Floating

Six years ago, my wife and I were on Koh Phi Phi Island during the Tsunami. You can read the story here. This is only the first draft of something I wrote a week after the event. It is raw and choppy and needs some love. Six years later, I am ready to revisit it soon. I am working on a second draft for the book, so stay tuned.

Every day since December 26th, 2004, I have tried to lead my life in a manner that illustrates that I have not forgotten the lessons one learns when one barely avoids death. Some days I live this life better than others, but one cannot help thinking about the direction a life takes after avoiding a giant tsunami wave by feet, minutes, seconds.

Here is my take on it this year...



Have a very Merry Christmas everyone. I love every single person who has taken the time to watch this, read this blog and share your lives with me through the various online channels. I do not want to get overly sentimental for fear of sounding melodramatic, but I hope you have had a great year and are living your lives to the fullest. Looking forward to seeing what comes next!

Everything You Need to Learn You Learn From The Ocean

There was a time when every vacation my wife and I planned revolved around Scuba Diving. Costa Rica, Mozambique, Mauritius, Thailand, Malaysia, and Hawaii. Yes, I have even dived in Lake Malawi. Although, I have logged nearly fifty dives and have my advanced license, I would never say I am an expert diver. I began diving as a way to face my fear of the ocean and claustrophobia, but years later, every time I don the regulator and sink into the big blue deep, there is still a part of me that is terrified. Beyond the ecstatic feeling of neutral buoyancy, the discovery of breathtaking marine ecosystems, and the feeling of perfect Zen meditation it is the fear that brings me back to diving.

I have not been in the water since my daughter Kaia was born over four years ago, so it was with great pleasure that I was able to look out at Bali to my left and Mt. Ranjani in all her fog capped majesty to my right, as our boat navigated the Gili Islands off the coat of Lombok, where I am lucky enough to be spending my Christmas Break.

image by yeowatzup

In the water, as I sank to about fifty feet and watched the bubbles engulf my body, I began to think about this blog post. Yes it is a sickness I know, but what can I say? My experiences are wrapped in my ability to document them in text and photos and music and video and…..well you get the point. This is not the “diving” post where I regale with fluid prose about the otherworldliness of diving, I am saving that for the book, this is simple a top ten list of things I was thinking about on my last dive as poked and prodded my way around the ocean floor. So there I am kicking along, controlling my breathing, watching my thoughts roll through my head and out my regulator and I thought of this list:

The four things I have learned from Diving:

1. Not every cause has an immediate effect. Sometimes you may see a big coral outcrop in your way and you take a deep breath to inflate your lungs, so by design, it will lift you effortlessly over the boulder, but before you let the air molecules play with the water molecules, and the ocean molecules play with the you molecules, you are kicking your legs and wasting precious energy and air, where if you had just waited patiently, you would have seen that the breath you took a few seconds ago would have done its job if you had just relaxed and let it. The world needs time to react to your energy, so don’t expect immediate reactions to your every action.
2. Don’t fight a current. Ever. The Ocean is much bigger than you. If a current is pushing you faster that you want to go and you are afraid that it will push you beyond where you want to be, well tough shit. Deal with it. Swim with it where it takes you and make notes a long the way. It is easier to gather your bearings and sort things out after a current is done with you than to try and fight it. No matter how big or brave you feel, going with the flow is always the right choice, even if you have no idea where you are going. Because fighting it will just get you tired and unable to deal with the end when you get there.
3. Don’t waste so much time looking into the big blue void looking for the big stuff that you miss the tiny nudibranch right in front of you. While sharks and Manta Rays may be impressive to spot, it is the myriad of tiny creatures making the ocean their home that make life interesting. Just because something is common doesn’t make it less interesting than something that is rare. When seen through the mask of curiosity and awe, even the most clichéd clown fish and anemone scene from Nemo can be fun to watch. If you spend the entire dive looking for something rare, you may waste your entire time not seeing anything at all. You are part of a bigger ecosystem; see it as a cycle and as a whole.
4. Focus on your breathing, but don’t fixate on it. Stay calm and breath. Live in the now, but don’t worry so much about breathing that you miss the ocean around you. No one wants to run out of air on a dive. Just like no one wants to run out of air on a life, but you can’t spend the entire time worrying how much time you have left. It is possible to be overly conscious. You try to stay calm, conserve your energy, and enjoy the ride, but if you see a turtle in the distance, never mind how much air you have; kick yourself over there and take a look.

Thought there were more, but I guess those juicy thoughts were mine alone to deposit onto the ocean floor.

The Daring Spectacle: A Review

A few months ago, I started to read Mark Morford’s weekly column on SFGate. I was in love. His fluid, verbose, Tom Robbinsian,  snarky young Hunter S. Thompsoneque prose  aligns perfectly with my vibrations and connect to someplace in my soul which I reserve for epiphanies, cosmic revelation and orgasmic joy. I look forward to his column every week as a chance to swim in wine glass of text and examine a perceptive that eerily mirrors my own yet always leaves me thinking.

Knowing that I had missed years of his work, I ordered a copy of his book, a collection of his columns called The Daring Spectacle. Morford himself advises the reader not to read the collections straight through, but who the hell is he to tell me how to read his book? He warns that even he tires of his over-the-top, run-on-sentence, throw in a few words like yoga, vibration, and ecstasy style. He is right, there are times when the prose reads like a shtick, but over all this is an amazing book filled with funny, important, angry observations on human beings and how we function in a universe we are powerless to ever fully understand. But more than that, these essays are a tribute to the magical, mystical, maniacal observations we could all make about the world should we choose to look. 

I have added a few links below to some of my favorite columns, but I suggest you get yourself a copy throw it on your bedside table, backpack, toilet seat, coffee table and flip through it every time you want to be reminded that the world is an indescribable, wonderful roller coaster ride.

How To Sing Like a Planet: Me, I like to think of the Earth as essentially a giant Tibetan singing bowl, flicked by the middle finger of God and set to a mesmerizing, low ring for about 10 billion years until the tone begins to fade and the vibration slows and eventually the sound completely disappears into nothingness and the birds are all, hey what the hell happened to the music? And God just shrugs and goes, well that was interesting.

Behold, A Furry Blond Lobster: Knowledge is not fixed in stone. It is transitory and ephemeral and exists only so long as we pump it with meaning.

Dick Cheney Kills Birds Dead Because it is, in the final analysis, all about how you approach and engage the world, nature, yourself. It is all about with what degree of sacredness and veneration you walk the planet, treading lightly or stomping heavily, in awe of the interconnectedness or working to crush the beautiful and the weak for profit and hollow thrill. It is, after all, your choice. 

Please Kiss Your Old Toaster  What kind of energy do you want to cultivate? What kind of reverence do you want to experience? With what kind of step do you want to tread the planet? What the hell can you do every single day that makes the gods grin? Maybe, after all, these are the only real questions that matter.


Politics, yoga, sex, homosexuality, technology, art, music, nature, god, right-wing, left-wing, pain, joy...Mark Morford reminds us of what it feels like to be human. Let me know what you think.

Finally in a, "you gotta love social media for the access and connection it gives creator and consumer" moment:

All Alone Is All We Are

Having kids, a robust social network, a meaningful career, a wife, peers,  an artistic bent, and a mind full of questions makes one remember the power of solitude. Sometimes the only thing that matters is sitting alone in your living room past midnight gently tapping the keys and letting your mind find it's shape in the cloak of words and ideas. No goals, no product, no agenda, philosophy or manifesto, just a tender voice telling you that it's all okay. The silence broken by the sad gentle sound of your favorite song. The smoke is gone, the wine glasses untouched, but here you are. As you always have been, pushing forward one small step at a time.

Glass House

I was quite upset a few nights ago; for no good reason I had bent myself out of shape and readied myself for a bile soaked rant. Ranting is easy. It takes  little courage and only serves to satiate the writer’s ego. By cleaning out ones own toxic thoughts, the writer feels that the he has done the world a service, but passing toxicity seldom makes the situation better. Dumping venom into the world only makes it more sick. This realization has been a big step forward for me.

I have a tendency to rant. I like it. I jump right up on my soapbox and let loose my opinions, as if they carry weight or have any significance to the flow of the universe. I flex my muscles and hide behind the bravado of words. Seldom part of the solution, I am finally learning that the view is skewed from the soapbox.

Some of the best advice I have ever received on writing was from my mom. I am paraphrasing here, but she asked what service does writing provide if it is not helping the reader in some way.

Tall order? I know. Who the hell knows how our words will touch other people’s lives? While I may not be able to “help” any one but myself, I beginning to understand when I am being harmful.  Sharing rants may make me feel better, it is not polite, however,  to spill noxious thoughts onto you, the reader. I do not want to do you the disservice of forcing you to attach to my negativity. There are so many more beautiful things to shed the light on. So I will put down the stones and open the windows of my beautiful glass house instead.

It finally hit me while writing last night. I was  really punching the keys. I was in about three paragraphs when I realized that no good would come from the post I was writing. I was wrestling with a confused anger that I needed to deal with internally.  I stopped and hit delete.

image by SandoCap

This is what I came up with tonight:

I am standing outside admiring my new lawn, actually it’s this weird spreading grass that never need be mowed. It has replaced the weeds and mosquito nests we had there before and I enjoy thinking about it setting roots. An all-encompassing gentle mist lingers in the air, and the grayness of the sky is neither bleak or gloomy, but subtly filled with shades of purple, yellow and violet, as if it is hiding a shower of rainbows, just waiting for a hint of the sun to shine. 

Inside Skyelar is nursing a cold and has finally fallen asleep. I am at home, alone, taking care of her. Her tiny cheeks red with fever, I have been holding her all day. She looks into my eyes and we smile. We kiss. We sleep on the couch. I enjoy the brief respite outside the front door staring at a massive tree in font of my house. I live in a city of eleven million people, one of the dirtiest in the world I am told, but at this moment everything is perfect. Every thought from my rant evaporates and disappears with the floating mist.

What makes it even more perfect is the fact that I am realizing the beauty of the moment as it is passing. It is a rare moment that we are aware enough to breathe deep and not concern ourselves with our thoughts. A perfect mediation in the now. I think about all the anger and cynicism I harbor, and exhale it away with one breath.

I think about the last time I was lost in wonder. Why do we allow our lives to be drained of astonishment and replaced by routine. It doesn’t take much to rekindle one's childlike curiosity. I stare at the tree and think about how it is really just another vessel of water, soaking in the moisture from the air and roots dug in beneath the city of Jakarta. The magic and power of this tree reminds me to focus on spreading light rather than toxins. Reminds me to highlight the moments of simplicty and not settle on the ease of routine.

I think about the rant I was brewing a few nights ago and am embarrassed by its pettiness. Life is too simple for mucking up so much unnecessary complexity. There is rain and trees and fevered one-year-old children who simply need to be made to feel safe and loved. They want to be held tight and caressed and reminded that their daddies are strong and capable and filled with hope and light.

These are the words that have been running through my head for the last few days. I hope they help.