Malevolent → V ← Benevolent

“10,000 demons hammer down at every footstep; 10,000 angels rush the wind against my back…” – Brandon Flowers

I’ve always suffered from unyielding ambivalence. I live in constant indecision and doubt. I struggle with commitment. I generally prefer being apathetic to feeling anything.

But 2010 has changed me. I suddenly have convictions I never recognized previously. I’m confident in my decisions. I find myself earnestly absorbing each and every one of these new experiences and emotions that have engulfed my spirit since I moved to New York City a month ago.

This year has been… stirring. I ended a relationship. I lost a job. I moved out of an apartment on one coast and into an apartment on another coast. Every single one of these events has forced me to look into the mirror and question my motives and desires… and in the process I’ve realized that I am the product of both benevolent motives and malevolent desires.

As a result, the barometer of morality that I’ve always held myself to has changed. I can’t judge myself anymore for acting recklessly in the spirit of fulfilling prophecies. I can’t blame myself for performing in accordance with my instincts because my heart yearns so desperately for recognition. I am also confronted by the challenging task of being both perfectly humble and disarmingly cocky… all of which has resulted in my often asking myself “who the hell ARE you??”

Of course, for all the intensity of experience and emotion I’ve felt as of late, I’ve also become incredibly Zen and serene… the best possible combination for a leap-of-faith move to New York City in the middle of a recession.

...here goes...

triumphant beginnings/returns

after a month of transience, i finally have a mailing address!

anatomical confusion

my heart is sore.

i got a million ways to get it: choose one

shout to josh eddy, who got me hip to a band called bitter:sweet, who has a song called "dirty laundry," that is HOT.

moving on:

moving, literally. i have to be out of my apartment on 31 august and leave for nyc on 1 september. no real plans beyond find a job and find a place to live. i'm sure i'll have some interesting sagas to report from the front lines.

it's weird what an introvert i've found myself to become since i've been home from the jungle. i prefer keeping to myself even more than usual now and am kind of trying to make a quiet exit from los angeles. i'm even a little burnt out on life blogging and exposing my naked soul to the world for examination.

so! i've decided to start reviewing things - anything i suspect will provoke you as it does me - in addition to relaying the colorful little incidences in my life. (plus it's way easier to be funny when you have a springboard to launch from)... ultimately this will be my narcissistic recollection of the banal circumstances and minor distractions of and in my life.

today i'm spending the day packing and getting myself organized to move, which might create some chaos worth mentioning...??? after dodging malaria and wading through elephant shit-infested water for a month, suddenly my life seems so boring.

video archives

the internet was too slow in laos to upload video, so here's a little archive v-logging following my first and last weeks on the trip.

week one:

week four:

Allow me to re-introduce myself ("smile all the way in your liver" - Eat Pray Love)

Today's preface: if I wasn't before, I certainly am a woman now. And for that, I am smiling, deeply, all the way in my liver.

I have embarked on so many new adventures and experiences this year, most recently the nearly unparalleled experience of living remotely in southeast Asia for an equally raucous and gratifying summer. This has been a process of self-discovery often disguised as self-annihilation; a journey through which I've found myself both learning and reaffirming various components of my worldview. In the past month, through facing my own personal demons head on, by listening to the often unimaginable and shattering stories of the people around me, and by absorbing the richness of a culture that is so deliciously far away from my own, I've come away with so much.

Just before I departed on my jungle venture, my mom accused me of running from something. With all my erratic, danger-seeking, non-committal behavior these past few months, I know I’ve caused my parents a great deal of worry. And I definitely agree that I’ve been running… but not away. I’ve been so desperate to “find myself” that I’ve run in every direction possible. This has manifested in the ultimate battle of wills: me against myself. What it’s sadly taken me so long to realize is that there is no winner in this war; either way, I lose. I spent so much time searching for the person I want to be that I never took time to just enjoy being the person I am. And although I know old habits die hard (and thus I won’t change overnight), this was a huge revelation and I like to believe I’ll be a much more fulfilled woman as a result.

There is a Balinese meditation called "four brothers," which is the belief that we are all born with four brothers, intelligence, strength, friendship, and poetry, who guide us through life. While this practice is unique to the tiny Indonesian utopia, the broader concepts of guardian angels and similarly atoned protective spirits are found in every society throughout the world.

The four brothers meditation, however, is particularly special because it provides us a peaceful acceptance of the terms of our lives. By consenting to this truth, we allow ourselves to be free to live a life, precarious as she may be, of both fate and free will.

Discovering the four brothers philosophy has reaffirmed my belief in the important balance between confidence and curiosity; of knowing when to take charge and when to have faith. Not everything can be controlled, but some things must be harvested. The beauty (and the ugly, depending on how you look at it) of life is that sometimes it's up to you, and sometimes it's up to God. Deciphering which rule applies when is the troublesome business.

As a result of this spiritual epiphany, I've learned that the most valuable virtues I must strive for in this lifetime are patience, courage and prayer. Through the attainment of patience, I am releasing anxiety and achieving Zen. In finding my courage, I am learning to live and love life for the moment I am in; the beauty of which allows me to let go of the past and stop panicking about the future. And through prayer, I have found a benevolent, remarkable and deeply personal relationship with God, providing so generously to me an opportunity to make sense of my place in my head, my heart and the world.

I recognize that these virtues are of particular importance, for me, in love. I admit without hesitation that today my heart remains locked tightly in a bitter contest of wills with itself: impatient and terrified and closed-off. But I know that in order to reach the plateau of faith in love that I so desperately desire, I must be patient in knowing that love in my life will be when it's meant to be, and not a moment sooner; I must be fearless in allowing myself to move on when necessary, but also love valiantly and forcefully when necessary; and I must be open to the value of prayer in the process of finding and maintaining love, because without the mind-soul-body balance achievable only through prayer, I will surely never feel enough external balance to recognize, maintain, nor appreciate love when it comes to me.

I’ve grown a great deal in my understanding (acceptance?) of the world. My entire life I've struggled with the karmic concept of fairness. How unfair, that a girl born in rural Laos has no opportunity to see the world beyond her village, while a western man born to money in the US, is granted the luxury to see all of it. How unfair, that a Saudi Arabian woman has no chance to make her own decisions, but a French woman can move about as she pleases. How unfair, that royal bloodlines denote prestige without work, when peasantry demands so much labor without any real compensation.

In this regard I've learned there's no such thing as fairness. There are only existences and circumstances, some of which are lovelier than others (and loveliness is really quite contextual). But what has come most importantly of this revelation is that within this paradox is an international acceptance of the sacredness of beauty, something that is found in and unified by happiness.

I've learned that happiness, once thought to be measured by an arbitrary combination of luck and destiny, is in actuality a tangible calculation of it's pursuit; humanity doesn't merely achieve happiness, nor is it automatically bestowed upon certain peoples. Rather, anyone, anywhere in the world can theoretically and literally secure bliss through understanding the delicate dance between engagement and complacency. We all need to learn to thread that needle of striving for more but being happy with what we already have. And at the end of the day one of the truly miraculous things about life is humanity’s ability to find happiness proportionate to what’s available to us. It almost seems like the less we have, the easier it is to discover and sustain real joy.

I’ll end on this: although much has been learned, much remains unanswered, underdeveloped. I still struggle with tempering my demands for urgency, everywhere, at all times. Great fear continues to grip my heart from time to time. I remain cynical about the prophecy of real, lasting love, and struggle with consistent, effective prayer. My mind still races with discontentment at the endless cycles of social and economic imbalance that exists in this world. Even amidst so much beauty, I sometimes find reasons to be sad… After all, a summer is a deliriously short period of time to have perfected the many things I've learned. But perhaps this is the greatest and most easily attainable lesson of them all: I am not perfect, likely never will be, and must accept and admire that fact.

For isn’t it imperfection that makes life beautiful and valuable? Perfection denotes immortality, which we will never, ever achieve. But who would ever desire immortality? Mortality is what gives life meaning.

So it's okay to cry until your face runs out of tears, or to laugh until your face muscles yearns for relief. The gamut of emotions that we experience are what embellish and celebrate our imperfections, our mortality... our meaningfulness.

Rustic Pathways… still living day-by-day… still no future… future still very dark…

In two days, my work as a Rustic Pathways program leader will be complete and although most of my energy has already gone into writing a final reflection piece (working on the finishing touches; posting tomorrow or Wednesday… and it’s bit of a barn burner if I do say so myself J), I thought it appropriate to jot down some notes on the highlights of week four.

I should’ve read the tea leaves early on in my relationship with Rustic Pathways. The company, for all its good intentions, is poorly managed and disorganized, more often than not leaving major decisions to the last minute. At first, I found this day-to-day lifestyle exciting; I thought it was the perfect remedy to my extremely structured, well-planned life at home.

Within a couple weeks though, I found myself not necessarily homesick, but rather plan-sick. I never knew what was going on more than ten minutes before anything happened, so I could never answer students questions about what we were doing next, and I had no idea which city, or for that matter, which country I could be expected to be in on any given day. The adventure grew to be emotionally nauseating.

That said, I’ve just completed four weeks of day by day travel, allegedly leading groups of students through various parts of the jungle (in actuality it was more an exercise of the blind leading the blind, thankfully, safely), and I am psychologically exhausted.

So like I said, I wanted this prologue to the final post to cover some of the most notable features of my final week of work. As I’ve already mentioned, I really put so much of my soul into the manifest that I’m posting before my departure, so please excuse my laziness in boiling week four down into bullet points:

· Due to poor planning on the company’s part, I was forced to work at elephant camp for a record third week. Typically program leaders are shifted around to different programs throughout their visit, and very rarely does anyone work the same program more than two weeks. It should go without saying that this city girl was physically drained after one week at elephant camp (overloads of bugs, mud, extreme isolation to the tune of living on an island, sleep that requires mosquito nets, etc), so when I was informed that I’d be overseeing a third week, I was less than thrilled. However, since the group is so small, I was given the authority to break up elephant camp a bit and spend more time in the city this time around; this necessary break from elephant isolation brought welcome relief.

· Luckily the new group is made up of only two students and they are considerably easier to live/work with than the last group (remember my lovely bipolar roommate?).

· Because our group was so small this time around, the elephant camp was able to open its doors to more outside visitors, two lovely families and a pair of backpacking twenty-something guys who ended up being hilarious and intellectually stimulating company… one of my favorite moments of the entire trip was a profound exchange between these travelers, an Iranian-Canadian and German, and myself about US defense systems and budgets. After spending the past month with teenagers, however amazing as they are, it was so nice to have a thought-provoking political conversation with my peers.

· Today I indulged in spa treatment number six (two traditional Thai massages, two foot massages, a facial and a body scrub) of the trip. For a total cost of about $65… for all six treatments… ‘nuff said.

· Lastly, I realized today that there are three things I’ll miss most about Laos: first, the sincere graciousness and earnestness of the Lao people (especially the children! Oh the children really tugged at my ovary-strings); second, the carefree, leisurely lifestyle that although throws a bit too much caution into the wind (babies are frequently seen riding in the front of motorcycles without a helmet), allows us to just throw stress into the wind, too; and third (and of least value to me in any way), my extremely fattening habit of visiting the crepe stands every evening (oh how much do I adore my peanut butter and Nutella crepes!).

Tomorrow is a day of total service, as we’ll be offering alms to the monks at sunrise and spending the rest of the day working with Rustic’s rice fields program at a pottery village and a rice village. Wednesday marks the last day of the program, where we’ll trudge back into elephant camp and the girls will take the final ride on their elephants and receive their “official mahout certification” (every student is certified a mahout at the end of the program, which is mostly laughable, since no one really controls those elephants, the actual professional mahouts can barely accomplish that task… but the ceremony is very cute nonetheless). From there, I’ll officially say goodbye to Luang Prabang and begin the loooooong journey home – Luang Prabang à Vientiane à Bangkok à Singapore à Tokyo à finally, so sweetly, Los Angeles.