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Dear Friends, This short prayer came upon me a few days ago when I was cruising the internet and it felt to me quite like the same message that many of us deeply feel. I have included it here because it just fits. Much Love and Blessings, to you, one and All One.

February 14, 2015 BLOG: Love is our only Reality: the Practice of Human Life Dear friends, as you might have discerned by now, I have been at a stall at the border in El Salvador for over two weeks. I have been most fortunate to find a home here while I wait for money stuff to sort itself out. And I have been doubly fortunate to find another part of my family here among very ordinary extraordinary people. I hope you will enjoy a little more about this part of the story: Journey of the Lotus. There is a part of me that at 76 is experienced and skilled, I have educated myself and taken all the lessons of my life as wisdom of the heart. Then, there is another part that is naïve and guileless. When I came to this border of Guatemala and El Salvador, the second part of me was the larger. I simply did not know what I did not know. Even when the very attractive young woman had denied my entry, I did not know from her rapid Spanish that that is what she had said. I am told …

February 20, 2015 BLOG: Living fences There was quite a lot of pure bliss on the drive through Mexico before I came upon the human realities of border crossings. The more tropical the weather and the land, the more I noticed and recognized the crops that grow in these humid and warm climates. The first big one was sugar cane. I had not known that when it is maturing ready for cutting, it sets up a feathery plume similar to corn but much airier, similar to pampas grass clumps I have seen in more temperate regions. There were groves of coco palms not so very different from the date palms in the desert regions of the Coachella valley. Papaya was also a surprise: it is an annual plant, sending up a crown of umbrella leaves over the fruit which ripens near the top and then, when they are cut, leaves the clump to be chopped down and composted on the spot for the next crop. The most fascinating and what became the most ubiquitous were the living fences. Seems that in tr…

February 20, 2015 BLOG: Mountain Bones Dear friends, part of my plan with this blog of my ‘Journey of the Lotus’ is to tune you into some parts of the travel adventure that might not commonly be noted. Forget the cities built of piles of stones and cement, girders and flag poles, the icons and the cobbled squares in front of 400 year old massive churches proclaiming a legacy of a corrupt church, forget the madness of traffic in congested cities, the hideous piles of plastic basura that seem to be an inevitable feature of light fingered humans everywhere, forget the beaches and the resorts, just forget all that. I’m much more related to – mountains. I was born in northern British Columbia in the gold veined mountains near the eastern borders. Not so far north of that is the Yukon Territory and westward, Alaska, where the mountains of this vast cordillera stretching all the way south through North and South America might be said to begin. My youth was spent on V…

February 22, 2015 El Salvador Mercado My stay here in El Salvador is accomplishing one of my purposes for this Journey of the Lotus: cultural immersion. Here in this family there is an ice chest that is supplied with ice only once in a while. This means, of course, that the getting of fresh food is an almost daily expedition. It also seems to be that a fair number of people depend on the street vendors for cooking. I am certain that people come to know who they like to cook for them and they habituate their businesses offering a few quarters to have everything just done right. Interesting. My personal style is to make my own food. I am joined here by the senior Mum, Orbelina, who makes meals for Papa Nefta every day. George often supplies himself by visiting his favorite vendor and because he is over at the border daily, he brings me what I ask for when he comes home for the evening: avocados, tomatoes, cucumber, papaya, melons, onions and other strange tropical fru…

February 12, 2015 BLOG: Arboles Magic: Tree Magic There was some time ago that I began to understand our human relationship with the plant kingdom. In my 30’s near the beginning of my training, a sweet older woman sat with me to talk about the kingdoms of nature. At the time, it was all a new concept but as she softly spoke to me, I watched the wonder of it all slip over her whole body like a beautiful lace shawl. From there it was not difficult to relate to what she was telling to me. Remembering that this may be termed, spiritual science, the concepts are broad and also mystical in their progression and dovetail into what our ‘hard’ science has discerned about the history of the planet, the solar system and our galaxy. The planet begins her journey in her mineral form and attracts to herself ‘atmosphere’, the element of air, and from that the rains (water element) fall incessantly for quite some revolutions of the sun forming rivers, lakes and ocean on the surface…

February 9, 2015 Journey of the lotus: All the Fine Princes In any kind of journey, people are all important. Even if I am rowing myself solo across the Atlantic, there is some one other person or persons to whom I am related, to whom I wish to return and who I would wish to thank for supporting me. Two of these three criteria fit me and so this small piece honors the Princes who have showed up for me as I have taken this kind of solo roll across a continent to another. Even if they do not remember, this is my remembrance of gratitude for what they did in service. It seems that at every turn, in every place there was a smiling face and a helpful gesture. I asked Pemex station men if I could park in behind in the truck parking only to be waved through with their kind of welcoming, knowing I would be just fine thank you to sleep through the night in their lot. There was a gardener with small, full, green lush piece of ground, a middle aged grey haired wiry guy who…

February 10, 2015 West Coast Mexico: Redux.: the Final Miles It was an eye opener when I first checked out the map of Mexico, taking note that the distance from Tijuana to Acapulco was 2000 miles! After the wild trip through the teeming centro of this truly quite fabulous metropolis, and the liberation I experienced as I drove up to the empty highlands once more on the way next morning to Pinotepa Nacional, the rest of the coast of Mexico figured in my mind as a kind of afterthought over the almost 1000 miles remaining. I was by this time quite thoroughly steeped in the magic of the land as it had become even more tropical. Everywhere I was in view of the beaches and the rolling surf, I once again imagined swimming in the Pacific waters. As I rolled through the thickness of the coco palm groves hung with bunches of green cocoanuts, as I gazed upon the many fields of papaya hewn down waiting for the wet ground and the damp air to settle and compost the old leaves and ste…

February 9, 2015 No Tire Basura: There is No ‘Away.’ It is a tribute to Julia Butterfly Hill to remind ourselves that the trash simply does not go away. As I am driving the libre roads of Mexico on my journey so far I see plastic garbage littered nearly everywhere. Most people simply ignore it while they drop another small water bottle, another plastic bag, another empty aluminum coke can. The Spanish word is ‘basura.’ It sounds like a cute Disney bear character in a blue jacket coat and green pants doesn’t it? Well, friends, it is the same old same old trash, and it is almost exclusively plastic trash, mixed with aluminum cans. It is drifted in piles next to buildings everywhere from the very small roadside towns to the center of the cities, in the streets and alleys of the midsized places and along the highways everywhere. I stopped at an elaborate shrine constructed into a large boulder at the perimeter of the wide open area along the highway. It had been lovingly mad…

February 5, 2015 West Coast Mexico: Redux: Manzanillo In this zone of the west coast of Mexico, the cities look a little like American centers especially that there are Walmarts. There is a difference here, however, in the tropics: the parking lots are covered with tent-like roofs and there are bevies of older guys, in their white shirts, hang-tags, caps and blue pants that help you park, that unload the packages and then guide you as you back out once more. It is expected that you donate a peso or two and a kind,“muy gracias” will also suffice. Also, roaming around the lots are young men who barrow along trolleys with buckets, spray bottles and rags who will clean your windshield or wash your car as you shop, also for pesos. Walmart, for all its corporate crap, is a pretty good grocery store here in Mexico in that there is a much wider variety of local produce along with quite a lot of what may also be found in the US, especially Washington apples cold stored often m…

February 5, 2015 West Coast Mexico; Redux: Playa Azul If you believe that you need some tuning up in the realm of patience, I can recommend a road trip down the west coast of Mexico to assure an outcome that you will become either a mountain of patience or utterly frazzled and burnt out, a basket case! The road is fascinating; the landscape verdantly green and tropically beautiful with gardens of coco palms, of papaya, and a sea of natural vegetation: grasses, bushes, flowering trees. The road itself, sometimes even smoothly paved with a yellow line down the center, is two trucks wide at the best without a shoulder: the overgrowth of the land comes directly to the asphalt. Sometimes there is a white line on the right but not always. Without a right side white line, trucks especially, and all the traffic hovers over the yellow line making it a necessity to slow to their speed especially over the slow grades up to higher ground. It’s not possible to see around the huge tru…

February 6, 2015 Puente Arce, El Salvador: Philosophe I was taken down again to the river today: Arce flows here between the borders of Guatemala and El Salvador. As I shifted myself into the cooling waters flowing quite swiftly over the stones in the river, I became entranced by the whole of the view I was looking at from close to the surface of the waters. In the distance are mountains of modest height, their vegetation enduring the dry season which comes when the earth and sun are focusing near the tropic of Capricorn. They are rounded and rolling even further over the land southward from where I am here. They turn to blues and purple hues floating with the mist of humidity the further away. The river is quite swift but not so much that the young boys who are strong swimmers cannot make it across the flow. While I sit at the edge clinging to a rock to keep myself steady, they are jumping in and swimming vigorously toward me to get up on the bank, walk up the w…

El Salvador,  January 30, 2015 If I Had a Hammer: Swim in Arce River The first night in the village allowed me to truly relax and sleep peacefully for the first time in nearly 2 weeks. I do rest well even in the remote places that I find free parking along the way, but in the warm aura of loving beautiful people, something wonderful settles into me even with the lumpy bed I have piled with much of my worldly goods. I awoke this Friday morning to George’s greeting and smile. In his world, it is necessary for him to hustle daily to make the family needs appear. He went off quite soon with a wave and his agreement to return in about 2 ½ hours to assist me to empty the van. It had been rather hastily repacked after the evolution with the customs inspector the late evening before and it could only be reorganized by starting all over again. Another evolution! He returned with the news that the border was dead and there was nothing for him. We moved the van and he took…

BLOG: El Salvador, January 30, 2015 Making the Impossible Happen: It takes Angels. There will be entries that in time come before this one, but today I am writing to you from a wonderful alley home in Puente Arce in El Salvador right at the border with Guatemala. As I arrived at this border two afternoons ago, I was met first with the refusal of a young woman from Immigration El Salvador to my request for passage that had something to do with the failure of immigration in Mexico to give me a entry stamp on my passport. But quite soon after this first interview, a young man showed up with an open face, a fine smile and delicious brown eyes offering to assist me. His name is Jorge, George, like my grandfather was George. His cohort was Alexander as my father was Harold Alexander. Go Figure! At moments like this it is important to make a quick assessment of the integrity of whoever you are looking at. The first young man who offered services did not make the cut. This …