First, I want to say hello to any of you who have followed my epic ride on the mainland. At this point, I am feeling like I have done it to death and we can let it be for now. I don’t think I meant for it to take so long for me to pick up writing on the blog again, but it did. The saga of Larry’s Somewhere Under the Rainbow Motorcycle Adventure is a tough act to follow.

I have to qualify the not writing business a little. I got home Friday evening, October 2^nd and the only thing I was certain of was that I wouldn’t be able to write for a while. Nearly a month has gone by and I still feel overwhelmed by the whole experience on the mainland. However, I had an October 19^th deadline for ForKauai and I decided that the first thing I wrote ought to be in the paper because the most readers are likely there versus the blog. I knew it was going to be about the ride and would be very difficult because the experience felt so big and the words so small. Well, that is behind us now and I feel liberated.

A week has gone by since I delivered my story to the newspaper. I confess to being totally relieved that I was even able to write that first piece. I will post it here shortly, so there is no need for me to resurrect it now. Even though the planning of my ride took over most of the blog’s space, it was not the reason for its existence in the first place. It is about writing, an affliction I can’t seem to escape.

I am not sure where we’ll go from here. It is easy to survey the headlines and find an endless supply of outrage, but in many ways it is too easy and it is a fairly useless exercise. Right now, we have the worst refugee crisis in history. Millions of people have been displaced, generations of families with empty pockets, wandering from one closed border to another. Our country is largely responsible for this catastrophic upheaval and we have opened our own door just a crack, barely enough to let in a single ray of light. I can write about this, but to what effect?

Everyday, we get up and face small challenges and sometimes larger ones. We can be out of coffee or have a cracked tooth. We can be out of propane or on the verge of losing our job. First, we all live in small worlds, where things impact us directly. In the world of Zen, there is something called dependent co-arising, which means we are effected by everything, everywhere, that which occurred or has yet to occur.

So, I will continue to write about my life, about what I am thinking and where I am going with it all. One life touching other lives because of its honesty and sincerity is the direction for me. We have so much in common and finding those chords is the harmony I continue to seek.