One Month Anniversary:

The lodge is getting packed and I’m realizing how privileged I am to speak the most important language on earth. The Ruski can convey his thoughts on Gandhi with perfect grammar, the Italian can tell me how his foot ails, the French Canadian can share my pleasure at leaving the northern cold, the Slovaks can tell me what it’s like to sleep under the Eiffel Tower and the Germans can ask me what time tomorrows boat leaves. Cheers to English imperialism.

I am slowly coming down with a classic case of Island Fever. The seas are closing in, and Pumpkin Hill looks shorter every day. The dive sites are most familiar and all the parrot fish look the same.

I want to be in Munchen for Oktoberfest, see the serenity in east Asia, be in Brazil the most interesting country in the world, then head south for Argentinan Patagonia. I want to be in Tennesee for Bonnaroo and in the Green Triangle to suffer the monotony of trimming season.

I don’t want to stay here, but I don’t want to go home either.  Walking home in New York, looking at the sad disgusting faces of the drivers of the new SUVS, whilst creating bubbling noise about their daily digestion of superficial culture on their shining white phones that can do so much it is almost considered magic, or god. Coming home from jobs where they produce nothing that they themselves or their consumers can tangibly see, working eight hours in hopes that someday soon they will receive the privilege of working twelve. That is why the human condition is so weak. We work all day, for people we don’t like, generating plastic and plastic related “things” that serve a purpose that bears no true emotional relationship to our lives. Our souls are half full, there can be no true joy until real work has been done, our food is half rich and our fun is half hearted. It’s like were playing a viciously competitive game of monopoly, where all you want to do is beat your best friends and make them cry like little girls.

There are moments when I am blown back, astonished that there are not only few, but many, seemingly even most people who disregard compassion, instead choosing hatred, violence and pain. Do they not see that compassion is peace and peace is love, the purest most righteous and desirable thing that has ever been known.