TO BE A SLAVE OF INTENSITY

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive.
Think ... and think ... while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten -
this is fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you
will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
Believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir say this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is
the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

Kabir

Feeling the end of a quick and filled summer ...

I think the 9 day trip around Mt. Rainier would be the memory I most take away from it, even more than a trip half way around the World to Cape Town.

It isn't the physical journeys I take, but the mental ones that are the most memorable. The delving deep inside of who, and where, and why I am in this World. Breaking away to new places and cultures can often break me away from the staleness of the everyday, and awaken a new awareness, but I still must have time to live within and soak into that experience. Often the whirlwind of travel doesn't afford that. Something about the rhythmic plodding on trail, or glacier, or mountain, awakens a deep awareness of being that is can be lost in the blur of images of new experiences.

..... And being away from the electronic umbilical cord of modern life. To often, I find myself defining myself in terms of "the other". How my life plays upon someone else's stage. It is difficult to break far enough away, that I am able to stand alone, and say, "This is me".

Even when hiking, I will find myself in communion with another, discussing, arguing, loving, embracing. Only after several days of walking, plodding, climbing, descending, that do I begin to awaken into the moment of being. Apart, but connected to the eternal.

Robby and I took maybe our final hike on Mt. Hood for this year. It's one of my favorite trails, about 12-14 miles, up through forest, and then meadows, and finally the rocks hugging the side of the mountain.

Wonderland Trail

Mt. Rainier

Had an incredible 9 days on the Wonderland Trail. Would describe it, but I think the above video speaks for itself.


Also, before the Wonderland Trail, had a nice weekend in Bend, and climbing South Sister with my Doctor, Mark, her brother and wife, Marty, and of course, Robby: