Freeformist

It is official: I am solidly in my late twenties.

These days, it seems like all the Facebook announcements of my fellow late-twenty-something millennial peers look like this:

I turned 28 years old today, and judging by all conventional measures of what success in one’s late twenties looks like, it is safe to say that I am not a very conventionally successful person.

I just left/got fired from my job two weeks ago because I got into an ideological disagreement with the non-profit organization I worked for. Yes, it is the second time in one year this has happened (as my mom helpfully reminded me when I called to tell her).

I do not have a partner, either, let alone a fiancée or a Life Partner. The number of people I am currently seeing is zero. I don’t even have entertaining stories of flirtatious/disastrous encounters in the club anymore, because I’m 28 and the club is not the glorious watering hole of unbridled sexual possibility it used to be.

I also do not have very many funds, an understandable effect of working in non-profits for six years and getting fired from them on a habitual basis. If funds were rocks, I would have a fairly small pile of rocks. A pile of small rocks slowly tumbling down a river and being carried away by the current of Fred Leeds Properties management, State Farm Insurance and Trader Joe’s.

There is a little anxiety-fueled prehistoric person in my mind that periodically likes to scream at me about the situation I am in.

This little social anxiety monster, fueled by its hunter-gatherer fear of not fitting in to the tribe of society and therefore starving and dying alone, likes to compare my life to those of my friends’ and acquaintances’ and tell me how much more successful everyone else is than me.

Adulthood is a strange thing. We like to pretend that we know what we’re doing. We like to show everyone how successful and happy and sexy we are by posting photos of ourselves on Instagram engaging in Enviable Activities like Brunch and Travel, and we like to measure our happiness by how many likes we accumulate on said photos. We’re in control. We have it figured out. Everything is great. 

It’s kind of what society in general enjoys saying. Our financial and political systems are working fine! Trust the free market to work it out. Or robots. 

But do we actually know what we’re doing? We’re living in a very weird time. Some of us have condos with a $1.5 million Pagani Zonda race car as a wall divider (I didn’t even know what a Pagani Zonda was until I googled “late state capitalism examples”) and some of us are starving on the street. We’re simultaneously putting thousands of kids in cages and committing genocide in Yemen while telling our Alexa virtual assistants to deliver almond milk to our front door because we’re too lazy to Uber to the grocery store. Exponentially accelerating advances in corporate technology have us increasingly fused to our smartphones and increasingly separated from nature. And then there’s the whole awkward situation with ecological destruction and how we might end up destroying ourselves and the planet pretty soon.

So I don’t think anyone actually knows what the fuck they’re doing, individually and societally. I think life is just one big free-for-all where everyone is stumbling around in the dark and hitting things with sticks and hoping candy/happiness will come out.

And the good news about all this is that in the bigger scheme of things, it probably doesn’t matter that I’m not successful by the standards of a society which clearly doesn’t really know all that much about success after all. 

So then how do I define success and happiness? Despite the attempts of my little prehistoric pal to drag me into conformity, I’ve known for a while now that lots of money and impressive titles won’t make me happy (they might make other people happy, and that’s great by the way). Through trial and error and lots of experimenting, I’ve figured out that I don’t really need much to be fulfilled. All I really want out of life is a strong and loving community, a healthy and interdependent relationship with nature, and to be able to develop and express my unique gifts to serve the world in the best way I can.

Of course, all of that is fairly challenging to achieve in a society based on competition, isolation, scarcity and exploitation.

I’ve learned a lot through my six years of working in political non-profits, surrounded by people who are trying to make the world a better place through policy change and elections and organizing for power. I’ve learned how impactful good policies and good people in office can be. But I’ve also learned that political change is always a result of cultural change.

I’ve realized that in order to create the beautiful world we want to live in, a massive shift of values, of ideology, of ways of being with each other and being with ourselves and with our planet is needed. Cultural change: from a culture of fear and judgment and anger to love and joy. From individualism and ego and distraction to consciousness. From mindless consumption to intentional creation.

I want to be a part of catalyzing this shift. I’m going to be a bit dramatic and go ahead and say that this might even be my purpose in life. That’s why, though I haven’t accumulated many fancy titles or possessions over these last six years, I’ve intentionally been trying to transform myself out of habits of separation into practices of collectivity and joy and presence. That’s why I took the peace economy organizer job in January, and that’s also why I left as quickly as I did – because while the initiative I managed was great, the organization as a whole didn’t see the need to transform its own culture, and we both knew we ultimately weren’t the best fit. But I’m grateful for the experience, and I learned so much from it.

So now what? How do I actually fulfill my purpose as a culture-shifter / consciousness-evolver, and how do I also make enough money to buy groceries and not get kicked out of my apartment?

I don’t know, to be honest. All I have is my intuition, and my intuition is telling me that 1) it’s time to step out of the full-time non-profit employee role for now, 2) I want to create something of my own, and 3) I want to engage my artistic expression.

Cultural change is essentially what artists do. The painters, the writers, the musicians: they hold up a mirror to society – this is who we are – and then turn it into a portal – this is who we could be. People will only go somewhere they have first traveled to in their minds. That’s why to create the world we want to live in, we must engage our imagination. And artists help us imagine what’s possible.

From the time I was a little kid making up pretend characters and stories on the floor of my bedroom, I’ve known I’ve wanted to be an artist of some kind. At first it was a visual artist, then it was a singer, then a writer. But as I got older, the scope of my imagination shrank. Fear and ideas of what was feasible and practical took over. Rationality took over. Realism.

I got really good at crushing the little artistic voice inside of me as I applied to colleges and then  to jobs. As I became immersed in the civic engagement world and sent out coalition emails and managed spreadsheets and ran phone banks, I told myself I was strictly a political organizer. That was my identity. I would try to appease the little voice by journaling my creative thoughts and observations down in a little notebook in my free time, then throwing it into a dark corner of my closet. I thought the urge would go away eventually.

But after all these years, it has never gone away. It’s still there, strong as ever, and now it’s also apparently rebelling and getting me fired. So I’ve decided it’s finally time to listen.

I’m challenging the paralyzing fear that has told me for so many years that I’m not talented enough to pursue a creative path. The thoughts that tell me I have no formal education, I have no experience, I’ll never make money at it, I’ll never touch people with it. 

I’m rewriting that story in my head. And I’m writing a new one in its place.

I’m going to get a job (or maybe several) that pays the bills and lets me do things like eat so I don’t die, and I’m going to create.

I will start with writing. For the first time in my life, I’m going to dedicate myself to writing every day. I’m going to take classes and get better and better at it, and I’m going to finally tell all of the stories and ideas and thoughts buried in my journals and my mind that are burning to be told. I’m going to put everything I have into it, and it might not work out. But that’s okay, because I finally feel like I’m doing something I’m supposed to be doing. I finally feel like I’m doing something from a place of inspiration and joy and aliveness instead of fear.

Today, I’m 28 years old and I don’t have a job, a partner, a house, or any concrete understanding of what my life will look like in five years or even in six months. But I’m pretty proud of how far I’ve come in figuring out who I am and who I want to be. I have a guiding vision of the world I want to help create. And I’m walking my own unique path one step at a time.

Stare at the endearingly nerdy boy sitting two seats in front of you in Mrs. Schubert’s fifth grade class. Stare a lot. Ditch learning your fractions for the much more thrilling pursuit of writing his name fifty times, with one hundred tiny hearts, on a piece of scratch paper that you later shred into several thousand bits. Say, “Of course I like him,” quizzically when your friends ask. “No, that’s not what we meant!” they shout in frustration. Know exactly what they meant and gleefully relish your clever evasion. Write awful poems in sparkly gel pen comparing his whisper to a soft breeze and lock them in your miniature hot pink locker from Limited Too that also contains N’sync HitClips and Smarties candies.

Feel thrilled when he picks you as his first choice for his basketball team at recess, even though you know it’s because you’re actually better than the other kids due to the advantage of being a Japanese American baller. Feel incredibly touched when he saves up enough NeoPoints playing hours and hours of Neopets Destruct-o-Match to send you a silver paintbrush for your Shoyru. Figure this is probably the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you. Feel sad when he moves away, but quickly forget because you’ve graduated sixth grade and many more exciting things await in middle school.

Start AIM’ing with the quiet kid in your eighth grade science class. Spend hours typing back and forth about everything you can possibly think up and send each other Blink 182 songs. Feel too awkward to speak to each other in person other than discussing science homework. Flirt for the first time over the Internet with bold phrases such as “I really enjoy talking to u” and feel a million bolts of lightning course through your veins when he types “ur hair looked really nice today”. Think about that phrase through five straight periods the next day at school.

Get dropped off by your mom in her minivan at the movie theater and watch “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” for your very first date, but drag your two mutual friends along to make it less awkward. Feel terrified throughout the entire experience. Almost faint when he puts his hand over yours halfway through. Silently scream to yourself I can’t believe a boy is touching my hand!!1!  Become official and hang out a total of three times over the summer.

Enter high school and start talking to a new boy in third period. Start IM’ing with him and feel incredibly conflicted because you have a boyfriend. Start a list in your diary comparing the pros and cons of each boy. One day while walking back to the quad from fifth period English, tell your boyfriend you think you no longer want to be with him. Believe this was the hardest thing you’ve ever done and feel awful. Ignore your now ex-boyfriend for six months because you’re a really awkward fourteen year old. Feel worried when you see his emo posts on Xanga. Simultaneously feel impressed that you have the power to make boys feel sad.

Study for AP Euro until midnight over AIM with the new boy and start to idealize him in the same way as the last two boys. Experience an incredibly thrilling moment when he asks you to homecoming in the hallway before third period. Write pages of anguished diary entries when he spends the remainder of the year alternating between ignoring and paying attention to you. Feel crushed when he asks another girl to the next dance. Take months to recover and do a Yahoo! search for “songs about heartbreak” and paste the lyrics into your Xanga, on private mode because you’re classy.

Receive an IM out of nowhere from a kid in your class one day during Junior year. Feel confused because the two of you inhabit completely different social circles – you are a nerdy honors student and he spends his weekends drinking with all the popular kids and gets suspended once a month. Start to feel seduced by this concept. Ignore your friends who hate him. Talk on the phone for two hours and feel fascinated by his crazy stories of running from the police and breaking his arm drunkenly falling out of a tree.

Decide to start dating him only because he really likes you, and because he likes you, figure you like him too. Go to a bonfire with your mutual friends and take a walk with him. Sit on a bench overlooking the beach and shut your eyes as he sort of pushes his lips against yours and then sticks his tongue in your mouth. Tolerate this for a few minutes and then stop because it feels incredibly weird. Engage in more make-out sessions over the next few weeks and contemplate how weird those those are too. Feel confused and break things off.

Go to Hawaii with your girlfriends after high school graduation and say, “what is that?” when they pull a handle of Skyy Vodka out of their suitcase in your condo. Proceed to take five straight shots with them, walk down the street, get called to by four boys on a balcony, go up to their hotel room like the extremely smart people you are, and make out with one. Go to college and become obsessed with drinking and making out with boys to make up for all your prudery in high school.

Start hanging out with a boy you met at an Asian frat party, aka watch movies on his laptop in his twin-sized bed of his tiny dorm room. Feel no attachment to him and end up making him very sad when you move on to another boy from another social space. Feel mature as fuck because he has an off-campus apartment and is an entire year older than you. Lose your virginity one day when he kind of sticks it in and you don’t stop him and cry a bit afterwards for reasons you can’t quite comprehend, other than you’re pretty sure you weren’t ready for that shit yet. Feel crushed when he calls you one day and says you should break up because he needs to think about settling down soon and wants to marry someone who is serious about making money instead of saving the world with a sociology degree.

Cry for a few weeks, then vow to save the world with your sociology degree. Join student government, and develop an obsession with the guy who’s repping another school at your first UC Student Association board meeting. Admire his charismatic public speaking and ability to get one thousand students at his school registered to vote in one day. Decide to secretly date, and bond over organizing tactics and your mutual confusion over trying to help create social change while also coming from a very privileged place of model minority upper middle class life.

Become official and attempt to navigate things like bisexuality and masculinity and his immigrant parents and your skeptical friends and insecurity and fear and ego. Say the L word to him after six months and really mean it and feel more vulnerable than you’ve ever felt but also incredibly alive because he says it back and now you’ve just opened the floodgates of possibility. Float on a cloud for several more months, believing nothing can disturb your haze of happiness until they do when the magic starts fading, and start to freak out because you’re only 21 and you don’t know what you want yet and break up because you’re moving to different places and you want to figure out your identity on your own. Realize in retrospect that you probably mistook “love” for the feeling of infatuation you had for him, instead of seeing it as a practice and a commitment – a verb – but decide you’re too young to commit to all that yet.

Relocate to the Bay, realize you don’t know anyone here, start an Okcupid account one impulsive night, and proceed to casually date 42 people over the next few years. Become exposed to people from all different backgrounds and careers and lifestyles and slowly grow your self-confidence. Figure out more of your deal breakers in a relationship, which now include the belief that technology can solve all of humanity’s problems, a consequence of going on dates with many guys in tech. Learn how to say no to unwanted sexual advances and how to have a better relationship to alcohol and how to use your intuition. Learn how to have mature “I’m not feeling this but I’m open to friendship” types of conversations. Learn graceful rejection and how to not take things personally. Overcome your inferiority complex to white people.

(Also go to the Castro with your queer friends and kiss girls and sort of question your sexuality for a while, but that’s a story for another time.)

Give up on dating for a while and move back to LA in order to spend your time with your friends and family and practice love with them. Start working at a civil rights organization and join a running club and a leadership fellowship. Realize that you don’t need a guy to complete you, because you are already whole – even as most of your friends start to tie the knot and invite you to their weddings and get a whole bunch of awesome kitchen appliances from the Crate and Barrel registry. Develop your political consciousness by learning from the inspiring work of community groups helping to empower low income people of color to change their own day to day conditions.

Meet a guy who is doing this. Hang out with him and talk about your mutual fantasy of living in nature and watch in awe as the youth he works with start their own community gardens and restorative justice circles and realize that this is how the revolution starts. Blaze and go camping and run at the beach and talk about obscure travel and transforming molecules with love and animal psychology and indigenous governance and the politics of Game of Thrones and what reality even is and how we are inseparable from the earth. Make peace with the fact that you can’t always put a label on your relationships with people and appreciate it for what it is. Feel inspired and go to Southeast Asia and discover a whole new beautiful world and come back and pursue a new direction for your life.

Realize that all you can do is live in the present, and stop worrying about what the future will hold. Follow your intuition, do things you love, appreciate how far you’ve come since Mrs. Schubert’s fifth grade class, and have faith that this whole romance thing will all work out in the end.

When I was a kid, I remember feeling quite skeptical of the concept of “growing up”.

I remember learning about what happens after college graduation – toiling in an office for at least forty hours a week for at least forty more years – and feeling simultaneously shocked and aghast.

Really? My indignant five year old self wanted to ask. After all the progress of human civilization you couldn’t come up with anything better than this? 

I was also wary of how boring people’s interactions with each other seemed to become once they turned into adults. Our social lives were thrilling, ever-changing adventures spun from the infinite depths of collective kid imagination. Our days consisted of saving the world from evil Digimon (usually an unsuspecting parent or sibling), surviving in the brutal wilderness (aka pretending to eat cheese sandwiches aka dandelions between leaves in a patch of grass at our school), and assembling glorious inter-species bug conventions (a hole in the dirt that we filled with beetles and rolly-pollys).

Adult social lives, on the other hand, seemed to consist entirely of sitting in one place while talking to each other about mundane, corporeal things like movies or sports or investments or investment in sports movies. There seemed to be a lot less laughter and a lot less movement and a lot less creation.

But I shrugged this wariness off and decided to go with the flow.  Not much else you can do. That’s just how things work. And year by year, I slowly felt myself starting to change.

I felt the boundlessness of my mind squeeze into rigid structures as adults attempted to integrate us into their world through algebra lessons and memorization of U.S. capitals and hierarchy and discipline.  I felt my connection to nature fade as I swapped crawling around outside in the dirt for sitting inside complaining about teachers. And I felt myself living less and less fully in the present as homework and grades and especially AP Chemistry took me more and more into worrying about the future and obsessing over the past. And it didn’t feel right. And I still failed the Chem test.

Upon my admission into “the real world” after college graduation, the adultification process and feeling of wrongness intensified. Even though I worked at mission-driven, social change organizations, I still found myself spending all my time reading hundreds of emails and articles at a computer in an office in the middle of a downtown concrete jungle. A box. Then I got into a smaller box, my car, and drove in traffic to a bigger box, my apartment, and got on the computer again to scroll through my Facebook newsfeed and Instagram in a sort of feelingless auto-pilot mode. And then again and again.

Be grateful you have a job, doing something at least marginally good at that, I said, not actually aloud because that would be weird. But it still felt wrong. It felt wrong and unnatural. The restrained way adults acted at work, where they censored their speech and scripted their conversations into minute-by-minute agendas and separated their time into 1-hour Google Calendar blocks, stretching out months in advance. The strange way we acted even outside of work, consuming a million of the most mundane-yet-painstakingly-produced details of other people’s lives, most of whom we didn’t even care about, on a smartphone glued to our hands. Living in boxes with fake light and fake air.

Life is supposed to be better than this, I couldn’t stop thinking. Life is supposed to be more alive than this. 

I dated a dude for a while during this time, a nice guy who also made approximately $650,000 a year as a partner at a big tax firm. I wanted to see what life was like for someone who could pretty much buy anything his heart desired, how the 1% lived – this elite, utmost privileged group that our society loves to demonize and worship at the same time. There was a part of me that wondered, as many of us probably have at some point: hey, wouldn’t life be awesome if I was a millionaire?

We went to the fanciest sushi restaurants in all of LA, flew first-class across the country, saw Beyonce and Sia and the AMAs, hung out at his luxury apartment in downtown ($5k/mo for a one bedroom), and drove around in his Tesla, or rather, had his Tesla drive us. And I found out that those luxurious spaces that only the wealthiest have access to, that most of us only dream about, were in reality, even more cold and alienating and empty than regular places (except for the Beyonce concert, that was lit). People weren’t nice to each other. They pretty much ignored one another. They didn’t seem happy. He wasn’t happy either. He worked for 70+ hours a week at a company that didn’t even pretend to care about him, that tossed aside his very humanity in the name of profit. How seriously wrong are things when the people at the very top, whose desires and dreams everyone else suffers for, are still suffering themselves?

And the suffering knew no end. Eviction and deportation and mass incarceration. Environmental degradation and shootings. Then Trump. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that all these things were connected: our corrupt political system, our addiction to technology, our rigid structures, our alienation from nature, our lost imagination, our empty consumption, our unwillingness to take care of each other.

And I couldn’t shake the feeling that in order to change things, I had to start with myself.

And you know what happened next – I got fired and embarked on a nearly six-month journey of discovery to figure out what the alternative to all of this shittiness was. To see what I wanted for myself and for the world, instead of just resisting what I didn’t want. I looked to my childhood self for wisdom and knew instinctively that the answers lay in nature, in creating beautiful things with other people, in living in the present.

So I took a leap and immersed myself in all of it. And went off to Thailand and the Philippines for two months, with a backpack, no companions, and no plan.

And I finally got to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the more beautiful world out there.

The Beautiful World 

Do you know what happens when you live a large portion of your life outside, fully immersed in nature?

When you step outside and stay there, you wake up to see the sun rise, a creeping pink and purple spreading across the dawn, a steady warming of the landscape until a dazzling beam appears over the mountain. You see its progress across the sky and how the shadows on trees and rocks constantly change and how the clouds shift textures and make fantastical shapes. How captivating the glow of light softly filtering through trees is. You feel wind on your skin and how the sun on your face seems to regenerate your energy and how the temperature drops in the shade and how pleasant that feels. You cut lemongrass and brew it in a pot for tea and you pick a few leaves of spinach and dust off the dirt and chew them and marvel at the cycle of life, how miraculous it is that you can just plant something in soil and water it and the suns grows it and then it’s your food.

You realize that every single sunset is completely different, and each one is its own miracle of pink and yellow and blue and sometimes purple seamlessly fading into each other and growing darker and darker until a blanket of brilliant white lights envelops the black canvas of the sky and a streak of dust spreads over it and you even realize how the moon rises after a while and casts shadows of its own and sometimes it’s a globe and sometimes it’s a sliver and sometimes it’s not there at all. And you hear a thousand crickets and owls and it’s a lull that sounds so right, so natural, that comforts you as you go to sleep.

And it’s so beautiful, and so stimulating, that you become completely and utterly present.

You become fully immersed in every moment, each one magical, ever-changing.

You live by the sun instead of the clock.

Your thoughts evaporate and you can feel your body and you can finally breathe.

And you are free.

And after a while, you realize something that most of humanity forgot – that we are inseparable from nature, that we are meant to live in it, that our very aliveness depends on it. If you take care of the land, the land provides everything you need for a happy life. 

And when you take away the physical and digital and mental walls between people, you sit in a circle on the dirt together and you tell stories. You talk about your dreams. When you trade time instead of money, your natural generosity blooms and life is just about sharing gifts – yoga, songs, acrobatics, cuisines. You create beautiful things together, planting seeds and building houses and singing harmonies. You become profoundly better at listening to each other.

And with the help of meditation, indigenous wisdom and maybe a bit of psychedelics (okay, definitely some psychedelics) you realize something else that most of humanity forgot – that we are not separate individuals, but rather all interconnected in a greater consciousness. That our sense of who we are – our job, our name, where we come from and what we’ve done – is all just stuff we’ve made up in our minds. That we are not a being in an environment but rather we are the environment.

And that means that hurting someone else means hurting yourself as well. Another person, an insect, a plant. It means that love is not just a nice ideal, but it’s our very nature – that selfishness actually destroys our souls, and giving and caring is what makes us alive.

We are not separate from each other. Our water, air, soil, forests, birds, wolves, ants, and people are all connected.

Bringing It Back 

So how it is being back? How are you different? What will you do next? People like to ask me.

When I got back to the U.S., everything here started to make a lot more sense to me. I had understood before that our country was founded on genocide and slavery, on white supremacy and capitalism, and that these systems shaped our laws and schools and economy. But what I hadn’t grasped was the larger worldview that birthed these systems: the belief that we are separate.

We live in a society shaped by a belief that I am separate from you and we are separate from nature, and nothing apart from humans possesses consciousness, and the universe is a dead and hostile place, and the purpose of life is to survive and reproduce. That our nature is fundamentally selfish – we are ruthless maximizers of rational self-interest and my interests are opposed to yours. And we must compete for scarce resources. To protect ourselves and thrive in this hostile universe, we must exert as much control as possible, conquering nature with our technology, mechanizing leisure, and eventually achieve our ultimate destiny of transcending disease and even death to leave the natural world behind altogether.

I lived in and believed in this story my entire life, even though I intuitively felt the wrongness of it. Now I believe a different one: the indigenous worldview of interconnectedness. The worldview that our identity comes from our connections rather than our individual achievement. That time is cyclical, not linear. And we are all one consciousness and our happiness and liberation lies in helping and loving nature and each other.

I’ve seen firsthand how much more beautiful the world of interbeing is, but I’m still stuck in this one.

How do I bridge the space between the world of separation and the world of connection?

It’s really hard. When I got back to the States, I saw separation everywhere I looked. The streets and sidewalks all wide, unnatural concrete and pavement slabs instead of dirt, the storefronts isolated and walled off instead of open-air, the cars separating people stuck in traffic instead of walking outside, the sterilized, hyper-clean yoga studios, people in restaurants eating dishes with ingredients of completely unknown origin while looking at phones instead of each other and exchanging money with a faceless server. It’s enormously hard to resist the inertia of all of it, to not get sucked into social media and stay inside and lose myself in thoughts and worries about the future.

But I took a few small steps, and I continue to take more every day.

I gave away the majority of my clothes and any possessions I didn’t think were necessary to my happiness and well-being. It’s amazing how living out of a backpack for two months can make you appreciate the freedom of a life unburdened by stuff, and how little we actually need to be happy. I also stopped wearing makeup for the most part and try not to look in the mirror that often. It makes life way chiller.

I also finally stopped using social media like a drug, deleting my Facebook and Instagram apps on my phone and starting to use them intentionally instead of scrolling mindlessly through posts. If I post anything I ask myself what my motivation behind it is – is it to make people jealous of how my great my life is, or is it to inspire and connect with them? I keep reminding myself of how much more beautiful the world outside of the digital realm is, and that always helps me put the phone down.

I started getting to know the nature in our own country, taking camping trips to Joshua Tree and road trips to the national parks of Utah and Arizona. I’m learning how beautiful the desert is, how much fun it is to climb on rocks, and how even just one weekend in nature can heal and rejuvenate my soul (and mushrooms can do that too. Mushrooms are great). I’m running at the beach and try to catch the sunset every day. And I’m volunteering at community gardening projects and want to start growing stuff at my own place.

I started to seek out and learn from Indigenous writers, artists, and activists, learning about thousands of years of knowledge of how to live in harmony with each other and solve conflicts peacefully and act for the good for the community and Mother Earth. To see ourselves as the result of seven generations behind us, and our actions as affecting seven generations in front of us. I’m marveling at how long I’ve lived without knowing any of this; of how colonized I’ve been without even realizing it.

When I hang out with my friends and family, I try to think of ways we can create together like we did when we were kids – making up music, art, stories, games. I view enjoying people’s company as being completely present with them in our surroundings and making magic happen in the moment, and not just spending all of our time talking about what’s happening in our lives. I try to listen better, letting their words fill my senses so there’s no room for my own thoughts to override them. And I think about what gifts I can give them; how I can increase the joy in their life.

I try to stretch and feel my breath throughout the day, to ground myself in my body. And I try to notice the negative thoughts that bubble up into my brain, the quick judgements I make of people, and I attempt to convert those into love, reminding myself that we are the same. I aspire to have all of my actions come from a place of love.

And I imagine how beautiful our movement would be if the goal of all of our work was to build love. If we stopped polarizing issues between “us” and “them” and saw the humanity in everyone – even Trump supporters – and put our attention on changing the system, not fighting and taking down the bad guys. If we stopped measuring change by critical mass and instead measured it by critical connections; by going deeper, not wider.

I imagine what would happen if we all realized our egos aren’t real, that our self-promotion and narcissism gets in the way of our happiness, and that inner peace comes from letting go of judgement and negativity. If we realized how ludicrous the idea of private property and possessions are in a world of interbeing. And what would happen if we started to reclaim our connection to nature, if we all grew our own food and used our gifts of human advancement to help nature thrive and make the places we live more beautiful. If we designed our buildings, laws, homes, schools from the values of love and connection instead of efficiency and control.

After I got back, I started scrolling through jobs on the Internet, but none of them appealed to me in any way – too transactional, too rigid, too unimaginative. I fought the urge to go into scarcity mode and trusted that things would happen as they were meant to, knowing that I had a safety net of unemployment money (perks of getting fired) and also very nice parents that let me crash with them (thank you parents <3). And one day, I found a posting for a non-profit job with this description:

We are seeking a campaign manager for our “Local Peace Economy” initiative. This campaign is focused on creating spaces, tools and opportunities for people and communities to reflect on and take action in divesting from extractive, violent and war-centric economies and instead build relational, local, peace-based economies.

Intrigued, I decided to apply. They asked me to submit a cover letter and an essay on “the world I envision and a strategy to get there.” I wrote about pretty much everything I said here, describing a world where we have shed our false sense of separation to embrace our interconnectedness to nature and each other, a world where we exist fully in the present, where life is about expressing our gifts and creating beauty. Where borders and bars don’t exist and we grow our food and raise our kids and meet all of our needs in community, exchanging things instead of money. And that transformation starts with each of us and radiates out through the strength of our connections to each other.

I sounded like a total hippie, basically. And that was why they decided to hire me, and now I have a full-time job in Venice helping people go through this exact process – the journey from separation to reunion.

It’s kind of hard to believe that this is my actual job now. That listening to my intuition all those months ago led me to this moment. Definitely surreal. In the words of adrienne maree brown, “what we put our attention to grows”, and I guess this is solid evidence of the power of manifestation. And a testament to all of the people who helped me get here; whose lighting of the path ahead was the reason I was able to walk it.

I’m not sure yet where I want to take this work, but I think sharing my own story and listening to others is a big part of it. And so if you’re interested in getting together and talking about this stuff let’s make it happen!

My five year old self would be proud.

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note: much love to the author Charles Eisenstein, whose writings have helped me immensely in articulating these concepts – check out his book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible, it’s free online in the true spirit of the gift. 

Grace Lee Boggs’ book The Next American Revolution is also amazing and so is adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. There are so many dope people and groups already doing this work, and I’m excited to join them in building this new beautiful world. 

After a month of traveling the Philippines, I wanted to write something that attempts to capture a bit of what this adventure has been like. Most of us are really into, if not borderline-obsessed with, taking photos of all the new places we go to in order to share our experience with everyone we know and have a tangible, permanent record of it for ourselves. And I’ve taken my fair share of photos here (and maybe more than my fair share of Instagram postings, sorry… those likes are just rather addictive), but photos can ultimately only capture experiences at a surface-level. Just the sight of a place. I want to tell you about the people who live in those places; the culture behind them; the feelings I’ve had and the things I’ve learned.

Sort of a daunting task, why is why most don’t bother trying and stick to their Facebook albums, but most people also have a job and other responsibilities, so I understand I am in a far better position to dedicate time to this endeavor. I also want to write all of these posts because I’m too lazy to verbalize this information over and over again in catch-up conversations when I get back home – hopefully you all can read them and then ask thoughtful follow up questions! But no pressure 😉  

So anyway. The Philippines. I did a lot of cool things here. Like farming! I lived and worked as a volunteer on an indigenous organic family farm in the mountains of Northern Luzon for nine days, learning how to create natural fertilizer and compost, cook traditional dishes (okay, mostly I just ate them), speak a bit of Tagalog, and even sort of conquer my fear of spiders by reluctantly co-existing in my cottage with several eight-legged friends who also happened to be the size of small dinner plates.

I went spelunking through gigantic underground caves in Sagada, which involved squeezing through absurdly small holes, rappelling up and down huge cliffs, wading through waist-high water, and trying not to get too covered in bat guano.

I spent two weeks island-hopping beautiful Palawan, chilling in hammocks on white-sand beaches by day and having epic 5-hour jam sessions with Filipino reggae bands by night. I even got my scuba diving license, which involved 24 hours of learning how to operate all the gear and take it off/put it on underwater, regulating my breath and buoyancy while 60 feet underwater, performing emergency rescue skills, studying theory, and taking a fairly intensive written exam (math was involved, who knew).

The Philippines is probably the most naturally beautiful place I’ve ever been to in my life, and I spent approximately 70% of my time here just gaping in silent disbelief at how jaw-droppingly gorgeous my surroundings were everywhere I went. But ultimately, what made my experience here so memorable wasn’t the nature – it was the people. I had a feeling I’d vibe with folks in the Philippines not just because everyone speaks English, but because the majority of my friends are – not Japanese American, not white, but Filipino American. Also, one of my favorite community organizations ever is the Pilipino Worker Center in LA. Random, I guess, but evidently we get along well, and I thought some of that affinity could maybe translate to here. Of course, there’s no substitution for my awesome friends, but I thoroughly loved every second of my time getting to know people from all over the Philippines over the course of a month.

Observations of the Philippines

Three general themes I’ve gathered from the nine places I visited; obviously generalizations and not meant as blanket statements: 

#1: Everyone is singing

Part of the reason why I was interested in coming here was because I knew people in the Philippines are fond of singing, a trait we share. But upon arriving, I quickly realized I had vastly underestimated just how much fondness Pilipinos harbor for the act of singing.

After our plane first touched down in Manila at 1 in the morning and I started shuffling zombie-like across the terminal, I kept hearing faint snippets of song emanating from my fellow passengers. At first I thought I was hallucinating them – it had been a long flight, after all. But then I saw a seven year old boy unmistakably belting out Mariah Carey at baggage claim. Moments later, I witnessed the security guard at arrivals break into a few lines of an undistinguishable song. To be clear, we’re talking about airport security guards here, supposedly the least fun human beings in the whole world.

All right, here are my people, I thought, feeling a little thrill of excitement course through me. Finally I had found a culture that wouldn’t give me strange looks for all of my spontaneous outbursts of musical theater melodies, which happens daily in the United States. It was a bit surreal to realize that here, this weird quality of mine made me the norm rather than the exception.

Things quickly started to escalade from there. In Baguio, my first stop of the trip, I trekked to the local public market to get some fruit and spotted a Philippines national singing contest broadcasted on TVs every few feet, the shopkeepers glued to them as if viewing a major NBA championship playoff. Walking back through the narrow streets and ally ways around 5PM, I discerned the angst-ridden chorus of “All By Myself” by Celine Dion being passionately vocalized in an upstairs karaoke bar.

That night around midnight, as I laid in bed in my bare-bones transient room on the fifth floor of a street best known for crack dealing and prostitution (as a tattoo artist friend I met that day at the park helpfully informed me) I couldn’t sleep because the surrounding air kept being punctured again and again by the sounds of a dozen different people belting the most dramatic female diva ballads they could select on their karaoke menus as loudly as humanely possible. I finally fell asleep around 1 and was woken up at six AM the next morning by guess what? The karaoke singers, at it again after a short five hour sleeping break.

“People really like singing here, huh?” I asked a week later of one of the Filipino college students getting his certification at the organic farm I was volunteering at.

“Being in the Philippines is like living in a musical,” he replied, completely dead-pan. “Everyone is singing all. The. Time. I’ll be in a store in Manila and the shop owner will be sweeping the floor and then randomly start singing and then other people will just walk in and join. I’m like, are you guys serious? This is real life?”

Not like I didn’t jump in with abandon as the singing enthusiast you all know me to be. I channeled my best Mariah and Whitney for karaoke in city malls, at beachfront bars, and in tiny mountain towns. I sang Alicia Keys with the band at two reggae bars and jammed with the college students on the farm and my Couchsurfing host and ten people at a cafe in Puerto Princesa. I pretended I was Moana and serenaded my fellow boat mates with “How Far I’ll Go” during our island-hopping tours, as I figured that was the closest I’ll get to being Moana. In one month in the Philippines, I sang more in total than I have in all five years of my post-college life, and relished every second of it.

#2: Everyone feels like my family 

I’m not sure how this is possible, but nearly every stranger I meet in the Philippines feels like they could be my auntie or grandma or younger brother or cousin. That’s how friendly and generous they are, and how comfortable they made me feel. Everyone seems like one big family.

When I was waiting by the side of a dusty road for the bus to Sagada, the middle-aged ladies sitting next to me spotted my gruesome insect-bitten limbs and asked me in concern about them, trying to discern their origins. “Maybe bedbugs,” they mused and I immediately recalled my idyllic dream of living full-time farm life before it had even gotten a chance to take a tentative foray out of its infant stage. When the rusty Jeepney bus finally appeared, to my chagrin it was already packed full of people. But instead of bypassing us indifferently, it came to a halt and all the men clambered out and climbed onto the roof of the vehicle to let the women sit inside, hoisting our bags up with them to free more space.

“Can I sit up there too?” I asked, thinking it would make for a good story to hold onto the top of a battered Jeepney for dear life through a windy mountain road.

“Sure,” the men said, motioning me to join them.

“There’s a spot here inside, better come in here,” the middle-aged ladies said, hastily squishing everyone even closer together to make room for me, clearly predicting a different ending to the story.

As we started down the bumpy mountain path, squeezed together side by side like a can of sardines (I’ve never actually seen a can of sardines but it just feels like good imagery), I marveled at how completely opposite this unfolding scene was from commuter culture in the US. Back home on public transportation, people attempt to take up as much space as possible and make room only when absolutely forced, and the more tightly packed the bus, the more tense the atmosphere. That is, if they even take the bus – most of us elect to drive ourselves, and with that comes even more heightened feelings of aggression and ill will towards our fellow commuters.

But here, everyone made room happily for new passengers. Every time someone clambered inside the Jeepney it felt like they were joining a party. Everyone was chatting to each other across the bus, and because the discourse wasn’t very English-like I couldn’t figure out if people all knew each other already or if they were just really amicable. Even the drivers would give friendly little honks to each other as they passed by on the road.

Then a nice lady started talking to me too (by the way, this is a rough outline of many, many other conversations I’ve had with locals in the Philippines):

“Where are you from?”

“California.”

“But your face looks… Korean?” (Chinese was also a popular contender)

“Japanese!”

“Ah, so you’re half Japanese and half American?”

“No, I’m like… 100% Japanese and 100% American.” (I would elaborate on this and depending on the appropriateness of the situation I’d also attempt to start a spirited dialogue on what “American” means, how white people are also all immigrants to the US, etc etc.)

“And you are traveling alone?”

“Yup.”

“You have no companion?” (it was always phrased exactly like this, and always asked in an incredulous tone)

“Yup, it’s just me.”

“Do you have friends here?”

“Not yet, but I will. I make them as I go.”

It’s very easy here, I would explain. And it’s true. In 20 countries I’ve been to in my life, I can say that the Philippines has been by far the easiest place in the world for me to connect with people.

“You do well in the Philippines if you’re a chill person, not aggressive or easily upset,” a new homie explained to me a few days ago. “We’re chill about everything here. Patient. Like even if one car hits another on the street, the drivers get out and are like, hey, it’s cool, we’re all friends here right. Come over for beers later and we’ll figure it out.” 

“I rear ended a guy a few months ago in LA and he sued me for eight thousand dollars,” I replied.

“Ah. He probably wouldn’t like it here very much then.”

#3: Millennials here are really good at turning their dreams into reality 

In my time here, I’ve been struck by how many young people I’ve met are charting their own path – realizing a passion and vision for something they want to achieve, then pursuing it and making it a reality. It’s ironic that in the U.S. – the so-called land of opportunity – the status quo is actually just to search for and apply to jobs that already exist. The safe route. But here, the idea of starting an entirely new project/business, something no one has ever done before, seems to be totally normal and solidly in the realm of the possible. 

For example, James, my wonderful Couchsurfing host in Puerto Princesa, loves traveling by way of hammock, so he decided to invent a new product: a hammock with a mosquito net that converts into a travel neck pillow. He figured out how to source recycled materials, create the design, and share it with the masses, and now Hammock Republic is the most popular hammock brand in the Philippines. He sustains himself entirely on income from the business, so he travels the world at the same time. He’s also a well-known travel blogger and a yoga teacher (we even did a morning session in his apartment together), and plans to open a healthy/mindful cafe/yoga studio in El Nido in the next few months. When I asked him where he got the idea for Hammock Republic, he said it actually came to him during a meditation session. 

Efren, another homie I met in Palawan, opened his own diving center and is now building a hostel upstairs. He likes climbing mountains, so he set a goal of climbing the highest mountain of all seven continents in the world, which the Palawan government somehow found out about and now wants to sponsor his whole trip. No big deal.

I met the third homie, Charlie, because I ran into one of my fellow farm volunteers weeks later randomly at a restaurant in Coron and he mentioned there was a secret natural pool nearby so I hitched a tricycle ride over to the spot he told me to go to and when I got there I met Charlie and he explained it was actually his land that he was in the process of developing with a friend. “Mount Avangan Eco-Adventure Park”, they planned on calling it, with the goal of creating a sort of forest haven for people to camp, hike, swim, and learn sustainable farming and building with recycled materials. It’s an awesome counter-balance to the rapid development and commercialization of Coron, as it’s intended to be a place that preserves nature and helps people get closer to it, not further away. They only started construction three months ago and have already made a ton of progress:

“How did you guys even know how to create all this?” I asked Charlie, gesturing around at the bamboo hut setups.

He shrugged. “It was easy. We just did it.”

“Maybe for you. I don’t know how to build anything like this.”

“Nah. If you believe it can happen, then you can make it happen. I used to be a tour guide, but it really didn’t fulfill me, but now I think building this place, teaching our people how to reuse plastic and grow food, learning to take care of nature, that’s my purpose. Everyone has a purpose, right? Do you know what yours is?”

“I know what I want to do, but I don’t know how to do it,” I said. “How am I supposed to fulfill my purpose? It’s difficult, isn’t it?”

He smiled. “It’s not hard, and it’s not easy.” He paused and laughed. “It is what it is. I’ll just leave you with that.”

What struck me about all of these people is 1, how casual and humble they seem to be about their endeavors, like they didn’t really think too hard before pursuing these projects and just assumed things would work out one way or another. And now, they’re totally successful but they don’t really think too hard about that, either. 

And 2, how free and happy they seem. They’re living simply and naturally, without a lot of physical or mental stuff crowding their space, and living entirely day-by-day, moment-to-moment. Being around them gave me an immense sense of peace. And it made me start to think that if they can chart their own lives, I can too.

Random Other Philippines Things I Appreciate

-In the small town of Coron exists a garbage truck. This garbage truck travels around town every morning with a giant speaker on top of it blaring a Filipino song that bears a striking resemblance to “Puff the Magic Dragon” in order to let everyone know to put their trash out for collection. Apparently, they change the song every year and the lyrics have to do with trash and not littering. My Couchsurfing host said last year’s chorus was like “Don’t, put your, don’t put your garbage in the street, please, please throw it away” or something very roughly like that. 

So wait, does that mean the city actually commissions a song for the sole purpose of being used as the rallying cry of trash collection? Who writes the song? Whose idea was this? I had so many questions and received no answers.

-Sagada, a town in the mountains twelve hours north of Manila, is indigenous AF. Self-governed by the entire community for thousands of years, although today they have a modern city hall with a mayor, the elected political leaders still go to the elders for counsel and approval of every decision. Only native Sagadans are allowed to own property, as well.

“We were the only place in Mountain Province that was able to resist the Spanish colonization,” explained Lester, a cool dude in town who owns a private museum of indigenous Igorot cultural artifacts.

“Oh dang, how did that happen?” I asked.

“We’re head hunters, so we just cut their heads off when they came here,” he said.

“Ah.” 

-One of the Filipino customs I was most excited to learn about was the practice of completely disregarding utensils in favor of eating with one’s hands. I’ve known that I prefer eating with my hands since I started eating solid food at age 0.5, but since age three or so it has been socially unacceptable to continue this manner. So for the last twenty four years, I’ve used forks and chopsticks only begrudgingly while secretly believing them to be a pretentious and unnecessary apparatus. I think utensils create yet another unnatural barrier between ourselves and the food we eat. It distances us from the earth, ya know? 

So when the owner of the family farm I was volunteering at told me I could use my hands to consume the dinner of grilled fish, rice and vegetables he prepared, I thought it was too good to be true. But then he started digging in utensil-less and I followed suit. And it was awesome and satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain. All I know is that when you can touch your food, you know it more, and it’s important to really know what we fuel and nourish our bodies with. 

-Lastly Cebu Pacific, a Philippines airline, played a trivia game with all the passengers on our flight to Manila called “Hashtag Millennials”. They would call out acronyms frequently used by #millennials and the first person to raise their hand and give the correct full phrase got an adorable yellow travel pillow. We all got really into it and though I sadly ended up pillow-less after an intense three rounds, I think the world would be a more charming and pleasant place if everyone played games on their airplane rides. And we’d all finally have an interesting answer to the question of “how was your flight?” posed by friends and family we travel to visit.

Long story short, I can now confirm that it is indeed more fun in the Philippines, as the Department of Tourism suggests. 

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Thanks for reading if you managed to get all the way down here. This officially concludes my Philippines post, but never fear, I still plan to write one more detailing my overall reflections and lessons from this whole trip. I might even bring back the handmade iPad drawings!