A Realization...

"Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"
                                                                                      - Henry David Thoreau

This desire for moral reform through the mere act of being 'awake' is a call to arms that dates all the way back to 1846. There is an even greater need now, for those who are able, to stand out among the slumberers. I feel as though the search for meaning in this life and the desire to satisfy the human spirit began as an answer to this call and now has become so abstract and 'spiritual' that people forget that it is the concreteness of this world that demands this exploration. They key to defining our physical existence on this earth and the relationships that we have with others and with nature and with God is to realize first that we are individual and alone in our experience. Not to say that we should all go live in a cabin in the woods by ourselves but that our personal experiences in these relationships is one hundred percent unique. How we relate to this physical world in unlike the experience of any other person, plant or animal. Our human qualities, our internal and external features, our past experiences and our anticipated goals all help to shape this individualized vantage point from which we view the world. Because of this, each person has the ability to effect change in a completely new way. In order to accomplish this change we need to wake up. We need to stop searching for the metaphysical meaning in this life and begin living tangibly in it. The first step toward absolute "wide-awakeness" is first realizing that we are asleep.

Drastic Measures Don't always work...

Change, for the right reasons can be a great and necessary thing. It teaches you to re-evaluate your current situation. Sometimes it can really make you appreciate things in life before you made the change. Sometimes, however, it puts you at such a distance from your old routine that you can look on it with new eyes and see it from a perspective that makes you realize just how stuck you were. Moving to Thailand was both of those things for me. I felt like the work that I was doing was significant and I was actually making some money doing what I love and then I hit a wall. I hit a wall creatively and strategically. I had started doing a lot of commissioned work for friends, and then friends of friends and it was spiraling in the right direction and then it came to a halt. My creative rut and my occupational rut came together and formed a trench with walls that needed scaling. I reached a point that most of us artists reach and had the brilliantly conventional idea that maybe I should teach. I can't seem to baby step my way into life altering decisions so I decided that the best way to figure out if I was a teacher at heart was to move to the middle of nowhere Thailand and teach english to five year olds. What I learned instead was that I have a ridiculous fear of small lizards and that I definitely do not want to teach five year olds. It was a great experience and I learned so much about myself and all of that reflective meandering but I wasn't on the same commitment level that some of my colleagues in the field were. Some of them are still there teaching and have found their way into great, high paying jobs and some of them went home and furthered their education. I went straight back to the bar. I was so broke and in dire emotional need of a comfortable, ego-stroking environment that I went straight back to place I clawed my way out of.

My Anuban kids (Kindergarten) learning english songs.
Alright, a lot of it was very rewarding.