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Paris in love.

I whent to visit  Nick Bragg in Paris, but upon my arrival he was unavailable and I met up with his live in Girlfriend instead. She was cute and American. There was an instant connection, we ran around the streets, holding hands, on piggy back, laughing, all under the guise of my excitement of exploring Paris. We ate at one point and I wanted her to talk about creme brulee since we were in fact in france. I was still in my explorer mode. And she brought to my attention some of her favorite “European Pies” as if to say creme brulee was an american term. I was excited to see her food interests.

We stopped at a party in a U shaped boutique. She had me grab some long pretzels and another bag with snacks. As I was rumaging through the car to find them she dissapeared. I whent into the Boutique entrance on the right passing strangers and actually suspecting a young black boy was harrasing me. I knew someone had thrown something at me in the store but he denied it. I intimidated him. A man next to him gave him change like he was a poor beggar. Everyone kept asking if I was American. They were very interested in my accent.

As I turned the corner of the Boutique I found a snack table and in a back corner was the girl talking with an older woman. They both looked at me, caringly. I put the snacks with the other and made a small plate with pretzels, dip, and utensils. I brought it over to them and let them finish thier conversation. This gesture again felt like I was taking care of her as if she were my own.

After the party we had lunch and then started searching for Nick who was supposed to come home. During this time a strange switch happened and the reality of the dream changed from this girl being Nick’s girlfriend to Travis’s girlfriend. Every once and a while we looked at each other, and I would hug her every chance I got, sometimes nibbling  on her ear. She would do the same, and I would say, “That’s not fair” then she would say, “Neither are you”.

We finally met with Travis and his friends at thier small apartment. I continued focusing on his girlfriend while he and the other men were watching wrestline in another room. They would come in and out just to chat until it was aparently morning. I asked if we would get breakfast and travis said after the next match. In the meantime I put on my shoes and just started joging in place. I found myself joging into the street and there it was like a billowing giant, the eifel tower. It was brilliant. I didn’t think I had time to see it but I figured I would jog around a bit to see other angles.

I hit a crosswalk and watched other people dart by traffic like they were in New York but I waited for the sign. Next to me was an older lady, she smiled histericly and wanted to talk with me but I wouldn’t have understood her even if she did. She walked very close to me as I walked across the street. I found a subway station and started to walk down but the bottom half of the stairs was covered in doufle bags. I tried to turn around but people were coming behind me. When I tried to climb the railing back to the sidewalk I was yelled at by a stern black police woman even though the old lady from before had actually reached down to give me a hand. I had my iPhone charger, maybe 4 feet longer then normal, wrapped around my neck like a scarf. I coiled it and threw it down the steps the jumped and half floted down, stepping on a few bags in the process.

My charger had landed on a reverse conveyor contraption that had taken it towards the wall and then down presumably to the floor below. I whent down another set of stairs and did find the charger in the corner amoungst some other lost debris. I turned around thinking, “what am I doing here. I don’t know how to use this subway, I don’t even have any french money”. But then I ran into Travis’s girlfriend again. It would appear she had come looking for me. She took my hand and we got on a train. We talked and nibbled each others ears some more. When we got out at the next stop I asked her if the train to the eifel tower connected to where we were. She said she thought it did.

I remember worring that we didn’t have time to see the tower since we were supposed to have breakfast with Travis. I thought wouldn’t it be obviouse if we didn’t show up to breakfast and whent to the eifel tower instead. Then part of me thought, who cares….

Theory #1: I am transmiting

While we exist as individuals we are all inherently connected through what we call the Universe. We sit humbly in our vessels lacking the ability to understand a very incredible thing: we are only the vortex of our true being. That is to say that the energy that composes our being is massive and extremely far reaching unbeknownst to our trapped souls. We are like radio towers standing in a field, transmiting ourselves through space and time.

My mother is gone.

Today was the first day truly by myself that I felt the loss of my mother. I glanced at a porly printed picture of the two of us at my graduation, something I had glanced at many times before, and I suddenly felt it coming. The “it” of course is emotion, something I rarely get to experience, and I kept gazing. I serched the image to find what it was that had touched my heart, challenging myself to feel instead of continue as I had rather unscathed from the event. And suddenly I found it, it was her smile. The picture itself had alsways been a abhorent site to me, not a very flattering picture of my mother and nothing I would ever hold dear, but as I looked closer I could distinguish her smile.

That smile was the source of my suffering. In it’s totality and unequivocal weight I boiled over into tears. She was so proud of me that day and more importantly she was proud of herself. She knew then and there that she has produced a child that was beyond anyone’s expectations, even her’s I sometimes think. And that smile, that person, the unending source of love in my life is gone. In the end the greatest suffering comes from the loss of one’s most closest ally in life.

Now I look back and find all the mistakes and the regrets begin to build. I confuse the pain I can’t understand with self imposed punishment and disdain. I now know how my mother suffered in her final months while I was in Manhattan, having the best and worst times of my life. I could see she was failing but work kept coming and I couldn’t turn it down. In retrospect I realize that I did not incorporate my mother in my life the way I wish I had, the way a better son would have. Of course better only means “more” then what I had done.

This is my life now and I’ve been waiting for it to come. I am no longer the stoic young man I once was. The suffering has come and, in all honesty, I have been waiting for so long. I now have acquired my Achilles heal, that one point within me that will cause me to crumble at the slightest tug on these all to rigid heart strings. Worst of all, the only one who knows of my weakness is fate. Destiny will use this as a tool in my shaping and I will fall at the worst of times from something as simple as the smell of a pumpkin pie or the glimmer of a Christmas tree. My suffering will only be felt in times of joy and prosperity because those were the moments my mother was most visible in my life.

In truth, my happiest moments were never conceived in my life but our lives as mother and son. I will miss you so much. It hurts to know you can’t read these words. But please know that I love you and I am forever your  indebted son. I have so much to live up to but even as I am crumbling now I promise to the best I can. Please remain in my lfe if only in dreams because I truly can not live without you. I love you mom.

Truth #3: Loss is an unescapeable suffering

The Buddhists say that life is suffering. Suffering surrounds us, it’s in everything, even in the seemingly happy moments we have we suffer for we know that it will not last. They believe that only through relieving the sufferings of the mind can we truly know life, truth, enlightenment. However, the Buddhists understand that not all suffering is avoidable. We can release our desires of worldly objects, money, and lust. We can heal those around us who are hurting to better alleviate our own eventual suffering through ourselves or even through those we choose not to help. We can even let go of the mind, in some cases the greatest form of suffering, and relinquish our ideas of self: that which traps us in this society. But the Buddhists are wise because they understand that there are some losses that are completely and utterly unavoidable. The suffering of Loss is something we can never escape. Loss is the end of a Joy.

Dream #2: Travel The Country

America is an amazing land, in many ways I think it’s greatest cities are a microcosm of what the world should look like. But what I find most fascinating is culture. Here we are all in the same boat politically, economically, and socially but each place in this great country has the potential to be a world unto itself. I want to discover and live through this great land before it is gone.

I have fallen into a trap believing that happiness can only be found by traveling the country through the open road. Not to say that the open road is not a discovery in itself, but that I don’t need to throw myself into a 6 month long escapade through the United States of America to find it’s treasures. The concept of the road trip is an impractical one for me and, while it may be more practical later in life it, now is the time to act and I must explore, discover, live.

The concept is simple: Get a map, pick a place, fly there, rent a vehicle if need be, tent in KOA’s, and spend at least 5 days discovering. You’re there, you’ve done it, now go.

Dream #1: Filmmaking

This is something I’ve doubted and neglected for almost two years now, but in fact no matter how hard I try it is an unalienable truth that I want to be a filmmaker. Not a television producer or a big shot reality show camera operator, not even a director working for Paramount [Viacom], I want to be a filmmaker. From beginning to end I want to create a story, told through the moving image and shared with the masses. If I can get payed for that then so be it, but I have never felt something so true then when I got the itch 3 1/2 years ago in Film 2 and I felt the same thing last night.

Truth #2: Life == Discovery

The true core of man is defined by discovery which is acquired only through adventure. That sense that there is something more, that we’re settled here discontent in our menial lives, it’s all true. We are trapped in so many ways and when we lose sight of the adventure in life we cease to live. Life is adventure, life is experience, life is the key to a lack of discontent. However it is so incredibly important to truly call one’s own settlements what they are. Have you settled on a wife and child, a 9-5 job, a mortgage and a car payment? Or have you simply settled that you no longer can allow adventure in your life?

Adventure, I believe can come in any form or shape or time. Scientist enjoy the thrill of discovery as they sit in a solitary room looking under microscopes at new and undocumented micro-organisms. Teens and twenty-somethings search for the answers to life through travel, backpacking the world to find themselves when in reality by investigating new and unknown continents they have already found the answer to living. Seniors like Berta find life through sitting on the porch and discovering the beauty of the mountains anew each and every day. Discovery can be directed towards oneself as well, it really doesn’t matter. I should think that the subject of discovery changes through out our lives. Maybe that is life’s what of showing us our destiny.

What’s important to note here is that Change is not the same as Discovery. Change, from what I can discern, is the uncalculated attempt at discovering new life experiences. It’s wreckless and in many instances fruitless because change does not dictate discovery. You can visit every major city in the world in search of yourself or just a new life experience, but without calculation and planning you will suddenly find yourself visiting the same city over and over and over again merely in a different land. To fully discover one must find something new, not by placing oneself in a new situation, but by actively putting oneself there to explore the intricacies of it. For example I think there are two kinds of people, ones who say they’ve been somewhere and others who say what they did there. The difference is that the people who remember what they did really lived that place.

Truth #1: The two sided coin of Happiness

Happiness is in it’s essance either a trap or a legitimate byproduct of following one’s true destiny. In any situation where there is option A or B, where both A and B result in different kinds of releative happiness, one is quite probably a trap.  I do however believe that it is possible to compromise and at least taste the rewards of either while still following one’s destiny.

Paulo Coelio’s character Berta in the extremely incitefull novel “The Devil and Miss Prym” sums this concept up very well. “[People] seek suffering in the most joyous of places because they think they are unworthy of happiness” She describes the constant struggle between being happy and finding happiness. Contentment vs discovery of new pleasures.

All ambition is suddenly gone

It’s been over a month since my mother passed, a week since saying goodbye to my family, and all but 10 hours since breaking my 4 day water fast secluded in my one room apartment looking for the answers to life and happiness. While I’m sure I will cover the revolations of the past few weeks I think now is an important time to start documenting my search for truth, if only for the fact that I believed I found it last night and it is now all but a glimmering beacon in the distance. I was there, I was so close I could feel the answers to life on the tip of my tongue just waiting to escape and breath new life into this yet undiscovered existence I’m leading. But it is quickly fading.

What I cannot ignore is that during these last few days I have felt more connected with myself then ever. Thoughts were no longer thoughts but truths. Dreams were no longer dreams but realizable goals. Life was no longer out there in the big world, it was within me. So I should find it important this morning to say what I felt last night so as to not forget the truths I learned, the dreams I had, and the life I sought for so long.