People Care So Much

Some nights writing these posts is hard. It could be that I have processed too many thought. Or not enough happened in the day. Or I might be too tired or slightly drunk. Or maybe I just don’t want to write, but when you make some thing a habit, a routine, a rule, you have no choice, but to suck up it up and write the words.


Tonight my excuses is that I processed too much information. I am tired and I am slightly buzzed. Just got back from a lovely meal of organic vegan food. I didn’t even suggest the place, but that was the vibe that the crew wanted, and this is a good thing. Had a few drinks before we went and some lovely micro-brews with dinner. We chatted about how to teach kids and save the world and how to be better at our jobs and how to be better people. We spoke about sustainability and Monsanto and Tyson meats and class and problems and solutions.


It is so cool to think how many people care so much to do the work we do. I am so proud to have dedicated my life to education and while sometimes it gets me down, it feels great to talk and share and fail and succeed.


Back in my room, I am listening to Sufjan Stevens and contemplating what is better- just turning out the lights and sleeping or watching Room.


My session went well today. Thanks for asking. I had about 14 people there and they were excited and engaged and asking all the right questions about the power of deliberately designed learning spaces. The rest of the day was useful and provocative.


I am so excited about my new head of grade role. And now that I have stepped even one tiny step away from my immediate teaching role, now that I have seen how many moving parts there are, I am starting to think that maybe I do have some interest in administration and leadership on a larger scale in the future. Now sure what that means or what that could look like. Let’s see how next year goes, but maybe there is some bigger leadership roles in my future.

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The excitement of travel and solitude in hotel rooms is slowly being replaced by fatigue and missing my family. Can’t wait to see them in a few days.

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Not everyday can be some profound epiphany. Today was well spent. I learned a lot. I thought a lot. I taught. I learned. I ate. I drank. I shared and received. Maybe these are the days that matter when we add them all up.


Random observations- The service industry in Manilla is amazing, So nice and warm and accommodating. Singaporeans should come here and take some hospitality courses.
The reaches of globalisation and American imperialism in the Philippines are both familiar and comforting, but at times nauseating.


That is all.

Sometimes Sleeping

I had a hard time staying awake today. It was a drowsy fast moving cloud, slow moving thoughts, just keep your eyes open a bit longer kind of day. I felt a bit guilty as I floated in and out of consciousness. Guilty because I could have been marking a few straggling papers. Guilty because I could have been entertaining my kids. Guilty because I could have been helping Mairin​ unpack and sort all the groceries for the week. Guilty because I could have been reading or playing guitar or even watching a movie, but I really couldn’t keep my eyes open.

The most exertion I was able to muster today was a ride to lunch- veggie burger and XIPA from Brewerkz. We were the only ones there and it felt a bit like a Zombie Apocalypse with refillable root beer. We forgot to ask for no straws and they brought four to our table. Made me think about a headline I just read where in 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.  That is a few years after peak oil, now that should be quite a show. I will be seventy something; I wonder what that will look like. The girls will be the age I am now. I don’t like to dwell on the depressing stuff, but on lazy sleepy Sundays sometimes the shit comes crashing down.

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For some reason the snow on the Eastern seaboard is making me miss New York. I always loved NYC in the winter. Well, that is a total lie, I hated it when I had to wake up at 5am and take two busses and a train to teach in the Bronx and I would step in puddles and the classroom would be so over heated that we couldn’t breathe, all 38 of us in the room, fresh off the boat,  and I would run outside and smoke cigarettes in the cold in between classes and cry on the train on my way home, because it all felt too big and too hard to fix.

But I did always like the fresh snow in Central Park. The whole city hushed under the blanket of white, while down on the lower east side, we crammed into bars with blaring jukeboxes, small crowds huddled outside watching the snowflakes fall, intermingling with our upward clouds of smoke. Still somewhat young and fresh and alive in the most exciting city in the world as we were slowly erased by the snow.

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It’s strange when you try and document your daily life, and you realise that it is all pretty ho-hum. Even your thoughts on it become unoriginal and predictable. How many years have I been saying the same old stuff? Years of tweets and blog posts and Facebook statuses contemplating the same old thoughts. But then in a few weeks, there will be an upturn when I will realise that this stability is good. I think I was even writing about that last night.

I needed a rest today. I needed a slow day. I love these quiet weekends alone with the family, sometimes sleeping.

Ahhh, who knows? This one doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Might be time for a good book, a full night sleep in preparation for the big week ahead. I hope Sarah Palin gives another speech this week. I really enjoyed that last one.

Lessons Learned:

• Live your life as responsibly as you can, knowing you will never get it all right, and rest when you need it. 
• Nostalgia doesn’t always have to hurt. Sometimes it’s just a fleeting memory, like a snowflake meant to only last a brief time. 
• Some nights the words must be hard earned and etched out of the granite of your mind, and even then the diamonds are not always to be found. 

1. What are your thoughts on the state of the world in 2050? 
2. Share a memory of a place you loved to love. 
3. What’s something you do that is hard and does not always yield the results you wanted?

I Know No Other Way

I was asked in a comment to reflect on, my lack of participation in this election and my relationship with consumption before criticizing…

Here is my reflection: I live in a constant state of guilt and frustration, because I do not know how to live in this world. The world I envision and the one I live in are not the same. This disparity causes me much grief. Desires and consumption controls my life in such a way that I often feel powerless and lost. The things I say, the criticisms I make are not directed solely at some subservient public; they are most often directed at myself.

I am a consumer just as much as the people I chastise. I do not know how not to be a customer because I was bred to consume. Every aspect of my life, despite my parents’ strongest attempts to shield me, has been affected by a capitalist culture designed to make me a happy consumer. I assuming that the comment was made to make me think about my hypocrisy. I am not blind to this. I am a hypocrite and this fact causes me much suffering. I cannot stop being a hypocrite, because I do not know how.

Perhaps much of my angst and rage stem from the fact that I feel controlled and not in control of my own life. I do not feel free. Do not get me wrong; I do not take the physical freedom I have lightly. I know I am blessed to sleep every night in a beautiful home with everything I need to survive, an amazing little girl, and a great friend in my wife. Despite my blessings, I constantly feel like I am running in circles, and that I not only tolerate a rotten system that thrives on injustice, but that I am actively contributing to it.

I read my Zen books and understand the concept of starting with myself and taking it slow. But my awareness does not necessarily make it any easier.

The only way I see a way that I can become the person I want to be is to totally disconnect from the system and live off the grid. I am not brave enough to do this. Perhaps it is because I have a family and my choices are now not only mine. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that I want to escape, or that my family is the only thing holding me back. I am not saying that at all. My family is the single most important thing in my life. My wife and my daughter sustain me. I am just saying that this sense of powerlessness may cause me to lash out.

It feels that the profit based-system has become so intrusive to our collective consciousness, that there is no escape. I feel like a prisoner to my own desires and needs. Perhaps this constraint and reduction of freedom is beyond politics and economics.

I am sure people will comments that say, we do what we can and try to work within the system, and I agree to an extent, but really then aren’t we are all hypocrites? I hate believing in and understanding revolutionary ideas, knowing my history, but still living the life of a reformer or worse a passive participant, or even worse, an active contributor to a system I can see is collapsing.

At the end of the day, I am just trying to learn how to find peace in a convoluted world. I may rant and rave, I may not participate in elections I don’t believe in, or I may have a dysfunctional relationship to consumerism; I am not denying any of that. I am just saying that I know no other way.

Morning Yearning

I commanded myself to spring out of bed as soon as the alarm went off. No snoozing or contemplation of further sleep. Like a quick band-aid being torn off, I know myself well enough to know that I cannot afford any delays, or else risk derailing the entire morning routine project before it has even started.

(Warning approaching tangent!)

One of the main components of this transformation project is a cognizant, self-aware reconnection with nature and re-entry into an eco-system I can recognize. As I have previously stated, and will no doubt repeat like a mantra, living in the desert makes it difficult to feel like you are a part of nature, let alone a denizen of the planet Earth. The barren landscape coupled with the unnatural heat makes one feel as if he or she is a colonist on a distant planet much closer to the sun.

I have, however, been trying to find certain elements of everyday life to remind me that I am indeed an earthling and that nature, even in this stark setting, is still part of mother Nature’s script. I notice small birds bathing in the sand outside my window, shrubs and weeds along the side of the road, but ironically the two bodies that have connected me the most significantly with the earth here in Doha are the moon and the sun.

When I go to cross that river
She is a comfort by my side
When I try to understand
She just opens up her hands

There’s a big
A big hard sun
Beating in the people
In a big hard world

Eddie Vedder

I am sure everybody has a certain novel appreciation for the sun. A basic grasp of photosynthesis should be enough to convert any person into a sun worshiper, and if elementary level science is not enough, any one who has spent anytime outside on a hot sunny day can appreciate that the sun is not only the source of all life on earth, but a beautiful deity in her own right. Without her energy no life on earth would exist. I find it strange that millions of people devote their faith to a god no one has ever seen, but the most people take the very source of all life on our planet for granted.

My casual understanding of the sun was dramatically altered after reading The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. (all quotes in this post are from this text.) Since finishing the book, I have come to better understand the true magic of our nearest star. Since this new discovery, I can now see that the sun is not merely a part of our eco-system here on earth, it is the root of every food chain on earth. It is the source of all energy. It is wrong to think that only solar energy comes from the sun.

At their most basic, fossil fuels are nothing more than ancient sunlight stored in decaying animal and plant life. Oil is an organic battery hoarding energy from the light that hit the face of the earth millions of years ago.

Almost all of Pangea was covered with a dense mat of vegetation, rising hundreds of feet into the air, creating a think ground of cover rotting and dead plant matter that became, in some places, hundreds or even thousands of feet deep. The mats of living and dead vegetation became thicker and thicker as this phase continued for over 70 million years.

This mat of rotted organic matter is the very oil that fuels are cars, electricity plants, tanks, war planes, processed foods, children’s toys, you name it- this ancient stored sunlight energizes our entire modern industrial society. The problem is that the earth was designed to operate using current sunlight energy only.

The planet’s human population grew beyond the level that the Earth could sustain if humans were using only local “current sunlight” as an energy and food source.

To put it simply, we are using energy that is not sustainable. The sun produces only so much energy, this amount of energy is enough to sustain a functioning population of Earth inhabitants, but humans have tapped into a hidden source of ancient sunlight, thus growing our population exponentially, and throwing the balance out of order. We now have a population dependent on more energy than the sun can produce, so when our credit runs out, the sun will not be able to produce enough energy to sustain the population we have created.

I didn’t mean to go on that rant, for more detailed explanation of these lessons please read the book. I just brought up the sun, because I wanted to illustrate why I have become so uber-aware of its role in my life. Nothing is more effective to show a person the power and worth of the sun, then feeling it on your skin in the Arabian desert. There is also something about the longitude and latitude of this region and the amount of sand in the air that makes for spectacular sunsets, and from what I realized today sunrises as well.

Today was the first day I woke up at 5:30. I made myself a cup of tea. (I really need to not buy tea in tea bags anymore. The waste of each bag seems ridiculous. Loose-leaf tea will eliminate so much unneeded waste.)

I hit the elliptical machine and felt my thighs ache from non-use. Onto push-ups/sit-ups and a short stint of Zazen. It was the easiest ten-minute session I have ever had. I could feel my heart beating, tiny globules of sweat danced on my skin; I mediated on a spec of dust in my field of vision. It stayed in place when I was done. Then I floated away to work and it too was gone upon my return.

Another day another chance to get it right
Must I still be learning?
Must I still be learning?

Morning yearning…