Junk Drawer

After doing housecleaning for a living for more than ten years and becoming more conscientious about my own home organizing skills, I decided that everyone deserved and should have a corner, a cabinet or a drawer where anything goes. A place where all those miscellaneous items that do not belong in any other organized area of the house should be placed. A space where apparent chaos reigned and where it was OK to let it all go…literally! I called this practice The Junk Drawer Principle.

Similarly, I thought, in our behavior or personality there should be one thing in which we allowed ourselves to be disorganized, chaotic; an activity in which we could be uncivilized, unruly, and mean; one part of us in which we let loose and let it all go to hell; our personality’s junk drawer.

The Junk Drawer Principle, as manifested in my personality, used to happen when I got in my car. Normally, I was the nicest man when you met me anywhere. I was caring, loving, genuine, generous, attentive, considerate and forgiving. But when our paths crossed and I was behind the wheel, I was the biggest A-hole you would ever meet. I lost my temper easily with drivers who did not follow my high driving standards. I would swear like a drunken sailor at people for the sole reason on being in MY lane. I was unforgiving and became rude. I used to tailgate people and flash my bright lights at them. In three words, I was UGLY.

Alright, some credit is my due: I stopped flashing my bright lights after I did that to someone driving southbound on the I-5. It had been a long day at work, it was late at night and all I wanted was the warmth of my bed and a good night’s sleep. This driver got in front of me clearly at a slower speed. After almost rear-ending said person, I flashed my bright lights repeatedly. Suddenly, I saw the car veer to the right, almost leaving the road, and then to the left across all the lanes, almost hitting the divider. I proceeded cautiously to pass this person to give them “the look” and, as I was doing so, I saw the sweetest, scared-to-death face of this minute, old, old lady wearing thick glasses.
The thought that came to mind was: If this lady were my grandmother, would I like hearing that she had lost her life because some impatient idiot flashed the bright lights at her making her lost control of her vehicle?
I stopped flashing my bright lights altogether. I figured since my odds of selecting people who deserved such behavior wasn’t 100% accurate, it was best not to do it at all.

Still, following the logic of The Junk Drawer Principle, I always felt entitled to allowing my driving be that aspect of my life in which I didn’t have to improve; that part of my personality and behavior where I didn’t have to be in control, in check. The one thing I could just let go to hell.

That was until I read A greater psychology, the psychological thought of Sri Aurobindo, Edited by A.S Dalal. I was enthralled by the vision and scope of this man’s psychology. His knowledge of Western psychology was astonishing yet, what attracted me the most to it was his inclusion of spiritual development as part of someone’s psychological identity.
It was not an easy book. I had had it for about ten years prior. I remember trying to read it before and I just couldn’t get into it. Well, I finally did and I am a better human for it.
The one thing that impacted me the most was when I read that one’s spiritual growth should have a positive effect and great influence in one’s mind, body, and spirit. It all should be reflected in our being and behavior, in who we are and how we act at any given moment, all the time.

A few months ago my partner and I moved to Desert Hot Springs from San Diego. We still work in San Diego three days a week making our commute of almost 150 miles a solid two hours each way. The two-lane highways connecting the I-15 and the I-10, the 215 and the 60, made my “junk drawer” difficult to bear. I felt so spiritually connected and balanced four days a week but, once I got in the car to go back to San Diego, I just lost it. I couldn’t handle the lane-hogs. I would find myself yelling “SLOW TRAFFIC STAY RIGHT!!!” I couldn’t stand people changing lanes without using their turn signals, talking on their cell phones, tailgating others: all things I had stopped doing long ago.

I found myself becoming one of them, doing all the things I had worked hard to eliminate from my life and I realized that perhaps I still had some growing and learning to do. It was obvious I needed to reacquaint myself with the lessons learned. It was time to practice what I know.

When I find myself aggravated by someone’s driving there are a few techniques that make my life immediately better:

1. I take a deep breath and hold it for 4 seconds allowing myself to really feel the anger; but when I exhale, I visualize all the negative energy in my mind, body and spirit leave along with my body’s toxins. Then I calmly take another gentle breath and focus on a pleasant thought.
2. I give people the benefit of the doubt knowing that it’s not a gift I give them but rather a gift I give myself. After all, we human beings have a tendency to get distracted with our problems, worries, or situations that keep us from being in the moment.
3. I practice compassion. I have no way of knowing the sorrows and suffering that people carry with them everywhere they go, including while driving. If the person in front is suffering or in pain, how could they focus on their driving?

Yes, I have decided that my spiritual growth should be reflected in everything I do. No more “junk drawer” … at least not the way it used to be.
I have since learned that I can still hang on to The Junk Drawer Principle but my junk drawer doesn’t have to be the chaos it used to be. I can still have one aspect of my personality where everything goes, everything but the negative, what I should discard, and what is useless and doesn’t serve me any more.
I can as well have one drawer where I can put all those miscellaneous things that don’t belong in any organized part of the house yet…there is nothing wrong with discarding what I know I will not use and getting good drawer dividers.

Pilgrimage

This business of living, what is it?

I look back in my memories and it’s all hazy, a blur of sorts. I can no longer swiftly recall names. I have never had what you would call a photographic memory so I do not recall faces as well, only traces, features, minor distinguishing characteristics. I do not remember events in detail either. Sometimes I question whether things really happened the way I remember them or whether my perception at the time was warped like a star's light as it is affected by a planet’s gravitational pull. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t all an invention of my subconscious. Did it happen in a dream? Was it all a dream?

And so I ask myself, what is this business of living after all?

I come from long ago. There is a date I shall remember because it is recorded on a birth certificate. I have travelled in time. The body has grown older, the mind more mature, and the spirit…the spirit, timeless.

I have memories of my parents’ tenderness: four eyes looking down at my minute stature, the feeling of safety in their nearness, the life lessons that my young mind easily disregarded. I remember a rebellious youth: didn’t grandmother say to question everything and find for myself what the world was to me? After all, I was just following that advice, I tell myself.
Yet, mother always managed to light a fire and start boiling water as she saw me approach every time I came back home. She knew my favorite meal was steamed rice with beans, queso fresco and jalapenos.
And then there were departures. Each time it seemed a chip of heart was left behind on the side of the road. I left them there hoping that I would one day go back, collect them all and have a whole heart again. Instead, paradoxically, I created a void, an emptiness that’s full of emotion and longing.

And on this winter solstice, in which the light returns, I don’t find myself returning to all that other than in feeling, in thought.

Animals migrate, they travel distances following their natural instincts. They look for food, a place to reproduce, better climate; in a word, survival of the species. Part of that migration is a return and so their journeys have been recorded in popular documentaries and books. One of the longest annual migrations being that of Sooty Shearwaters, which nest in New Zealand and Chile and spend the northern summer feeding in the North Pacific off Japan, Alaska and California, an annual round trip of 64,000 km (39,800 mi).


We humans, being part of the animal world, migrate too. We leave our homes, our families, our towns, and sometimes our countries but not all of us return. A lot of us who don’t return recreate the life we had, our setting and community elsewhere. We surround ourselves with our customs, our culture, and the social life we can’t leave behind. We do that perhaps because we understand that we can never go home; not the home we left anyway. We do that perhaps because it’s our identity. It is how we chose to identify ourselves.

Have I migrated?
Am I a seeker?
Am I after survival?

I have not migrated. I have been shedding my past, my life, my family, my home, my country, my religion little by little the way a vibrant flower loses its petals one by one in the sun, the way a joyful bird leaves multiple feathers on its flight path, the way a tree drops its leaves in the fall allowing them to be carried by the wind. Best of all, I have no desire to return.

No, mine has not been a migration.

Am I a seeker?

Those who call themselves seekers are not seekers if they don’t know what they are searching. If they know what they are looking for, they must have found it at some point in time, at some stage in life. How did they lose it, how did they get away from it, how did they depart?
I don’t know where I am going not because I am lost, but because I do not believe in destiny or destination. I don’t even believe in going anywhere. So I am not a seeker either.

Am I after survival?

S-u-r-v-i-v-a-l, I don’t like the ring it has to it.
I learned long ago that there are two ways to do dishes. You can do dishes to get them clean or you can do dishes to do dishes. In the former you focus on the result, in the latter you focus on the present, the task at hand, the doing. Being after survival to me has this connotation of focusing on the end result instead of the actual living. Therefore no, I am not a survivor.

I am more an explorer. An explorer knows that there is a pursuit, an experience at hand, a reality to be coded. I know the reality I choose to explore and because that reality is this continuous experience of living, this exultant worshiping of the Absolute, what I have been doing is not a migration, it’s a pilgrimage.
That is the business of my living: a timely recognition of the way it all is.

Belief in Spirit

"The definition of spirituality should be 'that which is its own evidence'"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since I was a child, I have maintained this belief that there is something that transcends the ephemeral in life, the temporal in time, and the apparent solidity of matter. I do not know how I arrived to such conclusion; I do know that I have put effort in maintaining and deepening it.
As a young man, disenchanted with the religion into which I was born, I started pursuing different religions. As a common denominator, in all of them I saw this unquestionable, unquenchable thirst to understand our relationship to everything around us and the comfort we find in believing there is more to existence than what meets the eye.

One diet I am very fond of is that in which I carefully select the quality and originality of what nurtures my mind. I enjoy reading spiritual writings, Eastern thought, religious writing, comparative religion, philosophy and science; all of which can be poetic or not.
It was while reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, in which she makes a call to re-examine our religion and our belief in God, that I found my call. In a chapter entitled “The death of God?” she concludes with a Holocaust account in which a group of Jews put God on trial in which at the end, after considering His trespasses, they find Him guilty and the Rabbi pronounces Him worthy of death. Then he looks up and states the trial is finished: it was time for the evening prayer.
That short ending paragraph had a huge impact on me. It taught me once and for all that this need we have to continue practicing what brings us solace in the midst of our sometimes bleak existence is not to be ignored and I decided to participate in this ongoing conversation we have about Belief and Spirit. I set out to writing, not for myself only, but thinking as well of helping others, of what empowers me, motivates me, and inspires me to regard the blissful life as a precious endeavor. It was this need in me to nurture the peace and comfort I find in reading that resulted in this blog.


The spiritual life is not one in which you kneal and recite some formula over and over again. It is one in which every breath you take celebrates the variety of life's experiences, the exultant, the grotesque, the ugly and the beautiful. It is one in which you are able to find a connection to a greater through the minor, the minuscule and the particular. The spiritual life is one in which eternity is not a question of if, when or how.

I challenge you to go beyond dogma and find in everything around you the essence of Spirit. We need to learn how to respect and regard other people’s belief systems as genuine and valid if only it helps them to participate in the mystery of life more fully, in a healthier way, and in a joyful manner. Belief doesn’t have to be homogenous, we each have our individual way of sensing the mysterious and we should guide ourselves by that unique internal compass.

It is necessary though, now and then, to sit in silence with your own thought and listen to what arises in it.

The Believer in Me

On Language

“Whether language is a medium for thought or just for communication, its importance in our lives cannot be understated.” Gary Marcus, The birth of the mind.

My plan, as plans went, when I first came from Mexico to the United States of America, was to learn English well, to become fluent, then move to Canada to learn French. I wanted to speak three languages. Oh my, how things change!
In the last twenty or so years I have spent here, I have changed my mind about languages and I have been able to narrow the scope of my pursuit. The aim now is to speak and to write as effectively as I can in only one language.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t try. Once I became fluent in English, and since I had fallen in love with someone and leaving the US was not an option, I decided to take a French class at San Diego City College. I thought I had a gift for languages and taking that class proved me wrong. A couple of months later my brain was so confused as to what I was doing that I started to pronounce English like French, began to forget my Spanish, and I commenced to speak a few words in French… with an out-of-this-world accent.
It was FUN!

“No soy de aqui, ni soy de alla…Je ne sais quoi”

As I understand it, our ability to learn, use, and master a language is a gift of immeasurable proportions. What makes us human beings unique in the known universe is that ability along with the complexity of the languages we have mustered.
I didn’t know there were as many theories about how the ability for language may have developed among humans. To name a few: the language from gesture theory, the theory that it arose from the neural machinery that evolved to control our muscles, the theory that it came about as an accidental consequence of having bigger brains, the theory that language is en extension of our capacity for representing space, and my favorite, the theory that language evolved for the purpose of gossip.

Research suggests that, unlike previously thought, our ability for language depends on several areas of our brains, not just the Broca’s or Wernick’s areas. In order to use language we also rely in our capacities for hearing and seeing which engage those other areas of the brain. We also need our short term memory and our long term memory. I find it to be a fascinating subject which makes stronger my commitment to use language effectively.

I believe that a language is part of our heritage, a gift from our ancestors, and I take seriously the responsibility that comes with being given such a gift. Hence the reason it upsets me to no end to see a language bastardized, becoming polluted particularly by laziness or lack of interest in learning it better. When, for example, we write “b4” instead of “before”. When we misuse a word like “love” when we mean “like intensely.” When we stay with our limited vocabulary when there are thousands of words ready for us to use.

I know that languages evolve and I am quite fine with all that. Yet I think that the evolution of a language should be driven by the idea of making it more effective while maintaining a pristine beauty.

A couple of days ago, I was particularly irritated when I saw someone had written a message on a board in Spanish using the same “technique” that the internet and newer technologies have made popular—that of using numbers as parts of a word, like in my example above:” b4”. This person wrote “100to,” to mean “siento” “I feel.” Said person basically saved the typing of one character. Now, that is laziness!

Ok, maybe this person was just trying to be “kewl.”

I am sure I have failed or stumbled a few times while writing this blog. I am certain that some linguist or English major could read this and barrage me with the many mistakes I have made in trying to make my point; and I hope that person sees in me the drive, the desire, the commitment to learning and to making my use of the English language better, to improve upon what I know. I also hope such person will point out to me the ways in which I have erred because I learn more from my mistakes than I have ever learned by getting things right.

There are two statements I make often when I am around people:

“Your ability to use language precisely and effectively is at the core of who you are as a human being” and “I would rather fail while attempting to do something than being known as someone who doesn’t try.”

In the beginning

"I USED TO HAVE a cat, an old fighting tom, who..."

These are the first words from the book that inspired the title for this blog. Unlike those sages who go into the wild or seek solitude to reflect on life and living, I want to get lost in the city, among people, among things, in the social and cultural landscape that surrounds me, and I want to find peace, calm, an ability to experience life fully in the present.

It's not so much that I want to disregard the past or ignore a possible future. I want to let the past dim itself and the future be dark enough so that the light of the present will be throughly understood and, if understanding isn't achieved, I want to be able to say I lived it!

I am this inquisitive mind that meanders through the landscape of understanding constantly, restlessly, furiously. When I was a child, I used to think that I wanted to pursue knowledge, I wanted to know everything there is to be known. Now, I know there is a difference between knowledge and information. Information is all those details that describe, define and outline the world around us in the minds of people. Knowledge is a feeling, a deep-rooted feeling in your subconscious, almost like an instinct, that let's you be at peace in the midst of apparent chaos. True knowledge lets you look at the world with respect, awe and wonder.

I am this sensuality. I live through my senses. I like the feeling of texture, firmness or softness, and even the roughness of certain things. I like certain sounds; others I utterly dislike. I like certain flavors, smells, and sights. I am constantly marveling at this wondrous combination of senses that allow me to experience the world in its organic state as well as the creativity of humans. I am these senses.

I find my inspiration mostly in the written word so much that it's no surprise I aim to write myself. I am hoping that, in the process of expressing myself in writing, I will discover the nuances of life. I am hoping I will bring them forth and I will be able to savour them even more.

As a child, I found the first words from the Bible simply misterious: "in the beginning..."
And then there was the voice of God, imagine that, a voice saying something.

Joseph Campbell used to say that "everything begins with a story."

We all have a story. Sometimes our story seems ordinary, particularly to ourselves. What we need, I think, is to learn how to see the extraordinary in ordinary things, the beautiful in the mundane, and the deep in the superficial.

This blog will attempt that.

Here's to new beginnings !