Questions for 2017

Yesterday, I went on a hike with my wife on a very special mountain south of San Francisco, San Bruno. The first few hundred yards of the path make my left upper body tingle in an arc from my nipple through my shoulder to my wrist. That’s the most wounded part, energetically. I imagine a thick aura around my body surrounding a Swedish Fish, just like the Clayboy man used to sell on the corner in the summers where I grew up, except I’m in Northern California now so instead of shaved ice with gummy candy in the middle my aura is an avocado and I’m one big thick seed. And just where the avocado is most tender, you can see the grey has broken through the skin and seeped into the flesh. That’s the part that tingles.

I’m climbing now through stands of eucalyptus. I’m walking receptively past descriptions of nature I remember in Jane Eyre. She was a sickly child until she arrived at the manor and they told her to walk on the moor. That’s when she learned that she had an appetite and when she came back home she ate herself a good porridge. At some turns, I feel nothing. At others, I can feel that the energy is just right and I am where I’m supposed to be. This is my Magic Mountain.

And it’s not just about a total escape from nature. I gaze out on Silicon Valley at each crest in the path and, peering at the buildup, I feel like it’s the first day of college. Boundless opportunity. The combination of pressure systems that forms clouds and rain and therefore eventually life. That’s me: life. I taste the city in a way I haven’t tasted for over a year now. The avocado flesh still tingles and there’s still pain, but there’s also reciprocity. Balance. Flow.

Yes, I think, it’s possible. It’s possible for me to be healthy and whole. Even in this city.

I’ve become reclusive over the past few months. I’ve let messages go unanswered, I’ve let friendships that I’ve seeded grow fallow. I’ve stopped apologizing. I’ve felt guilty, but it’s like even the most rudimentary acknowledgment suddenly bears this unbearable weight. My wife says, “Well, then that’s you.” I think that she’s right.

One story is that too many people came all at once and I became too drained.

Another story is that all the right people came all at the right time. They came to me after years of preparation, when I was finally ready to make friends. They broke the dam and now I’m all après le déluge. “Be careful, some parts of the city are literally ruins,” Pablo told me.

Here’s the thing, and it may be an incredible thing to you (that until yesterday I didn’t know): I am an incredibly sensitive person.

I think that I am slipping out of manmade time and into the rhythms of cosmic time. Or maybe some inner time that is synchronized with the comings and goings of homeless men in my dreams. I think that this has been going on for some time now and that at some point my unnaturally vivid dreams must merge with my waking life.

I’ve started to become cognizant of realities beyond what I can see with my physical eyes. Last week, I made an offering to a stone in my in laws’ front yard, pouring olive oil over grass in suburban Florida, bowing down like a heathen Muslim. Yes, I’ve started speaking with stones. Sometimes when I hold my right hand over my navel, I feel a burning sensation that doesn’t go away as I extend it further and further away from my body, and I know with conviction that it’s my energy field. In short, I’m starting to go full woo woo.

But it’s more than just that I’m losing my marbles. 2016 has become a fulcrum for my life:

• The first seven months, I worked like a dog at a startup. I nearly ruined my young marriage, lost all bearings on life — and became an absolute beast at building apps and being a technical lead/cofounder. (P.S., you should hire me.)
• I went on a trip to Chile at the end of July that made me realize how out of order my life’s priorities were. I quit my startup job.
• I fought with my wife for two straight months after quitting. We emerged stronger, less codependent, with more respect for each other.
• Then I went to StartingBloc in October. It felt for the first time in my life that I could reach out and ask people for love. Strangers, no less.
• My wife and I used an exercise that I learned from StartingBloc to help her figure out what she wanted to do in the future, and I resolved to support her in any way I could. Hence, I started looking for a job to help pay for a retreat that we want to create.
• Started going woo woo in December.

Summarizing the past year, I would say that I’ve begun to step out of the shadows of my past and make conscious choices about how I want to live. That’s scary. More than scary, it’s overwhelming. I’m coming out of Plato’s cave and into the sunlight, and I’m not going back into the cave but damn, can someone get a pair of sunglasses and some sunscreen up in here?! I mean, sweet Jesus it is BRIGHT in the sun. I don’t know how to tell people about what I’m experiencing. That’s why I think I’ve become reclusive and erratic in my relations.

As I look at 2017, really I just have one big question:

How do I live?

• How do I be healthy?
• My computer is my living, I can’t escape from it, but there’s so much more to life than my computer, even though when I was a child it was my escape. How do I live with and use my computer in a way that feels better, more in balance, less disruptive, more able to let myself be myself and my energy flow?
• How do I build my capacity to heal and to handle all these energies coursing through me? How do I build my power? My armature?
• How do I relate to my dreams? Should I start speaking to the people who visit me again? Do I allow my dreams to bleed into my waking state in the same way that my waking state has bled into my dreams?
• How do I bring my body and exercise into alignment with cosmic time rather than manmade time? (Daily morning exercise routines are dead. Long live hikes on Magic Mountain!)
• What the hell is cosmic time, anyway?
• How do I be safe, energetically, as I gain these new powers and open myself up?
• How do I not fall into spiritual bypassing as I allow myself to become spiritual? This runs in my family and it scares the hell out of me. My biggest fear isn’t that all my woo woo stuff is hokum, it’s that I will stop listening, living in this world, dealing with this pain and honoring this reality.
• Relatedly, how do I keep resisting tyranny while honoring my inner self?
• How do I love: my friends, my wife, women, plants, animals, myself?
• How do I be a man?
• Do I read? Do I not read?
• Paper: how much of it and when? (Is it just a fantasy?)
• How do I write? How do I speak?
• How do I deal with death?

Quechua speakers refer to the future world as “behind world” and the past world as “forward world.” The reason is that what’s already happened is known, just like how we can see things that are in front of us, while the future is unknown, just like how we can’t see things that are behind us.

Wishing you all a happy behind world.