I met Alive With Skies when he was passing out flyers for the Columbus Day Protest at a reggae show a couple weeks back. He is a Native man from an American Indian Movement family and a community organizer. We talked about growing up amidst the colonial regime that instructed me to play the role of "occupier" and him as "occupied", not because of skin color--he's the same tone as me--but because of continental heritage. We talked about the problems in the cities. We talked about the problems on the reservations. We talked about the hope growing on the reservations and [View Full Entry]

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I watched last night's Colbert Report as he made jokes about www.conservapedia.com and the Conservapedia bible translation project. Visiting the site to add my own conservative re-translation of the Bible, I found it blocked from accepting new contributors. Who knows if this is related to Colbert's challenge to viewers to "write me into the Bible", or if it's just regular policy at this heavily-administrated, heavily bureaucratic corner of the web. I couldn't add my Bible translation there, but I could try to learn where these guys are coming from. I agree with the Conservapedia folk [View Full Entry]

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Whoa. Here I am in August 2009 and the last 3 years have burned up like a flame. I... ...left for my Southeast Asia trip around this time in 2006. ...saw a whole other world and became a whole other person. ...ended up in India with Chelly by January of 2007. ...took her home to Kenya. ...was completely renewed and remade by my experiences in East Africa. ...asked her Father if I could ask her to marry me. ...asked her to marry me. ...invited my parents over for the engagement party. ...went on a trip through Greece with Mom and Dad. [View Full Entry]

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All God is one God All Creation is one Creation All Life is one Life All People is one People All Faith is one Faith All Tradition is one Tradition All Love is one Love All I have is: A body, A mind, A soul, A patch of Earth, A Bible, A drum, A family, A community, A history, A future, A Prayer. [View Full Entry]

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Surprise! Most of you must not know it, but I'm back in the U.S.A. I say you must not know it because almost everyone I run into here is shocked to see me. Guess I didn't give enough solid info in my preceding blogs. So. Here's the current update: - Chelly is in Kenya, taking care of her family and gathering paperwork for her visa interviews. Word is she's also been practicing her sewing and clothing design skills on Momma's sewing machine. - I am in America, getting back to work so that I can save some money for the [View Full Entry]

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I'm writing this entry just a few hours before I get onto an airplane for that last stretch of travel which ends my trip. I'm in Greece and I've had an amazing day with my parents and some long-lost, newly-discovered cousins. I'm painfully missing Chelly and we'll have thousands more miles between us soon. In short, there is a lot going on inside me as I write this last live blog from the road. The trip to Greece was very different than any of the other country-visits I've had in the last six months. It was a family trip--for one [View Full Entry]

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Since Crete was the main focus of my trip to lovely Greece, it's only fitting that Crete be the place I stretch my legs and find the pulse of this country of my ancestors. Chania It all went down in a place called Chania; we didn't spend every day there, but it was our homebase and the place where we got to be lazy. Chania is an old, old town. Inhabited by ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Venetians, and Turks, it was also the capitol of the short-lived independent nation of Crete. Now it's a tourist place, open to anyone [View Full Entry]

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The blazing beams of the sun shine across vast space and a crystal blue sky, bathing me in heat and light while wave after wave of cooled air molecules roll in from the Mediterranean, smash across my side, and tangle with my blowing hair. I'm standing on an Athens rooftop in the early morning, breathing and meditating after some long Hatha Yoga practice while the sweat dries on the Kenyan cloth Leso I've been using as a mat. I think about God's perspective: the simultaneous viewpoint of every particle, molecule, and complex structure in the universe. I think about the emptiness [View Full Entry]

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These are the last things I put down in my journal before moving on. Not a complete cycle of thoughts, but a good time capsule showing the status of my ideas just before leaving Africa. Musings Let's start with the recapitulation hypothesis: that Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny. This is the notion that the development of the individual reflects or imitates the development of it's entire ancestry. This idea originally referred to the development of embryos as a reflection of the evolutionary proccess of organisms. I actually learned it in a class on mythology, where we rel [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, March 14th We were up at 3:00 AM and in a cab by 4:00, headed out to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi to see my parents. Nairobi is wicked cold in the mornings, and I was shivering all wrapped up in nerves while carrying my now-massive backpack into the airport. I saw my parents through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the arrival terminal and I was hit with a new load of conflicting emotions. It was something wonderful to see them here, safe, in Kenya with me and Chelly. It was something awful to know that my trip [View Full Entry]

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