Bliss, Work and Travel: Dancing with Squirrels

By Ray Rasmussen

Yesterday, I was at work, one of an endless steam of workdays that I can barely remember. As a consequence, I've decided that anyone who remains in an office coffin too long will experience little but darkness and stale air, much of which comes from ones peers and from an unending supply of paperwork which is now enhanced by an even larger supply electronic non-paper, non-work. I'm not sure what Bliss is, but I am sure that office work is its near opposite!

So, I bolted and headed for home. Along the way I wandered into a used bookstore and found ... Patrick Roscoe's, "The Lost Oasis," selling for only $4.99! It's a travel story about a son searching for his lost dad in a remote part of the African Sahara. Maybe it will be a good read--and aren't I still searching for my lost Dad along with lots of other folks? He lived with me, but for all his talkativeness, he may as well have been lost in the Sahara. And, then there's the pleasant prospect of imagined travel as a means of escaping the office.

Of course, travel isn't all that it's cut out to be. Otherwise we'd all be doing more of it. Instead, I was in the mood for a different sort of pleasure, the kind that comes from letting days drift by like clouds while thinking and writing about subjects of interest.

So I headed home where I found Gypsy, a living rug called a dog, waiting for me and looking eagerly towards the door. When we do our almost daily walks, Gypsy scouts eagerly for places to pee. When she finds one, she engages in a number of gymnastic maneuvers, squatting like a woman, lifting her leg like a man, blasting every post, tree, rock, and piece of dog poop that she finds with streams of yellow messages. Her other key activity is chasing squirrels. I'm not certain who is putting on whom on as they chatter and bark at one another. Obviously, the squirrels could simply go into their holes and sleep until we pass. Perhaps it's true animals live a limited, unconscious life ... but this dog clearly lives a simple life of bliss.

Following Gypsy's example, I decided to spend the next morning at home. I woke early, felt the sun streaming in through the slats in my shuttered window, and experience what perhaps is a small part of Gypsy's bliss. Then, I had the thought of searching the Internet for the terms "bliss, pleasure, spirituality, happiness" and even to contemplate the notion of travel.

I enjoy these slowly unfolding mornings at home--a bit of reading, a dab of writing, the editing of something previously written, the sipping from a cup of coffee, and "Yes, Gypsy!" perhaps even a walk.

On the internet, I found a quote from Jeff Greenwald's "Shopping for Buddhas," an account of his travels in Nepal: "Back home in the Wild West, time whips by with the relentless and terrible purpose of a stranglevine, vine filmed in fast motion. A week, two months, ten years snap past like amnesia, a continual barrage of workdays, appointments, dinner dates and laundromats, television shows and video cassettes, parking meters, paydays and phone calls.--You read the newspapers, you think about your friends back home - marching along in the parade of events - and you know it's still happening.--Yesterdays, todays and tomorrows are tumbling after each other like Sambo and the tiger, blending into an opaque and viscous ooze. There is no such thing as now; only a continual succession of laters, whipping their tendrils around the calendar. The clutches of the vine--"

According to Greenwald, in Nepal: "-- the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic impassivity of house cats. Afternoons bulge with a succulent ripeness, like fat peaches. There is time enough to do everything - write a letter, eat breakfast, read the paper, visit a shrine or two, listen to the birds, bicycle downtown to change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas - and arrive home in time for lunch."

Greenwald has an apt description of the relentless routine that I was at this very moment trying to escape. But, I have great difficulty with the treck-junkies who travel to places like Nepal, smoke dope, eat food that some poor peasants have had to scratch out of the despoiled earth, flirt with orange clothed, chanting monks and who thereby pretend to have found a quickie nirvana-high. Maybe after years of disciplined bliss-seeking, the monks will have found it, but I'm fairly certain that in only a very short time after writing that passage, Mr. Greenwald discovered that he has not, that he got thoroughly bored with changing money, listening to birds, visiting shrines, and that he headed home and begged for an honest day's mind-numbing work.

And, yes, I see that like Gypsy, I seem to need to piss on things to get past them. However, I forgive Greenwald for the Nepal-groupie stuff when he goes on to say: "All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper reasons to travel - itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing there."

That passage brought to mind my yearly visits to Canyonlands National Park in Utah. I always have a moment on my first day of a visit to Canyonlands when I pause in the middle of the sand, heat, emptiness and biting insects that outnumber even the grains of sand and who are more than delighted to welcome me back and I say to myself: "What the hell am I doing here???"

Next in my search for ideas about travel, I came upon a quote from Augustus Hare: "Better far off to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often again; to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become a part of life and life's recollections."

Augustus is likening "loving places" to bliss. Every year, friends ask me why I have returned to the same park for nearly 20 years. "Why don't you go somewhere new?" they ask rhetorically. Deep immersion and love of place is my answer. The spirit and beauty of the place has entered my psyche. I'm at the point where I can't stand the thought of not walking in one small, off-trail Canyonlands wash each year. And, if I don't visit, who will? I'm certain that the place needs me just as I need it.

Next, I found a quote from D.H. Lawrence: "When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in--"

This morning I've left the cage of work and let the squirrels of my mind run free. This too is a form of travel-- the so called inner journey. Like my dog, my journey often starts with streams of yellow complaint directed at just about everything. Then, the Squirrels run amuck. Lawrence is suggesting that much of life is lived as a lie, but that travelling away from lies might cause us to shiver with cold and fright, and that at some point, cool unlying life will somehow fulfill us.

I would like to be able to say that in my escape from yesterday's cage, cool unlying life is now rushing in--that I'm in a state of bliss. But, it wouldn't be true. I realize that in my dash from yesterday's workplace, I am in danger of engaging in Greenwald's self-deception. Escaping the stranglevine doesn't automatically bring bliss. After all, it's taken 20 years for a visit to the small wash in the middle of the desert to bring blissful feelings.

As Lawrence suggests, these thoughts are getting too close to home--they're causing a kind of cold fright. Meanwhile, Gypsy is getting antsy, and, fortunately, So, we'll go for a walk together and dance with the squirrels.