The Spectacle of Adventure

I wanna be stupendous.  Spectacular.  I wanna knock the collective socks off an audience.  If I could just figure out how to fill the theater...

Hi, my name's Michael, and I'll be your guide on this excursion of the mind.  We're looking at a good, brisk hike today, hopes of burning some fat and collected malaise.  Our host has spent a lot of time gathering energy, becoming ready to burn.  Seasoning himself.  And now the match has been struck, and the fire lights our way on this traverse through the innermost unknowns to have yet see the light.

Sparkle, baby.  Let 'er rip.

There is so much to be known out there.  And in here, for that matter.  Too much, indeed, to know in a single lifetime.  So that's why we are more than ourselves.  We are more than just our bodies or just our minds or our souls.  We are all connected as one thing, at a very basic level.  We are one, all of us.  The butterfly, the mongrel, the gnat and the sparrow.  Infinity, limitless space, electrons and black holes.  It's all in there, baby.  If you lived at the cellular level, you'd understand.  There wouldn't be the distractions of logic and philosophy and religion.  There wouldn't be all this thought in the way.  There would be knowing, without explanation, what it was that you were supposed to do, what is the way.  There is that path to follow.  For you alone.  Each must find his or her own steps.  Viola.  Voi-la.

We watched a movie last night called Genghis Blues.  It follows a blind blues musician's journey to Tuva, a province of Russia near Mongolia, that used to be an independent country.  There are connections made to the likes of Richard Feynman, who attempted to make the journey there himself, but came up short.  Paul Pena, the musician, makes a pilgrimage to the home of "throatsinging" after teaching himself the craft.  It's an interesting adventure chronicled by a tag-team of documentary filmmakers that garnered an Academy Award Nomination.

There are many things in this film that have stuck in my mind.  There was a small treatment of shamanism, and I added it to my mind's file cabinet.  It's a myth, a fallacy, that we think we know what we're doing a hundred percent of the time.  Truth is that we're acting on inspiration, most of the time.  We don't know why we say or do the things we do.  But sometimes, that's what needs to happen, for the greater plan.  Kinda like karma, in a way, but different, because there isn't a sort of balance sheet where a good deed makes the world a better place, and where evil doing brings retribution.  The balance sheet is in a language we no longer understand, in the sense that understanding is developed and put into play these days.  It is understood, perhaps, but cannot be explained.  All the languages spring and dart around at it, and the work gets done, but it's not one way or another.  It is both.  It is all.  That is all.

My great uncle Tony collected stamps.  I wonder if he had one from Tuva.  Evidently, that's how Feynman discovered the existence of Tuva-- through his stamp collecting.  You just never know how things are gonna lead you, and where you'll end up.  It's an intriguing mystery indeed.