Here are some more photos!.

Wow. I am in Italy in a stone house on a hill facing a valley of steep cliffs and ancient terraced herb and tree gardens.

The journey was intense. Train from Schiedam to Amsterdam, train from Amsterdam to Milano through Bonn and Frankfurt and Mannheim, Basel, Vienna...all places I have heard of all my life and not yet visited. Chloe the cat had some rough times with the travel until I figured out (with encouragement from a friend thank you!) to use the leash halter thingy I have. She rode in my lap from Holland to Italy and that was fine. Schlepping the disintegrating duffle tied together with rope weighing 50 pounds and a drum bag and a computer knapsack and a cat in a cat cage...this was challenging, but we did it!

I went to the TIM store in Milano station and got a gsm phone and a usb internet modem similar to the one I have in the US, so I can do my online work here. Woo hoo!!

Here are some photos.

30 March 2008
10:00 on the platform in Schiedam waiting for the train, heading to Amsterdam. I'm seeing people, and feeling the oneness. I experience us as the same. Eyes meet, or not, we are in proximity more or less. I notice how much energy we spend pretending we don't know each other, pretending we are not the same, pretending that we do not recognize our cousins.

22:00 on the train from Amsterdam back to Schiedam, listening to Yoko Ono Kiss, Kiss, Kiss. People get on and off. We are soft flexible life forms in these metal serpents speeding over this marshy place, each with our own stories heading to our own place. In this expansive micro-moment of universal time waves of light and particles of universe coalesce into our experiences, us wearing bodies moving through space time, many times believing the stories to be definitive, when they are really just flashes of motion, some of which we can sway with our intentions, and flow with, or not.

I don't know why this is happening to me, but I am changing. The word that best describes what I am becoming is "transparent." Not so much in the visual way of being seen through, but more like..I feel like life is flowing through me, and is less obstructed than in the past. Not so much gets stuck and stays with me.

Skies are grey, it's spitting rain. It's wonderful to see friends here in Holland. I am still working out the travel logistics to get to Italy next week.

Back in 2006 I attended a round table discussion about mental health issues in post Katrina New Orleans at an American Psychological Association conference held in New Orleans. The discussion was very interesting, and out of that has come a series of articles, including one by yours truly. Check them out.