Summer In Itajubá Survival Tips

In summer Itajubá, you should take off your clothes when you get home. It is hot and you will sweat watching TV or surfing the net or whatever you do. You will then have to change clothes before you leave again because your first outfit is sweaty and Brazilians are an impressively clean, nice-smelling people. If you come to my house and I attend you at the door in my boxers and flip-flops, just look into my eyes and it won't be so awkward.

You should not be surprised by the sight of bare-chested construction workers, homeless, teenage boys or any other variety of male half-naked in public. Also, you should not get too excited by the ubiquitous short short shorts, the flowing colorful dresses, the shine of vitamin D on everyones skin. That will distract you from getting anything done. You may even acquire neck injuries, like whiplash, or fall back into the habit of drooling, which is considered rude in Brazil.

If you get irritated with anything at all, look at the sky, look at the mountains, buy a homemade ice cream or açai or an all-natural juice. Sit down and sweat in peace, knowing that you are in Itajubá and probably if you arrive "late" to where ever you think you need to be, you will most likely arrive right on time.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Take time to reflect today, Dr. MLK Jr. Day. 

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will."

From "Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963

Here are two quotes I like, the latter of which reminds me of John 1:5 for those of you interested in religion, quality literature, or hermeneutics. I put these two, also, because it has taken me around a decade of reading the Bible as an adult to finally feel like I understand the text. Many times I put it down and said, "this is ridiculous. This doesn't make any sense...it isn't realistic." I hypothesized that the failure to understand was my own. The effort to understand is a part of the experience of reading the text. The authors' were not obscure, I was dim and arrogantly considered my little candlelight of intellect sufficient to behold the cosmos of the soul.

There mere act of trying to understand the texts as completely as possible has strengthened, stretched, and rendered more nimble my mind in such a way that these "upgraded" faculties have enhanced my perspective on Life, People, Art, Work, etc. So, religious or agnostic or atheist, I argue that anyone who accepts the challenge of humbling his own "knowledge", his own conception of what is "True" to the narratives of (probably) any Sacred Text will find his mind more capable, his physical senses more sensitive to the depth of Truth, and his heart more at peace, pumping not just blood through his own body, but Love through a metaphysical organ of which all Beings are, arguable, constituents.

Excellent Men

Once, I found myself in the company of excellent men; or rather, men of habits lending toward what some might call excellent results. Well, I knew well enough to lay my third-eye gaze inward. Indeed my contents were in every way equal to theirs and yet my output, my expression, my transmission, my transubstantiation, my alchemy, of said substance (rather a "super-stance" or an "omni-stance" than a "sub-stance", I propose) was simply not par. It was a difference of method, approach, motivation. Indeed, either a lot of work was needed on my part, or a miracle, to come to match. I'd scribbled on a piece of paper, as I was in the habit of doing -- and still am -- whilst I sort of fretted in my agitated, inferior-feeling Will-force and irritated Ego: "I, too, must therefore seek excellence; if not, new company." 

And then, just at that moment, the lads of whom I speak, who were at the table discussing other things not-at-all related, all cried out, "amen to that brother!" smashing their glasses together above the middle of the table, and it was a Divine Timing behind that coinciding of my interior moment and that shared experience where by body, at least, was present. It was metapoetics, it was what the Single Soul in which we reside looks like when it dares to leap from the alphabet soup of the Collective Mind and fizzle in the caustic breath of Life, gazing upon itself through my confounded ears. Gone it went.

And of the capital “T” Truth, the meaning, there is no measurement, no empirical nothing in regard to it. Just me – I – and my response. I was to be the result, the proof, you so desperately need in order to confidently “know”.

But even now – and perhaps no matter what I might do or claim – you prefer your fine and reasonable doubt as if it were the shadow of a lone tree in a desert of confusion when, as I see it, it is much more like a mirage holding you from progressing onward, from returning.

Examining our two situations, I wonder: If you are right insofar as I am fueled by a fiction and I am right insofar as you are rendered stagnant by your Truth, which of us, in this Life, has got it right?