The Vangabonds

My hippie comrades left me a little while ago. They're traveling eastward, to Sonora. On their backs they've got their whole lives packed, at least for the next seven weeks or so. To get to Sonora they'll need to take a bus, to a train, to a train, to Modesto, where a friend will pick them up and deliver them to the place they're staying in Jamestown. I cautioned them against entering any armed compounds, given the name bears an eerie resemblance to a certain Guyanese city. It wouldn't be the first time my friends accidentally found themselves in leagues with a cult. Such is life when living in a van as a pair of traveling gypsies - vangabonds. But that's a story for another time.

While they were here we went deep and talked of life and love and loss and all the important things. We all gave each other goosebumps with our words. It is restorative to be in the company of friends, especially friends from across the world. Much to the dismay of our customs agents, my friends managed to smuggle in exotic chocolates and herbs and fruits and foods I'd never heard of before. One of my favorites, chocolate-covered feijoa, goes by another name that sounds like a potent strain of marijuana - "pineapple guava." They cooked me tasty meals and we drank a delicious Sauvignon Blanc they'd picked up in New Zealand. They left me with gifts; a basket; Australian cocoa; some healing tonic that tastes and burns just like whiskey but is non-alcoholic; and a jar of homemade deodorant. "Guys, I know I haven't showered in a few days," I said, "I thought I was being polite..."

Last night, as we were finding seats at a nearby Mexican taqueria, we ran into friends of mine, a couple soon to be married. I hadn't seen them in some time so they sat down and joined us. I made some irreverent jokes that only I found funny, and then I remembered again why it was that I'd stopped drinking. During all of our conversations, though, there was a constant undercurrent: the belief in the upward trajectory of all things. The husband and wife to-be seemed to challenge this notion a bit, but I still hold that to manifest goodness and positive change, one must not hope for it, one must believe, or trust in it. This is the difference between hope and faith. Hope is the passive form of trust. Hope is tolerant of doubt - uncertainty is its prerequisite. We hope in the face of the unknown, at times when we cannot muster sufficient strength in our convictions to allow them to become trusted beliefs. Faith, then, is a firmer expression of hope. Those who believe, those who have faith - faith that is true - do not doubt.

We see this in those who believe in themselves, too. They come across as confident, cool, collected, accomplished, warm, reliable, strong. They seem more in tune with who they are and what they want to be. Those who believe in love and kindness, and who do so in the face of evil and fear and monstrosity, they are the ones who will find love and kindness; they carry it forward. It exists in them. They seek it, and it, them. Hoping for love and kindness, on the other hand, often leaves us bruised and bitter, more likely to feel sorrow and perceive injustice. To believe in a thing, one must also acknowledge - and be tolerant of - the thing's opposite. Believing in love and discovering its absence is fine, so long as one does not doubt love's existence. But when we hope for love and it doesn't appear, hope is diminished and disempowered, while doubt is doubled. This is why dreamers often become disenchanted.

Before bed last night my friends provided me with a lesson. They're studying to be educators with the Waldorf school, and they gave me a small paragraph to read. Each month of the year has one or two of these brief lessons associated with it, to encourage thoughtfulness and rumination in the student. It was a short sort of parable, or meditation, densely worded and peppered with poorly chosen commas to aide in making the few sentences presented difficult to digest. I read it over a few times as I tried to understand it. It was a meditation on the self, and how one could best balance individuality with community. What it suggested, I came to understand, is that they are not competing forces. Instead, one feeds the self by losing it. It is only when we surrender ourselves over to the individuality of another, when we truly listen to what they are saying and feeling, that we come to know and understand them, and, in turn, know and understand ourselves. Once we do that, we find in another the part of ourselves we thought we had lost, and so we share a powerful sense of community and connection with another that then strengthens - not weakens - our sense of individuality. Far out.

We spoke at length about the Waldorf education model, and it intrigues me. It seems to take a more holistic, humane approach to the education and healthy integration of human beings than our traditional models do.

I'm thinking of running away with them. What better time than now?