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Intelligence reports and a whiff of Africa.

September 25th, 2006

Glorious weather in south Texas, and wonderful news abroad in the world. At last our sneering President’s own intelligence (I hesitate to use both words in the same sentence) agencies have reported what the Buddha said: VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE. Violencia faz violencia. It was never enough for our media-numbed populace that thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were dying bloody deaths from high-tech killing machinery; but at last we have word from a “conservative” source that the war has made life less safe for Americans. If that can just get people’s attention, maybe the movement for peace, or at least for a change in government, can take hold. So I hope. And as I was beaming in the gentler heat and grinning at the news, I stumbled over a book about southern Africa that is so achingly well-written it takes my breath away: Scribbling the Cat, by Alexandra Fuller. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About Africa, Books and Movies, Texas | No Comments »

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Beginning again.

September 24th, 2006

OK. Now I see. All my blog-entries between August 17 and September 22 were lost in cyberspace when WordPress had a server crash. Blogs, like meditation, may begin with good intentions, drift away, wander, get lost, and begin again. I begin again today, with a new blog-look and a fresh intention. No more illusion that cyberspace is a safe place to store things. Great lesson for a Buddhist. Everything is impermanent. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Seth, Texas | No Comments »

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Birth, death, and the inbetween

September 24th, 2006

This week was Seth’s birthday! Happy birthday, Seth! He’s thirty-three. Wonderful number, wonderful age. He was an enormous fat Buddha of a baby, nearly ten pounds at birth, who came to light in New Orleans with an air of wisdom and wonder. He didn’t cry when he was born. I did LaMaze, so he wasn’t drugged, and the doctor didn’t slap him on the bottom because he was so large and well-developed at birth, he just took a big breath, opened his eyes wide, and was fully present before the cord was even cut. His mouth made a perfect O, and he gasped and waved his arms in the air as if to say, “Oh, wow! Lights! Colors! Action! Look at this!” Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Seth, Texas, What does it mean? | 1 Comment »

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Blog loss

September 22nd, 2006

Suddenly the server for WordPress has lost all its blogs since August 17. COINCIDENTALLY the last blog entry I have left is the one written on my last day in Portugal. It raised the existential question with which I started this blog: Should I do this? Who would be served by it? Does it serve me? Certainly in Portugal, it served me, by linking me to my community of friends. Some people reported loving the Portuguese travel story and pilgrimage. But when I returned from Portugal, I waffled, started, stopped, was uncertain of my intention, and then that disappeared mysteriously.

Here’s how the WordPress man-in-the-machine explained it:

“Why are the Blog entries back to August?
Maybe you noticed that your blog is missing posts dating back to August 17th? Or that your blog ain’t here anymore. Well, after doing this for 3+ years we have had a series of server errors and the database that was storing all the blog entries was wiped clean. The most recent back-up that we’ve been able to restore is from August 17th. All our daily back-ups between August 17th and now are missing for the moment.

We are still working on finding a more recent back-up. If we do not find it, I am not sure if there is anything we can do. We are truly sorry about this.

Posted by Sean at September 21, 2006 06:27 PM”

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | No Comments »

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Lisboa: Last day, summing up

August 11th, 2006

OK, this is it. I spent four hours this morning riding trams, taking in the life, the azulejos (tiles), the monuments, the apartments with and without metal shades on the outsides, the flowers, the safety–have I talked about this before? I have never felt so safe. There just doesn´t seem to be any crime. That´s puzzling, considering that there is so much financial need. But everywhere I go, I see people leaving their backpacks, their digital cameras, even their laptop computers, lying around: on picnic tables, in the hostels, in city parks. And nobody bothers them. Last night I had a dinner of clams cooked in garlic and coriander, which I shared with a German woman married to a French man. I had seen them at the monastery earlier in the day, and we recognized each other when I entered the restaurant, and they insisted I come sit with them. We gabbled in several languages, laughing and comparing notes on Portugal, politics, and the difficulty, for them, of negotiating their lives between France and Germany. We didn´t finish dinner till after 11 p.m., and then I had a long walk home, alone, as they were staying in the opposite direction. I felt absolutely fine. The streets were full of people hanging out, listening to the music that filtered through windows, drinking at sidewalk bars and cafés. At one point I approached a group of young men with beers in their hands on an otherwise deserted street. If I´d been in the USA, I´d have crossed to the other side of the street. I felt that impulse. But just to see what it would feel like, I kept walking. They stepped aside on the sidewalk but otherwise completely ignored me. It was wonderful. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Portugal | 1 Comment »

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Bela Lisboa!

August 10th, 2006

I LOVE THIS COUNTRY! Portugal is everything anybody ever wanted a country to be except, of course, a place where the average person can “make ends meet,” according to Leo, the castle guard in Leiria. That is an important exception, but the LIFE here vibrates with beauty, vitality, and gentle awareness. I left Sintra this morning with no regrets, felt I had been as charitable toward it as possible, and maybe more than it deserved. As I got off the subway, I saw a wall of posters with G.W. Bush´s face on them and the word TERRORIST at the top, and (in Portuguese) WANTED at the bottom. OK, you two Bush-lovers out there, I´m just reporting what I saw, OK. But it made me laugh, and I took a picture. Lisbon moves in a dancing motion. Read the rest of this entry »

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Another View of Sintra

August 9th, 2006

I just spent a couple of hours sitting on the miradouro at the bottom of the mountain, and I realized what a sour old putz I have been about this city. From the miradouro, all I could see was the beauty, and the whole spectacle was laid out for my eyes, from the many-colored houses at the bottom of the hill, to the Pena Palace with its smudged chimney cones, to the tiled and glistening turrets, towers, and trim, and on up the hill to the very top, where the crenellated granite towers of the Castelo do Mouros tops it all. This city has been a playground for architects since the early kings and queens of Portugal started building palaces in this crystalline air. In and around all these visual marvels are the trees: thousands of trees, first the trees that were on the mountain before the royals and the millionaires came, and then trees from every corner of the world, imported from the colonies and planted here, where they have taken root and grown for several hundred years: evergreens from Newfoundland next to magnolias from Brazil, every kind of poplar and cedar and juniper, Indian trees, Asian trees, African trees, all thanks to those who brought them to their gardens in Sintra. If I look with the eyes of a child, what I see is fairy-tale stuff. And it´s NOT a theme park. It´s a living city, older than any theme park and full of history. From the miradouro, I could not see a single person–just the trees and the rooftops, the towers and the colors of the mansions, the palaces, and the Quintas that glint between the trees. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Portugal | 1 Comment »

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Portugal Restored

August 9th, 2006

I feel like I´m back in Portugal. Of course I haven´t left yet, but for a couple of days I felt I had landed in a slightly run-down theme park with no particular language or culture. This morning the smoke had cleared away, the day was gorgeous, hot, and clear, and I boarded the first bus for Cabo da Roca, the geographically western-most point in Europe, and therefore in some sense the real European End of the World. The bus headed down the hill to a little community of apartment blocks and picked up a number of women who must have been the maids to people living between Sintra and Cascais. Surrounded by these women, chatting laughing and nibbling bread and sweetcakes on their way to work, I knew I was in Portugal again. They got off the bus in ones and twos before the bus reached Cabo da Roca, and there was nobody left on the bus but me and a few hardy early-morning tourists. Cabo da Roca is NOTHING like Finisterre. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sintra

August 8th, 2006

Sintra does not feel like Portugal. For one thing, it´s overrun with tourists, many of whom have brought their cars. There is gridlock so bad that the mounted police can´t even get their horses between the cars to direct traffic. The tourists are bad-tempered. Maybe it´s the heat. Maybe it´s the crowding. But I´ve seen people hit their kids, drivers shout at each other and curse and make ugly hand-signals, and lovers yell at each other and walk off in different directions. The gardens at the Regaleira Palace are magnificent, just as the websites I studied before I left showed them to be. My cold is going away, thanks to some magical potion I got at the Farmacia called Cêgripe. I´m back to being myself and full of good cheer and wonder, but the press of people around me is not a happy press. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Portugal | 1 Comment »

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In Vigo with a Better Plan

August 6th, 2006

I woke with a sore throat and am coming down with a ferocious cold, so spending the whole night on a series of trains and ending up in Lisbon at 5 a.m. was definitely a bad idea. Instead I hopped a two-hour train to Vigo, where I can get a luxurious night´s sleep and then catch a train tomorrow at the reasonable hour of 7:45 a.m., getting to Lisbon around 3 p.m., then catching a half-hour train to Sintra. All it took was letting go of the money for the hostel, letting go of Santiago de Compostela (that was hard), and then springing some fairly big bucks (for me) on a credit card for the Hotel Mexico, located a short walk from the train station in Vigo (pronounced BE-go). On my way from the train station to the hotel I passed this internet station, two doors before the hotel door, so here I am again, after a couple of hours of lying in bed, sneezing and blowing my nose, and watching CNN. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Spain/Galicia | 2 Comments »

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