The photos and videos I’ve posted on Flickr capture some of the experience, and while the trip held too much adventure to describe here in great detail, I’ll hit some of the highlights below.  (You can also go back and read individual posts written during the trip.)

Our trip was a nice combination of planned itinerary (primarily, the week-long stay on the boat M/Y Eric to tour around the Galapagos) and “wander around once we get there” mode.  The Lonely Planet Guide to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands provide indispensable for the whole experience, from helping with food to lodging to cultural experiences and everything in between.  We were also visiting in advance of the heavier tourist season, so we were able to get into most any experience without advance reservation.

In the cloud forests of Mindo, to the northwest of Quito, we were so impressed by our stay at El Monte, a jungle lodge where we had a cabana for two nights.   Between the beautiful spot we had right on the rushing Mindo river, the amazing home-cooked meals three times a day, the beautiful main open-air lodge, and the warm and friendly staff, we were in paradise (mosquitoes notwithstanding).  We also had a chance to meet and dine with travelers from around the world, some of them on multi-month trips – it was quite fun (and okay, sometimes exhausting) to discuss politics, religion and economics with such a wide variety of global perspectives.  El Monte was created and is run by Tom and Mariella, who have worked hard to create an experienced powered by renewable resources (mostly hydro and solar) and supported by an amazing staff of cooks, guides, and hospitality coordinators.  We felt like we were among friends and well taken care of.

Our time in the Galapagos Islands was phenomenal.  The main theme of the encounters with the land and the animals of the islands is that they don’t know any fear of humans, and so it is possible to walk right up to a sea lion, a blue footed boobie bird or an iguana and look them in the eye. And that we did, day after day.  We sunned on the beach with the magnificent families of sea lions, and then joined them in the water when it got too hot. We snorkeled around amazing coral reef with penguins, sting rays, sharks and the most beautiful varieties of fish. We hiked through lava rock formations to see iguana resting and watching, huge bright red crabs sunning, waved albatross nesting, and great blue heron quietly stalking. Pelicans swooped by just inches away, and finches (all 13 varieties) showed us their nests. We watched in awe of the giant tortoises that had been alive longer than Kelly and I combined, slowly moving around their home in search of the best grass, the coolest pond.

After the Galapagos, we headed south into the Andes mountains for the city of Banos, where we originally intended to stay just a night or two, and ended up soaking it in for five days.  Banos seems to be the Ecuadorian equivalent of Boulder, Colorado – an outdoorsy person’s Mecca buried in the mountains, with myriad activities you can take on to pass the time.  Every block offers touring companies that will take you rafting, kayaking, canyoning, jungle tripping, go-carting, mountain biking and more.  There are trails extending up to the volcano and surrounding volcanic formations that range from steep to “are you kidding me?”   The best part is that once you’re done with your outdoor adventure, this place knows how to help you relax.  There are natural baths with water heated by the volcano, massage and spa companies on every block (most professional, some not), and so many different restaurants representing cuisine from around the world, it can take an hour to decide what to eat.  I think we found a good balance of high adventure (the most intense Class IV+ whitewater rafting either of us have ever done) followed by relaxation (ask me about the spa experience sometime).

Adjusting to different forms of transportation was a source of constant excitement on this trip.  As is apparently the case with much of South America, the experience of taking a bus between cities is very common, and can be very harrowing (especially for the uninitiated tourist).  Taxis in Quito seem to top even the most white-knuckle-grip experiences I’ve had in cities in the U.S.  One private driver we hired was an amazing and knowledgeable personal tour guide as he deftly navigated the different terrains, while another had never been to the destination we hired him to take us to and ended up depending on us for map navigation.  The Quito airport runway is a little bit short and sits smack dab in the middle of a densely populated city, so takeoffs and landings were a little nerve-wracking.  And it turns out that I am capable of getting quite sea sick, which I found out on night #1 on our Galapagos boat in the form of an evening-long  vomiting session on the sundeck.  Things got better from there, thanks in no small part to the great care from Kelly and the crew (and Scopolamine), but there were some moments where I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.  All in all, figuring out transportation was an adventure in itself.

This trip was the first real international travel I’d done in more than a decade, and my first time to South America.  Despite all of my detail-oriented preparation lists and packing and figuring out finances and scattered attempts to brush up on Spanish, in the end I just dove into the experience and let it take me where it would – this almost always resulted in great joy.  It was an honor to travel with Kelly, and we took good care of each other while enjoying the company greatly.  Ecuador was a beautiful, welcoming, diverse, complicated, amazing place to visit, and the experiences we had there were perspective-bringing and life-giving.

I’ll be happy to tell you more about it when I see you next.

I did eat a salad for lunch today (nice transition) – radish, green onion, and goat cheese on spring mix greens, with poppy seed dressing.  Everything but the dressing was grown/made at Abundant Acres Farm, the provider of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share that I bought this season.  Friends Kent and Dori have again done a great job making fresh, local, chemical-free food available, and I’m grateful for it.  I don’t have a garden on my own land right now, but having a bag of garden-fresh stuff delivered to me every week is hard to beat.  There’s still quite a gap between my ideals about where my food comes from and my actual diet.

This past week I took a vacation from the office to focus on…not being at the office for a week.  It was a brief but effective period of rest and catching up on life’s other projects – I spent some time hiking, traveling, exploring, unpacking and rearranging the new house, working in the yard, reading and researching, responding to old e-mail messages (I’m down to just 2 personal inbox items, YAY!), spending time with friends, getting my old house ready to rent, journaling, sleeping, lounging, and planning for the future.  I’m grateful to have co-workers and a work life that makes this kind of break possible and easy.

Yesterday I heard a clicking/chirping/screeching noise in the hallway outside where I was sitting, and emerged to find that the cats had surrounded a bat on the floor of my bedroom.  After swearing lightly a few times, I went back into the room I’d been in to compose myself.  When I emerged again, the bat had moved to the window frame in the bedroom, cats plotting their ascent, and I’m pretty sure it was looking at me.  “Your move, help me out here,” I think it was saying. I swore again and then shooed the cats out and closed the door behind me.  Then I did what anyone in my position would do: I Twittered about it.  The immediate responses varied in their helpfulness, from some genuine offers to come assist, to naming the bat Howard, to, “Bats carry rabies and if they bite you in your sleep, you’d NEVER KNOW! I heard it on NPR.“  Gee, thanks.  By the time Becky arrived to take charge of the situation, the bat had gone into hiding, and has yet to re-emerge.  Part of me honestly believes that it intercepted my Twitter feed and knew what it might be in for.  Oh well.  Sleeping in a bee-keeper suit was not too uncomfortable.

Despite being on vacation, I had a few great organizational meetings, and I joined two new organizations/projects this week.  The Creative Industries Task Force is a working group sprung from the city’s comprehensive plan, helping to prepare the ground for a county-wide organization that can support, celebrate and coordinate the arts and cultural environment of Richmond and Wayne County.  The Earlham College Alumni Council works to advance the College’s development and keep its alumni engaged with the life of the institution.  In both cases, I’m honored to be asked to contribute, and am optimistic that both efforts are already so much in line with work I am already doing informally that I won’t notice any additional time commitment. 

Doors are opening all around me with opportunities to dive into more of the community building work that I know I want to do.  I’m still working on some implementation plans following my Transition Training conference last month.  Coming up in June the Imago folks in Cincinnati are putting on a conference on ecology, spirituality and living economies that I’ve registered for, and just a week later the Earth Charter folks are having a conference in Indianapolis to help people create an ethical framework for sustainability in their communities.  I see excitement building locally around local food, alternative transportation, better communication and dialog, alternative media and citizen journalism, and a general openness to new ways of making the community better.  The hard part is no longer trying to get something moving – the hard part is figuring out what I have to say “no” to because there are so many things moving.  I’ll take it!

I saw this Maya Angelou quote recently and found it useful: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.“  I’ve been paying a lot of attention since to how each person I encounter makes me feel, and how I might make them feel.  My attentiveness has not been about striving for the answer to be “good” all the time, but at least to know that something is being felt, that there’s some emotional engagement we can both find worth remembering.

Those are a few of the ingredients tossed into my salad of life lately.  How about you?

No End In Sight is pitched as an insider’s tale of the reckless decision-making and subsequent incompetence that has propelled the invasion and occupation of Iraq forward from the planning stages to the present day, and it satisfies that characterization quite well. I was impressed with the broad scope (in rank, affiliation and political persuasion alike) of the subjects that writer/director Charles Ferguson was able to secure for the film – everyone from former State Department leader Richard Armitage to soldiers and diplomats who had been on the ground in Iraq carrying out the haphazard instructions from afar. What’s more, they seemed unusually candid and authentic, almost humbled by the chance to reflect – saying out loud how badly things were done, clearly second guessing themselves and their decision-making process they engaged in, barely containing their frustration at the conflicts and politicking within the Bush administration that prevented any real meaningful collaboration or planning to take place. It was amazing to hear from some of the people who were ostensibly planning for life in Iraq after the invasion, and all the roadblocks and impossible tasks they encountered. It reminded me somewhat of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, with the same kinds of long, uncomfortable pauses as people who were directly responsible for life and death decisions came to grips with their place in history.

Beyond the interviews, the film is a great chronology of the invasion and occupation as a whole. With the inattentive and lopsided media coverage the many-hundred-billion dollar adventure gets, it’s all too easy to forget that it’s been going on for more than 4 years and that so many different milestones of presidential, congressional, and national identity (many of them unfortunate) have been reached along the way. But despite the moving stories of discontent from U.S. soldiers and the wrangling of egos and power agendas in the U.S., this is about huge losses of life, total destruction of communities, cities, cultures, livelihoods, and a profound sense of injustice, all sustained by the Iraqi people at the hands of our country’s military/industrial complex. The collection of footage often never shown in mainstream media for its heartbreaking implications is in itself a story of unacceptable disconnection from this tragedy.

One of the soldiers interviewed for the film, Field Artillery Gunner Hugo Gonzales, talked about how his life now was preoccupied by trying to find some meaning in the occupation there, especially given his debilitating injuries and near-constant pain. I felt such sadness for him and his fellow soldiers, knowing they have in most cases done what they believe is right and necessary, and that some of them are now feeling pangs of doubt (if not plain outrage) about the nature and origins of their mission. As I walked out of No End in Sight, it was clear to me that any universally useful meaning will probably only come years from now, when the machinations of national and cultural self-consciousness will finally lead to some wider-spread sense that the whole ordeal was a catastrophic mistake. But until then, the movie gives us as much perspective as might be possible while the battles continue and more lives are needlessly lost.

While President George W. Bush would not be interviewed for the movie, other interviewers have asked him and his advisers about the logic and decision-making process that governed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and most often the response is to brush off the mistakes of the past, saying that dwelling on them doesn’t really serve a useful purpose, and to talk about what needs to happen to move forward (hey, that sounds familiar!). While I understand this perspective, I think it is horribly flawed.

And so I really appreciate that in The Assault on Reason, Al Gore took the time to look deeply at the thought processes, public and private conversations, and general approach to decision making that has dominated the Bush administration’s tenure, not the least outcome of which was the mess in Iraq. Gore starts with the psychology of fear and takes us on a whirlwind tour of how it is used to subvert our appreciation of reason, even to the point where the decisions we make are not in our own self-interest. He looks at the language and framing used by modern politicians (certainly with a critical focus pointed right at conservatives) and how every pressing issue of the day — from climate change to foreign policy to immigration to Katrina to the economy — are being poorly addressed or not addressed at all because of the paralysis of the nation due to these tactics. The sad part of his thesis is that, for those who are assaulting reason, it’s all about power:

Throughout history, our innate fear of others-who-are-different-from-us has combined all too frequently with some malignant dogma, masquerading as a message from God, to unleash the most horrific violence and oppression in the repertoire of hell. Moreover, this deadly form of exclusivist group passion can be virtually invulnerable to reason. So it is especially useful to demagogues who learn how to fan it and exploit it to gain and consolidate power. –p. 48

Like some interviewees in No End In Sight, Gore effectively lambastes the Bush administration for its approach to Iraq, but does so in the context of the notion that the Iraq invasion was a distraction from the search for Osama bin Laden and those who attacked the U.S. on 9-11. He returns to the amazing phenomenon where some high percentage of U.S. citizens surveyed incorrectly believed Saddam Hussein had something to do with those attacks, and the rhetoric and carefully planned talking points of the neocon planners that facilitated that trend. In other words, because of the way reason has been assaulted and the truth twisted, lots of people died.

Gore is optimistic about possibilities for improvement and solutions to the phenomenon he lays out, but I’m not sure I can agree with the specific paths he sees to resolution. His primary conclusion is that if Americans can reclaim the practice of meaningful public debate about the issues that face us, we can once again be a nation governed by reason and true democracy. Specifically, Gore sees the promise of the Internet as the key vehicle to that reclaiming, and goes on to promote some of his own efforts with Current TV to that effect.

…the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. –p. 260

It sounds really good, but as George Lakoff and others have identified, pinning our hopes for the resurrection of a nation driven by progressive values on the notion that everyone just needs to be more reasonable is NOT a strategy for success. The reality is that people will let their understanding of the world and their short-term preferences override any deep comprehension of what might be reasonable or right; even, as I mentioned above, when they are making decisions that conflict with their own self-interest. I’ve experienced that often here in my home town, where some of my attempts to engage those with opposing viewpoints using the tools of logic and reason results only in further misunderstanding, animosity, and even outright resentment at the attempt. I’ve come to understand this as something I can’t really completely blame on the people I’m engaging – if I can’t interact with them in a way that is meaningful and useful to both of us, then that’s partly my fault, too.

Still, Gore’s clarity of vision is worth hearing out, even if it isn’t a comprehensive one. As with soldier Gonzales` attempt to find meaning in the events of the past four years, Gore does manage to make a lot of sense of how we got where we are in a fear-based national identity, and I consider The Assault on Reason to be an essential contribution to the discussion about what we want for ourselves from here on out.

I’m grateful for the fact that, on the whole, I really enjoy the things that I do for my “work life,” and in many cases, would choose to do them even if I weren’t being compensated. Sure, they might take a slightly different form than they do in my role at Summersault (and in Summersault’s role as a for-profit company acting within and benefitting from the global economy), but I generally get to apply the skills and expertise that I posses to challenges, projects and organizations that I think are having some sort of positive impact on the world I live in. More importantly, I feel privileged to know that my “work life” and “personal life” are intertwined in ways that don’t usually feel uncomfortable, and are often very complementary. The relationships I have with the people I work with, the missions of the organizations I’m involved with, the projects I take on, the values I try to live out, the larger goals I have for my life…all of these things are improved or furthered by the larger notion of “How I Spend My Time,” and with every passing year, I see fewer distinctions between what I consider “work” and what I consider “personal”.

I suppose this is a manifestation of an ideal that I have for the world at large – that we can work toward a version of humanity that does not require people to spend time doing things they would not otherwise choose to do, just so they can have access to groceries, housing and other basics (and often at the expense of other great experiences like strong community, strong families, playfulness, seeing the world around them, laughing out loud on a regular basis, etc). I hope we can instead follow a vocation, which as Frederick Buechner beautifully put it, is “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” I think that when we have to save up all of those things we’d like to do, and the possibility for living out our deep gladness, for a planned vacation, we may not be living our lives to the fullest, responding to our true calling in the world.

There are plenty of cautionary statements to go along with this ideal. For example, I’m a privileged middle-class white male who can say these things on my quaint little blog that’s hosted for free at a company I started with resources acquired and derived from the struggles of many others before me, while plenty of others fight for basic survival – food, water, shelter – every day. For there to be any chance of an equity amongst humans where balance and interdependent communities of people living out their true vocation can thrive, we must first find peace with justice, a culture that doesn’t thrive on destruction, and an economy that doesn’t depend on exploitation and oppression.

But no matter the hurdles to getting there, I think there’s a version of humanity that does not require us to carve out a work life for ourselves that is separate from our personal life, that doesn’t necessitate as many vacations from our vocations. In fact, humans lived this way for quite some time before our modern culture came along and said we needed to make enough money so we can buy an iPhone or two. In that time, we knew what it was like to live, work, and play all in the same context of a community of people who were literally making a living together, no daily commute necessary. If they heard stories of what we call “making a living” these days, even in the cases where we start our own companies that provide exceptional opportunities for a harmonious life, they’d still probably say, “Ha – suckers!”

What kinds of vacations do you take? What’s your vocation? Where do they meet?