Michael Divine

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On and On and On

On and On and On.
This is the last chapter. I promise. Cause we're back and unpacked. But it was a while in getting here. The last stint of driving - from Sedona to San Diego with a stop in Quartzite to look at rocks in the insane heat went quickly, with us getting home at a reasonable hour. The rental car - that giant Toyota Sequoia we'd been driving - was returned without any issues the next day after a thorough cleaning but we left the Bonnaroo Vendor Vehicle sticker on it by accident. It drove off into the rows of Enterprise Rental car fleets, a little wiser, a good adventure under it's belt. The other cars looked at it with respect.

Sedona was a treat. Tasting wine, looking at art, an early morning hike into the giant red rock formations and climbing up onto their curving feet - high up so I could see the valley. Breathing with the world - the birds and trees and dirt and bugs and rocks and clouds. I'd open a gallery there one day.

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Canyons and Edges

But what of our fearless adventurers? Adventure: One man's adventure is another man's walk in the park. Wherever we find our edge - therein lies the adventure.

I found Violet's hiking edge while we were making our way back to the trailhead in Bryce Canyon. We'd decided to hike the Fairyland Trail - an appropriately named trail that leads in and out of the "hoodoos" as they are called that make up Bryce Canyon, Utah - tall sandy spires, sometimes many stories high, looking like a series of towers in some child's drip sand castle. The spires glow with an orange/sienna sand stone, streaked now and again with white or subtler colorings of green or purple or red from mineral deposits. Dappling them here and there are twisted gnarled trunks of juniper, bristle cone pine and, deeper into the base of the canyon, Douglas firs, thick-trunked and towering over the little washes and scampering chipmunks.

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Arches and Canyonlands and Exertion

"What are you thinking about at this moment right now?" I asked as we sat on the cool stone in the shadow of the massive red rock stone arch spanning out over our heads. This arch was a giant circle hewn from the stone by decades of wind and rain. The blue sky beyond it spread out rather infinitely with just a few little cumulus cloud puffs floating through it casting delicate shadows over the red rock towers and cliffs in front of us. We'd hiked up from a grassy valley to the stone towers and the aptly named 'Marching Men' rock formations and then onwards, trudging through beach like sand, passing wind blown sand dunes, delicate curves etched in their crests, and winding twisted junipers, aged and grey.

"War." replied Violet. "Endless war. The concept of 'inheriting war' is so... strange... and sad. That a kid feels he has to go off to war to be a man and have stories to tell about the war because he heard stories from his father..." She trailed off.

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The Colorado Rockies and Some Other Stops

Giant raindrops intermittently pelt our windshield while the sun still streams through the clouds, casting rays of lights through long cracks in the cloud cover revealing a blue sky beyond. We are driving through the western foothills of the Colorado Rockies. From Boulder the highway crested up and over hills into mountains passing Loveland and Vail and various other ski mountains with still snowy peaks and multi-million dollar condos butting up against their feet, occasionally a mine along the river mining gold or copper leaving obscene scars long the hillsides. The aspen and pine intermingling til the pine leaves it for the higher elevations. The mountains just as quickly turn into shear cliffs along the Colorado River - the cliff faces jutting out at odd angles and millions of right angles of every size. Now the cliffs have turned to arid woods, chaparral and tall wide mountains that will soon again change to something else- Arches and Canyonlands Parks, our next destinations.

We left Boulder after a hike in Gregory Canyon and a breakfast of mimosas and eggs benedict at the Chataqua Gathering Place, a lodge built in the late 1800's for the advancement of education and the arts. Their wide green lawn and the copper red Flatiron Mountains as a backdrop made for a lovely parting meal. The day before we'd woken at the Alps Inn, a bed and breakfast lodge up a different canyon outside of Boulder where we'd spent the night of our first anniversary as a wedded couple.

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Kentucky Rivers and the Mid-West

Driving through the mid west there isn't much to look at. curving sloping fields segmented by barbed wire fences and oaks give way to neighborhoods, shops warehouses and billboards advertising Nostalgia-ville with it's 50's and 60's icons - Elvis, I love lucy, Betty Boop and Scooby Doo - a time they hope to remember as simpler and more innocent. It's never simpler and innocent. Only different. There were wars and torture and drugs and sex and crime and corporations bent on poisoning the populace in exchange for a hard-earned dollar from father knows best. After Nostalgia-ville, Winery billboards pop up, maybe every tenth billboard, advertising wines - non-organic and not too special. Then we end up back with green wooded areas and cornfields. Endless cornfields. Soon, in the distance, we'll be in Kansas with it's own endless horizon of green. For now, wherever we are - Illinois? Indiana? - has become nothing but woods surrounding us.

"The Move Over Law" - a rule we don't have out in California but I can see the use for. However, I didn't know about it until a police officer kindly chose to inform us of it on our way from Nashville, TN to Bonnaroo. I'd made it a long ways at that point - all the way from San Diego - without any hassles. Safe driving, usually over the speed limit (except in Arizona where the red light camera are waiting at, seemingly, every curve to pop you and send a ticket your way). In Little Rock, AR I picked up Violet perfectly on time, right as she landed at the airport. She'd had final exams to finish, was without much sleep and I drove us to Nashville where we found a hotel. The next day, after going grocery shopping at the Whole Foods and breakfast at the Waffle House (not an ideal choice) we were on our way to Bonnaroo, early Wednesday afternoon, perfectly according to plan.

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Globalization, Capitalism, and the Magic Kingdom

Globalization is a movement - a force - that is sort of rolling along and, at this point, cannot be stopped, whether or not protestors want to admit it or not. If you use the internet, look for deals on things from far away, read blogs by Indian authors, enjoy Manga comics, anything really - then you are a part of it as well and to look backwards is to get nostalgic for a cultural museum. I bring this up because I've been reading a very interesting and illuminating book on the topic. I can't say I agree with everything the author has to say and it is certainly coming from the direction of the more right-wing Republican doctrine of less government/tariffs/trade restrictions - more free market economy than I can agree with - but it puts forth a lot of interesting information that is helpful in illuminating how we got to where we are in this economic "meltdown" today.

The book is called "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" by Thomas L. Friedman and was published in 2000. Friedman draws some very clear parallels between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Communist structure and the rise of the internet and the global marketplace. In a post-WWII/Cold War world, markets were closed off to one another, communication was limited, and countries were able to put safe curtains around themselves. You never knew what was going on in another country, other than what your government told you and, as far as they were concerned, you were better off because of that. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of communication lines between nations, investors and individuals, people began to realize that they could expand their trade and, subsequently, improve their lives. We might want to say - oh the Amazon tribe or the African Bushman is better off without the TV or the cell phone or the computer but that is only because we have some kind of retrospective thinking and, while we are immersed in it one way or the other, the more technologically advanced cultures want to keep these "cultural museums". As he says:

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Mount San Jacinto

I left Violet at the lodge where her other philosophy friends from UCSD and UCI were having a sort of informal conference and drove up the road a piece to the Fuller Ridge Trail - drove up a twisting dirt road and parked at a gate. I started hiking... p and up. Into the still silence of nature abounding where there is no stillness but no incongruous sound, nothing is out of place. Bird song, bird answer. A woodpecker in the distance and another bird that zooms past me at breakneck speed. I sat for a while. Feeling my heart beating. My breath breathing. My joints and fingers and feet.

I hiked further and higher... into groves of towering Douglas Firs with long striations of bark in several dozen shades of brown and red and tan. I stood up close to it, my face inches from the bark and breathed in the musky woody scent, mingled with the cold mountain air. I felt it's tall peace and, as I stood there, felt myself - the roots and branches and leaves and fruits of my being stretching to the sun and the center of the earth. Maybe I looked like the "tree-hugger" type but that is such a misunderstood idea. A "tree-hugger" gets hugged back as well - but beyond that I felt like i was meditating there with this tree that was more than several hundred years old. It's bark attested to fires and storms that it has weathered - knobs and gnarls of knotted wood giving away where a brach was blown free in the wintertime and charred edges and the center charring - a tunnel within the tree that has been charred and blackened. I felt it and tasted it and thanked it. And moved on. I stuck my hand in the snow and stopped now and again to let my footsteps catch up with myself. And in that moment - the moment of being caught up - i found a center - and ever evolving moving changing and constant center.

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The New Egypt: The Dark Side of Dubai

They say that Egypt was built on the backs of slaves for rich and powerful pharoahs. We marvel at their feats. These days, rising out of the desert, Dubai glistens like some sort of mirage in the desert. It too is a city being built on the backs of slaves, quite literally. over 300,000 slaves to be exact. Working and toiling under the ho desert sun, not begin paid, fed barely enough to survive... for the Shiek. Not much different than the ancient Egypt we learn about. And who is to stop it? It seems the slowly crumbling world economy is grinding the building and construction to a halt but...

Learn more here: The Dark Side of Dubai

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Consciousness as a “Business Model”

I was recently talking with a friend about a few different businesses he is involved with. I'm not going to say what businesses or which friend as I don't want to personalize it or create a sense of scapegoating. One business he spoke of as having a model based on a local/eco-friendly approach. Conversely, other business interests of his had no such vision. In this case the local/eco-friendly approach is done based simply on economic sense. People like to pay a higher price for the local/eco-friendly business instead of from a different business that doesn't take the same sustainable approach. Being eco-friendly, in this case, is a matter of capitalist convenience. If more product could be sold by not being eco-friendly, such as other business interests of this same person, then there wouldn't be a point in being eco-friendly in the first place.

It's difficult for me to want to support such businesses. I have various reasons for wanting to support local, eco-friendly businesses when I can and if it's not a local business then I hope for it to be conscious about it's environmental impact and ecological footprint. The world is getting more crowded every day with fewer natural resources to sustain our consumption heavy lifestyles and the effects of our rampant consumerism are being felt in every corner of the globe. To take responsibility for this and change our business practices because it makes ethical sense rather than business sense is an important distinction.

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Pausing @ Crystal Cove, Laguna Beach

Pausing, resting, stopping for a moment is when I have a chance to notice the silhouette of the sandpiper standing on a rock, dark against the blue of the sky reflected in the tide pool. It is when I see the glowingly green stone almost hidden by the ripples of the water and catch a glimpse of a magenta bodied starfish  - its white dots like rows of little stars – clustered with three other starfish under an overhanging ledge of rock, peppered with barnacles. Some barnacles are the size of my big toe, others more the size of the nail of my little toe and the cliff hanging living – compact and confined, clustered tightly – blue lips of thousands of mussels. In the watery pools the anemone softly wave their blue green tendrils – a sort of fluorescent flower under the sea. Above the water, they have turned to gloppy blob like things speckled with the bits and pieces of broken shells and sand all clinging to them. When you see rocks stretching out in front of you with this blanket of shell particles it is not to be stepped upon. This is merely the pieced together shell of dozens of anemone, all clustered together, one after the other, in sprawling communities. Who am I to not want to also live in the sprawl? Perhaps sprawl is a natural occurrence. The only difference between the vast sprawling wasteland – I mean Irvine and Orange County – just northeast of me – and this is that this plays an integral part in the workings of a healthy ecosystem. Conversely, that spreading cancerous growth that is modern day living consumes and consumes and consumes in a seemingly never-ending power struggle and the waste? Plastic, toxins, runoff, etc… Garbage and poison. So. It’s the toxic nature of that sprawl that doesn’t excite me, the part that isn’t much like these rocks and pools and communities of sea life spreading out in front of me.

So I wander further down the beach, [picking up a shell and marveling at the intricate complexity of the lines of the rocks like giant shards poking up through the sand, rubbed and caressed into sinewy lines by years of ocean currents. Blues that merge into green that follow a line into a pool. In the pool is a rock with an orange glow and speckled with a pink coral sort of growth. The pink only glows when it is wet. If I take the rock home to admire it on my mantel, the pink will fade and I’ll be left with an orange rock and memory. So after admiring it for a while, turning it over in my hand and loving the way the sun through the water through the rock creates this glow in my hand, I place it back into the pool, where it settles in amongst the snails and seaweed.

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