TTT: Critical Mass

Forces aligned, openings materialized, and a trip off the rock came into full view and was created.

In other words, after four long years away, I am returning to my homeland over the October Intercession.

My second (side) job is blossoming with promise and I had an opportunity to expand my business with this trip. It seems meant to be as things fell into place quite easily.

I have not seem my mom since the insanity of summer 2010. Those of you who have been here awhile know what I am talking about.

So I thought I'd pay her a visit. The death of a dear friend last week reminded me of the fragility of life. Despite the craziness that is my mom, it was time.

Ying and Yang.

Work and family.

It's all sorting out. Or not. Either way, it will be what it will be.

Critical Mass (Preponderance of the Great)

In an atom, when CRITICAL MASS is reached, it is a time when several heavy particles are occupying the same space, thereby creating extraordinary events and catastrophic chain reactions. In much the same way, the current situation is becoming weighted with a great many considerations. There are numerous decisions pending, the air is full of ideas with all their ensuing multifarious possibilities, and the ponderous affairs of the people around you are pushing into the foreground. All of it is important, serious, and meaningful, and all of it is coming to a head right now.

The I Ching Workbook

Travel tip? Not so much. After my trip to LA, I am sure I'll have tips to share. Meanwhile, feel free to link on up.

Adventuring We'll Go!

To the Makapu'u tide pools. This photo was supposed to be at the end of the post as it was the end of the trail. Oops. Consider it a preview.

Public school teachers went back to work here in Hawaii on Tuesday. So on Monday, my daughter and her friend took me hiking to a place I've been aching to go ever since a friend posted photos of their family hiking there on Father's Day.

When you live on an island for 27 years, it's not often you find out there is a really cool place you have never been to before. I enjoy a new discovery.

If you ever visit, I'm not recommending this hike to any and all. There are cliffs and tiny trails. There are rocks/ boulders you walk over for a long, long trek. Some of them wobble and you have to be careful.

But you can go there virtually right now with me

We're hiking the outside of Makapu'u. You park at the Makapu'u Lighthouse trail. There are two ways to go. Hike up the trail and deviate at the whale sign. Go down the steep drop to the ocean, heading towards the tide pools and follow the mountain goat of a trail. And remember, it's scary.

Or. Deviate earlier from the trail and head to the ocean along the dirt road to Allen Davis Cove. Turn left and start climbing rocks and watch out for the cliff that drops into the ocean with huge surging waves and major spray action. And remember, it's scary.

We went in by Allen Davis, and out by the whale sign.

Here we go; don't forget you can click on a photo to see it enlarged.

Heading left just past Allen Davis.

Scooching around at the start. We could have walked through the cove, but it was deeper than it looks and we had cameras and keys and stuff.

One of many cool rock formations.

Little cave, there was a much bigger one later but we didn't take a photo.

People make these rock piles.

Cool, yes?

About midway, there are these huge rock formations.

A shot of yours truly. On the outside of this cliff, straight down from me, I was watching huge swells crash against the cliff.

Crashing like this.

This tide pool is not like the others. It's not from huge spray and splash; it sits back from the cliff. The water is clear and cold. We think an underwater cave feeds into it.
It's hidden about midway and most don't find this tide pool.

Past the tide pool, it got very spooky. The trail was narrower and closer to the cliff.

The ghost skeleton of this puffer fish was freaky.

That morning I asked my daughter if I should were slippers or shoes.
She said slippers.....
Should have worn shoes.

That line along the cliff in the background is where we came from....

Right here would go the photo from the top.

Climbing up at the end, you can look down and see the same thin trail, and also the huge rock that was in the earlier photo.

Come on, link on up and show us someplace you have been this summer! Grab the badge in the sidebar if you are inclined.

The Moments Inbetween

Have you ever noticed that when you look at a photo album or a home video, the highlights of your life come blaring out like a foghorn of living life to its fullest? Yet, in the midst of any given day, the challenges, the heated tempers, the anxiety, the frustrations, and the nails thrown onto the road before you can sometimes make life seem like an obstacle course in plowing through?

OK. Maybe that's just my life of late. As the unbloggable from last year slowly ebbs, new quagmires surround me. I have spent the summer dealing long distance with my mom. I have one sister in Florida, I am here in Hawaii, and my sister who lives in Ventura (closest to my mom in Camarillo) has MS and needs to pace herself.

The medical community and social services were never able to help my mom nor protect my sisters and me from the worst of her mental illness while growing up. Now they are incapable of helping us help her. I'm debating a more detailed post because maybe someone who comes by to read may offer advice we have not thought of; but that post will have to come later.

Because today is traveling Thursday.

And my summer isn't all phone calls and emails to derail the train wreck that is my mother.

My daughter made this video of some of our summer highlights.

• Son surfing
• Trip to Target (and the girls having fun with the shaker thing)
• Watching a hula class of Japanese tourists in Waikiki.
  
• Drive around the island with Hubs, Daughter, BC...
• And BC letting me make him dance in the car.

Today's Travel Tip? Enjoy those moments that are going on the video....

Editing note: The young woman in the video is not my daughter, but my daughter's friend. Scroll down a couple posts and you will see my daughter at her birthday dinner. The song in the video is by Regina Spector.

Make my day and link up a post!

And Now a Word From Braja

I couldn't be more thrilled. Braja is guest blogging for you today. Braja lives in India, but then You all knew that, didn't you....

If you like pina coladas, and gettin' caught in .... intense peak hour traffic in Calcutta with a million horns honking and driving styles that would make a roundabout in Rome look like an old age home on Xanax, then this is the post for you. You see, Pseudo asked me to guest post. At first I was stumped. "India meets Hawaii???" Now *there's* a union that could give you some thought. So I trained my mind towards Hawaii. There's a few ways to get there from India.
Hey wait! This isn't Salem for cryin' out loud. There are FAR more civilized and advanced ways of travel. And living in India, I've learned some tricks...

And that's where we're at today: meditation. Hawaii is an ancient culture with advanced techniques for meditation that leave the world in awe of their depth and stunned at their ability to conquer intricate techniques, ancient rituals, and complicated processes like this:

India, however, possibly goes a little further, a tad deeper, a smidgen more complicated (damned show offs, what with Sanskrit and mantras and all), and has for many years led the world with time-proven methods of meditation like this:

In the end, it's all Greek to me and my conclusion is we should all just stand around and do more of this:

Works for me.

Come back soon Pseudo...xo

Friday Foto: Slice of Morning

Click on the sunset in the sidebar and travel to an amazing post...

During my summer break, I would sip coffee and blog until 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning. Then I'd take BC to the park for a run. By 8 it was already sunny and warming up.

Since I have gone back to work, I take him at 5:45. Yesterday we had a treat. On one side of the field was the moon setting.
On the other side of the field the sunrise was coming up.

Not a bad start to the day. As always, you can click on the pictures for a larger (better) view.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the early morning song of the birds.

For more Friday Fotos, head on over to Candid Carrie's.

Red Wagon Philosophies: Part Three (AKA The Final Chapter, I Think...)

Part one is here.

Part two is here.

And here we go...

My own red wagon was what first introduced me to the concept of balance.

Work and play.

Being responsible and letting go.

Practicality and throwing caution to the wind.

One of the problems I find with kids these days is that many of them don’t know how to work through boredom and earn their fun. There are the overscheduled kids of the Type A parents. Between back to back sports schedules, lessons, and whatever else they fit in, they get very little down time. Certainly not enough to push them to their limits of creative imagining. Then there are the kids whose parents are either are at work, or just plain don’t want them out of the house, or just don’t encourage it. These kids watch TV, play video games, or they are on the computer all day.

I’m just finishing up To Kill a Mockingbird with my classes. Did you ever notice how Scout, Jem, and Dill always start their summers out lounging around, bored, and figuring out what to do with their summer surplus of time?

Apparently this topic of not allowing our children to work through boredom and hand feeding them entertainment needs to be left for another post of its own. But you get the idea, yes?

So, moving on.

I introduced the years we lived in a mobile home park on the beach in Malibu before. Across from Big Sycamore State Park. When I was eleven and we moved from the San Fernando Valley to the beach, the red wagon came along with everything else. At eleven, I believe I had mostly outgrown the wagon, which had seen its own wagon train days on our Wonder Years Street years before.

So, one summer day, my friends and I were lazing around in my yard trying to think of something different to do. Hiking? Mmm. Not today. Rock climbing? Swimming? Raft riding? Tree climbing? Fishing off the pier? Been there, done that. Want. New. Entertainment.

I don’t remember who saw the red wagon and decided we should take it tobogganing down the steepest trail on the hill at the front of the State Park, but that’s where we ended up.

Epiphany Number One. The handle of the wagon is not just for pulling. Sitting inside the wagon, you can use it for a steering wheel, a rudder. I remember being blown away at discovering this. It amazed me that this potential had laid latent and pending and waiting to be discovered. That I had almost never uncovered this gem of engineering. (OK. I was a bit slow. My friends acted like I was retarded for not knowing this, so I had to tone down my surprise.)

We selected a trail that zig zagged up the side of a hill and then went straight up along the ridge, perpendicular to the ocean. When we went up the straight edge high enough to get the speed for the turns, and turned to go down, we were facing the ocean. The turn looked like the edge of a cliff. Which it was in a way if you did not make the turn. But contrary to the optical allusion, you would not drop off into the ocean if you did not make the turn, but actually land on the Pacific Coast Highway.

The wagon could only hold three of us and there were four. We took turns being the one to push the toboggan off.

We started off not going too fast and this ended with the wagon anticlimactically sludging to a stop just beyond the first turn.

We gradually worked our starting point further and further up the hill.

By the last rounds, we were careening around the corner on two wheels, our hair blown back by sheer speed, our grins and laughter screaming out from the deepest depths of our souls.

It was the Most. Fun. EVER.

When we realized the rubber was shredding off the wheels we kept going until the wagon could go no more.

My friends asked if we should hide the wagon so I would not get in trouble for trashing it.

We all stood there staring at what remained of the wagon.

It was made of metal and bringing it to the beach had started it rusting. It was old. And now its wheels were gone.

I confidently told my friends the wagon had long been forgotten, was on its last legs anyways, and not only would my parents not be mad we had fast forwarded the wagon’s trail to the dump, but they would surely buy me a new one when I explained I had discovered the most fun activity on the planet.

Epiphany Number Two. Parents don’t always see a child’s perspective of living life to its fullest.

I stood there in shock while my dad stomped and yelled and made a big production of throwing the wagon in the back of the station wagon to take to the dump.

I still could not believe, once I explained EXACTLY how much fun we had, the once in a lifetime thrill, the feeling that we had discovered a true purpose for life itself, that not only did my parents not agree to buy a new wagon…they grounded me. Talk about adding insult to injury.

I remember thinking, and I believe I had about a week to think about it, that if they had a clue what my friends and I had discovered, they would apologize. See the light.

Work and play.

Being responsible and letting go.

Practicality and throwing caution to the wind.

Turns out it was a once in a lifetime experience. I never got another wagon and we found our thrills in new ways. But for months I yearned to experience just one more ride down that trail in a wagon, careening around the corner, smiling and laughing like there was nothing better in the entire world.

As an adult I try to remember to let go of responsibilities once in awhile and take the time to be creative, to relax, to enjoy.

As a parent I try to get my kids to be more responsible.

Ah. The irony of life itself.

Red Wagon Philosophies: Part Two

If you missed yesterday's post, you may want to start here.
When my kids were toddlers, a red wagon was in my top five list of playthings they needed to have. I had fond memories of my own childhood red wagon. When we went to buy a wagon for our kids, I wanted to buy them exactly the same model I had enjoyed, but times had changed and the wagons were made of plastic instead of metal. This was before the heyday of online buying, and we settled for a model the toy store offered.

My children’s wagon lasted many years and served many purposes for them. The activity I remember most was them playing Wagon Train with all the neighbor kids. There is not much that says childhood than ten or more kids lining up the trikes, bikes, scooters, and the infamous wagon to play Wagon Train down the access alley. The first time they got this idea, the wagon had the pristine first position. Our dog, the one we call Old Man now, but back then was a strapping young fellow, always hung outside with the kids when they played. He was never leashed; he was like a babysitter to them. The kids would try and ride him, lead him, order him around. He played as if he went along with it, but there was no getting around that he was in charge more than they were.

The first time the Wagon Train was good to go, the kids had tethered the dog to the lead and wanted him to pull the wagon and lead off the posse. I was sitting outside watching the fiasco, half reading a book.

Giddy up they yelled at him.

He played dumb and just turned his head to look at them. My son, riding a trike further down the line (having given the wagon riding spot to someone’s young sibling who was too little to ride in anything else) got off his trike and tried pulling our dog by the collar to get him started.

I raised an eyebrow.

You might hurt him, I admonished. Take that rope off of him and let him go.

After much argument from my then five year old son (a mere preview to his debating skills as a teenager) he finally unhooked the poor dog. He allowed another kid the spot on first trike and my son went ahead and pulled the wagon with toddler to get the ol’ western styled parade a goin’.

Old Man that was a Young Dog was sitting next to me with his head cocked to the side as he surveyed the action. As the Wagon Train kicked into high gear and all the vehicles were clunking along down the alley with yipees and whoopees singing out, the dog took off at a gallop. He ran alongside the Wagon Train and gracefully propelled himself into the back half of the wagon.

He spent the rest of the day getting pulled by the kids, who had to take turns as Wagon Train Leader (wagon puller). The dog never looked happier.

After that, every time the kids started lining up the trikes, bikes, scooters, and wagon for an afternoon of Wagon Train, the dog would claim his spot INSIDE the wagon. Sometimes lying down so he did not have to share the wagon with undeserving children.

The children came to accept this as the natural order of things.

I have thought about this sometimes over the years when my kids have out maneuvered me. When it seems I am doing more for them than they are doing for the family.

Old Man is now 16.

Red Wagon Philosophies: Part One

The other day when I was walking along the bike path where all the cats live, I met a woman and her preteen daughter moseying along the path pulling a big red wagon. In the wagon was a huge Costco sized bag of dry cat food. And a five gallon jug of water.

We chatted a bit and it turns out that Sunday is “her” day for feeding the cats. She and some other kind-hearted people each take a day. They have really gotten to know the cats well. They have an idea which ones have been born feral cats and which ones were abandoned. Some of the cats have names. The little orange one that always runs up to me, wants to be pet, and isn’t the least afraid of BC – her name is Emma. The woman and her daughter are thinking of adopting her.

These people also trap the cats, especially the kittens, and take them to the humane society to get spayed or neutered. Then they bring them back and let them go where they found them. She told me I can tell by the snip in which ear whether it is a fixed male or female.

I wondered aloud at my measly bag of cat food I carry with me and the kind lady said that anything helps.

I know my healing book that is based on Buddhist philosophies advocated being kind to animals and to help those that are suffering. I started feeding the feral cats on the bike path during my recuperation.

But that woman’s wagon was big; as was the food bag and water jug. She brings them fresh water so they don't drink from the polluted pond. She and her red wagon were like a gigantic heart of giving. Ain’t no power walk when you are dragging that thing behind you.

The fact that I double up on my power walk and cat feeding. Does make me seem a bit more efficient than just a pure giver.

At any rate, the red wagon once again reminded me of all that is good in life.

Tomorrow, part deux

Friday Foto: Sacred Places

Before we get started, heads up to this contest. If you are not famliar with SITS (The Secret is in the Sauce - see sidebar for badge), it is a great blog run by the sweetest ladies in the blogoshere. Very supportive. Lots of contests. The latest is a really great one, so check it out.

Now, back to today's post...

My walks keep me healthy. My husband gave me an I-shuffle (which, according to my students is an embarrassingly ghetto version of the coveted contraption) and this addition has added an essential element to my walking that I had not realized was missing. The walks are, in part, to clear my head and center myself. Too much of my focus is in the mental processes. My Chi Kun therapist and my acupuncturist both have told me that my energy needs to be in my “furnace,” (center-just above the belly button). Not in my head. Which can lead to migraines. Stress. Stress can lead to illness. Want to stay in remission. Must. Clear. Head.

HOWEVER, there are times where I find myself mentally preoccupied with less than stellar thoughts while pacing down the trails. Or, some irritating song gets stuck in my head.

Presto bingo, enter the magic I-shuffle. Sets the mood. Blast the thoughts from my brain.

Off we go.

BC Says welcome to the bike path.

First stop, the “feral” kitty cats. Along this bike path, which is one of my walks, there are dozens of “wild” cats. I’m not sure why Hawaii has so many homeless kitties. I have heard that people move and leave their cats. I don’t know anyone who does that. But along this bike path there are a dozen or more places where a pride of cats has claimed their turf. There are ladies who walk with a wagon every evening and feed the kitties. They catch the ones they can, take them to the Humane Society, have them fixed, then bring them back. Most of the cats come out to see if you are going to feed them. One or two like attention and want to be pet.

One of my best friends gave me a book when I was going through chemo called The Ultimate Healing. It is based on Buddhism and has meditation techniques to promote healing through a grave illness. One chapter was about doing good deeds for animals and the tranquility and peace this creates. I got BC that year. And I feed the feral cats. I don’t have a wagon, so I bring a bag that I can carry and feed the little ones that look like they get bullied from the food.

The long and winding road, that leads.....

To the gazebo. A sometimes stretching spot.
Sunrise on the piers.

Deep breath in. Slow breath out. Deep breath in. Slow breath out. There is something about being surrounded by water, standing on the end of the pier, that cannot be duplicated with yoga and breathing exercises in my living room. This is my favorite yoga spot.

A second before you hear it. A second before you see it. You sense it. And there it is. The still surface of the water suddenly erupts as a school of fish changes directions and for a brief moment they simultaneously break through the water’s surface. The orchestra of a coordinated swoosh. A hundred little splashes. BC starts and trembles and for a second thinks about bolting.

Only one time it was not a school of fish. Right there in front of us a baby sting ray came flying out of the still surface of the water. It performed an acrobatic air bank and for a second looked like it was copying one of the planes that flies overhead on its way to the airport for a landing. A black shadow with a long black tail. Held in mid-air for a second not fifteen feet in front of BC and me. Take a picture with your mind, ain’t no time for cameras. A little gift from the sea.

It was gone in another second. We stood for a long time hoping for another show, but it was only meant to happen once. Sometimes, that’s just the way it is.

Then, it is time to turn around and head back.

Thanks for stopping by for a little slice of PseudoLand.

For more Friday Fotos, head on over to Candid Carrie's.