Baron Michael Mojohito John Richerson von Tchudi

It has sure been a day. A number of days, in fact. I am back in Reno, preparing to enjoy a bowl kicked down by Brother Cheetah and watch Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce (Go!), but first I am to make a report for my loyal readers…
I enjoyed Wenatchee quite a lot, which I didn’t expect. Frankly, I thought it would be something of a poe-dunk (hm, never tried to spell that before) town; kinda run down and sad. Actually, it’s quite clean and nice, with several parks equiped with swings and/or riverfront access, polite police (in my single experience), and a mid-level “mongolian barbecure”-style restaurant where one can get an oil-free vegan meal w/ brown rice cooked fresh. The fancy bakery on the edge of town even has a mostly whole-grain sourdough, and the “health food”-style store has quite a good selection, except for produce, but I guess, er, Safeway is pretty good. Hrm. Yeah, so I got along well enough with the Folks – Heather’s parents and sister, Pennie – and Dad says I’ll make a good man, so that means I’m accepted by the clan. Also means that moving there August through December is a, something of a possibility… provided I can find work there, etc.
We spent some time in Oly after that, at Fido’s with Cheetah and Jen. The beautiful weather followed us, so we had time for frisbee, walking in the woods, and a bonfire. Ate the damn finest lamb and chicken around, fresh oyster mushrooms and kale from the garden.
We would have liked to visit friends and colleagues in Bellingham and Lopez Island, but it just wasn’t in the cards (so to say). Sorry, peeps, hopefully next time.
Today, woke up in Oly, visited Alexis in Renton, then to Sea-Tac by 3:30, farewell to Heather, then in Reno, at the pub with old family friends by a quarter to eight. Tomorrow is finishing Heartwood coursework, and packing and preparing to head to ‘Frisco on Friday, CPR/First Aid cert. on Saturday, and that evening meet two of my fellow interns and drive to Emerald Earth. Official beginning of the program is on Monday.

Hoka hey.

BTW, isn’t Terminator II just a great action movie? I haven’t seen it in many years, mind you, but I think about it relatively often. That scene when the kid figures out that the super-robot has to do whatever he says is classic.

Yesterday was eight hundred miles of driving. Sixteen hours. Coffee and pie that no doubt had hydrogenated oils in it. Loud music and a fair amount of herb. I was primarily navigator, passenger, and disc jockey. Nice ride, up all night.
Today I find myself in Wenatchee Washington, staying at the family home of partner Heather. Meeting the folks is a good time to be nervous, and so I am, but as long as I don’t seem stupid, I don’t mind seeming quiet. Of interest is that part of this trip is to gauge Wenatchee as a suitable place for me to settle for a while after the NBiC internship this summer, so I am observing and considering the scene from that perspective as well. With an urban population pressing fifty five thousand residents, Wenatchee is technically considered a “metropolis”, but is perhaps a small market to work the miraculous attempts at employment I am building the spleen for.
It’s this or Reno.
‘Nuff said.

Currently in Reno Nevada, enjoying the weather, using the kitchen, kicking it with the folks. Working out all the logistics of recovering from my last incarnation (as a Asian healing arts student) and preparing for the next (as a permaculture design intern). Settling my accounts with California law enforcement, DMV, IRS.
Preparing to travel more, up to WA state in a day or two.
Managing stress but without utilizing proper tools.

A simple and common greeting is to ask a person how they are doing, meaning, presumably, as an inquiry into the current state of the individual’s emotional and mental health. I’ve been finding this question more and more difficult to answer – a simple “Ok” has never seemed sufficient, but lately I feel a mental short circuit when this question is posed to me. My emotional and logical landscape covers the spectrum of “very well” to “very poorly” at any given moment. To respond that I “just am” seems most accurate, but also sounds vague and pseudo-enlightened, of which I am neither. Detailed and specific with language, and I intend to answer every question as if it is posed with a genuine interest, not just as a perfunctory greeting. Enlightenment is something that requires it’s own body of writing just to define; I don’t fancy being in that category.
I can be very well as I am eating healthy food, spending the bulk of my time learning about interesting subjects, slowly developing meaningful relationships, and still have time to reflect.
I can also be very poor because I still struggle with destructive behavior patterns, the coursework is strenuous, I still feel lonely even when around people, and the reflection can be intense and aggressive as my mind seeks to process to completion each and every detail.
I am filled with love, but don’t particularly like people. How am I, you ask?

My mind, perhaps this entity holds some key. It does indeed seem to function rampantly, on its own, and the reigns I put on it can merely guide the stampede of thoughts. I am aware of feeling good, of feeling bad; these things influence – but don’t define – me, whatever “Me” is. There is more than one aspect of the concept of this “me” thing, processes and subroutines that run parallel, concurrently, influencing one another, condensed and broadcast through a body, face, and voice to be received by other humans nearby, each of them their own “me” structure, complete with receptive capability and filters, compiling information to co-create a version of reality that more-or-less works for everyone.

I stub out the slender roll of tobacco before it burns my fingers and throat further. Slip on shoes, other layers of dark color and symbols, shapes that define and contain physical parameters and transmit messages, and step out of the warm and dark and solitary room into a bright cold morning. I don’t hear my neighbors. Walking an unpaved trail through trees, I have in my mind the voice of a new friend, a good friend, conveyed through time and technology and headphones.
The music she has written and recorded and printed and distributed sings of love and self in ways I haven’t thought of in a while, having defined myself through celibacy, relationships indistinct and transient, but now I am in the present with this mournful and hopeful melody guiding my thoughts, considering what I would feel like to have another in my life, sharing a small reality. And I think of her, since as I listen to this music, I think not only of my relationship to it, but also her relationship to it, and my relationship to her. The music, the moment, alone, yet with her voice in my mind, takes me away, and I realize that I have reached the end of the path before I have reached the end of the moment.
I take the headphones out so as to be more aware of the environment I am entering. A lodge crowded with people inside from the cold. I make simple conversation, people accessing only the outer-most layer of the personality-complex, which finds it acceptable to give superficial answers to perfunctory questions. I fill a bowl quickly and leave again. The cold doesn’t bother me. It seems suiting.
I set the bowl down outside to turn music back on. Walk to a spot where it is likely other people will pass by, but unlikely that they will try and speak to me. I look out and down into a landscape of rolling hills. The morning sun pulls moisture up from the earth, and mist begins to rise, becoming low clouds, diffusing the light. In another two hours, the moisture will burn off, and it will be a warm afternoon. I breathe deeply the dense air while it lasts.
And I’m savoring breakfast and staring into the fog and absorbing the music and contemplating gently and I realize why I can’t give a straightforward answer to a straightforward question: there isn’t a cohesive “Me” to give an answer in the first place. There are many “me”s that all want to channel a genuine response through a single source of output, and the transmitter gets confused. Short circuit.
“I” am not limited to a personality-construct that interacts with others and has many techniques to establish itself as a dominant and cohesive unit. There is also a deep and vast existence that underlies all that. This manifestation of conscious energy is stunning, and it is doing very well. It is healthy and expanding and perceives love and beauty in all things. It is the personality subroutine that suffers from weakness, fear and doubt, desire and loneliness.
This explains why I feel so present and capable of offering nurturing and compassion to others who feel suffering, yet rarely feels safe with another person when it is my turn to be vulnerable. The energetic aspect of my existence can hold safety and awareness, while the fragile ego feels that it cannot be related to.
Tears stream down my face into my bowl of miso, and I am vaguely aware that I haven’t eaten much. I try, but food has no taste, so I set the bowl aside and cry quietly to the heavens at the realization of my self-imposed limitations. A person walks past, and I do not know if they see me.
I listen to the music, and hear her words:

Darkness can go on without me, because I no longer fear to face what is coming in it’s place.

I am able to compose myself, contain again the fission reaction of my soul within a rapidly deteriorating sarcophagus, finish breakfast, and move my body. Align my spine, encourage the movement of synovial fluid and cerebrospinal marrow. Stretch the tight muscles of my legs, working daily to reset nerve spindles within the muscle structure, extend the capacity for movement that this machine affords.
Tears have dried on my face, and I don’t expect others to notice. I don’t want to talk about it. It is time now to enter the disorganized training hall, make some part of myself available for learning, continue the expansion of thought and capacity. A new inlet has seeped through into the lagoon of my awareness, adding a fresh source for contemplation and nourishment.
I will hold on to this, gently

I have lived through now in my life with a certain type of lifestyle that allows an easy existence – comfort, luxury, and entertainment have been hallmarks of this mode of living. I have always known, however, that my youth would be the easiest and most ‘fun’ period of my life; eventually, these things would fade and would be replaced with intention, dedication, and discipline towards more advanced goals. I have had many interests but lacked direction: due to easy access to finance, I have had sophisticated audio, video, and computer equipment and world travel at my fingertips, which I have treated as puzzles and toys. I have learned much, but applied little; intellect without application. In recent years, I have seen more and more that the frivolous nature of my investments has been wasteful, and I have discovered deeper needs and interests that attract me. I intend that I will no longer treat my interests as games. I have discovered and decided that now is the time to initiate massive change.
Attending the Heartwood Institute is the first major step on this new path unfolding in front of me.
The time has come in my life when the comfort and ease of childhood must be replaced with dedication and hard work.

I am attending the Heartwood Institute for nothing short of personal transformation. This is the calculated process of using my knowledge and experiences up until this point of my life, combining them with a chosen path and direction, and submitting my whole self to a rigorous training program with the intention of becoming the person that I want to be. The Heartwood Institute offers a multifaceted and immersive environment that will give me the opportunity to make dedicated and intentional change in myself.

In this document, I am establishing my intentions:

Physical and Mental Purification
Destruction of Old Habits
To cleanse the body is to cleanse the mind; as the mind clears, consciousness is able to expand, which facilitates the process of purification. Drugs, alcohol, and poor diet all contribute to a toxic physicality, and thus a poisoned mind. In addition to ill health and disease, depression, self-doubt, low motivation, and lack of creativity are all brain-chemistry related, and can be addressed by the quality of what I put into my body.
At Heartwood, I will live in an environment with the cleanest air and water, organic vegan and macrobiotic diets. I will be away from the chaotic lifestyle I have existed in for so long, and the destructive tendencies that come from that lifestyle. Without constant social pressure, as well as long standing patterns and habits, I intend to break away from drugs such as caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and marijuana. I will quit smoking and drinking. With nine months living in this environment, I will develop a clarity and peace of mind that I will take with me into the outside world. While I will not make a statement that I will never touch tobacco, marijuana, or alcohol again, I can state firmly that I will break my attraction to these drugs as habitual behaviors and emotional crutches that I stumble with as I react against a world I feel ill at ease with.

Positive Attitude
I am a fairly articulate communicator, and I am effective at explaining and understanding issues and problems and work to find a solution agreeable to all parties; I can facilitate and mediate conflict situations. However, I have the feeling that my day-to-day conversational style seems smug and pessimistic, perhaps even superior and arrogant at times. In this process of transitioning into life at Heartwood and the rigorous education I will undertake there – especially considering the small community of individuals I will be living with, sharing a small room with another person, and the general positive and healing environment – I intend to practice the subtle attitude of humbleness, and cultivate a more sensitive ability to listen and understand, and to give all people the space to communicate freely without passing judgment. I intend to take these new communication skills with me into the outer world.

Development of Discipline
The work gets done. I push myself to study and learn. I stick with most projects I begin, and I don’t abandon a situation when it gets difficult. But discipline is more rigorous than these. I also don’t start new projects because I lack the motivation; I don’t develop creative ideas because I don’t see the point. I hate exercise even as I enjoy being physical. To have discipline means to be able to function through my insecurities, inhibitions, laziness, and overly self-critical attitudes. I will develop discipline at Heartwood in a variety of ways. One is to study the coursework rigorously; this will be the most intensive educational experience I have had to this point, and I will need to apply myself with dedication in order to graduate with Honors. Also, I will participate in Yoga and QiGong exercises, which develop both the physical self and concentration. Perhaps the most difficult will be to chose to function smoothly in a social community environment; I don’t know how I will respond in a community so small and close, since my tendency is to keep to myself. It will take a new kind of discipline for me to extend myself further in all these directions simultaneously.

Meditation and Concentration Techniques
Meditation is a process that seems so simple yet so elusive at the same time. I have practiced occasionally, and perhaps have slipped into a meditative state more often without realizing it – or taking advantage of the peace. Meditation is a powerful technique for calming mental chatter while simultaneously expanding the brain and mind’s ability to process information and emotion. Ironically, I find it very difficult to calm myself enough to make meditation a regular part of my daily life. At Heartwood, I will receive direct instruction as well as live in an environment highly conducive to contemplative thought. Like Yoga and QiGong, it will take a new type of discipline for me to meditate nearly daily, but the time I will spend will increase the level of discipline. With nine months at Heartwood, I intend for meditation to become an integrated part of my life.
Essentially, I will be breaking bad habits immediately, and establishing new, life affirming practices in my daily routine. Over nine months, this will allow my neural circuitry to re-map itself, and when I leave Heartwood I will have a new set of mechanisms for dealing with the stresses of chaotic urban life.

Energy Sensitivity
Chinese medicine is only one philosophy/modality that considers an intrinsic relationship between physical well-being and the body’s energetic makeup. Indeed, the energy systems of the body, documented as meridians and chakras, are but one example of the nature of physical reality – which from a certain perspective, matter and energy are indistinguishable. It could be said that what we perceive as matter is in actuality a complex webwork of energy relationships.
A principle of Zen Shiatsu is that an individual can detect and manipulate the bio-electro-magnetic field of another person’s body to facilitate healing, and this concept is repeated in similar forms in Polarity Therapy, Ayurveda, and the Martial Arts.
My intention in training at Heartwood to become sensitized to the detection of the energy fields of the body, and move my education in this philosophy/science from the realm of academic to experiential.

Health and Healing
Not only am I going to cleanse myself and establish and reaffirm powerful skills for healthy living, I am going to study this process as well, and study it in a way that I can take these and share them with other people. What makes Heartwood such an effective school is that students live in this immersive environment and learn by experiencing the process within themselves.
Traditional Chinese Medicine is an effective modality for a variety of reasons. It is detailed and specific. It functions on many levels; for example, I will learn about the value of whole-foods nutrition. I will also learn about the energetic properties of foods, another layer. And this, combined with Five Element theory and Shiatsu energy and massage techniques create a dynamic and fluid way to approach the subject of healing with a wide variety of people.
There is more to it than this. Why I decide to focus on health and healing is also a question with many answers.
We live in a society where we are inundated with propaganda and imagery designed specifically to influence what we think. Much of this is in regards to perceptions of health as distributed by massive corporate structures who have much more concern with profit than with health. I quote Inga Muscio:
“Loving, knowing and respecting our bodies is a powerful and invincible act of rebellion in this society.”
We must unlearn the disinformation distributed by profiteers so that we can re-learn how to live in a wholesome and healthy way. Attitudes about food are some of the most deep seated suppositions I have encountered, and yet are so basic to survival and quality of life, and – as I mentioned above – are directly related to mental functioning as well. It is here that the process of deconstruction and reeducation must begin.

Personal Transformation
In all of this, my intention is to unlock my inner potential. While Chinese Medicine and bodywork are a set of skills I can use, the experience at Heartwood is about clearing myself to get a better look at my Self, becoming a more complete and integrated person.
I am attending the Heartwood Institute for nothing short of personal transformation. This is the calculated process of using my knowledge and experiences up until this point of my life, combining them with a chosen path and direction, and submitting my whole self to a rigorous training program with the intention of becoming the person that I want to be. The Heartwood Institute offers a multifaceted and immersive environment that will give me the opportunity to make dedicated and intentional change in myself.

Civilized, intelligent creatures have existed on Earth for a lot longer than what is popularly considered under current timelines for the development of life on our planet.
Folks have anticipated that the end of the world will come within their lifetimes throughout all of history. People have always experienced their surroundings, referred to mystical texts, and read and interpreted prophecies to discover that nuclear war, pole-shift, alien invasion, or rapture was imminent – years or even days away, civilization was destined to collapse. Many would perish, but some – those prepared – would survive; bunkers with canned food, souls purified through prayer, and a superior morality would ensure the future of those special individuals, ones with enough foresight, insight, and spiritual guidance.
As is evidenced, however, the end of life as we know it hasn’t occurred, not any time within the last, 50, 000 years, give or take – so a lot of doom-sayers have been seriously incorrect in their interpretations.
Indeed, as young people alive today, we aren’t in very close connection with our heritage. It’s difficult to imagine what our grandparents’ lives were like, let alone two hundred or a thousand years before that. Recorded history is maintained by the victors and oppressors of the past, or at best, the wealthy minority. Those people thought and felt in ways fundamentally different from how we think and feel today, so it takes substantial creativity and conjective projection to even imagine!
So, I’m skeptical.
I’m skeptical of the WOTS theory, if only because I see how easy it is to envision the end-of-life-as-we-know-it, and to believe that we are the ones with enough foresight, insight, and spiritual guidance to predict and prepare for the inevitable. The capacity of human ego to inflate one’s self-worth boggles the mind.

We indeed live in troubled and trying times. Evidence abounds to support a WOTS scenario, but evidence abounds to support just about any imaginable theory, no matter how outlandish it may seem. At the same time, just about anything we can imagine to exist probably does exist, so it goes both ways.
I encourage each of us to consider alternative points of view very seriously. I know that there has been a lot of research done by the people who frequent this forum and by brilliant philosophers and magical scientists of all races and disciplines, and all of it is purely subjective – open to interpretation, regardless of corroboration. For example:
The 2012 end of the Mayan (actually Olmec, but we don’t even know where they got it…) calendar doesn’t actually predict the end of anything other than a cycle of time – no different than a year, decade, or century. The precise alignment of the Egyptian pyramids to reflect Orion’s belt in precisely the year ten thousand four hundred and fifty BC implies… damn, must be important. Stonehenge is a meticulously constructed monument that was likely very important to the people that lived in that part of the world way back in the blissful Unity Consciousness era of Earth’s history. But damn if that stuff makes any sense to humans alive today, at the turbulent end of this phase of Polarity Consciousness (if that particular model of consciousness development can hold any water). The ancient and highly refined spiritual science of Buddhism sees our reality of samsara to be never ending to those who don’t selflessly dedicate multiple lifetimes to the grueling task of spiritual development, and the other realms are accessible only through karmic action or the will of an enlightened being.

I call for each of us to consider alternative points of view very seriously. As well as constructing a spiritual philosophy, one must also deconstruct spiritual philosophy, and consider why it is s/he believes what s/he does. Only through this practice can you be sure you are developing your spirit and consciousness.

Believing you are Right is an extremely dangerous position to be in. One small assumption can block one’s pursuit of Truth.