Yellow brick world

I look outside the window of the second floor of a restored pre-revolution (the French Revolution being a significant point of reference for the French)restored house at a barn. Green moss-which would be vibrant in a less diffuse light, but not too long after this rainfall-scattered on the clay roof tiles. yellow stone walls, made from the naturally yellow stone found in this part of Dordogne. A squash and leek-onion soup with cloves simmers downstairs, three sausages have probably made their way into the hot bath. The wonderous music of Third World Love, an Israeli Jazzist friend of Christian. Christian is the deep-voiced man who is hosting Stephanie and I in this quaint house in this quaint yellow hamlet with clay-tile roofs with rain dripping off everything this afternoon. A former Parisian chef. A photographer. A carpenter. A sculptor of wood, clay, plaster. One who feeds hay to a donkey couple. Wears "the patch" to attempt to destroy the habit that has given him his deep tenor voice. A practitioner of the old way of constructing, using environmentally friendly, pre-industrial materials with post-industrial electric drills and band saws and the first electric chainsaw I ever sawed before. We are building the second floor of his barn, hammer, nail and saw. The old black-wooded barn door juxtaposed with the yellow stone wall shoulder-and-heading it and the yellow gravel path which it stands above. The pale yellow-plastered inner walls. I saw a house down the private little street at the other end of the hamlet with this yellow plaster on the outside walls, parts of it degraded along the bottom of the wall shozing the yellow brick stone underneath, each stone a different size and shape. There is word Englishman living nearby. Master carpenter. Doesn`t speak a word of French except paté and rendezvous. I should meet this master, ask him to take me on, teach me something. Feels like it is time to eat lunch now. A warm soup for my cold hands. A link for you to see a few pictures of this placed tucked away in Dordogne, with many small twisting roads at night behind us. I look at the sky, no detail in it whatsoever. an almost white sky. Am I looking at it, or through it, or beyond it? Hanna, return for a moment to your York times and your art project and help me get my head around this sky I am peering at.

http://www.perigord.com/gite-lefalgueyret.htm

A tout allors,
Maurizio

Back to the countryside

Today we embark in a carpool to Perigueux, Dordogne. I anticipate excitedly the return to the world of countryside farm life, where I feel useful, strong, unhindered, serene, healthy, sane. I do not exaggerate when I say that the pace of life in the city is not good for the health! We try harder and harder to be as fast as our every accelerating computers and cell phones and online banking and Twitter, but we are biological, and must slow our conscious minds down to have any hope to reconnect vigorously with our unconscious, which goes at the speed of nature. This is what meditation is for me, a gradual realignment with the unconscious parts of the mind, those which express themselves during our dreams, for example, a rearrangement of the mind, a holisticising.

Talk soon.

Maurizio

Inner Exposure

Pink brick buildings: I don`t know much about colour, except that it is spelt colour in Canada (and spelt is a grain, while spelled is spelt "spelled"), and that I have a minor cognitive disability (or it is within my eyeball, but then my eye is tightly interconnected with my brain it is my brain`s frontier territory where it has dared to extend it's empire, but dares no further physically. Is this border walled? It is certainly protected, sometimes, although my border has let many ferocious barbarians through since its infancy. Alongside developing relations with neighbouring territories, I have put effort into harmonizing the provinces within the borders of the empire, and integrating all those nasty barbarians who have settled in the frontiers and sparsely populated areas. Presently, there are walls along this frontier of the eye, however not comparable to Hadrian's. As I work on creating greater, more thorough harmony within the empire, I become more aware of migrants and refugees, more relaxed and inclusive, and more effectively house them. However, I have some spartan ideals I suppose, as I do not provide such a lavish social security net, as I aim to promote self-sufficiency and to empower these immigrants, instead providing education and inspiration, allowing the Tao to feed and clothe them. Ultimately, it would be grand if all power was surrendered to the Tao, for Tao is the real emperor, and this is but a fleeting empire of which the Tao sprouted, like the fruit of an enormous mycelial network sprung spontaneously through the bark of a rotted tree on the forest floor the morning after a rain.), also called colour blindness.

In "Thus Spake Zarathustra",Nietszche spoke through Zarathustra about dying at the right moment, about not dragging life along farther than it should go. Everyone has an ideal time to die. I would like to extend this as a metaphor for every endeavour undertaken. There is a perfect time to pick a tomato. A perfect time to leave a social gathering and go home for the night. A perfect time to stop working and come in for supper. A perfect time to end a relationship. A perfect time to give up a project, if it cannot be finished. A perfect time, before diminishing returns start to drain one's energy, start to cause imbalance. I wonder if I dragged the metaphor of the empire on too long. Did it die at the right time?

By no means am I alluding to a lifestyle of the non-comittal. I see so much divorce these days, and I think a significant cause of this trend is a vast lack of creativity, like a gaping chasm. Initially, it takes far less energy to receive information than it does to create something new. To trail-blaze. So people watch TV, read, go to a gym, follow an exercise plan from Men's Fitness, or a diet plan from Oprah, or the advice of pharmaceutical companies to "solve" health "problems". It is easier than acting, improv, writing creatively, listening to the body and experimenting with fitness, experimenting and observing the affects of what is ingested, observing the cause of unpleasant sensations and reactions of the immune system and learning healthy, less-invasive methods of bringing oneself towards equilibrium.

I have found many creative opportunities to transform existing circumstances without suppressing them or escaping from them, or outright destroying them. When I felt cheated on, instead of cutting her from my life, I forgave, learned, stretched my emotional borders of toleration, and the disrespect of a lover gradually became the trust and respect of a good friend. A tendency towards overeating I try to balance with a high level of challenge in fitness (but recently I have been on vacation!). No fat? Good fat. No carbs? necessary carbs, attempting to allow the supply of carbs to control the demand.

I will refer to Nietszche again I am sure, I studied "Thus Spake Zarathustra" and consider it a goldmine of insight.

I suddenly feel self-conscious, focusing so much on my own thoughts. I think it is very difficult not to exaggerate, not to paint a picture that is nicer than reality. Am I being totally honest with you about the inner workings of my mind? No more, no less? To not exaggerate, to not gossip...there are so many art forms to master.

I want to admit to everyone that I like to display my physical strength and endurance and flexibility, because it causes people to send me good energy, and it provides me with more energy to return to them and others. I am a 23 year old male with lots of testosterone, especially when I do physically demanding work. I choose to embrace this testosterone and try to steer it towards positive expression. No shame!

Cheers,
Maurizio

Culture Shift

I am intrigued by the idea of a lifestyle alienated from institutionalized society. I work towards this gradually, as there are still many uses for earning money. I do believe this money should be converted into more valuable, practical things readily, not saved for the sake of saving. I am zorking on a non QWERTY keyboard, so this will be a short entry.

I am in Toulouse, France. We flew to Girona, and immediately found our carpool host who I think drove us all the way to Toulouse (I slept during this drive, so I cannot be certain). Lunchtime now, then we rent bicycles situated at random stations in the city and bike around, to the movie theatre to see Invictus. What a pleasure it will be to hear South African accents. Ate Pate de Porc last night on morceaux de baguettes and a hard liquor made with anise as an appetizer!

Next day. movie was good, had my heart pounding and my tears almost jerking. Still dealing with this nonQWERTY keyboard. Movie reminded me how effective professional sports is in spreading emotion. It is like a national team, especially during some sort of world cup, invites its fans to surrender their emotional state to a massive tidal wave of emotion. People throw all kinds of baggage into it, and it is chosen as the catalyst for all sorts of situations in people`s lives. If the tidal wave reaches the shore, and they win, then happiness, relief, pride, ecstasy, erupt in a bar, or at a home infront of the TV, or in a car with the radio. The announcers and commentators use their voices and nonverbal communication to stimulate celebratory emotions, and then people start making loud, explicit expressions of their feelings, and go out into the streets looking for eachother, looking for that person who hasn`t yet realized what happened, or has gathered such an anti-celebratory emotional cloud over their head that they can hardly look up from their shoes. How good it must feel to be the messenger of victory and the infectious agent of the celebratory vibe! To see a face change into an expression of catharsis, to feel that wave of energy pour out of every crevace in their skull into the streets! And the wave gets bigger and bigger, fuelled by alcohol surely, and perhaps the premonition of a steamy night with little sleep and lots of sweat.

It is some expression of synchronicity, of nationalism, of collaborative energy, another slippery slope surrendering of individuality (in some cultures more readily than others). The success and happiness of sub-Saharan Africa stimulates good compassionate feelings in me: I hope an African team wins the football world cup this summer (Sorry Italy! Sorry Netherlands!).

So I am learning French. It is very interesting to see the subtle changes in my mind when I begin to learn a nez language. I was eating at a restaurant last night and started to wonder how different languages express thoughts and emotions. I wrote a bit about how judgements change perception, and how thoughts and emotions are changed when expressed and communicated with language. I think entropy applies here as well: an emotion or feeling, once expressed and transformed by language, can not return to its original, primordial, a priori state. Maybe it could if one suffered brain damage to the point of losing higher order functioning. Anyway, I am curious-and this is not really scientific because feelings cannot be exactly reproduced by oneself, and definitely not by another "scientist", and cannot be observed except by the focused inner awareness-how different languages applied to the same feeling or some inner thing to be expressed will transform it into different things as a result of the distinct cultural baggage, structure, and grammar of the languages. Can the love of a child for her kitten be expressed exactly the same in a Latin-based language than in English? Mandarin? Arabic? Do some of these languages provide better opportunity-with a more varied vocabulary, more supportive ordering of subject and object-to express certain emotions, emotions in general? Are Latin-based languages called "Romance languages" because they actually provide better tools for expression of romantic emotions?

I know some languages are better representatives of reality, such as Mandarin? where there is no isolated character for "I". There are no "I"slands in Mandarin, probably Cantonese too: there is only mention of "I" in a specific context, for example "I ate pork yesterday [they eat a lot of pork here in France, Italy too!]". I wonder if one can say, in Mandarin: "I am."

This is your homework: 

• Can one say, in Mandarin: "I am."
• If you are bilingual: the next time you experience an emotion or insight or feeling, try expressing it in writing or verbally in all the languages you know. Then meditate on how you fared in these languages in accurately expressing that feeling, assuming you have equal proficiency in the languages used.

Now we will rent bicycles for the day and go and visit an old Church to meditate in and explore its architecture.


Cheers,
Maurizio

Chocolatey Slippery Slope

Wow am I eating a lot of chocolate these days. I can feel it affect my digestive system, and later on my energy. Like coffee, but to a lesser extent, I feel my digestion speed up, I feel gas and solids/liquids speed up through my bowels towards their (blissful) exit. The effects on my energy are slightly destabilizingly stimulating.

When my parents, specifically my papa and stepmother, think I am wasting my precious time with something like carpentry, or farming, why do I feel like I need to convince them? Justify my direction to them? I know I shouldn't feel I have to, but I did yesterday afternoon (And for me, it is far more interesting to focus on what IS, in reality, than what SHOULD be, in some moral hypothesis). And when a temporary emotional state prevents me from expressing myself well, I lose confidence (Carpenters barely get by!). The emotion which began in one person (Elisabetta, my stepmother, as she started asking me, somewhat alarmingly, what my "plan" is for life) quickly spread into me and then hijacked my thoughts and communication (It would be really sad if someone with your mind stayed near the bottom of the ladder doing some job any man can do, without striving for the best!), and then started to stimulate other, slippery slope emotions (It is romantic to be a carpenter in the country and grow food, but is it realistic?). Emotions are very contagious.

I didn't feel too hot afterwards, but I knew it was just a temporary emotional state (it is such freedom to know this, to know you just have to bide your time, not feed the fire with reaction or runaway thought processes. Ahhhh, like putting your feet up after a 5 hour walk...), partially enhanced by my lingering cold, low energy, and the self-inflicted ass-kicking I gave myself on the treadmill the evening before. Steph and I did some baking (Tarte Alsacienne [she wrote it, no plagiarism here], and a chocolatecoconutpineapple cake) I told her more or less what I wrote here about the emotions I experienced (I hesitate to call them "my" emotions), and listened to Kenya Safari Sound Band and shook my butt a little, moved my hands up and down, and I was fine!

Good to see that I am still vulnerable. If I really am vulnerable, and I have convinced myself that I am not (that I am holier than that), this would be a mess! Such an easy mess to fall into, I have seen in other people. Or to convince oneself that one is in conscious control over themselves, fully. Is this not a great fallacy of this culture? Transparency? Realistically, I think many of us are at best translucent, I dare say most of us opaque. What do you suppose happens when X feels a pain in their shoulder, and then takes an aspirin to suppress the pain, so they can forget about it and seek more pleasurable sensations? Or when I used to try to detatch my emotions from present reality and attach them to the fantasies in 15 novels in 28 days while baking on a Mediterranean beach? Or 40 hours a week in a fantasy MMORPG? Anyway, with all honesty, no regrets. Observation without judgement. At least I attempt it. Society accepts, no, promotes, maybe even obliges a healthy dose of escapism, no? I want to see what it is like to do away with all that, that which causes big heads with little bodies, logic to escape intuition like Sudoku games on the subway to avert eyes from the gazes of other riders of the rocket. Ironically, I am playing a game similar to Sudoku inbetween these bursts of writing. It's the one with bridges. Building and growing with one's own hands. It is so easy for us to remove something from sight and forget it. If one is going to alter the natural world under the motivation of greed, it will surely involve this ignoring of the otherthanimmediatelyobvious-term effects of one's actions. Using environmentally harmful materials and chemicals to produce houses cheaper and faster, so more of us can exist on this planet at the same time. Slippery slope. Anyway, we took the reigns of this bull of a planet, lets see how long we can stay on.

My papa and stepmother. Middle-aged Western European urbanites. They seem to have very focused and hard definitions of "success" and "intelligence". I imagine they judge the general carpenter, moved to Roma from Romania, for example, his wife a cleaning lady, Fiat instead of Ferrari, as a failure. Anyway, let's go down this road no further. I have regained confidence in my path after a momentary lapse (TRIVIA: "momentary lapse" is the first half of the title of the album of which band?), and imminent collapse or not, see taking an apprenticeship in carpentry as a good idea.

So, because of logistics, and because the cold and lack of experience prevents us from walking out on the street and hitchhiking to the Pyrenees, we plan tofly to Girona, near Barcelona, from Roma, on Sunday. From Girona we will carpool with someone to Toulouse, and stay a day or so with a friend, and then carpool to Tarbes, where a WWOOF host awaits.

I have seen photos on other peoples' blogs. Sorry! No camera!

Oh, I almost forgot: some questions for you:

Ask yourself this series of questions once and a while, after something happens, and you think about it, and then tell someone else about it: 

• To what extent does my judgement affect my perception of an event? 
• To what extent does my judgement of an event spark emotional responses? 
  
• To what extent do my thoughts exaggerate those emotions concerning the judgement an event? 
• To what extent does my verbal expression of my thoughts exaggerate those thoughts and further exaggerate the emotions sparked by the judgement of an event?
• To what extent are those puffed up emotions transferred to my audience, who did not witness the original event?
• To what extent does my audience further exaggerate my already furtherly exaggerated focus concerning the now surely powerful emotions I associate with my judgement of an event? 

Slippery Slopes abound!

Cheers,
M

Back in Black with White Collar

So we returned to Roma on Saturday. The mill in the countryside was nice. A nice setting to reacquaint ourselves after five months apart. A great setting to practice some meditation, to do cupping, to practice lots of naturopathic remedies for the cold I developed and to counter all the meat and white flour we were ingesting. My they love to eat there in the countryside.

Our neighbours Sandro and Teresa come from a heritage of DIY out of necessity, huge families, hard workers, big eaters. Before the second world war, it was common to have a large farmhouse with over 20 family members inhabiting. They would work their plot of land (not theirs, actually, belonging to a landlord), and would not make money, but sew clothing, grow food, milk and slaughter, press olives and crush grapes, hang raw legs of pork salted, stuff intestines with ground pork, age grape leaves and stems and other pomace to make Grappa. Very religious, pictures of Maria and Padre Pio in every corner of their farmhouse.

They would have almost adopted us if we showed up at their doorstep more often. The mill is 400 meters below an ancient town called Amelia. Pre-Christian, Pre-Roman, Pre-Etruscan, not much is known of these indigenous Italic peoples. The original walls of the town are still standing, huge blocks cut over three thousand years ago. The streets leave less than a meter on either side of a small/mid-sized car going 60 km/h not in a straight line. Lots of nativity scenes in the churches. kilometers of forest surround the area: Umbria is called the "green heart" of Italy, as it is green and lies in the center of the country. The forests are apparently full of wild boar, porcupines, and rifles.

At some point, I decided I would like to do an apprenticeship in basic carpentry in France. A good place to start, I think. Jesus did it! Who knows where.

My nonna visited, and she said, pointing to St. Peter's (translated), "Inside those doors, it is all gold." A few minutes later we stood infront of some part of the columns bordering the plaza infront, and she said something like, "Those are being repaired. That takes money. Our money. Inside the doors it's full of gold, and they take our money to repair their pillars." She also insists that the current pope is a Nazi.

Time for lunch! Fresh mozzarella with prosciutto is delicious.

Cheers,
Maurizio

Eternal City, Internal Exposure

*Italy is 6 hours ahead of EST (the timezone which Ontario falls under)


Jet lagged, stiff and sore. Great food though! Thursday night dinner was a savory meal of wonderous pasta with olive oil, capers and black olives, toast with olive oil and proscuitto crudo, which is raw, salted meat from the leg of an adult pig (my papa got it as a gift from coworkers, the entire leg, that is).

I learned that as an Italian citizen, if I make it to 70 years of age, I will get a government pension of 400 Euros a month. Today that would be approximately $600, but who knows what that will mean, if it will mean anything, if there will be a coherent Italian government at all, in 46.5 years.

I did a lot of dancing before coming here, and have some serious stretching to do to cure my muscular hangover in my lower back and butt. I think I will start exercising today.

Some of you may have met Lucy, the French WWOOFer at WV in April-May. Well she is now back in France, and will begin work in Toulouse as one who advises homeowners and businesses how to make their homes more energy-efficient. She has a passion in ecoconstruction, and Toulouse happens to be the major city in the Pyrenees area where Stephanie and I plan to explore, so we would like to arrange working together on an ecoconstruction project.

In the back of a French ecoconstruction magazine there are ads for volunteer opportunities with ecoconstruction projects. We will begin WWOOFing, and then look into these other volunteer opportunities.

Alice is my little sister-with-another-mother. She is 12, and is a tennis fanatic. She practices 4 hours almost every day after school. She is a wonderful girl. Some of you might have met her before.

Elisabetta is my stepmother, and she manages some hotel rooms and timeshare for tourists in Roma, two blocks from the Vatican City. If any you of are planning a trip to Roma, I can hook you up.


I have been observing myself as I have gone through a year of large and unexpected changes in my life. What I think I am noticing is that I am starting to get a hang of this staying in the present moment thing, and it is resulting in some interesting reactions. As time rolls on, and I have come closer, within days, to the ends and beginnings of new situations (coming to Whole Village, leaving Whole Village, starting an evestrough and window cleaning job in Toronto, coming to Italy, and meeting Stephanie tomorrow after 5 months of long distance correspondence--which, by the way, is longer than the total time we spent together before we parted!), I only experience the slightest emotional effects as I would conventionally experience (those of impatience, excitement, nervousness, anxiousness, depression, fixation on fantasy imaginations of the future). Instead, things seem quite ordinary.

Let me tell you what sort of ordinary. This is a whole world away from the boring, routine, numbing ordinary. It is a calm, satisfactory ordinary, an ordinary which I react to with light emotions, and sometimes what can only be described as non-emotions.

These emotions are usually externally imposed, it is almost like people momentarily convince me that I should normally feel these emotions, perhaps because they feel them when they imagine themselves in my shoes (anxiety, excitement) and so it is to an extent a transference of emotional state. It is short-lived, however.

An analogy. When one sits in a nice restaurant with good company, good food, some light background ambient music of some kind playing. One is engaged in the person infront of them, the eyes, words, posture, engaged in their food, engaged in the tastes, the textures, the throat and belly sensations. Sometimes the music will demand attention, even for an instant, and perhaps one tries to recognize the music, or make an emotional judgement of it. But the person and food infront of them is so engaging, the music drifts into the subconscious quickly. Even if the music is disagreable, it is forgiven, as the food and company overpower this negativity with captivating pleasure.

This background music is what the uncalled for thoughts of the future and past, and the emotions that arrive hanging off them like pilots of small hang gliders, represent to me a majority of the time.

Sometimes, of course, the background music is captivating, and comes to the foreground, either because it is so fantastic, or the food and company are not.

I enjoy writing. I haven't written very often, and perhaps that is why I enjoy it so much. I find with many pleasures, that delayed gratification enhances their pleasurability. I have abstained (voluntarily or not) from food, sex, intimacy, warmth, H2O, sleep, rest, sun, marijuana, alcohol, fresh air, cardio, heavy lifting, conversation, socializing, reading, chocolate, coffee, and water, and oh boy are they almost virginally sweet when I return to them.

However, I would like to write more often, and you readers can help me by commenting on my blog! Stimulate me! I will be the first to admit that social influence is a powerful influence on my behaviour (In Canada it is with an "ou" like colour and harbour, correct?).

I think I will go and exercise soon at the little gym at Elisabetta's workplace (it looks like it is raining in the Eternal City this morning).

Unless I write another entry later on today, or I find a cyber cafe in the small town of 12 000 near the mill called Amelia (which supposedly dates back to over 1000 BCE, pre-Roman, pre-Etruscan), I will not be writing again until sunday the 17th.

So I will leave you with a question, which I encourage you to respond to publicly on this blog: why does pleasure tend to increase in its own absence?

Cheers,
Mmmmmmaurizio

Touchdown

Arrived in Frankfurt with little time to catch connecting flight. With a 40 pound backpack on my back and the beginnings of dehydration in my body, I ran almost 1km to gate A32 to catch my flight. The odd moving sidewalk gave me a boost, like nitrous oxide. I made it to A32, heaving, a little desperate, and the polite German lady told me I needed to go to A16. Can I still make it?....Yes, but you must hurry! I don't skip a beat. Turn around, and dash back, beginning to retrace my footsteps. Dodging bodies here and there, (A 30) with minds obviously far off (A25), tagging along like balloons on long, thin strings. Excuse me! (A22) Excuse me! I applied agility to avoid bulldozing. (A16) My mouth like the bottom of a dumptruck previously full of sand. No Euros in my pocket, only Canadianeros. Ameros, my conspiracy prophetic advisors foresee. Ameros after collapse. Anyways, I stop at a stand to buy water: liquid bliss. Only US dollars and Euros, says the sweet little Pilipino lady. Or Credit Card! My mind, on a very low gear at this point, recalls the VISA in my pocket. It is whipped out and inserted in the reader. PIN number please! Oh shit, I forgot about these new cards with the chip in them. Insert instead of swipe, and enter PIN number. I try the last 4 digits of my cell phone number. ERR. I look at her, smiling to feign non-nervousness (subconsciously acknowledging how comprehensive the security forces are in this Western airport in the land of diligent, hard-working, efficiency). Birthday and year! ERR. I pause, trying to think for the final try. ERR.

So I board the plane, stowaway my bag, sit down, and doze into halfsleep. At the end of the flight, I empty 3 little plastic cups of aqua frizzante (bubbly water!). Arrive in Roma. Wait 1 hour for papa to arrive, wait half hour for his luggage, get ride home at 160km per hour winding between crazy Roman charioteers from a heavily caffeinated middle aged Romanian bloke. Arrive at papa's apartment. Stay awake, make successful connections between regions of brain, senses and body, is what I would say to myself if I habitually spoke to myself. I was hungry. Exhausted too, was exhausted the day before I boarded the plane, too. Shower. Put away luggage. drink un cafe. eat chocolate. slow conversation. Wonderful pasta vegetable soup dinner with omelete! Add too much African ground hot pepper (pepperoncino) to the soup, stimulates this Kapha body, but rapes the back of my throat. 15 minutes to recovery, then I can eat the omelete (how do you spell this word?).

Back to the airport to fetch stepmother Elisabetta and Alice, half-sister at 9pm (2100). Everyone has had many hours of delay at airports. Alice back to school at 7am, Elisabetta and papa (father in Italian) back to work at 8 and 9am, respectively.

I awake Thursday morning after 13 hours of sleep...