“You know what your country has done so well?” my friend Abdullah asked. I was not sure where he was heading with this questioning. “For so long your country has been good at creating needs.”
As a salesman, Abdullah envied this cultural trait, the ability to create needs.
As countries move towards emulating the United States, I wonder what a world filled with created needs will look like.

“I was at my grandfather’s funeral when my boss called,” Mohammed recollected of a moment when his employer phoned him in Riyadh from London. “He knew I was at a funeral but proceeded to ask me where my timesheets were.”

“After the funeral I took the week off to be with my family. By the end of the week my wife was delivering our baby. I took the next week off from work to help with my new child. When I returned to work my boss called from the main office in London and said, ‘You’re not focusing on your work. You should be answering your phone and checking your email!’”

“With age comes wisdom.” This was the thought a friend and I were recently contemplating around a camp fire in the desert. We no longer communicate with our elders, and our elders are not as wise as their age might let on. These were scenarios swirling around the glow and warmth of the fire and burning at our beliefs like the wind-blown smoke stinging our eyes.

With my own witnessing of the world, I’ve drawn up a rough draft of criteria for a “civilized” society I hope to one day pass on to my children’s children.

My first look is at how a culture views and treats creatures other than itself, or whether it considers its own part of the animal kingdom. If their zoos resemble display prisons, or if their wild populations have been depleted down to stray cats and pigeons; if they talk of “thinning the herds” but refuse to whisper the words of human population problems, there are deep issues.

Next, I observe space dedicated to public use and access. If private property and the automobile rule, city parks are nonexistant, and nature preserves are for show only, then it explains much about priorities.

Lastly, but of just as much importance, I ponder what a society wastes. If it is a country without forests and I see a dumpster filled with lumber; if it is a country with little space for landfills and I see the aftermath of a festival looking like a landfill scattered in the streets; if it is a country with malnutrition and there is an abundance of vegetables being discarded, well, then… I see serious room for reflection.

“A Literal Reflection”

I heard about you once,
transparent man with iron-pressed pants.
You look familiar,
even though I can see through you.
You follow me on sun-lit days
and lamp-lit nights.
You shine in silver streams
and float in framed photographs.
Now you gaze in glass
and hover in the hues.
Your presence is a comfort,
a clue that I exist.

Doubt reigns in the dark…

-Annah

“Santa Claus is proof that children are more important than truth.” – Friend

Someone explained to me recently their theory about how men speak the truth and woman act in their true nature when drunk. In each case, I deducted, there is a repressed self only allowed to escape with a social lubricant.

It has always perplexed me how a few drinks can split the personality of a calm natured Dr. Jekyll into the devious Mr. Hyde. I’ve witnessed the transformation. A woman spoke with controlled elegance moments before shots of tequila and a truck-stop prostitute soon after. Or the time an inebriated priest threw a wine glass into a bonfire. The changes happened quicker than I imagined it took alcohol to enter the blood stream. It was as if the alcohol was only an excuse to carelessly take ones hands off the wheel and press down the gas.

Did Robert Louis Stevenson reveal the truth that in all of us lies a devil and a saint? If this is true, what does it mean when we say someone can “handle” their booze?

The United States attempted to ban alcohol during World War I, but the reasoning was so tied up in a mix of convoluted interests and the enforcement so relaxed that the end result was an increase in violent crime and an eventual repeal. It is said woman were at the front of the movement of prohibition because of the way alcohol affected the household.

Saudi Arabia and other countries with large muslim populations have banned the sale and consumption of alcohol. Mohammed says of alcohol and gambling in the Koran,”In them is a great sin, and (some) benefit for men, but the sin of them is greater than their benefit.” A thriving black markets fill the gaps.

If I were a carpenter,
With calloused hands
And all to be expected of a man,
Would you still love me?

My grave and allotted soil
Will know only what I provide.
It asks not what I was, or what I am
But only for me to stay.

Am I not like the tree?
Whose limbs lose the burden
Of yesterday’s season, rest,
And birth new form.

The me who has been
Will no longer be.
Freed from the worldly,
I return. Reborn.
Naked, I hold no instruments
Of art nor the tyranny of trade.

I ask only for the breast
To feed me
And the warm comforting calm.

They may not break my bones, these names, but they hurt.

Lately I’ve been haunted by the name wasichu (pronounced wah-she-chew). It is Lakota for “non-native” but has come to mean greedy, or “the one who takes the best meat for himself.”

My plate is full of meat, and I sit across from a Bengali whose tray has broth with few vegetables and a piece of bread. He sops up his broth, drinks his glass of steaming water, and makes his way to a job likely to last late into the night.

In the stores of Saudi one can buy soap for “skin whitening” or lotion with “skin bleaching agents.” I’ve gone from a town in Ohio with more than five tanning salons to a place where people are doing everything they can to look white.

Whites want to look dark to give the impression they’ve vacationed some place with a beach and had little to do but relax in the sun. Others bleach their skin to make it appear as though they are not the peasants in the field laboring. Both groups aim for the illusion of those privileged with leisure.

Martin Luther King Jr. hoped for a day when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” When will this day come?

“That’s the first time I’ve seen a bald eagle the whole time I’ve been here,” I realized out loud as I watched an eagle soar over the deconstruction of the Elwha Dam. The bird’s confident flight seemed to approve of what was happening below. It was my last day in a trip to the Pacific Northwest. “Have you been looking up in the sky at all?” Colleen asked. “Actually, I think I’ve been looking down most of the time I’ve been here,” I admitted. To this Colleen replied,“You’ve just been looking in the wrong place.”

She was right. For weeks I had been inside my mind reflecting on inner struggles. Meanwhile the world, complete with natural wonders, makes it’s rotations around a burning star and life continues.

Mahatma Gandhi once said a person is the product of their thoughts, and what they think they become.

“For all the frustrating mass movement toward banal self-destruction, I had the good fortune of being forced by circumstances to work at a corporation to get off welfare. I listened and watched the people there, somehow having the good fortune to see value in some of how they lived. In particular, and helped by reflections on my own self-destruction at an early age, I settled into a desire for a simple life and willingness to sacrifice a lot for it… Achievements pass quickly, like leaves scuttling along streets on blustery autumn days. On the other hand, in my experience eternity is made up of the relationships that stand the test of time.” – A Friend

As more and more people I surround myself with trip over the speed bump of turning 30 and recognize the reality of 40, I hear a similarity of sentiment.

“Maybe my job doesn’t have to be this big meaningful thing that defines me,” a friend from California confided in a phone conversation that made two hours disappear in my six-hour drive home for Thanksgiving. “I’m beginning to realize that maybe it’s more important for me to find a job that pays me enough that I can do the things I want to do: travel to see friends and family, eat good food, take vacations, have a family…maybe…maybe I want to have a family some time soon.”

The “soon” of my friends begins to take on an immediate desperation in contrast to the “soon” of our 20′s hinting at a procrastination of decision.

“I’m a practical idealist,” a relative declared when I questioned him about taking his business in a different direction. The idea of a “practical idealist” baffled me. Each of these words seemed to lie about the other.

My own idealism often sweeps me up like a Pacific Coast current. With its “SAVE THE WORLD, NOW!” push-and-pulling unconscious undertow, it spins me in a off-course blinding white foam of not-knowing-up-from-down tumbling and washes me on the shores breathless and disoriented. Spitting the water from my lungs, I’m elated to have breath.

This humbling crash amongst the tides in the nature of myself reveals how practical becomes the adjective of idealist.

“Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher death, and God adore.
What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.”
-Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Hope lately feels like a weighted mist surrounding me. A breeze of reality blows through and hope recedes.”Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” or “Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper.”
Are hope and faith the same?
The past year of my life has been consumed by this word HOPE. Instead of looking at the troubles of the world I have been instead looking for hope.
Does this mean I have faith? Is hope a non-believer’s version of faith? Is hope also a recognition of having little influence or control over an outcome? Is being hopeful the same as being faithful?
Hope is a trusting in an expectation. Faith is also a trust in someone of something, but leans in the direction of spirituality, something affecting the spirit or soul. Hope up against faith seems watered down.
To say I am hopeful is to expect something to turn out the way I want it to as in “I hope you are well” or “I hope to see you again.”
To have faith is to let go of the expectation but to be convinced by a building of trust in the outcome that is best.

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