October 2010

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It is now October of 2010. I started this blog around this time 4 years ago. I'm in Seattle again, and I can't seem to sleep tonight. I guess I need to write another blog entry.


Leaving Babylon

Anyone who knew me in the summer of 2006 might feel a little uncomfortable with the walking contradiction I had become. Far from the SHARP traditionalist of high school days who wore button-down shirts and published radical literature, in '06 I was a business school grad working on shamelessly commercial films and--oh, the horror--commercials! I was getting wasted a lot and partying more often than I slept. I looked like a mess and started living in the back of my truck. Sure, people at UW, and people in the film business, and people at Crossfit, my land-lords, and even the punks and skins thought I was very intelligent and talented, but they all knew I needed to take better care of myself and get my shit together.

I felt nervous all the time. Amped, pumped, hyped, wild, rambunctious, crazy, verging on insane. I had no sense of calm and I had no center. My focus was all ego all the time: wake up and do some nutty workout, eat a ton of food, BS my way through class, womanize, have some outrageous adventure, then tell everybody about my outrageous adventure, wake up with a hangover, and do it again.

My only honest peace came from hanging out with old friends and smoking some weed, then talking about things dear to our hearts. I would then go off by myself, jam my favorite reggae tapes in the truck, swim, sleep at the beach, take a day trip, whatever.

I wanted to trade my life in for something else. I was looking for something more like what I'd burned for as a teenager: a peaceful utopian life full of good health, creative expression, and personal fulfillment--on my own terms, with all my friends there too. One day, I met one of the Ethiopian Rasta elders at Madrona Beach and asked him where I could find some books about Rasta. He told me to go to Zion's Gate Records, but I didn't go there. I went to Thailand.


My Microsoft Nightmare

The idea of traveling to Thailand had started a year earlier when my rock-climbing buddy Gary had come back from his first 6-month trip to Southeast Asia. He wanted to do another trip in '06 and we planned to set out together, aiming for Thailand, Nepal, and India. Then one of the girls he'd met on his previous trip invited him to stay with her in Europe. One of the girls I knew from Seattle invited me to stay with her in Thailand when she got there in the end of October. I graduated from UW in August and headed to Thailand on my own in September.

My parents were worried about me. I wasn't worried. As far as I could tell, this was the coolest thing I'd ever done. I was FREE! I had no cellphone, no rent, no bills. I had no schedule, no agenda. I was just gonna bounce around the world and get jobs where I needed to and have tons of fun for the rest of my life. I even packed a bartender's guide so that I could learn how to mix drinks.

And it was pretty fun. So fun that I almost never dreamed. But then, when I did dream, it was a creepy realistic nightmare of working at Microsoft in a most blase shituation. Little did I know the dream would come true! Thailand was such a beautiful place that I started to feel I'd never again return to a life of Pacific Northwestern drudgery.

Those who were keeping track will already know that I did indeed return to the rain. I did, in fact, do a bunch of low-level work at Microsoft Studios. I did find it to be rather blase. I did escape on another international trip. I followed this exact sequence no less than twice. I really wanted just to stay on the road, but for some reason, I did the thing I didn't want to do.


My Second Great Awakening

I have a story I tell people sometimes, maybe I've told it to you. Let's call it "My First Great Awakening". I was six years old, I had gone through some traumatic experiences. I wanted to know the meaning of life. My parents didn't know it. They were taking us into a different church every Sunday and letting every sort of missionaries fill our heads with whatever they thought fit. I was trying to read every book I could find. One Sunday, one Sedro-Woolley church, I'm not sure which, they took the adults to the worship sanctuary and they took my little brother and I to the Sunday school. These people, strangers, told me that my parents were sinners. I was mad. I went home and told my parents I was on a mission. Setting up a tent in the yard, I spent three days reading every single book I could find in the house of a philosophical, religious, mythological, or moral nature. I came out with a light. "I'm gonna start my own religion!" I told my mother. Then I started keeping a religious journal with drawings of my personal cosmology, and notes I wrote about how the whole world could live right if they followed my advice. I locked this in a blue safe with my favorite full-color Bible and buried it under a tree. Around the same time, I briefly became a Baha'i.

You all probably know that this "enlightenment" did not save me. I was still confused and still lost for the next twenty years or so. Then, on the road in Asia, I experienced "My Second Great Awakening."

It probably started on my exodus from Laos, fleeing a town full of affluent Western drug addicts. I wrapped a black bandana around my face and declared death upon the previous phase of my partying life. I crossed the border into Thailand and went down to Suvarnabhumi airport near Bangkok. I met some local guys and crashed on the floor of their apartment. It was my first time to completely let go of 'western civilization' and place my trust in strangers who speak a foreign tongue. I met my friend from Seattle the next day when she came into the airport. We were staying in a hotel together, and maybe it felt like we were supposed to be sleeping together, but we didn't. It just didn't feel right, and now I wanted to listen to my heart. I started going out whenever she was in, and she started going out whenever I was in. There was another girl who followed me around for an entire day like a lost kitten. I wasn't interested. Then, one night the soldiers shut down the bars on Khao-San road and put me on the street. I was wandering around when I met Chelly.

Our story is pretty much well covered in these 80-or-so blogs here. We fell madly for each other. She shared her room in Sriracha with me. She played Bob Marley every morning. She gave me a Bible to read while she was at work. She went with me to the islands and she showed me pure love like a dream. She left her scary job with the Bengal Tigers and travelled across India with me. She let me sit up late nights writing in my journals. She listened to my trippy rants on the train ride through Andra Pradesh. She took me to an African paradise and introduced me to Zion culcha. She occupied my mind while I toured the ruins of Greece and found long-lost family. She was the catalyst for My Second Great Awakening.

It was a light, it was a lifting of weight from off my back, a setting-down of burdens, a breath of fresh air. There was even a beautific vision. A vision of totality. A vision of repentance, and redemption, and maybe even repatriation. I had a vision of God--the Almighty, Most High, JAHOVAH, whatever you call HIM--experiencing and living through every single experience of every single person and atom and state of being of all time, ever before and forever after. God being there, He who is named "I am that I am", being and having perfect knowledge of absolutely everything that is. I started to write some heavy mystic stuff, but it pales to the heavy mystic stuff that was going on in my head.


The Black Greeks

My parents came to Kenya when Chelly and I got engaged. After that, they headed to Greece. So I went to Greece.

I knew that the name Nakis had come from Crete. So I went to Crete. I learned a lot of things there. I learned that ever name ending in "akis" had indeed come from Crete. I learned that the original Cretans had come from Egypt, that they were Africans, referred to in the Bible as "Caphtorim", sons of Ham. I learned that they had built the first civilization in this part of the world, and they'd later been overrun by mainland Greeks, then occupied and oppressed by Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks, each in their turn.

Then I went to Kranidi, on the Peloponnese. I searched through the hall of records, the cemetery, the phone books, the coffee shops, and I found my long-lost relatives. Then I wrote all about this on my blog: Crete, the history of the island, the origins of it's people, the long, difficult trod to freedom, the Nakis family's tumultuous history fighting guerilla warfare against brutal Ottoman oppressors. This was the blog that got my TravelBlog hacked, and when I posted it on NicNakis.com, that got hacked too.

Why was my family history so controversial that it got internet hackers up in arms? Because I stated that I was descended from Black Greeks, and I outlined the 3000-year history of brutalization against our people. I said that we formed a living connection between Africa, Europe, and Asia, and in us there was a force for peace on earth. Was I wrong? No. In fact, I find even more evidence of this history every day.

Here's what Marcus Garvey says about it:

“There is good grounds to say that civilization started in Africa and passed from and through Northern Africa into Southern Europe, from which the Greeks and Romans and the People of Asia Minor made good copies. The swarthy colour of the Asiatics and the brunette colour of the South Europeans were due to the fact that the cultured and civilized blacks of Africa mixed their blood with them. “

And,

“From Africa to Ancient Greece
The light of knowledge flew,
But up to now the truths revealed
Go back to what men knew.”

This is from the book "African Civilizations" by John G. Jackson:

"The first civilization of Europe was established on the island of Crete. It is sometimes called Minoan culture, after King Minos, an early legendary ruler of the island. The ancestors of the Cretans were natives of Africa, a branch of the Western Ethiopians."

This from the book "Minoan Crete" by H. E. L. Melersh:

"Greeks and Minoans were not, however, of the same stock. The Minoans were a more ancient and indigenous people, indigenous that is to say to the Mediterranean, much alike no doubt to those people whom the Greeks, coming in from the north, met and called the Pelasgians: dark people, and little and lithe. Ethnology has been able to give these people no better name than "Mediterraneans". Sometimes they have been called Dark-Whites, sometimes Iberians though that presupposes that when later the type spread north and west it came only from Spain. They are not Semitic. But they are dark."

This book goes on to reproduce many pieces of ancient Cretan artwork depicting black and brown people.


Religious Tourist

I wrote some Yoga of Jesus stuff and some Universalist philosophy, and I probably would have stayed on that track if I hadn't had this notion building inside of me that I should join a church. I didn't know what church to join, so I became a Religious Tourist.

I went to Mosques, to Buddhist temples, Hindu temples, Jewish temples, the Hare Krshna farm in Sedro-Woolley and the Krshna cafe in Seattle, the Unitarian Universalist church, the Roman Catholic church (in English and in Spanish), the Episcopalian church, the Mormon church, the Ethiopian Orthodox church, the Greek Orthodox church, the Russian Orthodox church, the Orthodox Church in America, the Self-Realization Center, and the Mars Hill church in Ballard. I also went to Zion's Gate Records for some Rasta books and DVDs. I read piles of books and pamphlets. I spent countless hours listening to priests and discussing with parishioners. I listened to a lot of reggae, also Byzantine chants, the Hanuman Kalisa, and CDs of Haile Selassie speeches and radio interviews. I was somewhere new every Sunday.

Onne Sunday morning, an Ethiopian Abba told me I should be baptized. I got in the truck and listened to Peter Tosh sing,

"Dis ya one, come tell I say
Dis ya one, come tell I say
He tink it wize dat
I should get baptize
But when I realize
It was de Devil in disguise."

I was scared about it. Then I decided to spend my Sundays jamming on hand drums with some Rastas I knew instead. Herbs, dreadlocks, think for yourself, this sounded pretty good to me.

I stayed on that tip during my next trip to Africa, letting my hair dread up and going to the Rasta yard on Sundays. Until Brother Levi taught me about the Sabbath and I started linking with the bredrin on Saturdays. These guys were not thought-conformists, they had no wealthy temple building, they promoted self-awareness and self-actualization. One brother told me that Haile Selassie was the Almighty God of the Bible, another said Jesus Christ was God and Haile Selassie was merely an earthly figurehead for African Christians, another one told me that he didn't believe a word of the New Testament because Haile Selassie was the true Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. Theological doctrine did not seem very important. Livity, the way of life, was paramount.

But I still kept up my religious tourism, learning Koran and Hadith from Kenyan Muslims, practicing Yoga regularly, going to the Catholic Church with Chelly's mother, and reading a lot of books, from the Bhagavad-Gita to Bishop Kallistos Ware's 'The Orthodox Church". I wanted to crack open the whole religious question and steer a course out of the quagmire for all mankind to follow. Pretty heavy stuff. Ambitious. 😊

At least this wasn't unusual to the Kenyan RastafarI bredrin. I discussed Koran with the Muslim-Rastas and practiced Yoga with the Yoga-Rastas and rejoiced in Christ with the Christian-Rastas. I even gave my heavily-annotated Hare Krshna version of the Bhagavad-Gita to one of the Rasta brothers so he could share it with his Jehovah's Witness friends in Bible study.

It was only with the RastafarI brothers and sisters that I was able to truly express myself and take an active role in my own salvation. These were the only people having an authentic first-hand religious experience. Everyone else was just a cultural inheritor, at best a student of someone else's long-ago authentic experience. Here I was learning about myself, and about my world, and interpreting facts with my own mind. I had beautiful music to pray along with, and the best kind of friends. I had an outlet for my creative energies, a role helping my Ras elders to educate and organize their people.

After several stressful trips to the embassy in Nairobi, Chelly finally got her visa to come to the United States. We left Kenya in November 2007. We stayed with my family in New England for a month, then came to Sedro-Woolley and had a civil marriage with family, friends of my parents, and a few of my close friends in attendance. The civil marriage employed customs from Greece and Africa, a poem from the Coast Salish natives, a quote from Haile Selassie, and mine and Chelly's own best Indian cooking.

We moved into a little place in Seattle in January 2008. There followed two years of beautiful marriage, new friendships, great fun at reggae shows, bbq's, drum jams, and two things that started fun but became quite unpleasant: Pacific Northwest blase corporate drudgery, and confused religious tourism.

I started Producing TV commercials and worked on the production crew of corporate videos. I went to even more churches, and had visits from even more missionaries. I began to associate with the Nyabinghi Order and other Rastafarians in Seattle. I felt like I could take on the world.

And it all became too much. There were disagreements with people, friendships under strain, anxieties, a market crash, clients that weren't paying on time. It makes me think of another Peter Tosh quote:

"You can't please everybody, so you got to please yourself."

Chelly and I moved to Kenya again in December 2009. We thought it would be a long-term thing. One friend from Seattle travelled with us for a visit. My parents were coming over Christmas. This was supposed to be the beginning of our new life. It was not.

Sadly, unpredictably, unexpectedly, Chelly's father Javan Ali Ndaiya passed away in March of 2010, while we were with him in Mombasa, Kenya. He had become very ill soon after our arrival.

It is a hard mourning process. I wish to always remember his life, and to know that his life is without beginning or end of days. I try to call to mind eternal life whenever I feel sadness at the loss of the flesh.

We returned to Seattle again, and there were more tragic type things happening. The seizure came one night after a Rasta Bible study. I had long talks with the Mormon missionaries and visited their family history library. I went to the Ethiopian Orthodox church several times, until I was accosted for being a Rastafarian and made to feel unwelcome there. I had meetings with the Greek Orthodox priest and the same kind of thing happened. Another haircut soon followed. I hung out around the Christian Science Reading Room and the Hare Krshna cafe. i spent some time in the Presbyterian church library. I spent many hours in the University of Washington's Suzzalo Library, reading books about Emperor Haile Selassie.

My backpacking days were a long time ago, why have I been feeling homeless?


Home on Earth

And now, I guess, I've had some eye-openers. Godliness is not a form of gain. No man is safe from the touch of death. Everybody's on their own level. Home is where the heart is.

My heart swells with love for the whole world, so I suppose the Earth is my home. And I myself belong to JAH, He has begotten me and loved me in His mind, bringing me into being so that He may love me here on Earth and forever after.

On that note, here is what JAH RastafarI Qedamawi Haile Selassie has to say about Greeks in general:

“We on Our part told him that from time immemorial Athens had been the source of wisdom and knowledge, that We had discovered and read in our history of the goodness of the Greek people, and We declared Our intention henceforth to render assistance to all Greeks living in Ethiopia.”

And now the Abyssinians:

"JAH loves you man
ever know JAH needs you, woman
and to know the things you did
to him,
it makes you want to die.
for greatest love,
all you ever learned
is to love,
and be loved in return."


A Declaration of Today

Today I kept my Rasta Sabbath, the only consistent religious observance I have held strong to throughout the past few years. I burned Ubani (Frankincense) with Ganja in a censor the way they do in the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox Church, the way Moses commanded in words that Orthodox Jews still chant every Saturday. I read the last chapter of the Book of Hebrews. I read from the Wisdom of Srirach in my Orthodox bible. I sat in prolonged meditation with deep rhythmic breathing and third-eye awakening. I abstained from eating until the late afternoon. When I hit the heights of my meditational vibes, I grabbed this little djembe drum I bought in Zanzibar and began to beat the Nyabinghi heart beat and chant:

"I am descended from the island of Crete,
I am descended from the sons of Caphtorim,
The sons of Casluhim,
The sons of Mizraim, they call Egypt,
The brothers of Kush, the sons of Kam,
The Black African son of Noah, the Hebrews call Ham.

"I am an ancient Ethiopian,
I am an Incient Ithiopian,
I may not be tall, and I may not be dark of skin,
But I am an ancient Ithiopian.

"I am a son of Amon,
I am a son of Zeus,
I am a son of Herakles,
I am a son of Minos,
I am a son of Iesus Kristos,
I am a son of Qedamawi Haile Selassie.

"I am an ancient Ethiopian...


Now

Now I don't feel so lost. I don't feel there should be any confusion. I don't feel there should be any trap. I don't feel torn in my loyalties, I don't feel like a traitor to anything, and I don't feel damned. I am that I am.

This is my own Testament.

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