california dreaming

I’m finding it interesting, this business of having so much time to take this trip. Now that I’ve literally thrown away my watch, things are improving beautifully.

In keeping with my approach of taking in the local culture, I went to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert because everyone else was going and a friend invited me to a re-compression party. I think I’m falling in love with California. They know how to live. I now hang out with surfer dudes, do yoga, meditate, hug trees, go on peace walks, people watch in downtown funky Ojai, and generally stay open to interesting events and things to enjoy. And there are so many of them around here.

Burning Man was fantastic this year, as usual. I think of it as a big weeklong party for fifty thousand people. But it’s the way it’s done that is so amazing! Of the many principles of Burning Man, the ones I resonate the most with are radical inclusion and radical self-expression. When it was suggested to me that the whole place is my home, I took it to heart and needed to test out the theory. So I would randomly walk into other people’s camps and proceed to make myself at home. Every time I did, I was welcomed wholeheartedly and asked to join whatever activity was in progress. This year I arrived quite late at night, and when I woke up, my neighbor Jose came over and offered me a cappuccino drink and said warmly “welcome home”. Those words of welcome are very special to Burners, as it really is a spiritual home for many of us. The Ojai Valley newspaper has a little marketing caption under its masthead which reads “People who live here, get it”. That is so like Burning Man.

It was awesome to hook up with Joanie, David, Ken and Mark of Calgary at the Burn. I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures at the Burn, so if you want to see more, just go to www.burningman.com  I love how we refer to the rest of the world as “the default world”. The Burning Man project is really an annual experiment in getting people together to build the kind of city they would really like to live in.

I am off to Mexico now, via the Baja Peninsula. I’ll take the ferry from La Paz to Mazatlan, and then on to Puerto Vallarta to visit with friends of friends. Yahoo!

Thanks for checking in on my travels.

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”

When I was in Vancouver on my way down, I was having trouble finding the place I was looking for on my map. After some time it occurred to me to look at the date of my map. It was a 1977 version. Yes, there is such a thing as being a bit too frugal…

I was in downtown Ventura one day and heard some teenagers shouting out of their car window as they drove by “Jesus loves you, Jesus loves you, Jesus loves you.” I felt like shouting back “Jesus saves… But Gretzky gets the rebound!”