Chile Ryano

Be A Channel, Not A Dam

2010-07-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

Picture of Hamsa

We have a saying at the camp I work at. It is one of my most favorite sayings and concepts in the whole world. It goes: Be a Channel, Not a Dam. It means this: instead of projecting onto kids what you think they should do or be, start where they are at. If a kid is feeling energetic and you had in mind a quiet activity, meet them where they are at and make it more active. It allows kids to be who they are and to channel their wonderful emotions and energy into something positive. Instead of a dam, which becomes blocked up and eventually, if not let out, will explode.

There is an ancient, beautiful symbol called a Hamsa. It originated in Northern Africa before the advent of modern religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Throughout the years, it has gradually become an important and popular symbol of protection and good luck for the Jewish people. In many homes in Israel, it's very common to see a whole collection of these Hamsas.

Part of my job at camp is to teach at least one Jewish activity per session with the campers, and the Hamsa was a symbol I decided to use for an activity with my bunk of 7 campers. They are 10 years old, and incredibly silly and rambunctious. They had been having a lot of fun at camp, and I wanted to also make sure they could have a more serious, meaningful experience where they could share personal feelings and get to know deeper sides of each other.

So with some help from some creative people, I designed an activity. This was the plan: Go to Arts and Crafts. Collect about 20 sticks each. On a huge piece of butcher paper, we were going to draw an outline of a body. They were all going to write some of their own perceived strengths and weaknesses on the body. After that, we would go around and share what we wrote. After each strength or weakness, people would throw a stick into the center to show that they also felt they had this strength and weakness. The whole point of the activity was to highlight all of our various unique strengths and also show that we are not alone in our "weaknesses." It's a pretty cool activity, with the potential to remind kids of their strengths and also show them their weaknesses can really be strengths.

After that, we would all decorate our own symbolic protective hamsas on a piece of plastic called a "Shrinky-Dink," which you then put into the oven so that the design remains but the paper shrinks to about a quarter of the size. Then we would make necklaces of them and wear them around camp, to remind us of our strengths and also to help us feel safe and protected.

I huddled them up before hand and talked to them about the more serious, meaningful tone we were trying to set. I wanted this for them. I wanted them to get to have a meaningful experience.

But life rarely goes as planned.

As the activity began, they started going crazy as only 10 year olds can. They collected 5 foot sticks instead of twigs like I asked them, they started trying to hit each other with the sticks. They wrote weaknesses like "I have flat feet" and strengths like "I can see with my eyes" when I had imagined they would go deeper and talk about sensitivity, or being too judgmental. When we tried to share, no one was listening, kids would get up and run around and I'd have to drag them back to the table. They fought each other for the sticks.

Boy was this frustrating. This was for them, right? I started feeling angry, telling them they weren't being respectful, that I expected more from them, that I had designed this activity especially for them. I even threatened them with not doing the shrinky dinks if they kept going. It got so bad that I reached this boiling point where I was almost about to say, "That's it. We're done. We're not going to finish the activity."

And then, and then, something magical happened. I actually got out of my head and my own ideas of how things should be and I LOOKED AROUND. What I saw was a beautiful sight. They were all laughing with each other, having fun. Some were rolling on the floor, they were laughing so hard. They were cracking jokes and sharing their humor with each other. And you know what I did? I started laughing too. Because, I realized, it didn't matter what me Ryan Cole wanted for these kids. It was about who they were and what they needed. And they weren't 22 yet, and they weren't needing to go so deep, at least in this moment, and share their most profound and intimate feelings. No, they were 10, and they were needing to be silly 10 year olds and experience the joy of the world through laughter and stick fighting and all the wonders of being just 10.

I had cast my own, unfair expectations on them. The activity was truly about them being themselves and seeing that was not just okay, but beautiful. Who was I to try to change them in this moment? Who was I to have this idea of who and how they should be? To fit them into a box that cramped their style. To mold them into what, for some reason, our society has told us a child can or cannot be? So I let go, and 10 year olds got to be themselves in a world that doesn't often allow it, and their laughter rang into the night. I handed them the shrinky dink paper and they made the designs how they wanted to, and when the night ended, we all had shrinky dink Hamsa necklaces, and they all felt a little closer because they got to be themselves in front of each other.

I go in the Tuolome River every day here. I watch and learn from it. When the river comes to an obstacle, like a rock, it doesn't get stuck, or try to burst through it. It just splits itself and goes around, and rejoins on the other side. I want to be like the river. I want to be a channel, not a dam. Life has a flow, and listening to it, and being a leaf in that river, is a very beautiful thing, I am learning.

Love,
Ryan

John

2010-04-26T00:29:00.000-07:00

This story is too heartwarming not to relate...

Today, I was at People's Park in Berkeley for the park's 41st anniversary. I was tabling for the Berkeley Free Clinic, where I volunteer as a peer counselor, so we had all kinds of characters approach our table. One was a 45 year old guy named John, and he graced us with his incredible story. Here it is.

In his younger days, John was a firefighter. Back then, they relied more on person to person communication out in the field, rather than by radio. As they were fighting a fire, John was approaching the edge of a cliff. The person who was supposed to be looking out did not communicate that the cliff was near, and so John fell over the cliff, plunging 90 feet through a thicket of trees, finally landing on some boulders. He instantly shattered both of his knee caps, and according to him, "I broke 99 percent of the bones in my body."

After recovering, John became homeless. He got into meth, both dealing and using. He said his cycle was to sell meth until he could buy enough meth to go up into the Berkeley hills, where he would spend several months consistently high. When the drugs were used up, he would return to deal more, until he could go back to the hills.

One time, after finishing a 60 day stint on meth in the hills, something changed for John. The moment his foot hit the sidewalk on his return, his mind snapped, and he realized he needed to stop what he was doing and sober up. He gave away his remaining drugs, telling everyone he knew, "Never ask me for this ever again." He sobered up on his own, and also got a couple of his friends to sober up. They moved into Section 1A housing (free government housing).

"John," I asked. "So many people in your situation don't make it. Why are you different? Why did you make it?" He pointed to his right, where his 13 year old daughter stood. "Everything was for her," he said. "Without her, I wouldn't have cared about myself enough to change."

This is the first of three points he and I were able to identify in what is responsible for someone making it (or not making it) out of a tough situation. Here are the three:

1. Having a higher purpose, something outside of yourself. For some people recovering, that purpose becomes a higher power, like God. But it can just as well be someone else in your life, or an ideal you believe in. Perhaps because when you're in addiction you're so mired in your own problems, you need to believe in something outside of yourself to escape it.

2. Community Support. John had people around him (like his daughter) who believed in him, who supported him, who kept him honest. He admitted, he could not have maintained his soberness alone. He needed people. We need people.

3. The will and desire John wanted it so bad, wanted so badly to get his daughter back, that it fueled him whenever he was feeling weak. He discovered that indomitable human spirit that exists in all of us. When he tapped into that, already having a higher purpose and community support, he could make it.

John said he sobered up in 2007, and that today, April 2010, was his first day back in the park since then. He now raises his 13 year old daughter and helps people who are addicted get off their addictions by getting them in programs. The man has a certain vibe, an aura around him. It is one you can only have when you have been to hell and back, when you have seen the darkest night imaginable, the darkest depth of the human spirit, and returned to the light. To go away and come back, to struggle and persevere, to lose everything and regain it, seems like one of the most incredible blessings we could receive.

I forgot to mention, due to his 90 foot plunge off the cliff, John is in constant pain. He's got a pretty sunny disposition, too. How does he do it?

I look at John and I think that he's special, but I think we all have that within us. Maybe we don't see it until we encounter something dark and despairing, but it's there, as sure as your beating heart. When we tap into the best part of ourselves, we can always do it.

Here's to you, John, for the joy you bring to the world.

With love,
Ryan

Hold Your Breath--I'm Eating Vegan! (Gasp)

2010-04-21T15:47:00.000-07:00

I just deleted the blog post I had been writing for the last hour. Bam. Wiped the slate clean. I rarely do this, but as I was writing it became apparent to me I was lost in my own discussion. And it's because I have so much to say! So I'm going to break it down much more simple, and leave the facts and arguments for a later time.

I am eating vegan!

To clarify, especially for my Uncle Ron, who took me to a vegan restaurant in Berkeley and asked me what a "vegan" (he pronounced it "vagan") is, here goes: to eat vegan is to eat no animal or animal by products, including: beef, chicken, fish, turkey, eggs, dairy, gelatin.

Why in God's good name would I undertake such a crazzzzy undertaking, you ask?

Well, it turns out that for my current beliefs-about the environment, animal treatment, farmworker's rights, industrialization, small business being shut down--eating anything but vegan simply doesn't match up. What I'm saying is, at least for right now, I can't feel good about making food choices besides vegan.

I would like to say at this moment that I am purposely NOT writing to judge, persuade, or convince anyone. I am writing about myself, my thoughts, and my own experience. I think people can do whatever the heck they want. I would hope for them they have the privilege of feeling good about what they do, and I think you can have this eating any kind of diet you want. But for me, at this tender time in my life, I simply cannot eat non-vegan and feel good about it.

My reasons, which are numerous, are so scattered and new and all over the place that I'm not even going to try to go into all of them, or even most of them. I need time for them to settle, so I can talk about it in a clearer, perhaps even more objective way.

For now, I'll try to simplify it. Girl gives talk at my co-op. About factory farming. She brings vegan ice cream and homemade cookies, which incentivize me to attend. She gives 45 minute presentation about factory farming and veganism. I am so taken aback that I (and seven other people in my house) decide to eat vegan for one week. We call it the "vegan challenge." (To clarify, I am simply eating vegan now, with no one week limit to it.)

What, you may ask, would ever convince me to give up the Fish and California Burrito at Sarita's? I'm just going to offer one reason for now, and it is the first one that hit me.

Here is ever reliable Wikipedia's definition of "factory farming": "Factory farming is the practice of raising livestock in confinement at high stocking density, where a farm operates as a factory." Basically, a factory farm is one where, generally, animals are crammed into a space that is too small for them, given a modified diet, and subjected to external forces like 24 hour bright lighting to encourage maximum production.

What picture do you see on the package when you're at the grocery store and you're buying bacon, or eggs, or whatever we buy? I often see an idyllic farm with a small red barn, hay, horses, a happy farmer on a tractor. Apparently, I learned, it is simply not the case. A staggering fact: 99% of our animal and animal byproducts in the country are produced at Factory Farms. When I heard that, I was like, "Dayammmmm."

What's wrong with factory farms? Many things, but for now, I will offer the treatment of animals. I recognize that doesn't resonate with everyone, and so I think it is important to elucidate all the different arguments against factory farming. But i want to focus on what initially struck me.

Baby chicks. Baby chicks in a factory farm are typically given the space of an 8x11 piece of paper. They are crammed sometimes 30,000 chicks to a relatively small space. That sounds rough, but this is the part I can't stop thinking about: it is common practice to CUT OFF baby chick's beaks (often without anaesthetic). Why would anyone cut off a baby chick's beak? Well, because of the conditions of the factory farm (lack of space, 24 hour bright lighting to stimulate growth and production, etc.--baby chicks would literally peck each other to death if they had their beaks.

In different settings, be it out in the wild or even in a regular farm (the kind that was the majority until about the 1960's), chickens use their beaks to establish a pecking order, ensuring stability. But in a factory farm, a chicken's beak must be cut off.

Before we get to posing all-or-nothing hypotheticals (well, would you rather us have enough food to eat, or keep your chick's beak on), let's stop. Let's think about our values, what we truly hold dear to our hearts. And then let us, for a moment, consider what it means for us, as a society, to engage in a practice in which we cut off chicken's beaks. A chicken's beak is the first thing that sees this beautiful world. It helps it break out of its shell and breathe our air. And then it uses its beak to feed, as well as to defend itself. It is comparable to our human mouth.

I'm sorry, but I wouldn't want to be part of a society like that.

Well, what about cage free or free-range chickens? I thought the same until I heard this presentation. It turns out cage free or free-range means almost nothing. You could cram 30,000 chickens into a small barn with 8x11 piece of paper space per chicken, and if you have a 3x3 foot area outside, then your chicken is "free-range." But not even free to roam that 3x3 foot area, since the door to it is rarely open and there's not room to move anyways. As the author of a book I'm reading said, "I could keep my chickens under my sink and call them free-range."

And 99% of our chicken meat and eggs are produced this way.

Here is where I run into my dilemma. As I said earlier, I'm really not writing this to try to persuade you, to make you feel bad, to even do anything. I wanted to share my experience and what moved me. And I fear my rhetoric is already moralistic, judgmental. I fear that as soon as I write this I am labeled "a vegan" and cast into a category. Well, all I can do I suppose is state my intention to avoid that.

No, what I want is to continue engaging people in dialog (notice, not "debate") about the food we eat. I want to know, in as caring and non-judgmental a way as possible, why are you choosing to eat that?

Is it because it tastes good to you?

Is it health, because you believe meat and dairy and eggs is the best and perhaps only source of reliable protein?

Is it economics, that you can only afford a certain type and quality of meat and dairy and eggs?

Is it lack of awareness and knowledge of what food you are eating?

Is it apathy, that you just don't care?

Is it that you don't have the time to find out?

These to me all are valid reasons. You can have whatever reason you want, and I just want to engage with it, know about it. I want to know where people are coming from. Say I did become so passionate about eating vegan that I wanted to convince people to change their eating habits-what good would it do for me to condescend and belittle people for their food choices? We judge each other all the time. I think we need to listen to each other. In an honest and caring way.

Where do I go from here? Oh lordy, I have so much to say. I might just keep writing blogs about this. I could write about all the facts related to factory farming I'm finding out (some from a movie called Food Inc. that I highly recommend!). I could write about my experience of eating vegan, from a health/food perspective as well as a social perspective. I could write about my conversations with people. Really, there's a lot to say.

But this is a start. This is my proclamation to the world, at this moment in time, that I'm eating vegan. And I would like to talk about it. I would like us all to talk with one another. Because when we do that from a place of care, compassion, and genuine, non-judgmental curiosity, we learn from each other, and good things happen. Maybe that's the most important thing I've learned at college, and I sure as heck did not learn that in the classroom.

With love,
Ryan

*A woman named Carolyn just emailed me with a link to her blog, which has 100 useful links for people interested in vegetarian/vegan diets. Here's the link: http://surgicaltechnicianschools.org/?page_id=131

Outside a Video Store in Berkeley, CA

2010-03-31T14:54:00.000-07:00

It wasn't until an hour had passed and I was getting up to return to my house that he told me his name was Kenneth.

Kenneth Winters. A pretty normal sounding name, I'd say. Who do you picture when you hear that name? I picture someone aristocratic, perhaps with a stiff, starched collar and dress shirt.

That's not who Kenneth Winters is, though. Kenneth is a man I met today outside of the video store. Earlier today I read this article from a daily, positive news email service called The Daily Good (http://www.dailygood.org/) It was an inspiring article about Jaime Escalante, a Bolivian-born teacher at a low-income mostly minority school in East L.A. Escalante helped high school kids--who no one thought could do a whole lot--to pass the AP Calculus test at an astonishing success rate. Anyway, the article mentioned there was a movie made in 1988 called Stand and Deliver about Escalante's story (http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?qid=4075)

So naturally, I went to the video store to pick it up. I got to the store feeling a little rushed, because I had a plan: get my video quickly, get home and spend an hour making a nice lunch, maybe go on a run, then meet my faculty advisor to get my major approved. That's some plan!

I parked my bike outside the store and there was this black, elderly man sitting on a couple of milk crates selling a paper called The Street Spirit. It's common in Berkeley for homeless people to sell this paper for a dollar. What do you do when you see a homeless person? Today I felt a little guilty and the thought went through my head, "Well, I can't give money to all of them, now can I?" I gave him a quick smile and averted my eyes, so I could get inside and stick to my plan. I bought the movie and I received 65 cents in change. "Perfect," I thought, "I'll just give the guy outside this change and go on my way."

I gave him the money, which was 35 cents short of the one dollar fee for the paper, and he said, "Here, take a paper."

I took the paper, even though maybe some days I wouldn't have. And even on those days when I would have taken the paper and half-heartedly looked at some of the articles about the plight of the homeless and gotten disillusioned and discouraged and thrown it away, I usually wouldn't have sat down to read it. Why did I sit down on this day?

I don't know, but I did. I sat down next to the friendly, elderly man wearing what we would consider raggedy clothing and a black raiders cap, and I tried to read a couple of the poems in the paper he had given me.

We started talking, as two people who are just sitting there and aren't trying to get anywhere are prone to do. He didn't have his iPhone and I didn't have my Blackberry, so logically we started conversing. I think I asked him how often people said yes to him and bought a paper.

And then started an hour long conversation that moved me, moved me enough to come back here and write it down. We got this idea to write a poem together, to maybe submit to The Street Spirit newspaper someday. So I got out my very pretty Parker pen.

This guy could talk. I just had to sit and listen. He surprised me by being incredibly eloquent and well-versed. He talked about time, and patience, and the ability to accept a lot of no's. He quoted the Bible, a passage from James about being quick to listen. And he laughed quite a bit, the whole time in fact, looking off into the distance and laughing, and laughing. And to every person, every single person who walked by him, he smiled and laughed and looked them in the eyes and said, "Hey, how you doing, you have a good day now!"

I wrote down his words, and contributed a couple of my own thoughts. And the whole time, as me and this guy were sitting against the wall outside the video store, him on a milk crate and me on the ground, people were coming and going, going and coming. Someone would walk into the video store, and he'd tell them, "Maybe on your way out." And then they came out. Most said no. About half looked at him. Some didn't even respond to his question. And a few stopped and gave him the change they had received. One guy even gave him a 5 dollar bill and a smile!

And then things got really crazy. This guy walks into the store, and when he comes out, he stops to talk to me and Kenneth. It turns out this guy is a bus driver for the UC Berkeley perimeter line-and Kenneth used to be too! We all chatted for a while and Kenneth remained philosophical and laughing and the guy eventually got on his bike and left.

I want to include Kenneth's quote from the Bible, because I think it symbolizes nicely what all this was about.

"Be quick to listen,
slow to speak,
and slow to anger."

Kenneth said, "You know, everyone's got a story. That lady who just walked in has a story, just like you and me have stories. Even the wind has a story if you listen to it."

This homeless guy I almost didn't bother to make eye contact with just said to me one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. Even the wind has a story. Even the guy you see on the street who looks crazy or scary or drunk has a story. Even that person you hate because they're so annoying, or so mean, they have a story too. That, I did not expect.

Why do we turn our heads? When someone looks at us and asks for money, why do we look away? Is it because we think that if we don't give them money we also can't give them a smile, that it's not worth anything? Or is it because it's painful to look at them, look at him, and see a human being who was born from a mother just like we were?

It's really painful. It's really painful to start seeing everyone as human. It's painful and yet at the same time, it is so fantastically beautiful, so vibrant, so full of love and truth.

I don't want to be moralistic here. Gandhi said, "Action expresses priority," and, "My life is my message." I merely wanted to relay a story that moved me. And I'm still asking myself, "Why did I go to that particular video store in Berkeley? And why did I stop and sit down? Kenneth's answer was, "God works in strange ways," as he looked skyward. That seems like as good an answer as any I can think of.

Here is the poem I transcribed, of Kenneth's words:

Time,
Patience,
and the ability to accept a lot of no's.

Add some humor and
remember the yes's.
But don't forget the maybe's and next time's!

That equals life,
and today.

And then the quiet comes,
and we return:
Time,
Patience,
And the ability to accept:
Yes, no, maybe so.

I'm baaaaaaaaaack

2010-02-20T17:44:00.000-08:00

Approximately 7 months have passed since my last correspondence on this Chile Ryano blog. Instead of boring everyone with all the details of what I've been doing, I feel it's better to play one of my favorite games: two truths and a lie. I'm going to list three things that have happened to me in the last 7 months, and only two of them are true, and you have to guess which is the lie. Here we go:

I ran naked through the UC Berkeley school library during finals
I got hired as a substitute preschool teacher
I ran naked through the school where I got hired as a substitute preschool teacher

If you guessed the third option, you are very wise. I have not yet run naked through Aquatic Park School, where I sub.

Good. Now that you're caught up on my life, I want to explain why I'm re-entering your cyber lives. Writing about my experience has always been something really important to me, and it assumed a heightened importance when I was in South America and far away from my community. I realized there I really love to write about my ideas and reflect on my experiences. But because of circumstances of the last year, I had sort of stopped writing.

Now I'm in a class at Berkeley called "Non-violence." The class is about physical violence that happens out in the world, but perhaps even more so, it is about emotional "violence" (unkindness is another way to think of it) that we perpetuate on ourselves. In the class of about 70 people, we sit in a circle (almost unheard of at Berkeley), and dialogue about various things that come up, from homelessness to sexuality and repression to our own inner struggles. This is my favorite class I've taken at Berkeley, and I feel really lucky to have found it.

Our class is based upon a project which each student undertakes, called a "Vision Actualization." This is basically a project we design and implement which somehow spreads non-violence in our world, or in ourselves. We have a huge amount of freedom in the project we create: projects range from learning to grow your own food to teaching a class in an inner city high school about dialogue and conflict resolution. And that's why I'm back here: my vision includes writing a consistent blog.

My vision, encapsulated into a magnified baby nutshell:

1) Educate myself about diverse topics, ranging from evolution to cosmology to psychology

2) Write, write, write. Write about what I'm reading, write personal reflections to myself, share ideas and experiences with a larger community through a blog

3) Personal mission statement: Create a document of my own personal mission statement. Another way to think of it is: what do I believe and what do I want to do?

4)Here's the culmination of all of it: Student-teach a class at Berkeley about inner and outer non-violence in the fall. It will be called something like "Community and Empowerment," and will include elements of the first three pieces of this project.

I'm excited to undertake such a project. Already it feels pretty revolutionary. In my three years at Berkeley I don't think I've ever checked out a book from the school library. I've actually tried to avoid it at all costs, because it is large and partly underground and filled with people, many of them stressed out and not looking that happy. And now in the last week I've checked out 7 different books. The latest is called "Being Peace" by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk who won the Nobel Peace Prize. I'll write more about it later.

Well, my battery is running out and I feel like reading. Nice to be sharing with all of you again!

Love,

Ryan

You Open The Window, And You Wait For The Breeze

2009-06-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

at the camp where i'm a counselor, the red flag is reserved for incoming campers who will, for some reason or another, require more attention or even potentially create problems for people around them. the reasons for a red flag can vary, from behavioral problems, to a past history of violence or giving counselors trouble, to even physical or emotional syndromes. it's not unusual for bunks at camp, which have 12 campers each, to have 1 or 2 kids with red flags.

so that's why, when our 2 week session started this past sunday, we were a bit concerned when 8 of our 11 campers were labeled as red flags. this bunk was actually so potentially problematic that they switched me into a different unit in camp so that i and another veteran counselor could be with the bunk. when i heard, i was excited, because i felt like it was a huge honor. and also, of course, a huge challenge.

here are some of the bunk stats: two of our kids have aspberger's, a form of autism. about 4 or 5 have add or adhd. one is in therapy for anxiety. another has minor physical cerebral palsy. one is in therapy for anger management, and was just kicked out of school and is currently living with his aunt, who forced him to come to camp. oh yeah, and he's one of two black kids in a pretty much all white, all jewish camp. another kids is catholic. and two of the kids, upon arriving, kept asking if they could be switched from our bunk, or alternately, things you could do to get kicked out of camp and sent home.

fast forward now to tuesday. day two of the session. camp, where so much happens in one day, makes two days feel like you've been here a very long time. the first couple days were a definite struggle. i was in a state of constant awareness, making sure the kids with aspberger's weren't wandering off, making sure there were no fights, both emotional and physical. trying to steer some of the kids away from their general mode of being hurtful and disrespectful.

so our first block of the day was rockhopping along the river. very physically challenging. i forgot to mention that one of the kids with aspbergers, eric, is 12 years old and clocks in at 6 foot four, 250 pounds. all of us had rock hopped ahead, and as we looked back at eric, we see him take a huge fall. the lifeguard manages to pull him up and eric is sitting, hunched over. and then spontaneously, less from one kid and more from some spirit of love and compassion and unity that had been brewing unseen, erupts the most beautiful thing i had heard all day, maybe all month: "Eric, Eric, Eric." All the kids are cheering, yelling, for this strange, removed, unusual looking kid who was slowing them down, yelling for him to get up, yelling that he could do it. Oh my, it was beautiful. Aaron and I, the counselors, exchanged an amazed look.

and then fast forward a bit more to tuesday night, last night. we had been hopeful about the group all day, and we took them on a trust walk, where they line up single file with their eyes closed and hands on each others' shoulders, and walk around camp. the point is to trust the person in front of you. at one point, james, the kid with the anger management, said, "i don't trust anyone in this group." eric asked us to stop because he felt uncomfortable. i've been trying to remove the word failure from my vocab, but it sure felt like it.

i sat us in a circle in the grass to debrief. it was twilight, that transitionary time of day that always seems a bit magical to me. i said to the kids, how did that feel? what made it hard? and after a couple insightful comments, sai, one of the kids with aspbergers, obsessed with fictional tree warriors and sometimes making uncontrollable grunts, says just quietly enough for us to hear, "i have aspbergers."

i wish you could have been there. come with me for a second to a patch of grass right outside of the national park, in a two week camp with eleven 13 and 14 year olds, 8 of them labeled "red flags" by camp. sit in the circle as sai adams quietly tells a group of his peers, kids he has known for 48 hours, "i have aspbergers."

when we sit in the circle and have conversations, i like to tell the kids that the circle is a special way to sit and talk. a circle is unbroken, continuous. it creates a space for everyone to be held, to be trusting with one another, to say things like i have aspbergers to a group of kids who you don't even know how they they'll respond. i titled this "you open the window and you wait for the breeze." the circle is the open window. you create a space for these 11 kids, so many of whom have labels, who have been pigeonholed into a certain way of thinking and doing and being, and you let them be. you wait for the breeze to pass through, and when it does, you let it brush your face and your arms and your body and you say thank you for special moments like this.

so sai told the group what he had, and mitchell followed by telling the group he also had aspbergers. then matthew told the group he had cerebral palsy. and some kids talked about having adhd. they shared what it was like to live with these different things, the challenges they faced. matthew told the group he could only run a 12 minute mile on his best day because of his cerebral palsy, and the group gave a sympathetic moan. and they all listened like i had never heard them listen before, kids who sometimes couldn't make it through a 30 second round of instructions.

every bunk at camp has a theme. the theme aaron and i created was, "yes we can." we thought it was pretty funny, given that bob the builder and obama, and many civil rights groups, have adopted it as their mantra. i don't think we realized how appropriate it was for this group of kids. and at the end of our circle, when we got up, with everyone holding onto the magical talking shoe, and yelled out together "yes we can" at the top of our lungs, i learned again that the kids are always teaching me more than i'm teaching them. i learned that if they can, then i can, and you can, and we all can. no matter if we have aspbergers, cerebral palsy, depression, or just a plain bad day.

thank you for reading this, and for being a part of my circle.

love,
ryan

Why I Want To Be A Preschool Teacher

2009-04-24T18:12:00.000-07:00

I recently began volunteering at a pre-school in Berkeley. On Tuesday I had a realization that my calling is to be a pre-school teacher. Today I was riding on the SF BART train when I began writing. Though at first I faced a very uncooperative writing utensil, I managed to get a start. By the time I reached Berkeley, I was so into what I was writing that I raced to the library, desperately found a bathroom, and sat and wrote like a madman, like I was a leaky vessel and someone was pouring water into me and I was just leaking all over the page. By the time I was done, I realized what I had written was a declaration of why I want to be a pre-school teacher.

Thinking about “allowing” related to children and then adults

As we grow and form our values and fears, we essentially take the stance that certain things are allowed, and others are not. Often we use the language of “should” to express this allowance and disallowance. “I should be this way.” “I shouldn’t think or feel this.”

Here are my questions: why do we do this? Does it work? And how does it make us feel?

Why we do this

When we’re kids, we are told explicitly and implicitly by parents, friends, media, musical, cultural and religious influences how we should feel, think, act, what is better and worse, what we can and can’t do. Basically, what is allowed.

Rarely are these phrased to us as ideas, or developing processes, as one possible way to do things. Instead, they are the way. We learn one language and one accent, and that is how to speak. We learn one way to treat sickness, and that is the correct, the only, way.

So we learn absolutes. Right. Wrong. What is allowed.

And unless we happen to travel, live with diversity, be exposed to open-minded people, we often don’t find out there are other ways, other viewpoints, other possibilities. Other right ways.

So if we don’t fit into this system of what is allowed, if even part of us doesn’t fit, two unfortunate things tend to happen. One, we rebel against what isn’t allowed, which can sometimes be excellent. Rebellion is what the civil rights movements, Gandhi’s salt marches, were. But in rebelling, we so often lose ourselves, angrily lashing out at what we perceive as oppressing us, filling ourselves with sadness or rage, losing sight of the original purpose to express ourselves. We end up hating. We conform by anti-conforming.

Or, option two; we go along with the system, burying that part of ourselves that doesn’t fit. But this takes such a terrible toll to hide it, it produces such a shame and closing up and distance. Just think about something you don’t like about yourself. How does it make you feel when you try to not be that way, not feel that way, when you try to fit into what you’re supposed to do and feel and be?

Alright, so we have this system, basically what is allowed and what isn’t. Before I go more into if the system has its own merits, let’s look at if it works.

What does it mean to “work?” Is our goal as a people, society or world to get people to be and do and act a certain way? If this is our goal (I will soon address how short this goal falls), then still it doesn’t work.

Take young kids. If we tell a kid not to cross a line, and he doesn’t understand why, or disagrees, here’s what happens. If he consents, maybe out of fear, or for a reward, or because he lacks the confidence to question authority or express what he believes, then you have begun to create a child who does things out of fear, or out of incentive, or due to lacking confidence.

And if he refuses? Often, especially because of how young he is, and because of the adult’s reaction to this disobedience, so much is lost. We lose his reasons for disobeying, we lose his courage to face authority and express what he believes. What could have been an empowering situation, what could have turned into a conversation about values and differences and understanding turns into an unconscious power struggle.

Here’s a crazy idea I just had. What if, as adults, we’re sometimes just plain wrong? What if we tell a kid not to cross a line, but that’s actually the right thing for him? Can we at least admit we might, sometimes, maybe, be partially wrong? That there are upwards of 6 billion human beings on this planet and there might be 6 billion right ways to do something? That throughout history knowledge and beliefs have constantly changed? That the only constant is that people almost always believe that their way is right? Leeches were once the right way, said Western science, to cure sicknesses. We laugh at this today but at one time this was right, according to them. Do you think they’d listen if you went back and told them they were wrong?

So how does all this allowing and disallowing make us feel?

Well, if our goal, as I suggest it at least partially should be, is to raise empowered, happy, safe children, then most certainly allowing/not allowing does not work, even if it does get people to fearfully or ignorantly comply. Because when the child agrees not to cross the line without knowing why, when he sees the adult doesn’t care to include him in the knowledge and process, or if perhaps the child wants to cross the line but is too scared to speak up, a whole paradigm is set into place: control. Disempowerment. Only allowing certain party of yourself. And excuse my language, but how the hell can we leave certain parts out? How can we not let ourselves be whole?

Back to adults. So when we’re adults, we internalize all of this “allowance” and “disallowance,” unconsciously. We are at times angry or sad or apathetic and we don’t know why. What we have inside is an army of “shoulds,” of allowed and not allowed. I am right. You are wrong. This part of me is right. This part of me is wrong. We feel all this pressure, because ourselves, our friends, our religion, or maybe just aliens from outer space, said so.

Our thoughts and emotions all come with positive and negative values. “I like girls.” I can think this. Good. Positive. “I like boys.” I can’t think this. Society and religion says it’s bad. Negative. And the negative thoughts come with a whole negative story attached. “I am sad. It’s bad to be sad.” Now we feel worse. We’ve created a whole story, an endless chain of thoughts, to go along with our “negative feeling.” We don’t understand this and now we feel out of control. Disempowered.

Would it be possible to live like we’re partly still kids, like we’re still learning, like we don’t know it all, like maybe we learned some things in a way that doesn’t suit us as well? When we’re kids we can say we don’t know. What makes us think we know any more when we’re older? Isn’t it possible we just know different things, that the kids know some stuff the adults forgot and they can teach us just like we can teach them?

So what happens when we embrace, when we allow? I see it on the faces of the kids all the time, the boundless, radiant joy, the most joyous smile you’ve ever seen. Something special, pure, beautiful. Something that melts your heart. Something that will change you. Something that will change the world.

It would be against the spirit of this to say I know all this I’ve said is right. I don’t. I don’t, and that, to me, is a beautiful thing. Can we find the joy in the process, not just the product? In the journey, not just the destination? Can we find the blessing in change, in not knowing?

A year ago I didn’t know or believe most of this. Perhaps a year from now I’ll believe different things. What I do know is that writing this has been fun as hell, that the process of growing and testing my knowledge and beliefs, of allowing, is incredible.

And you might believe something totally different. Good. Good. Can we come together and create a loving space where we allow for each other, for each other’s beliefs, for every part of ourselves? I wouldn’t want to live any way but whole. Would you?

And that, in the end, is why I want to be a preschool teacher. Or perhaps I should say, why I want to be in preschool. Because I’m not sure whether it’s me or the kids who are doing the teaching. Sometimes I have this crazy idea it’s both of us. At the exact time.

Silence Is Precious: Unless You Have Four Days Of It....

2009-04-20T00:36:00.001-07:00

My nephews Ethan, 2 1/2 yrs old, and Jordan, 3 weeks.

They are unrelated to the following post, except that that they are just so darn cute.

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Ah, the joy of talking.

I just spent the last 3.5 days doing the exact opposite of talking. (Not talking, in case you hadn’t guessed yet.) I did this shutting of my mouth at a meditation retreat in Marin, CA, about 30 minutes from Berkeley, at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

Ooh, you’re probably thinking, meditation retreat. How calm and serene that must be!

Uh-uh. No siree. Guess again partner. Lemme give you our schedule just so you understand:

Retreat Schedule:

6:00 (a.m.) Wake up

6:30: Sitting meditation

7:00: Breakfast

8:30: Sitting meditation

9:30: Walking meditation

10:15 Sitting

11:00 Walking

11:45 Sitting

12:30: Lunch

1:30: Rest (thank God)

2:30 Sitting

3:00: Walking

3:45: Sitting

4:30: Yoga

5:15: Dinner

6:30: Sitting

7:00: Teacher Talk

8:00: Walking

8:45: Sitting

9:15: Sleep

Word has it the Dalai Lama himself looked at our schedule and said, “Damn, are you guys out of your f***king minds?”

So yes, that is the schedule we 60 or so silent people, ranging from ages 21 to 65, followed. How was my experience? Well, actually, it was really, really hard.

I soon discovered that sitting meditation ain’t exactly my forte. I was an anxious, wiggly-squiggly dude. And when I wasn’t wiggly-squiggly, I was falling asleep, or thinking the most random of thoughts. I mean, this kid named Chris Attisha from the third grade popped into my head. I haven’t thought of Chris in like 10 years! What are you doing in my head, Chris? Especially at a time like this!

The walking meditation wasn’t a whole heck of a lot better. Walking meditation is where you walk excruciatingly slow, focusing on feeling every step. It’s a little easier because you’re moving, but you also have to endure the heckle of snails on the ground passing you, jeering, “Look at these slow fools!”

I know so far I’ve given the impression that the retreat was really tough. And I do intend to keep giving that impression. But I must say, the food was incredible. Mostly vegan, all of it homemade and delicious and creative, I looked forward to those meals with salivating anticipation (don’t tell the teachers, I was supposed to be in the moment). And we couldn’t talk to anyone while we were eating, so we had no choice but to look into our delicious bowls of food and get lost in the wonderful, healthy tastes. (*Side note-only eat this much vegan food if you want to poop 4-6 times per day.)

To give a better idea of what exactly all this meditation business is about, it can be summed up in one word: mindfulness. Or you can call it awareness, consciousness, paying attention, being in the moment, being there. They all point to the same idea: notice your thoughts, notice your actions, instead of reacting or thinking unconsciously, like when you fly into a rage because your child put his used diaper in the fridge.

One way I started thinking about mindfulness is that it’s like having a really good, non-judgmental friend you respect and look up to. So when you start getting angry, or frustrated, or jealous, or expectant, or any of the whole range of emotions we experience every day, you have to tell your friend your thoughts: “Joe, I should be a funnier person,” or, “Joe, it seems like everyone is happier than me,” or, “Joe, I’m in such an angry rage I might punch my boyfriend in nose.” Joe, being the nice non-judgmental friend he is, won’t make you feel bad, or say don’t do that, or laugh at you. He’ll just smile at you and nod, or maybe just say a kind word. And in the mere act of being mindful, of identifying and labeling and acknowledging how and what you’re feeling, like magic much of the emotion disappears, or you at least gain some perspective on it.

But the great thing is, this friend is inside all of us!

Now, this whole mindfulness business is easier said than done. Much of the retreat I was bored, frustrated, sad, or looking forward to being back in civilized life. I kept haranguing myself for being a bad meditator, for not enjoying the experience as much as I thought others were. At many points, I eyed my keys in my backpack and thought how easy it would be to put my backpack in my car, drive back to Berkeley, mindlessly multi-task in peace….go to the cross-dressing party at the new co-op I moved into….

But I was committed. I didn’t go there to have a fun, easy experience. I went to learn more about myself, to be with myself in a way I never had been before. Silently, without distractions, without people.

Funny enough, my best and brightest moments of this retreat were when I made my own noise. There was going off by myself to hike on the trail after lunch, sitting on the ground, and having a 30 minute jam session with two sticks and a rock. Then on the last morning, vigorously humming the Rocky theme song while on the toilet. And lastly, this morning, when in the bathroom alone, breaking into an impromptu Circle of Life from Lion King (coincidentally, the song I played on piano at my first and only piano recital in third grade), complete with body gyrations.

What is to be learned from all of this? For one, I learned that we don’t all fit into a mold. Sitting meditation is a nice idea, and it has certainly done wonders for many people. But that’s not who or where I am right now. And it’s a huge trap I don’t want to fall into to say that I should be this, or I should be that. I know I feel the best when I’m active and physical and with people I love. That’s a precious thing to know, and value, worth a lot more I could ever earn at a job.

I keep thinking about this idea of my path. We so often live with this idea, thrown at us from all sides, that there is a certain way to do things. We get it in moral lessons from things like religion (which also does a lot of good, don’t get me wrong) or the media, or people, or even just our tendency to compare people. Advice is good, especially from those we love and trust. But we’re all teachers, if you ask me. And we’re all our own best teacher, when we’re mindfully in touch with ourselves.

It’s time to own my path. When he was 29 years old the Buddha left his secure life as a prince and went out on the road to find purpose in life. Jesus did much the same, essentially forming a new religion and taking on the Roman Empire.

I think I know what Jesus or Buddha or whoever else you look to for guidance would say, at least my version of them: follow your path, carve it every day in your tears and laughter and rushing footsteps and aches and gains. Follow the beating of your own heart. And don’t ever let anyone, most especially yourself, tell you that you’re anything but beautiful and capable and worthy of giving and receiving love. You are and I am and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. Lord knows I’ve fought myself long enough on this issue. You just have to say it enough times until you know it in the core of your being. I am worthy. I beautiful. I am good.

Contained in all this individuality is the most beautiful, unifying paradox I know: that we are one. We are all traveling our own unique path, and yet we are all traveling to the same end. Christians call it heaven, Buddhists call it Nirvana, and Jews call it bagels, lox and shmear (just kidding). Inherent in all these names are some unifying concepts—an end to suffering, finding peace, happiness. You can use different names but if you feel true joy and see it mirrored in the eyes of the one you look at, you know the words all just try to describe that same feeling.

So that’s some of what I learned. I learned you can take 4 really rough days and turn them into something you’ll carry in your heart for the rest of your life.

May you be well J

Ryan

10,000 Words, or 10 Pictures

2008-12-18T06:35:00.000-08:00

I have about 10,000 words to say about my experience here in Chile, but I figured, why not just post 10 pictures? You know the equation. So here´s a series of about 10ish pictures which try to sum up my time here..... :-)I posted this in an earlier blog, but it´s a good representation of what a lot of this semester was: reflection. I came here to Curiñanco on Yom Kippur to fast and reflect. One of the most incredible things about my time here was how much time I had to myself, which really let me get to know myself and my thoughts and feelings.
Here you have it, the people of the pensión I called home for about 5 months (minus Diego and la Señora Carmen, perdón). From left to right: Allison, Mati (not to be confused with beverage Mate), Ryan, Jorge, Luis, Manolla (daughter), Jaqui (owner). this was on a boat to an island called Corral featuring old Spanish forts. Damn, it rained a lot. The first month in Valdivia, it rained 29 of the 31 days. I´m still leaking.
Jorge, my closest Chilean friend, and a truly incredible person. He introduced me to mate and helped me get through the rough times. Here we are with a volcano in the background. it´s true, we are in the middle of the road, but we managed to dodge to the side of the quickly oncoming traffic.
One of the best days I spent in Valdivia. Jorge, Allison, Jaqui, manolla, me. We went to the park on one of the first days of sun, played soccer and teeter totter, and ate a lot a lot.
The lobos marinos (sea lions) are one of Valdivia´s main attractions. They have a reputation of biting your limbs off, which is why I look a bit nervous here....
Another of Valdivia´s fames...Kuntsmann, one of the founding German families, has their brewery here. Valdivia is filled with artesan beer, with Kuntsmann leading the way. We had some good times here. Also, the cardboard cutout in which I´m posing isnt so far off...I think I gained about 10 pounds in Chile, a.k.a. land of endless bread.
At our pensión with Alex, me, Jorge. This is our famous "Vamos, Valdivia!" pose, which is one of our inside jokes which will never, ever, get old. It comes from the mayoral race in Valdivia, in which the entire city is covered with huge pictures of the candidates. Alcalde Berger, a gruff looking guy who won, had huge carboard cutouts with him with a serious face and thumbs up, saying Vamos, Valdivia. We are emulating as best as we can here.
Another one of the best nights ever. Me, dressed as tourist. Manola the fairy, Allison dressed as me, other Allison a gypsy. We went to a friend´s cabaña and hung out with gringos, Ecuadorians, Columbians and Chileans alike. They had to drag us out of there, it was so fun.
About 11 gringos gathered at our pensión for Obama election night. Alex animatedly found updates faster than CNN, although he lacked their sweet holograms (still in awe). Notice the celebratory alcohol in the foreground. We were all so excited, Allison actually started crying during Obama´s election speech. One of the times where we all would have really loved to be there for an incredible, historic moment.
Thanksgiving (día de acción de gracias in spanish) at Alex´s Chilean parents´house. The six of us, led by the incredible efforts of allison, put on Thanksgiving, Chilean style, cooking all day. Afterward, we went in a circle and said what we were thankful for. Naturally, I cried. I´m going to post, without her permission :-) what Allison said in reflection about the day:

"In a lot of ways, you could say that our Chilean Thanksgiving was the perfect metaphor for my experience here this first semester: arriving without any sense of what the “ingredients” were, searching unsuccessfully for all the things I had left in the U.S. and trying to replicate the world I had known before, when replication was impossible. In the end, you improvise and you realize that, in many ways, plum sauce is just as good as cranberry sauce and, though you had to abandon the pumpkin pie, it will be waiting for you next year. Though it may be difficult at times, you can still build a life and a community for yourself amongst strangers — beautiful in spite of and because of the differences."--Allison
I am still in complete awe at this entire hike. Up above you can see the glaciar, called Cerro Tronador. We hiked, at extreme peril (sorry Mom!) close to the source to drink the purest water of our lives. Then we climbed up to 6,000 feet and continued to gaze in awe at both sides of the Andes. Just an all around incredible weekend trip, and a nice representation of all the awesome weekend trips we took, from Pucón to Puyeue to Puerto Montt.
Here´s an anecdote for you peoples: Jorge (in the middle) introduced me to the church here, and I went with him about 8 or 9 times throughout my stay here in Valdivia. It was always the incredible music, with the whole congregation singing loudly and passionate, that brought me back. This last Sunday, we all sang a song called "With the Power of Your Love." I was singing at the top of my lungs, and getting pretty emotional, when I look to my left and see a 45 year old women with her hands raised up towards the heavens, praising, and just BELTING out the song, with an incredible beautiful voice that you could hear over the 80 plus people singing. I looked at her and just lost it, the tears started flowing. Afterward they called Jorge and I up since we were both leaving town, and we got to say some words to the congregation. Talk about a first: First good-bye speech in Spanish to Chilean church...that´s something I never thought I would say! Afterwards everyone prayed for us to have a safe return home. This church was truly one of the best things I did here in Valdivia.
Here you have 5 of the 6 kids in the program: Lilly, me, Alex, Adam, Allison (sorry Ian, you shouldn´t have vomited that weekend) in Puyeue, near the volcano peak. We all became pretty close in our own ways, and I feel really lucky to have gotten to share my time here with such wonderful people.
In Cunco with some of Jorge´s family...his 80 yr. old grandma, mom, and cousin. A truly awesome experience to spend the sept. 18 holidays with his family (sept. 18 is similar to our july 4th, but celebrated for about 4 days here). Their hospitality and amount of food they shoved in me will never be forgotten.

And so it is...I suppose I lied, I posted about 13 pictures. It turns out there was a lot a lot of cool amazing stuff I did here. One last thing I want to share.....

This past Sunday, some of us went to the beach for one last beach romp. I suggested we do a little ceremony...we would all say one wish-hope-prayer-whatever we had. Here´s mine:

"I want to take everything I´ve learned in these past 7 months, go to Italy and be with someone I love for a month, and then return to my home, and bring all of it back there. I want to take a semester to learn outside of the classroom, explore, find community and some peace."

That´s what you realize when you go far away from home. You realize your home is where your heart is, and my heart is with someone in Italy and in California, in my country, in my language, in all the people I´ve ever known. As the girl in House from Mango Street says at the end, "I had to go away to come back."

And I see now, I did. I went away so that I could come back, come back to my home, and come back to myself. Here´s to the next stage of this crazy, crazy life :-)

Love,
Ryan

"When you find yourself face to face with something you don´t understand, maybe you should ask, ´"What do you think? Is this a gift?´"--Adam Weisberg (thanks Michal for showing me)

Put A Sock In It

2008-12-09T06:45:00.000-08:00

A deadly water bottle assassin killed my computer about a month ago, which has made my blog entries wane. So now I find myself en el "Cibercafe," located in the backright corner, with a sweet view of the bathroom and its cleaning supplies. Talk about inspiration!

This, I believe, will be my last Chile blog. It has been quite a ride, family, friends, and occassional random web stalkers. We have shared bathroom references, more bathroom references, and occassional abstract anecdotes to what I´m actually doing here. So so lovely.

And now, I´m going home.

As most of you were probably aware, I was going to spend a year studying in Chile (14 months outside the U.S. in total). And about a week ago, 6 months into my stay, I hit the wall, and I just knew, all of a sudden, that it was time to come back. I actually went to the forest, a la Thoreau, to write a long impassionaed letter about how I was feeling, my reasons for returning, all of that, which I might still share. But for now, I find it sufficient to say: I had an incredible, incredible time here. I came here to learn Spanish and get to know myself better, and that´s exactly what I´ve done. I´ve had the biggest ups and downs in my life, and in the very end of things, I can say I´m happy for every single moment I had here, that I had a million once-in-a-life-time experiences, that I dont regret a single thing. What else can we ask for, in the end of things?

To better illustrate my feelings and reasons for returning, i´d like to share with you all a little anecdote from this past weekend. With Alex and Adam from my program, I traveled to Bariloche, Argentina, my second time there. Only this time, besides watching people drink mate from the bank to in the bathroom (no joke), we decided to hike a glaciar, called Tronador (thunder) because as you hike you occassionally hear the glaciar cracking and spitting off little gumball loogies into the valley below, which sounds like thunder. It was truly incredible, we hiked into the valley and got pretty close to the source of the water, where we bottled up and drank the freshest water of our life. Screw you, Arrowhead, I´ll get to the source myself!

And after 6ish hours of hiking, powering through snow and giant horse flies who wouldnt even let us stop to pee, we reached a lodge at 6,000 feet where you can stay, and have a 360 degree view of andes mountains in every direction. we havent invented good enough words yet in any language to describe this view. alex and i woke up at 6 am to see the sunrise. the only word i got for that one is dayammmmm.

and finally, here´s the anecdote that describes it all:

alex wakes me up at 6 a.m. i groggily reach up above on the shelf to pull out my two beautifully soft and warm wool hiking socks. somehow, they shoot out of my hand, i fall onto my side like an oval shaped egg rolling around, and when i right myself, i look down expecting to see my two beautifully soft and warm wool hiking socks on the ground next to me. any decent csi bullet spray detective would have shown the only possible place for them to land, based on angle and location of fall, would be on the floor, somewhere around me.

BUT THERE WAS ONLY ONE SOCK THERE......

It was a nightmare. The only Andes mountains sunset of my entire life approaching. An impossible horrific situation...a missing wool sock, without any explanation. It was terribly insignificantly annoying. Muttering to myself over and over again how very impossible and ridiculous this moment was, I turned up every matress and floorboard on this side of the Andes, to no avail. Finally, I gave up, found other socks, and went outside to enjoy the sunset. Then I came back to look some more. Still no results. A couple hours later, I return again, this time constructing far flung theories about how perhaps it landed in my pants, how perhaps Alex stole it, how perhaps it bounced off a floor board, a matress and an errant horsefly and flew out the open window, where an Andes current carried it to the top of the glaciar, where I would be forced to conduct a dangerous life threatening glaciar rescue.

Nada nada nada. At one point, Alex, who kindly helped me search, was like "hey man, you might just have to forget it." It was good advice, at some point you gotta let it go, right? So I decided I would walk to the other side of the room, my last grand search. Nothing again, until Alex, who followed me over there, looks on the ground and sees my beautifully soft and warm wool hiking sock sitting there like a sad lost puppy. He hands it to me, and in the glory of an NFL touchdown, I do mad fist pumps and hop around the room. Glory is mine.

Now, perhaps youre asking me how this crazy long drawn out anecdote has anything to do with deciding to return home. Here it is, two things: the mysterious force of life and persistence. mysterious force of life: I had no idea where this south american journey would take me. i had my ideas, like where i thought the sock would land at my feet, but as tends to happen in life, i got thrown around for an exciting tumble. and here´s where persistence comes in, something my mom has always always told me: its all about persistence. everytime she would tell me maybe i should think about switching programs when i would tell her i was struggling, i would shrug her off. its me, i would say, i need to try harder, make it work. i can be happy anywhere.

And man, I fought. I persisted and persisted, and I had some incredible times here, some incredible highs. But also some incredible lows, the lows of loneliness, missing your language, missing the companionship of those who know you. And then, out of nowhere, appears the magical sock. Across the room, where you least expected it, where you hadnt even looked yet. Persistence isnt always just sticking things out cuz you should, it turns out...persistence is staying with yourself, compassionately, seeing what appears, listening to yourself over and over again. And everything in me is telling me to return, take the semester off Ive always wanted, go and explore and find community and learn about permaculture and rest my tired spirit. Be home in April for my sister´s second baby being born. Get to know my first nephew better. Read and write and learn to knit and reflect on everything these past 7 months has meant to me. Thats where I found the sock, when I least expected it. And I am so so happy for everything...so happy that I put the sock up there in the first place, so happy it got thrown around and I spent so much time searching for it, so happy to pick up the stinky sock and start the next journey of my life. I have about 11 days left here, and Im blessed with the time to say good-bye to something that has just meant so much to me, so very very much. To write letters to the girls at the orphanage, to Jacqui and Manola from the hostal, to all the incredible kids in the program. To walk down Avenida Picarte just one more time, see the blind man in his same white coat play his accordeon as people walk by without stopping, walk down the costanera and watch people rowing on the calle calle river, watch this beautiful valdivian spring, which has brought so much life, spread its seeds to the wind, that giving and receiving that is life itself.

Thank you Valdivia, thank you life, you have given me so so much.

So for some hard facts, so you understand what´s next: I leave Chile Dec. 20, to go to Cancun, Mexico with my family for vacation for one week. From there, I fly Dec. 28 to Bologna, Italy, to visit Kalen for a month. And then Jan. 28 I fly home to San Diego, where I´ll try to plant some tomatoes and make up for my deepening carbon footprint, hehe.

So that´s it folks. I´m gonna put a sock in it for now. There may come a night in the future when I awake from a dream and notice my fingers moving antsily, like theyre trying to write on a keyboard, and Ill sleep walk over to the keyboard and just start typing another blog. Be prepared, peoples, be prepared....

Love to you all :-)

Ryan

"Every night when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, I´m reborn." --Mahatma Gandhi

Thanksgiving Is Backwards, Shouldn´t It Be GivingThanks?

2008-11-27T05:17:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-09T20:52:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-05T09:48:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

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

The Bird Man, Magical Mate, And The Beauty Of Community (hey that rhymes!)

2008-10-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

I have decided, to prove to you all that I don't always just sit around dancing with trees and reflecting on the nature of life, to dedicate this blog to something really cool I got to do this past weekend.

The United States shares some things with Chile-the pacific ocean, relative isolation from other countries, McDonalds. It also shares a rather horrific past of indigenous people murdered, forcefully converted, their land taken away, discrimation, and lots of other sad things that humanity can do sometimes. The Mapuche is the main indigenous group of Chile, and it has suffered mightily at the hands of first the Inca and next the Spanish, and then the Chileans.

But don't you worry, this blog isn't about bemoaning the past...it's about celebrating the beauty of the present and the hope of the future! I'm in an agroecology club here, and the club organized a weekend with two Mapuche leaders to hold traditional ceremonies, drink hella mate, and salute the beauty of community and forging a positive future.

---This calls for a brief interlude to discuss the wondrous beauty that is mate. Mate is an herb that is crushed up, dried, and consumed with water in a gourd. It has quite a history in South America, especially places like Paraguay and Argentina. But what attracted me to mate was not it's bitter, at first kind of gross taste, nor the fact that it helps you pass things through your system like you're a human waterslide (it had just been too long since I made a bowel reference). Nope, what attracted me is the communal way in which mate is consumed.

So you sit in a circle, and one person is the cebador (pourer). He/she fills up the gourd with mate and hot water, and passes it to the first person in the circle, who finishes it and passes it back to the pourer, who refills the gourd and passes it to the second person, and on and on in a perfect circle. Sorry bacteria freaks, but you drink out of the same straw, just adding to this communal tradition. You're not just sharing the herb, you're sharing your intimate bacteria. Don't you even think about wiping off that straw! You can betcha if there's one thing I'll be bringing back to the States, it is blessed mate. Prepare yourself, my friends....---

I'll be posting some serious mate pictures soon. Now, back to the main function.

So yes, about 10 of us spent the night in Bonifacio, a 1.5 hour bus ride from Valdivia very close to where I fasted last week. It's about a 1,000 person pueblo with open pastures, pure ocean views, dirt roads, and something very sacred and pure in the air. The house we stayed in was outfitted with all kinds of Mapuche instruments. I sort of learned to play the katruun, a circular tube with a horn at the end (somewhat similar to the Jewish shofar). After each katruun session you turn it upside down and watch all your expended spit drip out. Mmm....

The night was like the rural indigenous childhood I never had. We sat around in a circle, passing the Mate, mostly listening to the two Mapuche elders speaking of things which sounded very very wise. The whole time I was mostly in awe at just how cool this all was. A big theme of the weekend was rebuilding Mapuche self-esteem and learning the Mapuche language, which is nearly going extinct due to racism and discrimation against all things Mapuche. Their language is beatiful, totally based on 19 symbols, of things in nature and things integral to their culture. It occurred to me here just how important a language is to a people's culture, how much of their sacred identity it forms. It made me very thankful that people like these Mapuche leaders exist and fight mightily to maintain their beautiful traditions and culture.

So far I've neglected to reveal the identity of the one of the two Mapuche elders: El Hombre Pajaro (literally, the bird man). In the Mapuche tradition, there is one hombre pajaro every generation, and we were graced with his presence. He has an ability to communicate with the birds, an incredible knowledge of them. His bird calls and chanting blew me away. He's a poet also, and writes poems about all the birds (I bought the book and managed to spill wine on it, but hopefully it'll just flavor the words even more).

El hombre pajaro led us through a Mapuche ceremony in the morning, where several people played Mapuche instruments, and everyone stood facing the sun, directing their prayers that way. After the ceremony we ate an incredible amount of oysters, homemade sopaipillas (like fried bread), and drank a lot more mate.

At the bus stop on the way back, a middle-aged couple struck up a conversation with us, and insisted on giving us their crackers, a simple gesture which just blew me away. So it is with many people here, so generous, without asking for anything in return.

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe Me."
Look what happens
with a love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky. --Hafiz

Be well, peoples!

Love,
Ryan

When The Trees Invite You To Dance

2008-10-14T18:02:00.000-07:00

That's me, about to be eaten by Valdivian sea lions.
Doing capoeira, martial arts fight/dancing/craziness (explanation to follow in later blog)

Alright so it's not the tree, but it's a nice one.

Maybe it was doing capoeira in the Botanical Gardens today, maybe it was sipping about 6 cups of mate, but I got inspired. And as I was walking down a very nice cobblestone lined pedestrian avenue, I saw a very nice looking tree, leaves bristling in the wind. I thought I'd sit for a minute, and that minute turned into an hour, and when I was done I had written this. I don't have the picture of the tree on here yet, but I'll get it here soon!

Tree

Have you seen how the leaves dance to the wind's beat? The leaves, green and fresh, nod yes, yes, to life. I accept what you offer, I accept where you take me, I will dance to your beat.

This tree remembers. Its rings, circular like this life, show us how it remembers every single year. It remembers when the wind came, a month ago, and itself, so bare. Bare, no leaves to spare. Just an empty hulking figure proudly bearing the cold, beautiful in its vulnerability. It shed that most vibrant part of itself but it did not retract.

It said, "Wind, one day we will dance, bu today we just gently sway."

And then changed the season, as all things change, and it was time to dance. Have you seen how the leaves dance to the wind's beat? I did, one day, when I stopped to rest. The tree invited me and we danced together. He knew what he was, this tree.

And when I asked him why dance, why now in this moment, he said it was windy, and it was time to dance.

He seen sprouted flowers, the tree. He couldn't even contain his leafy dancing joy, so he bloomed life itself, and for a few precious moments he offered the world the vulnerable precious core of his being, his very life essence.

And he danced some more, the dance of life, and the wind fulfilled that most ancient compact to carry him and his offspring where she would, to land in the outstretched hands of Mother Earth and all her children.

I returned again one day, ready to dance the dance of love with the tree, and I found it bare, the vitality of its past rotting at its feet. It started to rain and its barren emptiness didn't even cover me.

"Where is the glory of your past?" I cried out, drenched in this terrible rain. "Where is your dance of love?"

It looked at me with the patience of a tree. "I learned to die so that I may live again," he said. "The former parts of myself I shed to enrich my blood. The rain has come and it is time to rest."

And I realized he was still dancing. How could I love his flowers but not love his death? They were one and the same, one following another in that precious circular rhythm that his rings affirm, that the perfect cycle of the full and new moon dance ever month.

I am a tree, I am the moon, I am the Sun and the Rain and the Wind that invites us to dance. I am not separate, even when I think I've broken off. I am not unwhole even when I only see parts.

The moon shows but a sliver, tonight,
yet its full illuminating
shadow shines through.

I did not realize until tonight,
that though the moon is so rarely full,
it is always present and whole.

So, then, are we.

There's nothing we have to do. We are given this gift and when the wind comes we can dance, when the rain comes we can rest, and in every waking moment we can be awake to that which we are.

"You scour the Earth," says the tree, "and still there you are."

And I say, thank you for inviting me to dance today.

Love,
Ryan

Yom Kippur: Not Just A Poorly Conceived Jewish Diet Strategy

2008-10-09T20:51:00.000-07:00

Self portrait in Curinanco today (I swear I'm not a hunchback).

What the pristine view would look like without people in the way.

At a different beach on a different day. This has nothing to do with my blog, but, I feel it's important to show you all everything (no pun intended, really). I'm proving to the world that it's not just Europeans who can get away with speedos ("zunga" in spanish)

If you ask a group of adolescent Jewish children about Yom Kippur, they'll probably tell you it's the worst holiday conceived by mankind. For most of my life, I've been inclined to agree, because Yom Kippur inhibits one of the things I most enjoy doing in life (no, it is not making puns): EATING!

Yep, Yom Kippur (to pronounce correctly, say "yom" like it rhymes with "gnome," "key," and "poor,") is the most holy of the Jewish holidays. The "Day of Atonement," it is a day spent fasting and apologizing for the wrongs you've committed in the last year. Or, better put, a day spent complaining about how damn hungry you are.

But, being in Chile for this year's Yom Kippur, I felt I should really support Chile's Jewish population of approximately 4 people. Also, I was ready for such a day...I reached a serious lowpoint last Thursday night. It was a sort of build-up of a couple months' worth of things not completely aired out; the loneliness of traveling and not being with close friends, not being able to fully express yourself, missing home. All the stuff that tends to come up on a long journey.

And interestingly enough, something incredible happened that Thursday night, at my lowest point: I accepted how I felt. I said, "I'm sad, and that's okay." And it's incredible what accepting my feelings and opening up to them did. Like this wave of relief spreading through my body. I started to realize how hard on myself I had been for, well, 20 years, how much I had expected of myself to be happy, be a certain way, have things go the "right" way.

So I've been thinking about that this week, about making amends for being so hard on myself. And Yom Kippur arrived just in time. I decided to dedicate the day to fast and reflection. I bussed an hour away to Curinanco and spent the day hiking, enjoying nature, staring out on the cliffs, meditation, writing. It was quite a day. And here's what I wrote while up on a high cliff surrounded by sea and forest and myself:

Here I am. At the tip of this pen. Sitting cross-legged, shoeless, on a grassy hill far above the ocean. Here I am staring at nothing but ocean and trees and dirttrails. Here I am in relative peace, gentle breeze on my face, doing something (writing) I love to do.

I came here for different reasons. One is that it's Yom Kippur, and I'm joining Jews around the world in fasting. There's a beauty in joining in on the same shared action, on taking a day not to eat and dealing with those hunger pangs that inevitably come. There's a beauty, too, in finally celebrating this day in a spiritual way, in using it to emotionally and physically purify me. As Senora Carmen told me, when you fast for God, there's no hunger.

And I also came here because it's a good time to come here. A conscious shift in my life. To accept and celebrate who I am, what I'm feeling. To embrace with an open heart.

Atonement. That's the theme of the day. "Day of Atonement." I want to rethink this day. I used to think of fasting as a punishment for our sings. We've done bad, caused suffering. We must fast to punish ourselves, and ask forgiveness and try not to do it again.

Yes, I want to rethink this day. What if instead of a day to atone for the bad we've done, it was a day of acknowledgement and set intentions? Acknowledgement that we all have this pain, acknowledgement that at times the world really gets us down, that we snap at those we love for silly reasons, that we're often not who we want to be, where we want to be, how we want to be. Acknowledgement that we've struggling here, some of us more than others.

I'll be the first to acknowledge it--I have struggled. A week ago today I sank into one of the deepest depressions of my life. "I think I'm depressed," I told my friend. "It's okay if you are," she told me. "I know," I said. "But it doesn't feel okay."

And as I sank to my lowest I received inspiration from the highest. How hard have I been on myself my whole life, demanding more, not being okay with being sad, fearing who I am, what others will think? I have held myself to the highest standard in the world. I will become enlightened. I will always live joyously. I will heal myself and the world.

Oh Lord, it was exhausting. It still is, when I get caught up in that mode. If anything I should probably seek forgiveness from myself, for not accepting and loving myself, for hiding shamefully as Adam and Eve hid from God in the Garden of Eden after eating a Fuji apple.

But I'm not going to seek forgiveness. There is nothing to forgive. There is only to accept and love. Everything I've ever done, as misguided and lost as it's been at times, has been an attempt to love, perhaps to return to that original and innocent and beautiful love that children give out so willingly. Desperate, fearful, painful, grasping, aversion, greed, confusion, sadness, gluttony, all of the yuckiness we see in the world, in our friends, and ourselves.

Oh we're so lost at times, so far from our love and joy, so far from who we are. So often we're lost, but always we can come back to Me, to ourselves, to our breath, to our body. And when we return, if only for a few moments, there's nothing to apologize for, no sheepish grin needed. You went away trying to love and remembered that your love is here, that all those things that hurt and that you fear are love too, just forgotten and misguided.

Instead of forgiving, just hug and love and acept and be whole. Return to the source, again and again. That suffering we cause, that this holy day calls on us to fast and atone for, comes when we lose touch, when we forget and reject that which we are.

I lament there is suffering in this world. I lament having caused some of it. But I did. I unconsciously did. We all unconsciously did. There's nothing to forgive, there's just to acknowledge and let go, and to love.

I don't want to cause any more suffering. I know I will, at times, but I consciously set this intention to be whole, and to not cause myself and others needless suffering.

That's what this day is for me, not a guilt-trip hang-up on my past, it's an acknowledgement and embracing and letting go of what was, an intention to move forward with all parts of myself, not just the parts that are easiest to love. I don't want to just love the sun. The rain and storm are also part of this life. And I want to love life.

As the hunger sets in and weakens me I am thankful for this physical reminder, this physical cleansing, that accompanies my emotional and spiritual cleansing. I am thankful for the ability to spend my day bowing down to myself and this vast ocean, to spend it reflecting and learning to love myself and others and this world better.

So I acknowledge myself, I acknowledge you, I acknowledge and embrace the suffering we cause and our loving attempts to end it. This is life, man. The energy is chirping and sparkling, just let it roll over you like this forever undulating ocean in front of me. And do it with all of you, because it's too painful to live anyway but whole.

Love,
Ryan

4 Month Anniversary=Bob Marley+Large Quantity Of Chilean Honey

2008-10-01T21:17:00.000-07:00

Ecuador to Chile: much has changed, including about a 12 pound weight gain (thank you, Chilean pan) and the leaving behind of two good buddies.

It being October 1st, I'd like to wish myself a happy 4 month anniversary in South America. Four months ago today, Max, Gabe and I stood in the airport with clean shaven faces and clean bowels, ready for the blob on the map called Ecuador. 7 weeks later not much was clean, except for our consciences, knowing we had lived it up down South.

And now here I sit, munching on my Senora Carmen homemade bread topped off with too much honey from this Chilean campesino I met who sells his honey by bicycle, listening to Bob Marley (okay, so not everything can be Chilean all the time, all right?) sing "No Woman, No Cry," and then he gets to that part at the end where he says, "Everything's gonna be alright." And it's true. Even with the occassional struggles of being so far from the incredible community I continue to think about, one can't help think, as he listens to Bob Marley's assuring voice with a little bit of sweet Chilean miel (honey) to top it off, that not only is everything gonna be alright, it's gonna be really darn great.

See y'all in 10 months! (If you're thinking about getting pregnant, do me a favor and wait one more month, so I can be there for the birth).

Love,
Ryan

Happy New Year, in September

2008-09-30T19:01:00.000-07:00

There are many benefits to being Jewish, including 8 days of presents at Chanukah, the freedom to spell the word "Chanukah" (Hanukah, Hannuka, etc.) about a zillion different ways, along of them correct, and the ability to grow sweet curly sideburns, if you're orthodox. But one often overlooked one is that you get to celebrate TWO New Year's, in one year.

That's right, along with never showing up on time, the Jews have their own calendar. And today, a day like any other day for the gentiles of the planet, happens to be Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.

Now, you shouldn't feel bad for not having known this. Truth be told, Adam (fellow program member) called me this morning at around 2 p.m. to tell me. Thanks to his excellent Jewish initiative, we decided to gather our small Jewish U.S. Valdivian representation of 2 people and meet at my pension tonight for some good 'ole fashioned apples, bread and honey, a Rosh Hashanah classic.

For those of you unaware, the traditional way to bring in the Jewish New Year is with apples, bread and honey. The honey is representative of having a "sweet" new year, which is fitting, given honey's high sugar content. Besides the fact that apples, bread and honey is a bomb diggity combination, it's a really cool simple ceremony.

I had the idea of having us 3 go around in a circle (Allison, wanna-be-Jew, joined us for her first ever Rosh Hashanah) and say one thing we wanted to do to make the coming year more sweet. Adam said he wanted to be more open, Allison said she wanted to take the initiative and talk to more people, and I said I wanted to more fully commit to being here for a year, and consider it my home. It really turned out to be a cool little exercise. I think we all learned something more about each other (and ourselves) that we hadn't known before.

And more than that, I learned that it doesn't just have to be on my two New Year's that I set intentions to have a sweeter next year. Why don't I wake up every day and set my intentions to have a sweeter month, day, heck, even hour? It doesn't have to be Rosh Hashanah or New Year's for that. So maybe I'll start waking up every morning and pledging to have a sweeter day.

And of course, to make the ceremony official, I'll have to include apples and honey. Probably two servings to make sure I'm really serious about a sweet day.

Happy New Years!

Love,
Ryan

Cool Videos I Stumbled Upon

2008-09-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

Miles of Smiles: http://www.helpothers.org/story.php?sid=604

Darn cool video: http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=1324

Pick your word: http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/now_showing/eternity/stories_from_the_emotional_heart_of_australia/

For a little bit of inspiration on a dull day.....

Sitting Down To Tea With A Caveman

2008-09-26T10:48:00.001-07:00

Sept. 25, 2008

Gratitude and perspective. Two oft-used words. “Be grateful for what you have.” “Just have perspective.” Good advice, certainly. But it’s like giving someone the parts to a model airplane without the instructions, nor even a friendly tip to get started.

So how do I gain gratitude? With perspective, perhaps. How do I gain perspective? With experience, I believe. And why preoccupy with these intangible, lofty ideas, gratitude and perspective?

Because I believe they are key to happiness.

Here is how it works with us uber-intelligent, evolving, developing, civilized humans:

In the beginning was our caveman. Pretty animalistic, uni-brow and all, Cro-magnon man style, but at least peeing upright. A human, by our human standards. What was happiness to a cro-magnon?

One can imagine it was survival. Life was harsh, food unsure. His one purpose in life, to fulfill his biological function, to reproduce, continue the species. He was helped by hormones that told him, “You horny Cro-magnon, you best get spreadin’ yo seed!” And his hunger, his thirst, his adrenaline, no doubt drove him to desperate lengths, made him take down Mr. Wooly Mammoth like it was nobody’s business. Hormone-driven, indeed.

And then, someone saw a decapitated head rolling and thought to invent the wheel, someone saw some wild beets growing and realized the beets were just like them, they too wanted to propagate their seed, so we obliged, and planted. And naturally, if your food is all in one place, ain’t no need to be a wanderlust hunter-gatherer. That’s right, y’all can civilize.

One can imagine these developing homo erectus were fairly pleased for a while. Likely life was still tough, and they had to fend for themselves. But now they were surviving in large numbers, steady food supply. The adults, remembering the tough old days, gratefully smiled fondly at their agriculture, their surplus. But the children, weaned in a civilized world, lacked this perspective. Some of them clamored for something greater. There must be more to this life....

And then the technology began to rain from the sky. Printing press, sewing and weaving, metallurgy, animal domestication, electricity, telephone, planes and cars and trains, sanitation, hot pockets, all the way up to this very moment, to the Internet and iPhone and everything we have in this world.

Every generation, marveling at this new world with its new technology, recalling what the old days were like. Some started calling them “the good ‘ole days” because there was something nostalgic, something beautifully simplistic in the simplicity of yore.

What had the children done, when they clamored for more? They had improved our lives, made them safer, made survival and a steady food source practically guaranteed. Safer, easier. And better?

What was a successful day for Mr. Cro-magnon man? Survival. Food on the dinner plate. Bearing the cold winter. Reproducing. The things we do everyday, that we take for granted, like they’ve always been this easy, handed to us.

What is a successful day today, for you? Not so easy to define now. For some, it’s how much we got done. How much we earned or gained. Perhaps the friendships or relationships we possess or have. The quantity, the surplus, the magnitude. Better?

Now, I think, is the time to answer the question that we complicate more and more every single day: Why?

Why. Just sit with it for a second, this tiny little word that can forever burrow deeper and deeper, to the very core of our beings, the very source of all that is.

Why. Without even answering the question we should probably consider the value and importance in forming the letters. What does it mean to ask why?

To me, it signifies a pause, a break in the flow of things. The right “why” isn’t cause for an immediate one-sentence answer. It’s cause for a pause. For reflection. A desire, perhaps, to stop and understand.

And once we begin to the understand the significance of this all-too-rare question, then perhaps we can begin to attach it to all it could ask us.

How about: why am I writing this? Good question. I’m writing this because I watched The Invisibles in my Salud y Medioambiente class last night, a series of five short films about tragedy around this world. Killer bugs that affect poor populations without health care in Bolivia, war and violated women in the Congo, child soldiers in the 20 year war in Northern Uganda, African sleeping sickness without government investment in delivering the cure, displaced campesinos, removed from their land that sustains them, in Columbian guerilla warfare.

Death, sickness and war, heavy, blood, violence, rape. The worst of humanity. Things I have never experienced. Things I hope never to experience. I felt sick, terrible, helpless as I watched these scenes. How could we do this?

Beyond the guilt and the heartache, know what else I felt, way down deep? Grateful. There it was, like it was always there, waiting for me to say hi. Grateful that I don’t know these things, grateful I have money in my wallet that buys me things like this delicious Te de Navedad and allows me to sit in this bustling café playing Air, shoes off, writing furiously to answer the question “why.”

I felt grateful for a while because while I didn’t experience the movie first-hand, I gained perspective on my life and my luck, the possibilities out there.

So that’s a “why” catalyst, to why I sit writing. But there’s more. There’s also, “why are you really writing this?” What if we asked this question everyday: “Why are you really doing this?” What would it do?

Don’t worry, I’m not dodging my own question. I’m really writing this because I want to be a happy person, and help spread that happiness to others. I’m writing this because I’m always interested in getting to the core, and this seems like a pretty good start.

Happy. I want to be happy. Not so important to get hung up in defining happy...it’s an emotion, a feeling, a state of being. You know deep down what it is, however you decide to call it. We don’t ever have to agree on a definition of happiness, but I truly believe we can see it, feel it, sense it. Whatever word we use, there is a presence, a vibration to this thing I choose to call happiness.

And this movie, The Invisibles, made me consider this happiness. None of that terrible stuff in the movie has happened to me. Am I happy?

Sometimes, yes. Sometimes I’m very happy and joyful. More so in recent years.

Sometimes, no. Sometimes I’m stuck in my own head, cut off from the emotions and needs of others.

And so I wonder, why am I happy only sometimes? What would make the people in that movie happy? Some would be happy to survive, have food on their plate, be sitting with their family members. Where have I written this before?

Ah yes. I remember now. The cavemen. That’s what the cavemen sought. They didn’t seek to buy a new car or iPhone, or to look prettier or be thinner. They sought the simple. They sought survival, basic comfort.

They....oh geez. Ohhhh geez. Pardon me. I was just about to get to a breakthrough point, I’m sure of it, when this caveman sat down at my table.

If there was ever a stereotypical cavemen, he is it. He’s got his loin cloth wrapped around his thighs. Hairy hairy man, hair everywhere. A fantastic beard, and a slightly open mouth, like he’s just as confused as I am about where he is. I suppose they don’t have cafes back where he lives.

This is quite a surprise, to have a caveman at my table. I don’t quite know what to say to him, but it turns out I don’t have to. He’s staring at the tea I’ve been sipping quite unmindfully since I sat down to write this.

“You want some tea, caveman?” I ask.

He grunts like a caveman, in what sounds like an affirmation. The first sip he takes is like an electric shock just ran the length of his slightly stooped caveman body. He grunts at me after recovering, and I understand he wants to know what’s in this magical blend.

“Well, there’s vanilla, from somewhere in Africa where it’s cultivated, I presume.” He raises his busy eyebrow. “Cinnamon, from a tropical region. Other herbs, I’m not even sure what. And electrically heated hot water.” His hairy eyebrow raises even further at the last one. I realize hot water is probably tougher to come by in caveman land. I start to realize the tea I’ve paid little attention to really is pretty darn magical.

Suddenly Mr. Caveman starts sniffing the air like a rabid dog, and I realize he’s smelling the acrid smoke that fills this café like an early morning mist. It’s legal to smoke indoors in Chile.

I start to explain to him. “This is something a lot of people in the world do. 30% of the world’s population, in fact. It calms and relaxes you, which helps people who get stressed from so much work. Interestingly, it significantly shortens your life...statistics say each cigarette takes an average of 5 minutes from your life.”

I see my caveman is pretty dumbfounded at this point. I guess when your life is survival it’s hard to imagine knowingly shortening your life.

I check my watch and see the caveman looking at me. “Oh,” I tell him. “I can only spend a certain amount of time doing this. I have a lot of appointments and things to do today.” I don’t bother explaining further, as I imagine a caveman measures time by the cultivation of his vegetable garden, by the changing temperature of the seasons. Geez, this is like explaining life to a baby....

Babies! That thing we once were! Hmm, babies. Who once told me to live like a baby? Speaking of happiness, in thinking of the most happy people in my life, I have to go with babies.

They’re just so darn simple to please. They’ll play peek-a-boo for hours and scream in delight like it’s new every time. I take my keys out of my pocket several times a day to open the gate to the pension without thinking twice, but give these giggling magic pieces of etched metal to my baby nephew Ethan and he goes crazy. They are a certifiable treasure for him. For me, they’re a tool that lets me in the house.

Why?

Good question. It reminds me of all those questions I asked before all these cavemen and babies entered my life.

I believe I had asked what might make the people in the movie The Invisibles happy, and I said survival, food on their plate, sitting with their healthy family members. Like the cavemen, I imagined, or like babies.

And here’s where I finally get somewhere (signal the celebration drums). We’re not cavemen. Neither are the people in the movie. We’re not babies, either, at least most of us (apologies to you babies out there). No, the only people who are cavemen are those who live in caves, and for most of us, that ended long, long ago.

I’m not proposing we live in caves. We live in houses, pretty sturdy well-built ones, most of them with AC AND central heating. Our sinks obey our command and spit water at us when we turn the lever. I’ll be the first to say, that is pretty darn sweet (“bakan” if you live in Chile).

Yeah, I don’t know how well I’d do as a caveman. I don’t even like caves that much, although I do think the word “spleunking” is fun to say over and over. We live in a modern world. Most of us can’t renounce that. This is our life, and in a way, we would be living in the past if we sat all day bemoaning what has become of our civilization, of all the negative things. We don’t need to feel bad that time sometimes runs our lives, that we don’t always pay attention to our tea, that we smoke cigarettes knowing we’re hurting ourselves. It does nothing to feel bad. But then what do the cavemen have to teach us, if they were then, and we are now?

Who ever said you have to live as a caveman to live like a caveman? Well, maybe the cavemen, but I hear they were pretty rigid in their thinking.

So what does it mean to live like a caveman? First, I think, is just a state of mind. Expectations. If you told a caveman the Internet was down, he wouldn’t complain, he would just sit with you and inquire with a grunt what the Internet is, and once you explained it, he would patiently wait till it was fixed to search “Caveman” on Google images to see if his picture comes up.

Expectations, and along with it that gratefulness and perspective I mentioned at the very beginning of this ditty, before I had even considered a caveman might sit at my table and drink my tea. To occasionally look at the keys we use every day and consider that someone figured out how to make these.

Hmm, but even after all this, even as I write myself into a state of gratefulness and perspective, as I realize I suddenly have this wonderful warm feeling of happiness inside me in this very moment, I wonder if this is still like a de-constructed model airplane without instructions.

I can write this same letter over and over again, stress these same ideas, but will they stick? Will they stick in a world where we all forget this all the time, where the billboards tell me I need more and the TV tells me I should look different? Will this stick if I stay in my same bubble with my same privilege?

I don’t know. I think not. I think we can tell each other to be grateful all day, but I have a feeling it’s the experience and reminders in my life that will make it stick. Reminders:

1. Good friends, certainly, who live joyously and remind me to laugh and not be so serious.

2. Good books, good movies, good teachers who impart this message to me. I want to share the scene that struck me the most from The Invisibles. It’s in the short film about the war in Northern Uganda. The war refugees are gathered inside a building, singing and dancing with joy like you’ve never seen, about the war, about life, pleading for the violence to stop. And they sing “Dancing, we demand that this war ends, that the peace returns.” In the face of mindless senseless destruction they dance. If only they knew how they inspired a privileged kid sitting in a café in Valdivia, Chile, trying to understand in a world very different from theirs.

3. Myself, of course myself, writing or taking pictures or doing whatever it is I need to do to remind myself of the goodness around us. These big three, myself, teachers, and community are indeed excellent reminders. And as we live we start to see that our teachers are everywhere, in our babies and our cavemen and the person sitting next to us, we start to see our community is everyone, that we’re not so different from others. We start to see that myself is connected to all of this, no matter how much we get lost and think we’re all alone.

But I leave myself with this question: where do I go from here? Where do I take this knowledge, how do I remember it, how do I live it? Writing, sharing, exploring, experiencing. Endless incomplete intangible answers.

The most important thing, I’m realizing, is not the answer. It’s the question. It’s continuing to honestly and lovingly ask that question, to live the question and the answer that inevitably follows with purpose, with intention, and yes, a bit of gratitude for simply having thought to ask the question. Shoot, a little gratitude for getting to do this, whatever it is we are doing.

To dig up my Jewish roots, here’s a quote from a Passover seder:

"We must celebrate each step toward freedom as if it were enough, then start out on the next step. If we reject each step because it is not the whole liberation, we will never be able to achieve the whole liberation. We must sing each verse as if it were the whole song‑‑then sing the next verse."

Amen. Dance in the face of everything bad, dance because we give what we can, and that’s always enough, because it’s all we can give.

Only 2 Out Of 700 Kids Hit On The Fingers With Hammers

2008-09-21T08:17:00.000-07:00

click here to see more photos of chile!
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2366922&l=0db01&id=1241186

1. Manola totally dominating me at the teeter-totter.
2. Manola, Jackie, Jorge, Allison and I at beautiful day in the park.
3. Chilean child, totally stoked for fiestas patrias.
4. Bearing the Chilean flag like a true gringo.
5. Trying to jump higher than the snowy volcano, and failing.

http://www.goodmagazine.com/section/Features/adventure_playgrounds

"Over a two-day period this summer, 700 children came through the Adventure Playground. The injury total was two fingers hit by hammers."

Is it bad that this sentence made me crack up laughing? Probably so. But regardless, this is a pretty cool article about Adventure Playground in Berkeley, California, where I go to college. Woot woot Berkeley!

Alright, now to discuss things not involving hammers....

First I need you to go through a little exercise with me. I'd like you to say the word "Chicha" over and over again until you have fully appreciated the word. It's prounounced sort of like a Brooklyn-ite might pronounce the word "teacher" (teacha) except with the "c" instead of the "t."
Thank you.

Chicha is an alcoholic fermented drink derived from corn and other rice cereals. It's old school, which you can tell, cuz it comes in an unassuming unmarked glass bottle with a shady cork. Normally I wouldn't accept such a bottle filled with a suspiciously smelling drink, but as they say, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. And when in Chile, drink 1.5 liters of Chicha...

Let me back up just a bit. The last four days, beginning at midnight on Sept. 18, were the "fiestas patrias," the Chilean version of the U.S. 4th of July celebrations, except that the Chileans get way more stoked and party it up for 3 or 4 days instead of 1. Chile also has a still very alive and vibrant culture and traditions, which come into full bloom during the fiestas. Coolest traditions, in order...

1. Cueca, an old school rural flirting dance involving a man waving a napkin-like thing over his head and a woman with a poofy enough dress to clothe a whole room of naked Chilean babies.
2. Empanadas, fried.
3. Emapanadas, oven baked.
4. Chicha chicha chicha CHIIIIIICHA!!!

There are more, but I've covered the important ones. So back to the recurring theme of Chiccha. Wednesday night, the 17th, kicked off the fiestas in Valdivia, so we went to a park with a bunch of different rooms which all appeared to be doing the exact same thing...playing loud loud salsa-y music too loud for anyone to have a conversation, some people dancing, many people gorging themselves on fried mini empanadas. At around 2 in the morning, my friend Luis and I decided to buy 2 liters of Chicha for the whole table. Friendly gesture, right? 9 people, 2 Liters, enough, right?

Well, when we returned triumphantly to the tables with our 2 liters of chiccha, everyone declined. Even the 3 friendly Chech Republican kids! Man! But I've never believed in letting things go to waste, so Luis and I decided as good citizens of our respective nations, we had to finish the bottle. I think chicha has the same alcohol content as wine. By the end of our chicha escapade, I was officially drunk for my first time in Chile. It was fun. I fell asleep on an uncomfortable chair at 3:30 (damn they do party late here in Chile). We got home at around 4:30 in the morning, and from 3:30 to 4:30 our conversation revolved around floss, because I discovered the Spanish has NO verb for floss, at least that anyone knew of. Outrage, I know. As a favor to Chile, I invented the word "flosear," so they won't have to go around saying, "voy a usar el hilo dental," wasting precious time they could have used to dislodge fried mini empanadas from their teeth.

Four hours letter, Thursday morning, I was ungraciously woken up by Jorge (fellow housemate) and Chicha, my faithful friend who had decided to play a morning rock concert in my brain. Jorge and I had plans to take a bus 3 hours north to Temuco, where he has a lot of family. This almost didn't happen, as we arrived 2 minutes late to the bus terminal, the one thing in Chile which leaves frightenly on time. A dead sprint to the top of the street to intercept Señor Bus got us on, and allowed me and my friend chicha to finally sleep in peace.

Temuco is the fourth-biggest city in Chile. Once we arrived we briefly stopped by the city parade before taking a one hour bus to Cunco, a 6,000 person rural pueblo which I'm convinced is made up of about 3,000 members of Jorge's family. Aunts, cousins, abuelitas (affectionate term for grandmother), they're literally on every corner of the town. As the joke goes, you can't throw an empanada in Cunco in any direction without hitting someone in Jorge's family. Alright, I just made that joke up, but it's totally true.

So the weekend consisted of us meeting different members of his family, celebrating the fiestas patrias with homemade empanadas and gigantic pieces of varied types of meat, and trying not to burst (Chileans are known for their hospitality, part of which is to consistently offer you food, and a slightly offended look if you turn it down). Friday night we went to another fiesta for the Fiestas Patrias, where my dancing spirit was finally awakened. It's true, I was weaned on Cole family bar mitzvah celebrations, so I've had plenty of practice, but a high school experience full of hip-hop school dances with gyrating "freaking" held back my true creative dancing spirit. But something about this Chilean fiesta, with its cigarette smoke creating a thicker haze than an Andes morning fog (there was a 'no smoking' sign inside, but you can't stop a room full of Chileans from smokin', no way no how!), made the dance spirit to come alive. I spun like a rural Chilean woman making her wool yarn. Jorge called me a trompito, which is a Chilean game very similar to the spinning dreidle of yore. I'm inspired now, and plan to take some salsa and meringue classes, to convince my hips and butt that they should also move when I'm dancing (a classic guy problem, I believe).

I also posted a couple of pictures from the sweet national park we visited, which featured a snow-covered mountain burping out lava like it had a serious case of indigestion.

That's about it. Enjoying life down here...send word if you have time!

Love,
Ryan

"We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing." --Storefront window, College Avenue, Berkeley, CA.

The Man Who Let Strangers Into His House

2008-09-16T21:46:00.000-07:00

http://www.wikistory.com/wiki/Author:Ryan_Cole

Here's what happens when I finally have more free time than I know what to do with...I write a story. Click on the link to read it. Enjoy!

Love,
Ryan

Languishing In Language

2008-09-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Since nothing too exciting has happened in the last couple days (I did go visit an orphange of 45 girls, and was invited me to come every week to teach them english, but I´ll talk about that some other time), I´ve decided to dedicate this entry exclusively to language.

Now, when speaking and learning a foreign language, two things tend to happen during conversations in your inevitable struggle to master the language...

Option 1: The people who are speaking to you or near you are literally speaking so fast that it might as well be a colony of Chewbakkahs discussing foreign affairs. Sometimes when this happens, I convince myself that the native speakers can´t even understand at this speed, that they all got together and said, ´´hey, let´s trick this gringo into thinking we can actually understand each other.´´

Option 2: All the words you are hearing are words you know and understand, but they are like the gold coins in the game Mario, you can SEE all of them but there are only so many you can grab. So you hear a few words, all is going well, and then all of a sudden you hear a word like ´´entregar,´´ and you think, ´´ah yes, entregar, how excellent, i learned that word a month ago, while standing outside of the chocolateria gazing fondly at all the candies. how fantastic that i learned this word. to return or deliver, it means. and when you add the reflexive, it means to give in, let go.´´

and then you realize, that not only has the entire conversation ended while you were thinking about the word ´´entregar,´´ everyone has actually already left the building to go eat empanadas and sopaipillas.

So yes, there are so many ways one can think about learning a new language, speaking it all the time. Sometimes, when Im more discouraged, I think of it as a series of developing failures of varying magnitude...there are always words, meanings, connotations you miss in this subtle theme called language. Sometimes when I´m feeling optimistic, I think of it as a series of every improving successes, like someone dumped a ton of fish from the heavens and the net you use to catch them gets ever bigger and stronger every time you decide to step outside to catch fish, at the risk of getting smacked in the head by a chubby dolphin.

Language is one of the best metaphors I´ve found for life so far. Check it: I have this goal. I know what I want. I want to speak SPANISH, fluently. And sometimes it goes great, I have a conversation and understand everything, we joke about the difference between anticochi and choripan, I leave feeling like a regular Don Juan. And sometimes, it goes exactly how I dont want, I can´t understand anything, I leave feeling like a wretched failure.

Isn´t life like this? Don´t we know what we want, and if it goes that way, we´re happy, if not, we´re bummed? And won´t life always go like this...won´t there always be conversations we do and don´t understand, situations that go how we want and how we don´t want? I think so. So what do we do about it?

First, I think, is to not blame myself. I´m doing the best I can, I remind myself every single minute as I strain to understand every word, as I accumulate carpal tunnel syndrome from looking up all the words I don´t understand. I´m doing the best I can, and that´s all I can ask myself, all I can be asked. The best I can do is always enough because it´s all I can offer.

Second, I think, is a lesson in perspective. Every conversation is either how many words I failed to understand or how many new words I learned. I can assign a negative or positive value to every single thing in my life, or it can all be positive, because I learned something, because you learn a lot more from the failures than the successes.

Third, I think, is appreciate and be grateful. Just being aware. My God, I think sometimes, I´m speaking another language. I´m learning new words and phrases and concepts for every single thing I´ve ever known. Holy shit! This is crazy! And what´s more, I understand, more and more everyday, this new language.

Fourth, I think, is to think about who we are without all the things we´ve ever known. Who am I, away from my friends and family, my community who props me up when things are tough? Who am I, without the weekly selection of fresh vegetables that makes up the California diet? Without consistent bowel movements? And most especially, who am I without my language, my tool for identifying with people and defining my world?

When everything is stripped away, when you strip everything away, is when you start to really understand that question. Who am I? I don´t know, is the first thing I´ve learned here, the best lesson I´ve ever learned, perhaps. I thought I knew for 20.3 years. My friends told me, my society told me, my magic 8 ball told me. I told me. I was what I could see, what other people could see.

Then when we take the light fluffy cotton candy and SMASH it together, there´s suddenly a lot less of it there. And yet, that sweet flavor remains. What happens when we smash ourselves together, condense into the most solid dense form we are? We hit the powerful solid center. And from there, once you´ve contracted into the most tiny and powerful and real part of you, then you build, everything just an extension of that core.

And so, in the end, I think that´s why I´m really here. To finally see that I am more than I can see, than others can see. I am here to learn that not everything can be described with words, be it English, Spanish, or the Elven language of Rivendale. I am here to learn that the only language the heart has is called love, and it´s something we´re already fluent in. It´s a language we don´t need to learn, because we already know it, deep down in that cotton candy center.

Much love, peeps,
Ryan

´´My message is my life.´´ -Gandhi

Yes, Qi Gong WILL Improve The Quality Of Your Lettuce Crop

2008-09-13T09:31:00.000-07:00

Left to right: Making friends with a McDonalds cow (don't worry, we didn't eat there); Valdivia's fish market and big ass river
Since I'm not a very ordered person, I don't think it would be very fitting to write this in order, so I'll start from the end and work backwards. Last night was, well, quite a night. On Thursday, after whimsically deciding to saunter in the botanical gardens to feast on my mandarin orange instead of heading home, I met a couple girls who are planning a class about teaching alternative energy solutions in a rural area, and after I offered them a little bit of my mandarin orange, they invited me to take the class and help them plan it.

And so, on Friday night, armed with peanut butter (one of the girls in the group had never tried it...I told her I literally had pb and j for my packed lunch every single day of sophomore year) and crackers, I found myself locked inside an apartment building on Yunguy street, unable to leave. Let me back up. The original plan was to meet at this girl's apartment at 8:30, but it was changed to 10:30 p.m. later in the day, so that's when I showed up. After meeting a nice man who lives in the apartment building and lived in the U.S. for a couple years and wanted to practice his english (he spoke English while I spoke Spanish), the nice man let me into the building. But when I called the girl, she was at an insanely loud concert, and Spanish is hard enough to understand on the phone. Confused, I decided to go meet my gringo friends at a nearby cafe, but when I tried to leave, there was a big metal gate, and since I am technologically inept, I didn't find the buzzer button to let myself out. At least I know now that I would handle jail pretty well, cuz I stayed super calm throughout my imprisonment.

Anyway, I was eventually let out of captivity, and I eventually met up with the people in the group. Our class planning meeting turned into drink beer and wine night. My rigorous American side was saying, "but we have a class to plan" and my less rigorous Chilean side was saying, "Just drink beer and try not to eat all the crackers." I think you gotta love this about Chilean culture...maybe people don't always show up when or where they say they will, but my god, these are the friendliest people I have ever met. So good-natured, passionate but chill at the same time, not stressed. There's a lot for me to learn here, especially how to stay up until 4:30 in the morning discussing the merits of peanut butter vs. dulce de leche (like caramel). It surely was quite a cultural exchange last night...I convinced everyone to combine pb and dulce de leche, and while at first they thought I was crazy, eventually we were all crowded around the table, talking about how revolutionary indeed this North/South combination was.

Last night ended with a ride home from an agronomy major writing his thesis about how Qi Gong (a Chinese martial arts/spiritual exercise) improves the quality of cultivated lettuce.

Continuing to move backwards in time, Thursday I was invited to a meeting in the Agronomy building, and it turned out to be the formation of a new club interested in organic agriculture and being hippy. It seems like a much less formal version of the Sustainability Club I was involved with last year. We talked about planning a trip to Argentina to visit a permaculture farm, and overthrowing the entrenched capitalist regime and returning to horse pulled carriages (just kidding about the second one).

After the meeting I walked to the plaza with a couple people from the group, and we encountered a lady on the campus selling sopaipillas (imagine fried bread with God's blessing). She was tragically out of sopaipillas, but we talked to her for about 30 minutes, and it was awesome! She told us how she loved selling on campus, how she considered the students like her nephews, how our spirit animates her every day. It really was beautiful, this meeting, because I think that I often have this perception to "feel bad" for informal street vendors like this, imagining it's a tough job, that they don't earn very much money. And while these facts may very well be true, I think it's easy to forget that some of them have such an amazing attitude, that they can teach us a lot about life and living. The lady was really excited when she found out I was from California. I told her she should open up a sopaipilla stand since we don't have this Chilean treasure in California. She was extremely shocked we don't have sopaipillas in California, to say the least.

Last thing, I finally have my classes. I'm taking three, plus my internship. One is that pending class which was not planned on Friday night, but we're meeting Monday on campus to actually plan it (I'm assuming involving less beer this time). The other two are a class called "Ethnographic Documentaries" about the history of documentaries and how they follow social movements. The other is called "Health and Environment," an excellent combination of how the health of the environment affects the mental and physical health of people, and vice versa. We watched an incredibly sad but powerful movie called "The Invisibles" the first class...if you want to feel really bad, but really grateful for your life, I highly recommend it!

Alright peeps, send some word down south. Hope all is well in your toasty northern hemisphere....

Much love!

Ryan

"A lot of times, I think of what is the worst possible thing that could happen. It's usually not that
bad, so I do it." -Professor George Brimhall, from my environment class last year.

Hug Attack

2008-09-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Sent to me by a good friend I'm lucky to have....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMBgSfQI49E

One more way to make the world a better place....

Love,
Ryan

Who Knew Broken Underwear Could Taste So Good?

2008-09-08T08:35:00.000-07:00

1) Sideways picture of standard Chilean cigarette carton. What makes you want to smoke more...these teeth or the American cowboy?
2) "Bigger," the neighborhood giant grocery store, is the view I wake up to every morning...forever reminding me that bigger is better.
3) Manola, ballerina star. See previous entry for a written rave review of her performance.

Aware that I'm much better at writing silly anecdotes (see entries 1-4) than explaining the details of my program, I have decided to dedicate this entry to those of you who don't quite understand where I am, what I'm doing, or why Chilean cigarette packages make you want to quit smoking (I don't smoke, but if I did, I would quite after seeing those gnarly teeth).

Alright. It all began on a sun-drenched December day, when my mom (TravelAgent superstar, awarded Most Likely to Successfully Find Everything You Need on the Internet), aware of the fact that I was too unconcerned for my future to actually look into study-abroad programs, asked me where I wanted to study. Looking at a map of South America, I noticed there was only one country skinnier than my wiry 135 pound frame, so naturally, I told her Chile. "But mom," I said. "Don't worry, I'll look into it." After indeed not looking into it, my mom saved my future by finding a supersweet year-long program in Valdivia, Chile, through Middlebury University in Vermont.

The Middlebury program has a couple of unique elements. First is the language pledge, a document we sign promising to speak only Spanish while here, even among our fellow gringos. The language pledge is one of my favorite things about the program, and has helped bring my Spanish to a new level (From, "What the heck did you just say?" to "I understood the first word, but after that, What the heck did you just say?"). And it's sort of a symbolic thing too, an intention to fully immerse yourself in a place and a culture, to speak the language, learn all the mysterious phrases special to Chilean spanish. Definitely interesting to form friendships, especially with North Americans, while only speaking Spanish. But in all seriousness, I feel a gazillion times more comfortable in Spanish, and I credit it to simply speaking Spanish, all the time, even in the shower (not a program requirement, but fun to sing "Cantando en la lluvia" in a shower).

My program also sets you up with an internship catered to your interests. Mine is in the Ministry of Agriculture, a regional government office which oversees other government agriculture offices involved in forest management and research, health and safety, and aid to small and medium agricultural producers. Indeed, pretty strange to be "working for the Man" when I felt like I was working somewhat against him last year, but it's nice to see the other side of the coin. So for the 15 hours I spend in the Ministry of Agriculture office every week, I get dressed up in a nice shirt and slacks, but because I forgot to bring 1) nice shoes and 2) a belt from the States, I wear hiking shoes and show up beltless. Fortunately, my good wit and charm make these classy items unnecessary.

My time in the office has been interesting. I mentioned in an earlier post that I made out with the president of Chile (okay, so we cheek to cheek kissed, but they're pretty much the same thing, right?), but I've also been doing things with people who aren't the president of Chile. Rural women appear to be an up and coming theme here in Chile, especially in a country where women didn't receive the vote until the 1950's, and where agriculture remains such a huge part of the economy (there's a good chance your next apple or avocado says Chile on it...) Many rural women's groups are forming, and part of my internship is to attend meetings with them and people in my office, who give them advice on how to take advantage of resources around them, good agricultural practices, etc. The rural women have been exceptionally nice...a couple of them brought some homecooked fried sweet things to one of the meetings (they are called "calzones rotos" which literally means "broken underwear." the only reason i can think of for the name is that eating too much of them would result in broken, or at least badly damaged, underwear). Admitedly, it's frustrating at times during these meetings, as I would love to participate and understand everything being said, but with the language barrier it is often difficult. But with or without language, one can see the spirit and determination, and it's a cool feeling to see how animated and determined many of them are to improve their lives and equalize the playing field.

Besides time spent in meetings, eating fried things, I've spent a lot of time in the office. I've had little experience with offices in America, but so far the stereotype holds up-Chilean offices are cooler. The people in my office are always joking and laughing, are friends with each other, and create a really happy office environment. Erica the accountant told me one day, "You have to work, so you might as well do it with a smile on your face!" The office is also open and cubicle-less, which adds to the communal environment. My time there so far has shown me that I really don't want to work in an office, but that you can transform any place into a happy one.

The last element of my program is a home-stay. I'm staying at a pension, which is like a long-term hostal. There are 3 Chilean students, Jorge the Engineer, Allison and I from our program, Senora Carmen the all-around awesome Nana, and Jacqui and Manola, the mom and daughter team who own the house. Unfortunately for me, the tv is a constant fixture in the house, but besides that, it's really awesome here. Meals sometimes turn into 1-2 hour long engagements, where we discuss everything from funny Manola stories of the day to english and spanish phrases (I'm happy to report I've finally learned the translation for "Better safe than sorry": "Juan Seguro vivio muchos anos." literally, John Safe lived many years.") We also recently formed a weekly indoor soccer game with all the guys of the house, which promises to have us hobbling around most of the week (Chileans take their indoor soccer seriously!).

That's about it for program specifics. I'll be finalizing my class schedule this week, but I think I'll be taking "Campus Sustainability" "Ethnographic Documentaries" (film class) and "Economic and Social History of Chile."

Here's a nice parting quote from someone named Ben Sweetland:

We cannot hold a torch to light another's path without brightening our own. "

Peace!

Love,
Ryan

When You Fart in Public, ALWAYS Blame It On The Quiet One

2008-09-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

Well, I last left you all class-less and in the midst of a Mapuche revolution, and not much has changed, except that the Mapuche have promoted me to assistent to the secretary of the revolution, a post which will take effect once I master the Mapuche language and show them I can march in protest like a total bad-ass.

As for classes, it turns out the Antropology department doesnt bother to show up the first week of classes, leaving us exchange students hanging out on the gringo limb. No worries...you wont find me complaining about having free aimless days in now sunny Valdivia (thats right biatches, alert the press, the beatles were right, here comes the sun!) Next week we will see how the classes go, but this week, I lived it up, Valdivian style.

On Wednesday I finally entered the botanical gardens here, an amazing wide open labyrinth of trails and trees that lead to random isolated sections of the campus. God greeted me that day in the form of mysterious flute music while I was walking along. Like a dog that suddenly smells food nearby and starts wildly sniffing the air, I too wildly sniffed the air, searching out this flute music. Assuming it was the music of temptatious deserted island sirens, I prepared to defend their ploy to seduce me and enslave me forever, but it turned out to be jus a regular university student walking along the path, playing the flute. I followed him in secret for several minutes, wanting to hear his magical flute but not wanting him to feel subconscious. I reluctantly left after a while, but now I want to learn the flute, and also meet some sirens.

Wednesday night found us at dinner, enjoying relatively normal conversation, when 6 year old Manola donned her ballerina costume and decided to perform a full length show. She began by doing 360 degree leaps in the air (more like 112 degrees, but we can pretend for her sake), which resulted in her dizzily careening in the direction of a fair number of sharp objects, like the tall points of the metal chairs. My heart leaped higher than her 112 degree spins, in preparation for her gouging out her eyes, but somehow she averted the chairs, and maintains full vision. Her next act was to run full speed at the wall and kick it, which to me is something youre more apt to learn in karate, but who knows, maybe she attends ballarina-karate classes. Her final act involved her on the ground, accidentally farting rather loudly, and screaming ´´It was Mati! It was Mati!´´ (Mati is a quiet, shy university student in lives in the pension). Mati gracefully decided not to debate Manola on this point, but if I were him, I would have gone with the ´´she who smelt it dealt it´´ argument.

Thursday, I accidentally told the entire family in Spanish that I hooked up with Jorge, a good friend of mine who also lives in the pension. A classic Spanish blunder. He had taught me the word ´´poncear´´ the night before, which means ´´hook up.´´ The next day, somehow this word came up with Jackie, Manola, and Allison, and I told them, ´´Jorge me enseñó poncear anoche.´´ (Jorge taught me to hook up last night) Of course, what I wanted to say was ´´Jorge me enseñó la palabra poncear anoche,´´ which means that he taught me the word ´´to hook up´´ last night. Needless to say, the family appreciated this blunder quite a bit.

Played soccer with a bunch of guys from my pensión two nights ago, where I learned Im slightly afraid of the ball (doesnt it kill braincells or something when you do too many headers?) I also learned that all the jargon you use when you play sports (over here, I take it out, you just kicked me in the balls you jerk), Im lacking in my vocabulary, so I ended up grunting a lot, hoping this would signal to my teammates I was open. We ended up tying, and limping home. I´m pretty excited for this, it looks like we will get a weekly game going, and I hope to soon get over my fear of the ball, and getting kicked in the balls.

And finally, here is a story for those of you who complain about walking up the stairs ;-)

http://www.helpothers.org/story.php?sid=8606

Be well!

Love,
Ryan

What Class Is This? or A Severe Lack Of Toilet Paper

2008-09-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

From Top to Bottom: Mapuche protest sign that says: "With Autonomy and Revolucion, Liberation Fight"; Mapuche leaders speak with very friendly, accomodating Chilean police; Madonna is performing in Chile for the first time: magazine says, "Finally Gringo Meat Arrives." I'm hoping the translation is not as literal as I think...

I was quite confident my second day of classes would go better than my first. Actually, in thinking about it, this is not true at all. I'm confident of a lot of things, including global warming, the ability of love to conquer all, that Maggie shot Mr. Burns on purpose...but I am not confident of my classes situation.

So, as I unconfidently entered the building of my first class today, and unconfidently failed to find proof that the room I had written on my schedule actually existed, I sought the help of the secretary, who kindly escorted me to a room called Auditoriom. Now, my schedule didn't say anything about an auditoriom, but he appeared so confident, and besides, the word Auditoriom just seems to give off an air of confidence. So I confidently strolled into the class, which was called, "Antropology, Education and Development." And after 20 minutes of listening to the professor talk about Latin American poetry, I began to wonder, "What does Latin American poetry have to do with Antropology, Education and Development?" It turns out, not much. Not much at all. In reality, I was in Latin American Poetry.

At this point, I had two options...try to find my Antropology class, which I was beginning to believe was merely a figment of my imagination, or stare at the professor, who looked uncannily similar to our family friend and dermatologist Bill Resh. Naturally, I chose the latter, so I spent the rest of the class contemplating what it would be like if the real Bill Resh spoke Spanish. I also learned that it's fun to hear English poets like T.S. Elliot prounounced in a Spanish accent.

So anyway, after the class finally ended, it turned out I had to go to the bathroom, drop the kids off at the pool, "echar the larga" as they say here in Chile. As I calmly walked into the bathroom, I uncalmly noticed that none of the stalls carried toilet paper. And I began to more uncalmly notice that all the other buildings all didn't carry toilet paper, until I was speed walking to the other end of campus, where perhaps exists the only building in a 2 mile radius with toilet paper in the bathroom. Apparently in Chile you don't have to bring your own beer (BYOB), but you do have to bring your own toilet paper (BYOTP). Fortunately, because of months of practice with this type of thing in Ecuador, I didn´t ruin my good reputation by pulling an Ethan on the stone steps of the Valdivia campus. There are some things to be truly grateful for...

Speaking of grateful, here´s a nice video, if you´re into this kind of thing :-)
http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=428

Anywho, Lilly, Alex and I met two German exchange students, and then a third German exchange student, and we sat down to have a proper international coffee/tea. It was pretty cool, speaking Spanish with Germans in a German Spanish accent. We all had a good time, secretly appreciated the ease with which we could understand our slowspeaking gringo selves, and eventually parted ways.

At this point, I managed to stumble into a protest by the Indigenous Mapuche people, a small but active part of the population who, much like the American Indians of the States, were forcibly (and violently) removed from the land, an action whose effects are still seen in abhorrent levels of poverty in the Mapuche population today. About 50 strong, with traditional Mapuche dress and all kinds of cool Mapuche instruments, the group blocked one side of the road, had a brief chat with the police, and continued on, with the police leading the way. At one point, I started walking with them, but I wasn't sure if they would take kindly to me walking with them and also snapping pictures to satisfy my tourist nature. My host mom told me the protest is part of a "land reclamation" movement, an up and coming theme here in South America, where the Mapuche are trying to reclaim land, at times forcibly, which was taken from them long ago. Pretty cool that I got to witness it!

Well, I've learned much today, but most importantly, to always carry a roll of toilet paper in my backpack. I have yet to attend a class I want to take, but my confidence in the Chilean Educational system is at an all-time high, and I'm fairly confident tomorrow won't let me down. And if it does, at least I'll be prepared with 505 sheets of double-tiered toilet paper.

Oh yeah, and here's a cool poem I found by poet Mary Oliver:

Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life? --Mary Oliver

Love,
Ryan

You Can Poop Your Pants If You Want To, You Can Leave Your Friends Behind

2008-09-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

Well, auspiciously enough, the surpisingly calm Valdivian day literally just turned into torrential rain falling like out-of-control baby elephants from the sky the moment I began to write this entry, but as they say here, it's probably just a nubesita (baby cloud).

Today was the beginning of classes at Universidad Austral de Chile (UACH). Because of 2 month long strikes last semester, this semester began a month later, and is being compressed into a shorter time frame. I'm not sure why they protested last semester, but I imagine they were protesting how much it rains here.

Anyway, I began my day at the university feeling somewhat like a lost puppy. After two years at the same university and 3 months of summer, it felt pretty surreal to be at a different university where I didn't know anyone, and didn't know where I was going. After aimlessly wandering around for awhile, I met up with two other kids from my program, Lilly and Alex, so that we could be like three lost puppies wandering around. But with the true determination of the gringo spirit, we found our various destinations, and met up with the director of our program. However, we were delivered rather devastating news...Historia de Chile, a class we were all really excited to take, was exclusively offered to foreigners, because apparently the Chileans already know their own history. Because we're hoping to be in a more legit, Chilean-filled atmosphere, we decided not to take it.

This was the auspicious start of a day I have decided to call, "Gracious welcoming to the Chilean educational system." Now, it could be that they're just playing a huge joke on us foreigners, or it could be that in the States we're just too used to a system where you can find all your information in one place, but regardless, here is how it works. To find out what classes you want to take, you must first go each specific major's building, where with some prodding and poking and confused looks, you can hopefully obtain a list of classes offered. Once you've passed this hurdle, you take this information to another office, where you tell them the name of the course, and they tell you where and when it's offered. Once this is achieved, you go to your course at the time and place it's offered, and it's not there. As you frantically scour the premises for a trace of human (or even animal) life, a nice man with a radio offers to help you, calls approximately 34 people, and tells you that, naturally, the course you're trying to find is on the other side of the campus.

So Alex, Lilly and I entered my anthropology of globalization class about 20 minutes late, but fortunately, there were only 2 other people there. It turns out the professor makes attendance optional, which the other 25 Chilean students in the class appear to be taking full advantage of. However, coming from 700 person Berkeley classes, it was pretty cool and surreal to sit in a class with only 4 other students. We joked and laughed a bunch, the professor talked about some theories of globalization and used other big words, and that was about it. I have to choose 3 classes in total to take, and I have about 6 others to choose from, so I might not be taking this one.

But in the end, I passed the day very happily. I'm getting really into reading books in Spanish, and I found an awesome used book mini-store here, so after finishing a book by Paulo Coelho (who also wrote The Alchemist) I returned to buy another one of his books. I really recommend him to everyone...the man is a genius.

Alright, well I'd like to end this blog post with a special shoutout to my 1.5 year old nephew Ethan, who, with the collaboration of my mom, managed to poop his pants and send the diaper flying while running rampantly through our house, while I was talking to the family on Skype, prompting a humorous escapade which had me giggling all the way from the southern hemisphere. Thank you, Ethan, for reminding me that you don't have to be ashamed of pooping your pants in front of a crowd of people. May we all shamelessly poop our pants in front of our respective loved ones some day.

Origins of a Pun

2008-08-31T19:20:00.000-07:00

Top left: Jorge, Chilean engineer; Allison, girl from my program who lives in my house, Jacqui, host-mom, a ball of energy known as La Manola
Top Right: The result of 1.5 yrs. of undeterred hair growth..
Bottom Left: The result of 1.5 mins of professional scissors...

Hello! Hi! Welcome! I hope I didn't scare you
with too many exclamation marks! Please forgive me, but I couldn't contain my excitement at starting a blog. I've heard so much about these things called "blogs" in the past few years, and I just never imagined I would have my own. But the time has come. Spurred on by the help of trusty Jenna, former Stebbenite, who provided the ingenious pun Chile Ryano (get it, like Chile Relleno?), I am now ready to blog it up to the cyberlimit.

A little backstory, in case you weren't aware...

After traveling through Ecuador for two months with Santa Barbarians Max and Gabe (summary of trip=Alpaca+diarreah, thankfully never mixed), those fair-weather fans decided they couldn't handle the foul-weather of the south, and returned to the currently sun-drenched northern hemisphere, leaving me to take a 5 day bus ride south (summary=violently bloody movies+inward cursing at the bus companies for having "urine only" bathrooms on board) to Valdivia, Chile. I surprisingly survived, and have been living in this university town for 1 month now, and I have 11 more months to go!

It's been a pretty crazy month, so I'll try to sum it up with the most important/interesting occurences...

Most important is the discovery of a Chilean dish titled "As," which sounds awfully similar to "ass." "As" is a version of the Chilean completo (read: essentially a hot dog filled with every condiment known to man), with beef inside. Needless to say, I've entertained myself too much asking people I meet if they've tried the Chilean "As" yet.

Second most important: I kissed the President of Chile. I'm still a little bit in awe that this happened, especially because I've never even gotten to shake hands with George W, nevermind getting him to pucker up. Here's the story: I have an internship here with the Ministry of Agriculture. The jefe (boss) called me a couple nights ago to tell me to be at the bus terminal at 8:00 a.m. sharp the next morning. He neglected to tell me we would be attending an event with Michelle Bachaluret, first female Presidente of Chile. I admit, full of shame, I fell asleep for a brief portion of her talk (she has a very soothing voice). But afterwards, a little bit groggy, I stumbled over to a line of people, and when I looked up, there was the Presidente of Chile! At this moment, all I could think of was "I must touch the presidente of Chile. I'm so close. All I have to do is reach out and grab her sleeves..." however, to my horror, I discovered a large Chilean man in my path.

So I sidestepped left, and right, but his bulk prevented me from making physical contact. But la presidente, bless her kind soul, saw my desperate gringo eyes, and gracefully stepped past mr. large chilean man and gave me a cheek to cheek besito, the common Chilean greeting. Two days later, I swear her perfumed scent remains on my cheek...

Third most important: my brief career as a guitar teacher for precocious Chilean 6 year olds appears to have come to a failed end. Backstory: Jackie, my host mom, took me to the store to buy a cheap guitar to fill the void left in my heart by leaving my guitar back in California (by the way, I neglected to mention this earlier...a colleague of mine at my internship informed me that "Californiano" in Chilean Spanish means horny...no wonder they snickered at my office when I told them where I was from...). I bought a pretty sweet 50 dollar guitar, and Jackie, being the hopeful mother she is, bought a small cheap guitar for Manola, her 6 year old daughter, and asked if I could teach Manola to play the guitar. She said she thought it would help Manola out quite a bit to learn an instrument like the guitar. I foolishly agreed...

Now, a little backstory on Manola. 6 year old Manola has enough spirit to power the electricity grid of the city of Berkeley. Manola will charm your heart out with her ridiculously wry, imploring smile that begs you to play any and all game with her, at all hours of the day. She also has a disease common to some young children and many adults called "You best not try to teach me nuthin' cuz I's already knows it all!" I diagnosed her with this after our second guitar lesson. Here is how our first guitar lesson went...

(Keep in mind this is all in poorly spoken Spanish) Okay Manola, first we need to tune your guitar to make sure it..Manola, Manola, stop strumming, we gotta tune your guitar first, it sounds like a barn full of recently milked sick untrained cows trying to harmonize together. Manola! Hold on a second! Let me at least show you where to put your fingers! (Manola continues strumming with wild abandon). Manola, this is a good life lesson, you gotta put in a little effort before you can play the guitar well, you didn't pop out of the womb and immediately enter the mile relay did you (Manola still strumming), MANOLA!!!

At this point, I was forced to concede defeat, and Manola began to write the first verse of a song as I strummed the chords. Here is the translation of what she came up with:

The father-plane crashed down with its son-plane,
And never again appeared and it was a grand history
Of a father and his son,
And a friendly plane appeared and rescued them.

Keep in mind, some important things are lost in translation...

Last thing: It has literally rained EVERY SINGLE DAY since I got here to Southern Chile. If it's true that every time God sheds a tear it rains, then God must be extremely dang depressed this month. One thing I've heard is that people here appreciate good weather more than us Californians, since it's so rare here. Now, this is merely a theory, as the good weather to prove this has been severely lacking. One can always dream...but alas, it isn't so bad filling your time with attempting to prevent your umbrella from turning inside out at the powerful winds.

Well, I think this fairly sums up my first month here in Valdivia. I start classes tomorrow, which I'm really excited for. I miss you all! Send word (or words)!

Love,
Ryan