The Trifecta

There is no denying it. The evidence is there. We came as a loosely built team, centered around a solid goal, and set out on a path to put together the loosely connected parts. Driven by our individual passions and the building strength of the team, we worked... tirelessly. Slowly, one by one, we left as time and circumstance saw fit, temporarily saying "See ya Later" until the next hellos. At one time on three separate continents, three separate cultures, and living in three separate languages, the next hello came. And we converged on Madison. And it was like we had never been a part.

It's apparent to me that from this mystical introduction, one might assume that The Trifecta is a whimsical love triangle... I was going to refute that, but then I realized that there is part truth here. Rather, what I am meaning to demonstrate is the unlikely relationships and bonds built upon individuals' blood, sweat and tears - never meant for each other, at times in spite of one another - but in the end, leading to a shared accomplishment in a project much greater than either one of us. There is no ownership, and there is no end result, as it will forever be evolving, like the bonds of friendship - and more deeply, brotherhood - that were built in that forge - the AIESEC Oman Development Team.

What makes this feeling now so fulfilling is not merely the success that we enjoyed while there, nor the continued success of a new generation of AIESECers carrying forward in Oman - but the continued celebration and joy that we have in the personalities of one another. Rather than an unsettled tolerance of one another - we experienced a deep friendship.

And that friendship is here to stay.

Thank you to Oman - the people, the places, the government, the universities, the goats, the mindis, Jihad and Hassan and so many others - for allowing us to dream, and giving us the world.

This is a gift that will be forever unfolding. You all have inspired me to give of myself forever.

Shokran

Never Gonna Give Up

Recently, I've found that an inordinate amount of my time is spent fearing failure and not knowing what truly is my definition of success, followed by an anxious push to discover my purpose and meaning at that very instant. What is most frustrating about this struggle is the feeling that I've done this before, I've waged this battle many times already... and once I found my balance, my rhythm, my harmony; I let down my guard, lost my consciousness and eventually lost my way. I read a quote today, from Bhudda, saying that, "If you're facing the right direction, keep walking" which begs the questions, "How do you know what is the right direction"? Posed like this, one might expect that it is a problem to be answered with reason and principle. But more recently, I am rediscovering a guiding tenet of my early epiphanies... It's just not that simple, and the mind is ill-equipped to discover the answer to that question, and to those similar, alone.

We are human beings with human existences. And the question here may of course be, "What is human?" The question itself is a Pandora's box, and may depend highly upon one's experience, culture and belief system. But I posit that more people than not can see that to be human is more than mind. I wager that most can identify with a combination of body, mind and emotion... and still many others that can feel something more, perhaps expressed in deep emotion, intuition, uncanny coincidence - or a confluence of each that lends one to believe that there is in fact something more than meets the eye.

And just like any human faculty, which I am at this point taking this experience is, that sense for something more can be trained and honed and refined. Some may be more inclined to feel and use this skill, but as a human faculty, we all possess a part of it. Therefore, if we are to use it, we must develop it, and we must persist with discipline.

I've had it before. I feel as if I've lost it. But if I've walked the path before, I know I can find my way back. And this time with a more matured and disciplined approach.

And I'm Never Gonna Give Up

Perfect Proposals

Inspiration only exists in the present.

To say I love you is poetic - to live I love you is courageous. And that's exactly what we have chosen to do.

Amie is my fiancee and she's finally wearing the ring to prove it. The Aquamarine depths of her sparkle is courageous poetry. She inspires serenity in my Soul. She ignites my courage to be her hero every day in a whole new way.

She has helped me, once again, to find my poetry. To rediscover my Search for the Soul which is the meaning and beauty of each moment and every person. There is no other way for me, this is my purpose.

I have come to see what is less seen.

Come Again... ?

Yes I will. I am back in Madison, Wisconsin in the US of A. I never would have predicted that I would be back here after working and traveling abroad, but life and karma had different things in store for me (and Amie) than I predicted. Nor did I ever believe that I would be back working for the same firm I interned with as a Freshman and Sophomore in College. Life has taken so many interesting and perplexing turns recently.

And I didn't yet mention in cyberspace that I am engaged. Yes, Amie and I made it real - the same woman that has appeared intermittently throughout this blog over the last 5 years. We did, we made it, and we will be making it official before the law and the Everlasting Soul on July 30, 2010.

I have flashes of feelings and emotions from my travels that come to me ever so often. Sometimes I am walking down the street, or in the middle of a story about those times, and there I am, back again. I'm walking with Amie through the middle of those crowded Indian and Asian streets, a million smells and even more thoughts passing through my brain - overwhelming it to the point of sheer denial that my life exists in the midst of it all. And I realize, that my travel experiences to this point have left me in a state of disbelief that life can be so real and complex and confusing and enlightening - all at once. So perhaps that meer fact is what has anchored me back to this city, maybe it is my only chance of rebuilding my world into something that I can understand and articulate - in hopes that I can have a chance to pull from the last 18 months those lessons and truths as well as falacies that must be shared.

I have been scared to open this door for a while now, intimidated at the scope of what I will undeniably have to embark upon. And then to, there is my unwillingness to take ownership over everything that I have seen and done, as if it is easier to let it all pass by like a dream that quickly slips away as you turn your eyes to the events of the day. Increasingly, my heart and Soul have proven so restless as to convince me of this impossibility of silence. We are living to share with each other, and to celebrate the good with the bad so that we may somehow understand that we are not alone, that there is purpose to be found in chaos, and that there is some great symphonic unity of which we all play a part, however big or small that part may be.

So I open up my life to the new possibilities of realization and epiphany as well as union with the subtleties of everyday life in the here and now. I open up my heart to the peaks and valleys of those around me so that I may demonstrate a greater degree of empathy to the real challenges and celebrations of others' everydays. And I open up my Soul to the invisible guide that is experiential cognizance that finds union in seemingly disparate realities.

Let this declaration be my catalyst.

Madison Soul Global

And... I'm back. Again, in the place where the dream began. A slice of inspiration with subtle elements of the lives I've lived embedded in the places I hold dear, and the ones I am still discovering. Finally, my stubborn silence has been eroded by the warmth of family and friends, and the Soulful Energy of identity in place.

Learning.

And it's never ending, this changing perception of time and place and purpose and reason and logic and understanding.

I'm still not certain of where I am, where I am going, or even what I am doing - but therein lies the beauty of the times. I can do, go and be anything, anywhere. I have two certainties contradicting my confusion. To quote Paulo Cuelho in "The Pilgrim": You have only two certainties - What time is it? Now. Where are you? Here. Now begin your fight for truth." (That may be a liberal paraphrasing, however I believe I am doing poetic justice to the essence of his message.)

My last posting was in reaction to things that I learned in Laos about a cruel, unjust, vastly unrecognized crime against humanity. And it brought me great silence, especially in the face of the warmth and joy of the Laos people. Subsequently, each stage of our travels were viewed through this lens, and were somehow irreconcilable in juxtaposition one to the next. The struggles of Vietnam have bred a certain harshness and edge into the psyche of the Vietnamese... but also an irrefutable resilience. Cambodia... the dichotomy of the glory and fall from grace that has been achieved and committed in the name of the Khmer - Angkor Wat in all its majesty stands... and the legacy of the Khmer Rouge lives on. It seems I have buried most of the questions and sadness elicited by those things: pictures, places, bones, videos, testaments, emotions, human essence, injured Soul... And the silence those things create endures, against the passion of the Souls who demand recognition. Leaving Cambodia, the memories remained but struggled against the hard reality that life goes on in spite of itself - or perhaps out of a singular strength of manifest Soul. Thailand... somehow calm, clean and orderly against the backdrop of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. And then Koh Phangan... a life apart, but still, there is struggle for the Thais to maintain their dignity and identity while creating a sense of perfection and paradise for their unsuspecting guests.

And then there was time crunch and exhaustion and budgets. The curse of the overzealous, curious traveler is that you want to see too much with too little time. And so in sacrifice of a depth of experience you attain the title of having "been there". Of course the observant Soul never misses the world turn. And so Malaysia passed in a whirlwind of experience in the Kuala Lumpur metropolis with a pervading energy of tenuous inter-ethnic compromise - an ironic expression of our preceding journey from the Arab Gulf, India and Southeast Asia. And Singapore was just a "been there" as we passed through by bus and metro to the airport, as clean as it was made out to be as well as efficient. We successfully made it through the country in less than 24 hours.

Tokyo warrants a posting entirely unto itself, and may get one as I wind down. It is my hope that different experiences back in Madison and the next chapter of life will elicit different recollections and reorganizations of memories and experiences. The danger in this account writing of such experiences is that I run the risk of letting things go to a world apart as they are beginning to feel. But then there is potential to weave my experience of a lifetime within the running thread of local reality that will create a lasting fabric of inter-connectivity. And thus, realize my ultimate discovery - that as human beings and experiences, we cannot shed our fundamental unity that is our Soul. I've seen it. I've lived it. I've hated it. I've loved it. I've released my doubt into the truth that the Soul Is.

Goodmorning Viet... Laos??

I break my latest streak of blogosphere absence with a posting from the People's Democratic Republic of Laos (silent "s"). It has only been two days, and I have to admit that I already feel the laid back lifestyle of the people creeping into my travel weary bones. After pushing through India and Thailand, it is a relief to find a calm, relatively quiet place in which to enjoy the finer things in life again... news magazines, beer, espresso... and the depths of one country's experience with pain and suffering.

Laos is a country yet undiscovered by the vast majority of citizens of the country that has had the single most influential role in its modern existence as a state. I have to say I was certainly in that category until just a few hours ago. Amie and I took a visit to the COPE extension of the government operated National Rehabilitation Center (rehibilitation from what I first thought). The COPE center held a free (key word for budget traveler) exhibition about the modern travesty of UXO in Laos - or UneXploded Ordinannce - and its still central role in Laotian life, even after 40 years of its first misguided spread across the majority of the countryside. The exhibit proved to be a rude awakening to the less than benevolent role of my country, which stirred once again a resentment and confusion about the forces that be - even in spite of my newly rekindled respect and hope for the coming administration (read Obama).

I bring all of this up mostly out of hope that things can be different, and that we as a nation can avoid being the catalyst for such tragedies in the future. And yet I am troubled by the legacy that we will leave in Iraq - but cautiously hopeful that a change in our collective direction can offer to proactively heal wounds without tearing out the stitches.

Hoping for good things to come.

The Gulf’s Family Living Room

I’m sitting at Muscat International Airport, about to end the chapter in the place it all started. I said goodbye to the two gentlemen who have accompanied me throughout, and who will be carrying the torch onward until they too make their move to continue on their own paths.

There is a mix of emotions, sitting here with the woman I love, about to start our own journey that I know with certainty is the one that must be made. But still aching at the imminent goodbye to a place that I have called home. It was a journey to get to that home feeling too, but once it was made, I felt like I was in a comfortable family living room.

To me, that seems most accurate description for what Oman really is. It is at once a beautifully ornate, warm and accepting place, where you walk right in and feel at ease. I will never forget the way Oman welcomed and accepted me.

In my final posting in Oman – the last of the posts that have expressed quite closely every aspect of my emotional and physical state in Oman – I must express my gratitude and eternal respect and love for two of the finest individuals I have ever met. Jihad and Hassan, you have made my Oman experience what it is, and left me forever with a warm place in my heart for you and Oman. Rest assured that I will be Oman’s biggest advocate wherever I go.

To my team, Brett, David and Katy – you will continue to do incredible things in your work for AIESEC and for anything else you choose to dedicate yourselves to. It has been an honor to work with each one of you. Thank you for your friendship and support throughout this adventure.

My love and respect will be with you all.