Well, that was fast!  I left on Friday for cloudier skies in Seattle, where I had two days of teachings with Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, my dear friend Belinda’s teacher.  He taught on the 50 Verses on Dependent Arising, a text spontaneously recited by his teacher, Khenpo Rinpoche, and recorded and translated by Ponlop Rinpoche.  I can’t say that it was a retreat per se – there was very little silence, and only an hour or so of daily practice, but it was great to be in an environment where so many people pursue the path of study of the Dharma.  It was fascinating to see people take out their laptops and notebooks and organize the teachings they were receiving in their individual ways, and then reviewing their notes and going over the teachings with others.  A very different approach I think than the one I have so far seen in the context of zen practice – or at least zen practice in our tiny sangha on the East End.  

Anyway, these teachings were meant to point out the inherent emptiness of reality.  Not emptiness in the nihilistic sense, but empty in the sense of there not being anything to cling or attach to.  Rinpoche said so many things that opened up my mind to realizing how attached I can be to my concepts of reality, even as I go about thinking I have let them go.  I also really liked how disarming he is in his presence.  He has deliberately stripped away many of the trappings of the Tibetan tradition for the benefit of his western students.  He doesn’t engage in too much of the pomp and circumstance of many high lamas, preferring to wave to his students rather than bow, and using much of our western colloquial language to convey the teachings in a way that’s readily accessible to his students.  And he laughs with ease and frequently.  

Anyway, it was refreshing and interesting and sparked a whole different level of inquiry into my practice and my thinking about the dharma.  I’d like to think that I could take from this a renewed interest in at least studying dharma on this trip since I don’t have so much room to practice it.  I brought back books and tapes – and believe it or not, songs.  It seems that Khenpo Rinpoche, in his infinite wisdom, decided that his Western students needed to relax a lot more in their bodies – and to get them to release their uptightness and “perform” a little bit less in their practice, he had his translators bring funny, very up to date translations to Milarepa’s songs, composed in the 800s, and set them to catchy little tunes.  So, just when things would get really stultifying during the teachings, or when a song might illustrate a particular point he was making, Rinpoche would ask his translator to pick up the guitar, and the whole sangha would sing!  And sometimes get up and sort of bounce a little while singing.  It was hysterical at first, to me, but then it felt really nice and it really did make the atmosphere so much less uptight, so much warmer.  It was like singing campfire songs in a shrine room.  Anyway, I liked some of the lyrics so much that Belinda gave me her Milarepa songbook as a parting gift.  

But to cover some lost ground, we dropped down from Vancouver last Friday, after I had my first breakdown of the trip.  I’m not sure exactly what the trigger was, but suffice it to say there’s a lot of stress involved in this kind of constant travel in this kind of teensy space.  I spent a day and a half not able to do much but sob into my pillow – when I wasn’t raging at my two favorite people in the whole world.  It felt truly awful!  I guess it was an opportunity to familiarize myself with that aspect of me that is NOT together, NOT generous, NOT collected, NOT warm, and just generally NOT sane.  I forget sometimes that everyone has this edge, that I have this edge.  We don’t like to experience it and we work hard at maintaining the boundaries within ourselves that keep us away from those edges.  But sometimes, the edge gets wider and wider until you find you can’t help but be on it.  And there I was.  Miles, as always in my darker times, was caring and kind, and tolerant and supportive.  

Despite my slightly less-able state we decided to push out, as planned, from Vancouver that evening, driving through the Columbia River Gorge along the border between Washington and Oregon.  Fortuitously, we had decided to take the eastern route through Oregon toward Bend, because the day after we came through, I-5 (the main north south highway between Seattle and Portland) ended up closed and flooded out for days.  Our drive through the gorge wasn’t much better though.  We drove through a lot of snow up the gorge (unfortunately obliterating our potential views of it), but the truck and trailer handled very well in the snow.  Just east of the cascades we got a lot of wind as we wound our way up small mountains and on over to Bend. Unfortunately, we got to Bend on the day of a big wind and snow storm, so instead of taking part in skiing at Mt. Bachelor, we used our day there to get the truck and trailer ready for snow driven highways and mountain passes – and doing laundry of course.  We’ll have to go back on our way back up the Rockies later this winter.  

From there, we dropped into Northern California, spending two nights at Redwood National Park campgrounds.  It was nearly impossible getting the trailer into these tiny campsites and winding through roads woven through the network of huge redwoods, but well worth it.  There’s nothing like waking up and looking up out the window behind our bed and not being able to see the canopy of the trees around you.  It was truly a fairy-land.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get to take any big hikes – many of the hikes in that area are made for touristas with naturalizers, not hiking boots.  And the ones that aren’t tended to be too long or sometimes too rugged for Kell.  But we did get to see a lot of crazy big trees.

On our second day in the redwoods, we met up with a really sweet family from the French alps.  They were a young couple about our age, with four children ranging in age from 15 months to 10 years.  Ok, many thought we were a bit mad for taking this trip, but Jean-Noel and Christine are really going for it.  They plan to spend four years traveling with their kids from Canada to the States, to Mexico and then on to South America.  They are living in a completely custom designed camper built on top of a heavy duty off road Mercedes truck that they had shipped from France to the states.  I can’t do it justice with words, you’ll have to check out the pics.  But it’s a much smaller space than we could ever have managed with.  I have to admire their willingness to change everything so drastically. 

Their children were lovely and they had a 5 year old boy, who, despite their inability to converse in the same language, spent a couple of hours running around with Kell playing some kind of game involving sticks and climbing in redwood tree stumps that were 15 feet high. Jean-Noel and Christine said that they don’t like living in France now and that people there don’t want to come here because they have such a bad image of the States and Americans.  But Jean-Noel and Christine felt it was a place that their kids, and they, should explore for all of its vast and varied beauty.  They seem to be having a great experience so far, despite the breakdown that Christine had in Vancouver (curiously the same time I had mine, must have been the weather or something).  They, like us, are also thinking of not going back to where they came from when they are done traveling.  Of course, they are casting a much wider net for potential relocation, from here down to South America. It was great to connect with like-minded people and see how they were planning their transition to a completely different life.

After the Redwoods, we headed down to San Fran.  We had hoped to stay in Marin somewhere in a less citified setting, but the campground we found, in Olema, was just too out of the way and desolate itself to work for the whole week.  So, we moved on to a campground just outside San Rafael, and close to where Miles’ brother lives and works.  Our first day there we headed over to Infineon Racetrack, where Telo has has racing team's (Worldspeed) shop and offices.  Another big highlight for Kell of course.  Telo immediately captured favorite uncle status when he actually let Kell sit in the racecar that won the championship for Worldspeed two years ago.  Of course, I’m already imagining Kell begging to spend summers working for Uncle Telo and learning to drive these things!   Telo having just upgraded to new and larger digs, we got to see all the cars that are part of the team lined up and being worked on in the most spotless garage you’ll ever set eyes on – you could eat off the floors!  Kell was mesmerized.

Anyway, with my two days of contemplation behind me, I’m now returning to San Francisco, where we’ll spend a few days seeing friends and family, and the sights, and getting a hit of the warm(er) air, maybe do some hiking in Marin, and then it’s over the Sierra mountains to Salt Lake, where we’d like to be by the 16th to spend some time with Miles’ family there.