Thanksgiving Is Backwards, Shouldn´t It Be GivingThanks?

We have a tradition in my family. When I was a kid, Thanksgiving was always at my grandparents Arlene and Milt´s house in Palm Springs, land of cousin pillow fight wars. We would gather once a year at the long oval shaped glass table, and each person would say one thing he or she was grateful for.

I live in a family of criers. It´s beautifully true. We´re a bunch of saps, every one of us. You can go through the archives of all of our Thanksgivings, and you won´t find one where at least a couple people haven´t shed tears during this ceremony. My mom, especially, always impresses us, usually by forming tears in her eyes before she can even get a word out.

I´m happy to say that I´m fulfilling the family birthright. As I sit here writing this, I can feel the tears filling up my eyes. It´s my first Thanksgiving away from home, and I´m not just away from home, I´m thousands of miles away, in a different time zone and a different language. I didn´t quite realize how special and crazy that is until just right now, I think.

Today my family is going to gather in our house in San Diego. My grandpa Milt, tall lanky grandpa Milt, died several years ago. So now we gather in San Diego, some new family members, some of them still pooping in diapers (we´re all hoping my brother Adam will move past this phase soon). And everyone will go around to say something they´re grateful for, and tears will be shed, and people will leave the table uncomfortably full. Ah, the beauty of traditions.

I hadn´t even thought about continuing the tradition from down here until this morning, when I received a beautiful email from Kalen, with 5 things she was grateful for. And when she asked me, I was amazed to watch all the things pouring out of me. So here are a couple things I´m grateful for....

1. I´m grateful for you, every single one of you. You are all on this list serve because you´ve formed the fabric of my life. You have all impacted me in ways that stun me. You have all taught me, shown me compassion and love. You have all blessed my life in some way, and for that I am truly grateful.

2. I´m grateful for the tears that keep trying to get out, but I tell them, I won´t cry in the Windsor Elementary School computer lab where I help teach English. Those tears are little liquidy reminders of home, of everything I left and love so much back up in the northern hemisphere. To be able to miss something is a beautiful thing.

3. I´m grateful for my family. I´m grateful for growing up in a loving home, where my dad threw me groundballs everynight in the living room, focusing on my backhand, where my mom asked me every day how school went and cared and endured years where I didn´t feel like sharing, I´m grateful to my sister for always making me feel like I was special even when I didn´t feel like it, I´m grateful to my brother for taking me to costa rica and showing me the joy of exploring the world, for sharing his wisdom and flatulence with me. To my loving grandparents, cousins who hid beanie babies and played red indian, aunts and uncles who always respond to my emails. To everyone.

4. I´m grateful for the struggles. I´m grateful for being made fun of as a kid, for feeling like I didn´t belong, for this semester which has been one of the biggest ups and downs of my life. There´s a quote by Richard Bach that says, "I gave my life to become the person I am today. Was it worth it?" I´m grateful to be able to say yes, thank you, I love who I am.

5. I´m grateful for forgiveness. I´m grateful that my family sat around the couch a couple months ago and had an honest, loving conversation about everything going on. I´m grateful that I´ve learned that to forgive means to embrace and love everything that´s there, even if we didn´t choose it. I´m grateful to be able to start forgiving myself, for not always being how I want, for not feeling how I want to, for not saying something the right way or doing something the right way. And to attempt to do the same with everyone else in my life.

6. I´m grateful for technology. With all the negative impacts it has had on our culture, it connects me and all of us every single day. It allows me to share this with you, to send an email and receive it in seconds, to feel like you´re together when you physically aren´t. And I´m grateful that with all of that, it´s still a day like Thanksgiving, with its most basic elements of food and family, that is the most warm and important.

7. I´m grateful for the longing we all have. It´s a longing for freedom, for joy, to express ourselves and our most basic human nature. I´m grateful to see that no matter what we all do, no matter how misguided or lost we are, that it all stems from that longing we share. I´m grateful to see we´re all doing the best we know how in that certain moment. To love that longing and all the manifold ways it manifests itself, is to love life itself, I think.

8. I´m grateful for health, for my ability to get up in the morning without a problem, go to the bathroom, walk outside, stretch, run, jump, all without thinking twice about how incredible it all is.

9. I´m grateful for what we have...sink faucets that give us water when we need it, cupboards and markets full of food, clothes that cover us, houses that shelter us, people that surround us.

10. And the last thing I´m grateful for, is being alive. I´m grateful to be given this one chance to truly live, to express myself, with all the joy and pain that comes simultaneously. This one wild and crazy life, as Mary Oliver called it. I´m grateful to be able to honor myself, my body, my spirit, and all of you, in everything we all do, even though I´m pretty apt to forget sometimes.

Man, I wish I asked myself this question every single day!

May your Thanksgivings bring you exactly what you need :-)

Love,
Ryan

Don't Cry For Me, Argentina

Left to right: Roberto (chilean), Mari (German), Ryan (buzzed from wine), Walter (crazy Brazilian), Omer (Israeli), Francisca and Antjie (more Germans) at the dinner/barbeque we made.
The group on the hike. Walter undoubtedly saying, "brotha" to Roberto. Read paragraph dedicated to Walter below to understand what I mean.
Omer, Ryan, Walter
The original group: Roberto, Mari, Francisca, Antjie, Ryan. Apparently in Chile bunny's ears behind people in pictures is also funny.


A Chilean, an American, an Israeli, a Brasilan and 3 German girls walk into an Argentinian bar...

It sounds like the start to a complicated and potentially hilarious joke, but it's actually just a good description of my weekend! Let's start from the beginning....

Thursday afternoon found me at the bus stop across from my house, late for class as usual, huddling from the rain as usual. All of a sudden, 3 German girls arrive! They are also exchange students at my university here, and we had met and chatted a couple months ago. When I asked them their plans for the weekend, they said they were leaving for Bariloche, Argentina the next morning, which fortuitously enough, I had planned to do, but had given up because Jorge couldn't go. It was too coincidental to pass up!

So I somewhat invited myself along, bought a bus ticket, and woke up the next morning at 8 a.m. to catch my bus. Or so I thought...

Arriving at 8:46 a.m. for my 8:45 a.m. bus, rather groggy, I became rather alarmed when I noticed my bus leaving, quite rudely, without me. Roberto, the lone Chilean in our group, took the lead as the Chileans are apt to do, and erupted into a dead sprint with my backpack to the top of the street, with me also shouting and following behind him. Fortunately the big bus caught a redlight, so I frantically borded, where I was informed I was on the wrong bus. But fortunately again, it was headed in the right direction, so three hours later I eventually transferred to the right bus. I'm still a little confused about the Chilean bus system...everything else in Chile is late, so why the buses?

Anyway, bus number 2/a.k.a correct bus found me seated next to a 30 year old Irish girl traveling through Patagonia with her boyfriend. She was the first Irish girl I met, and I was pleased to able to tell her my name (Ryan in case you forgot) is Irish. I was also pleased to listen to the Irish accent for 4 hours, which I think is one of the coolest accents. We had quite a shambollucking time (thank you for this excellent addition to my vocab, Irish girl), and I also enjoyed being able to speak English and express myself eloquently.

So we arrived to Bariloche, Argentina, my first entry to the country, singing, "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" (sadly this did not happen, but reflecting on it now, it was one of my life's greatest regrets that it did not), and inadvertently smuggling 3 mandarin oranges across the border. Sorry agricultural protection control!

Then we found the coolest hostal, ever. I met my first Spanish person ever, who had an excellent lisp. I met my first Uruguayan and Argentinian people too, whose accent and ease of understanding compared with the Chileans was also quite nice. The nighttime (which lasted until 4 a.m.) was to me the pinnacle and best of what it means to travel. I had conversations with the Germans, the various Spanish speakers, and this Brasilian guy named Walter, who deserves his own paragraph to follow. All of this took place with the mate being passed around (Argentina, along with the "guys" of Paraguay and Uruguay, are the kings of mate).

Paragraph dedicated to Walter the Brasilian:
Walter the Brasiliean spent 9 months studying in New Zealand, where he learned to talk like a mixture of a rasta man and a rapper. His every fourth word was "brotha" and he often told people not to be haters, even when they clearly were not hating. Just the kind of guy who creates his own interesting show wherever he goes. He and the Israeli had some very funny language exchanges, where they called each other haters in thick accents, and said slightly offensive words, which I have written off as not really understanding what they were saying.

Saturday we assembled our odd group which represented 3 continents and approximately 6ish languages, and headed to a big lake, where we hiked for a bit and traded off speaking English, Spanish, Portuguese, Israeli, and a bit of German for good measure. It was here I discovered my talent for imitating the German language, possibly a trait passed down to me from my father, who also enjoys overdoing the gutteralness of German. Funny enough, in doing this, and saying words like Slcheim and Stineanjf, I accidentally said things that actually existed. The Germans were extremely entertained.

Saturday night is where that first sentence I wrote at the top of this blog actually took place. We went to see a reggae band. Being in South America, it didn't actually start till 1 a.m., and faithful to my grandpa-ness at heart, I fell asleep at the table at 2:30. But Youthful Ryan rebounded thanks to the insistent Germans, and I hit the dance floor after awaking for a solid 1.5 hours! Between the plentiful availability of balloons and Cole family Bar Mitzvah dances, we had a rocking good time. And now, for funniest moment of the weekend recap:

--Me, the 3 Germans, and Roberto the Chilean were at dinner Friday night when I told everyone about when I didn't cut my hair for 1.5 years, and had super long hair. They were amazed, and so I wanted to show them a picture, which happened to be in my money belt, wrapped around my waste, under my shirt. I said, "Check this out," and started to reach for the money belt when I was met by the scream of one of the German girls, saying, "No!!" I looked down and realized that from her angle, it appeared I was reaching down to show everyone my pubic hair. When we all realized what had happened we started BUSTING up laughing, tears flying. It makes me chuckle still as I sit here writing about it.

Well that's about it. An awesome weekend, 4 new friends, a new passport stamp, and the word "shambolluck" in my vocabulary. May you all avoid shambolluck in your life!

And a parting quote:

"Live your life from your heart. Share from your heart. And your story will touch and hear people's souls." --Melody Beattie

Amen, sista!

Love,
Ryan

Who I Voted For

You know when you just gotta do something? When everything builds up and feels just really strong and powerful and you gotta do something? That's how I feel right now. And I decided, I need to write.

There's an incredible mix and swarm of emotions inside me. Like my insides are a big cauldron and a crazy leprechaun dumped in all the colors of the rainbow and is swirling them around, over and over and over again with his big wooden mixing spoon. Like a pack of ambitious Amish are making their year's worth of butter in there. Like Barack Obama and George Bush and everything else I've ever known are at a pool party, all trying to mingle, some of them rather unsucessfully.

My God, where do I start? Barack Obama got elected. We elected him. The students and the youth that never ever vote voted. Left and right people are saying I voted for the first time and they're saying it with pride. I want to cry when I think about what Obama said last night, about the 106 year old black woman in Atlanta, Georgia who stood in line to cast her vote, a woman born a generation past slavery, who lived through Jim Crow and signs on public establishments saying "Your skin's pigments are a different color, you can't enter," who saw Martin Luther King Jr. with his message of peace and freedom and justice captivate a people and a nation and then get assassinated, a woman who saw schools integrated and a country change its laws and start to change its character, even if it took an eternity.

"Yes we can," he shouted and they repeated over and over again last night, an orator of the caliber of Frederick Douglas and MLK Jr., a pastor carrying his church because they wanted to, needed to, believe.

It was incredible, as us 10 gringos sat around our house, glued to the television and computers wildly finding poll updates and funny clips of John Stewart. Incredible in that we watched a truly historic moment filled with so much hope and jubilation and promise. Incredible in that we all collectively passed a serious moment of nostalgia, of homesickness, of wanting to be where the action was, where are country was.

There are some moments, like when you find out your sister is pregnant and his having another boy, when your friends are going through a tough time and they need a hug, when you need a hug, that you really wish you could be there. This was another of those times.

And when you get past that lump in your throat, it's a beautiful feeling. It means we love that place, those people. It means finally we can get past this collective generational sense of shame that we live in a country looked down upon by so many other places, that when we tell people here we're from the U.S. the first two questions we hear are "what about Bush?" and "isn't the U.S. too racist to elect black Obama?" That we can say now, "I am American, and my goodness we have screwed up a lot, but a nation of people, the people that have never before made the difference, are clamoring and saying Yes We Can."

That, to me, is the true beauty in all this. Obama's message of hope, of change. Yes, as a country, we have done some seriously shitty things. As people, each one of us, has struggled, had pains, at times dealt with all of our conflicting feelings about ourselves, about the the world we live in. Who among us has not said, "I don't want to be myself right now?" One of the few political issues I feel seriously passionate about is gay marriage, and the U.S. collectively said no to it last night, my home state said no. It fills me right now with this pit in my stomach, this knowledge that we continue to discrimate, however we want to call it, however we want to justify it.

But am I not discrimating too, as I look down on what I perceive as their discrimation? As I live in a country and even a house that overwhelmingly doesn't support gay marriage or even just being gay, how do I deal with this? In thinking about this, in truly feeling this out, I have come to one conclusion:

To love them.

To love them? Yes, to love them. To love the people, to love everyone, for who they truly are inside, apart from all the things that society piles up on us, that people pile up on us, that we pile up on ourselves.

Jonathon Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach says it better than I can:

(fletcher): "I don't understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has
just tried to kill you."
"Oh, Fletch, you don't love that! You don't love hatred and evil, of
course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one
of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by
love. It's fun, when you get the knack of it.”

One of the hardest and perhaps most important things in the world is to love when it seems the hardest. To love your fellow people, to love yourself, when part of them hates, when part of them discriminates. To realize we're all in this together, that none of us is better than anyone else. We just are, we just are, and we're all doing the best that we know how in this moment. How can we not love this, love all these follies, love every single moment we try and get knocked down and get back up again and again and again? "Joyful participation in the sorrows of life," as the Tibetan proverb goes.

That's what Jesus, Ghandi, MLK Jr. did. That is how true incredible inspired beautiful change happens, through a loving embracing forgiving accepting spirit that holds all of the world in its heart, all of the perceived good and bad and everything else, and says, "I can hold you, and I can love you, because I know what you really are, I know what you're really made of."

So as the television channels show the blue and red states and all these interesting statistics and breakdowns and numbers, who voted for who, I just hope, from the very bottom of my heart, that we all, in our own ways, vote for love, tolerance and celebration, and embracing. Because in the end, in the very end of things, from where else does it stem? What else truly matters?

I end with a Tibetan prayer, given to me by Kalen, that says exactly what I want to say:

"May all beings everywhere, with whom we are inseparably interconnected,
be fulfilled, awakened, and free. May there be peace in this world and
throughout the entire universe, and may we all together complete the
spiritual journey."

Love peoples,
Ryan

Manolla Shows Us How To Play The Blues

Well, after setting a vociferous blog pace for the first month, I've tailed off significantly. I'm not quite sure what I've been doing, but sure enough, the time is a passin'. I spent one weekend with three friends in Chiloe, the seconds biggest island in South America (click on the link to see photos). Lots of good stories, some small penguins, and typical dish called "curanto," which comes with 5 different types of animal on the same plate. Click on the link to guess which five, and also to see how I felt after managing to eat just 1/3 of this ridiculous monster.

I also recently got an internship helping teach English at the Escuela Windsor, a private bilingual school. It's been incredible so far, and makes me want to be a teacher more and more every day. I'll hopefully find the steam to write more about it soon! So far, all I can say is, I have sung Yellow Submarine with the kiddies twice, and it went over well.

And last but not least, here you have Ryan and Manolla, the blues duo, with a mostly unintelligible song. I believe the only word you can make out is "harmonica," but that really says it all. Six year old Manola makes her debut in this truly inspired, stand-out performance:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2385156&l=f1953&id=1241186






And a parting quote:

“If this day in the lifetime of a hundred year is lost, will you ever touch it with your hands again?”
–Zen Master Dogen.

May we live a hundred years and not lose too many days!

Love,
Ryan