Dharma Traveler

  Peace is your natural state. It is the mind that obstructs the natural state.  ~~Ramana Maharshi Tinkling, bubbling water tickles at my eardrums, lightly playing with my subtle sound sense.  It dances in my eyes with slips and slides, drips and drops cascading down nature's mossy steps toward the mass of ocean I know is just beyond the thick of trees, a cliff's drop away.  Bugs move nervously in spasmodic short spurts over my arm hairs and toes.  The wind's cool licks caress my neck, a goddess blowing lightly on my skin.  So much movement.  Nonetheless, there is a sense of stillness here where the redwoods tower perfectly erect. Making no efforts to minimize there grandiose nature, they poise  ever-present with a dignified air of dominance that can only come from being utterly peaceful, balanced, and centered. The redwood is the tallest tree in the world and I am a dwarf in a forest of them.  Along with spirits, foxes, bears and the ...

In New Orleans , you get jazz.  It's a sexy, silky, sultry soul rubdown.  Upright basses thump and singers croon to make you wish you owned a tube of killer red lipstick just to fit in. There's a woman who looks like Lisa Loeb circa '99, only she's wearing polka dots.  It's 2 in the morning but she's got a TV dinner stand set up on the sidewalk cling clang clanging away at her first novel on a vintage typewriter.  She strikes and resets her stream of thought on that ancient machine in rhythm with the guitar player making his living by offering chord progressions to passersby, willing you to drop a coin in his open, orange-crush-velvet lined case.  The doorman at the joint you're flipping your hair in to the beats that built this very city for centuries, slinks off to the dark alley just there and beckons you with a flip of his hand to come near.  You do and you feel your souls connect like two Tetris pieces, a perfect fit in a crowd of ot...