So, what’s important?  For me, it’s important to keep dreaming.  That’s why I’m back here – that’s what this blog is about.  Sometimes, I feel I don’t have the right to dream – that I should just shut the hell up, get a job, grow old and die, like so many others do.  But I can’t let that be my life.

I’m still in paradise.  I know I wrote about shopping for a different country or looking for a new state to move to before.  I still think about those things from time to time, but mostly I’m trying to be more present and just enjoy where I am.  I’m in Hawaii, after all.  It’s not a horrible place to be!

In the last year, I didn’t move – not even to another apartment.  I have the same place with my same girlfriend, our same furniture, and our same dog.  It’s good.  It’s a lot more than many people have.  We’re fortunate, and I’m trying to remember that.  I got a job, I quit it, and I got another job.  I started playing music more and going to open mics.  Then I didn’t.  Then I did again.  On New Year’s, Susan and I decided we wanted to have more fun this year.  I think that’s a good goal.  And we have had some fun amidst the uncertainties and imperfections of life.  I have another new goal:  to become completely comfortable with the uncertainties and imperfections of life.  I think this would give me more peace.

Anyway, it’s good to be back on my blog of lofty dreams.  Peace is still at the top of the list of my lofty dreams – peace in the world and peace in my mind.

I don’t know how Sensei became homeless.  He was already living on the Ala Wai when Susan and I met him.  When we first met him, he had a job as a chef.  But even working full-time, he couldn’t make enough money for a deposit on an apartment.  He was fired when the restaurant owner found out he was homeless.  She decided his being homeless meant he was also dirty.  Sensei started collecting unemployment.  He looked for another job, but he refused to work for $8/hour and he made more money on unemployment.

Sensei was always telling us great stories.  In one of our many conversations, I told Sensei that he ought to write all of his great stories down and make a book.  He said, “Oh, I’ve got an idea for a book…  It’s called Aloha, My Ass!” – a book about being homeless in Hawaii.  I thought it was a fantastic idea, and so I bought a pen and a composition book.  I found a picture of a monkey bent over and looking through his own legs with “Aloha” written on his ass (pictured here).  Using this picture, I made an “Aloha, My Ass” cover for the composition book and gave it and the pen to Sensei as a gift.  Every once in awhile, I’d ask him how his book was coming along, and he’d say, “The book has been started…”

Like so many guys living along the Ala Wai, Sensei contracted MRSA, a horrible antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and he drank a little too much (I’m sure to numb the pain and shame of being homeless and feeling powerless to do anything about it).  His health deteriorated.

Over the last few months, Sensei has seemed sick and tired a lot of the time.  On Thursday of last week, I saw Sensei while walking Jake in the morning.  He looked sick and all blown up like a balloon.  I asked him how he was feeling.  He said he thought he had a stomach virus and that he’d gained 15 pounds of water weight in the last two weeks because of a new medication he was put on.

On Friday at 2:30am, one of his friends found Sensei dead on his bench.  When I heard the news, it broke my heart.  I don’t know Sensei’s whole life story.  I don’t even know his real name.  But I know that he’s not the only war veteran who has not been taken care of upon returning home and who has ended up living on the street.  To me, it feels terribly wrong and unjust for a soldier to come home, not get the care he needed, end up homeless, and die on a park bench.

Sensei’s cause of death is still unknown, but the homeless guys out there suspect a heart attack or stroke.  Yesterday (Saturday), they had a little ceremony for Sensei.  When Jake and I walked by his bench this morning, it was covered with a bunch of liquor bottles filled with flowers and that “Aloha, My Ass” notebook I gave him, which has become a place for people to write to Sensei and pay their respects.  I added a little note of my own to the many pages of goodbyes.  I started by saying, “Sensei, Aloha, My Ass is right.”

I was wrong.  Gavin and I have remained friends to this day, but our romance never blossomed.  And as we went to colleges on opposite sides of the mainland, my feelings about marriage and my future changed.  In my early 20s, I decided I didn’t ever want to get married.  I felt that I could never promise the traditional wedding vows to anyone.  I particularly took issue with the parts about “obeying” and “till death do us part.”  I know I’ll never blindly obey anyone.  And I can’t realistically promise to be with someone until the day we die, because things happen in life.  Things change.  It is important to me to keep my word, to not promise anything I can’t deliver.  And it’s also important to me to live my life to the fullest and always keep growing personally and spiritually.  If at any point it weren’t the healthiest and best thing for my partner and me to remain together, I wouldn’t want us to.  Too many people stay in miserable, abusive, and dead marriages, because they made a promise to be with their partner for life.  I think that’s tragic.  So, in my early 20s, I decided marriage was not for me.

And then I met Susan, an intelligent, kind, and beautiful woman.  I fell in love.  Not the “this is like my parents, so it must be right” kind of love that I felt with Gavin.  Not the “I’m infatuated with you, because you make me feel superior” kind of love, or the “I desperately need you, because you love me when I can’t love myself” kind of love, or the “I feel intense desire and lust, so it must be love” kind of love, like I felt in my past relationships.  Those really aren’t love at all.  Susan made me want to be a better person.  I admired who she was – her sense of justice and fairness.  We shared the same core values, and I felt we could learn a lot from each other and grow together.  And after being together for a couple of years, my feelings on marriage changed again.  I still didn’t feel I could promise the traditional wedding vows to anyone, but I wanted to be in a committed relationship with Susan.  And who says we couldn’t write our own vows?  Who says we couldn’t create what Gary Zukav calls a “spiritual partnership,” a marriage for the purpose of spiritual growth?

Well, it turns out that a lot of people do.  Marriage for gay couples is not legal in most of the world, including the United States of America – supposedly the land of freedom and equality.  Currently, gay marriage is legal in 5 states and Washington D.C. and banned in 30 other states.  Some states give gay couples all the state rights of marriage, but call it a “civil union” or a “domestic partnership.”  Still other states offer some of the state rights of marriage under these names or, like Hawaii, call it a “reciprocal beneficiary.”  All very unromantic names, aren’t they?  “Domestic partnership,” I think, is the funniest one.  It sounds like we clean houses together.  Even with full marriage rights in some states, most of the 1,138 rights that come with marriage are federal, and they are currently denied to all gay couples in the US.

So, now I want to get married, but because of where I live (Hawaii) and who I want to marry (Susan), I can’t.  Coincidentally, Gavin fell in love with a man and is dealing with being treated as a second-class citizen in the USA as well.  In the end, I don’t know what will happen.  Maybe Susan and I will make a commitment to each other one day, and maybe not.  But I believe in my heart that we should have the right to decide for ourselves.

The main educational course, Voice Is Power, will be a holistic course for writing, singing, and speaking out, designed to teach people to recognize the power of their own voices, how to use their voices for healing, empowerment, justice, and peace, and to find where their passions and the world’s needs connect.  I’m working on writing the curriculum for this course now.

Right now, I’m in a transitional period in my life – looking for a job in order to save some money to move to the mainland with Susan, still working for Kids Talk Story (a creative writing program) part of the time, working on my own curriculum ideas when possible… dreaming and planning for the future.  I suppose one could argue that life itself is a bunch of transitions, because things are always changing.  But right now, I have that very strong feeling of being unsettled that usually comes with big transitions – of being simultaneously excited and scared of what will come next.

Maybe sometimes our “trying to make a living” gets confused or entangled with “trying to make a life.”  I DO want to make a decent living, so that I can have a place to live and food to eat.  However, what I really want is to master the art of living – not making a living, but living itself. I think the confusion comes in because I live in a society that values work and money above everything else – above even one’s well-being or life.  I am trained to always look for ways to make money.  If I love writing, make a career of it.  If I love singing, become a professional singer.  And even more often, unfortunately, those messages don’t come with one’s interests in mind; instead of “make money doing what you love,” the message is “make money however you can, no matter how unethical it may be.  It is a dog-eat-dog world, and you have to look out for #1.”  I do not subscribe to that belief.  I believe that I can do something I love for a living.  But even more, I think that I can have a happy life and that work is only a part of it.

I’ve had a couple ideas recently.  One is to record on GarageBand my own a capella version of The Fray’s song, Never Say Never. Another is to write what I call a “fragmented memoir.”  This would be a memoir with different sections giving a different perspective on my life.  One would be my life as a tragedy.  Another would be my life as a comedy… and so on.

What is the significance of these ideas?  Maybe nothing.  Will they lead me to a way to make a living?  Maybe, maybe not.  Or a life?  Maybe, maybe not.  I can only hope that following my heart’s desires, however strange or disconnected from the rest of my life they may seem, will lead me in a positive direction.  In the very least, I think that it will make me more in tune with myself and my own intuition.  And that alone is very valuable.

A fellow writer suggested that instead of fleeing the country, we ought to stay and try to change things in the United States.

I don’t know if wanting to move someplace – whether it’s across the country or out of the country – is like chasing a rainbow.  Maybe I’ll never be able to capture what I’m after outside of myself; maybe I can only find true peace and happiness within, and moving around (or even dreaming of it) is a convenient distraction from that.

Then again, what if moving someplace in particular would somehow facilitate the process of discovering my own inner peace?

Sometimes I wonder how to tell the difference between true desire (which leads you on your true life path) and obsession, between resistance brought on by fear and resistance brought on by honest disinterest, between what is really good for me and what isn’t.

So, for the sake of trying to look at this practically, here are some pros and cons to moving to Massachusetts…  Susan and I have been looking particularly at Northampton, MA.

Pros:

• Gay marriage and adoption are legal.
• Massachusetts has a public option for healthcare.
• Seasons (sometimes cold ones, but the change can be nice…).
• Northampton has great schools – elementary through college – which means the potential for great jobs (as Susan and I both work in the education field) and a good education for kids down the road…
• Northampton has been called the “top town for a simple life,” the “#1 small arts town in the U.S.,” and (and I quote) “Lesbianville, USA.”  Three things that are especially appealing to Susan and me: simplicity, the arts, and an acceptance of our relationship.
• Cost of living in Northampton is definitely lower than Hawai’i.  We could even buy a house at some point!
• Bike trails and parks where we can walk our dog Jake.
• More social and political activism (to get us working on making positive change within the U.S. instead of fleeing).
• Friends and family on the East Coast.
• The ability to see my sister more often, as she often goes to New York on business.

Cons:

• Well, it ain’t Hawai’i – by which I mostly mean, it gets cold! Hawai’i's also got a laidback atmosphere we enjoy.  And beautiful beaches!
• We’d miss our friends Jill & Evelyn.

I’m sure I’ll think of more pros and cons as we do more research.  Right now, however, I’m thinking that Massachusetts may be a decent compromise to getting more of what we want without having to leave the country altogether…

1. We can get married.
2. We can adopt kids.
3. We have universal healthcare.
4. The people and the Earth matter more than profits.

Yes, we’re not talking about moving to the U.S. mainland; we’re talking about leaving the country. So far, based on the above criteria, we’ve found eight countries that could work:

1. Canada. We’re leaning towards this one, just because it seems most feasible and is closest to our friends and family.  (Don’t want to break my mama’s heart!)
2. The Netherlands. The first country to legalize gay marriage, and Amsterdam is ranked the #1 most bicycle-friendly city in the world.
3. Spain. Probably the warmest of all our options (which is a consideration after living in San Diego and Hawai’i my whole life!), and we do already know a little Spanish!
4. Sweden.
   
5. Norway.
6. Belgium.
7. United Kingdom. They don’t have gay marriage, but from what we can tell, they give same-sex couples all/most of the rights of marriage and call it something else.
8. Iceland. Same as the U.K. on gay marriage rights.

There’s still time.  We’ll be in Hawai’i until at least May 2010 as Susan finishes up her PhD at the University of Hawai’i – Manoa.  But a big move and even dual citizenship could be in our future…

I don’t want to do that.  I want to be smarter than that.

So now I’m asking myself a question:  What do I want from all of the things I want?  For example, I want to take a year off of work.  I want to marry Susan.  I want to join an a capella group.  I want to go to Italy.  But what is it that I think all of these things will give me?  What is the desire that underlies them all?

I guess it’s what most of us want:  We want to be happy.  To be at peace with ourselves and the world.

So, the question then that follows is:  Do I need to do all, or any, of those things in order to be happy or at peace?  Hmmm…  That’s what I tell myself sometimes, yes.  But is it really true?  Can I be happy now? Can I be happy without those things?  Or before I have those things? In fact, maybe being happy now would help to create those things…  Would it?

I have no great answers.  Just these contemplations right now.  Truth is that I am quite happy with my life as it is.  There’s just this gnawing feeling that it could be so much more.

Can I enjoy the journey of life and not always have my eye on the destination?  How do I set goals, dream, and strive for great things, and at the same time, be present and happy right now?

My heart tells me that stopping the activity of my mind is one way.  It is when my mind is caught up in the to-do’s of work and my emotions are on overdrive to accomplish a million different things… that I feel detached from my own soul.  So, for now, I will just stop.

Susan and me on top of the "pillboxes" in Lanikai.

One big dream Susan and I have is one we each came up with on our own and then to our surprise, we discovered we had the same dream!  That dream is to take a full year off of work – to practice following our intuitions, gut instincts, passions, and insights.  To take time to truly discover who we really are at our cores and what we really want out of life (as opposed to being constantly caught by the need to merely make a living, please others, and “be productive”). We don’t know yet how we’ll pull this off, but we’re determined to find a way.  We’re saving our money and looking into caretaking as a way to live rent-free…

Another dream we have is to get married. This is probably a stronger dream for me than it is for Susan, since a former marriage left a bad taste in her mouth… but for the first time, she has said that she wants to marry me, too.  Of course, there’s somewhat of a challenge to this one:  the fact that in most places on Earth, gay marriage is not legal.  It isn’t legal in Hawai’i, where we live now.  So, to marry AND enjoy all the rights and benefits that come with marriage, we will have to fight for the laws to change here and/or move.  Once again, we don’t know how we’ll do it exactly, but we’re determined to make it happen.

So, there you have it.  My career dream is now on the back burner, and my love dream is taking center stage. I imagine our year off as the perfect time to build the foundation for a happy career anyway.  (Susan and I have talked, too, about starting our own non-profit organization, so maybe that is in the cards…)  So, until then (or until my dreams change again…), my energy is going into making our year off and our wedding realities.  Here’s an idea:  We get married, and then call our year off our “year-long honeymoon”!

Here’s to you and me and our dreaming, growing, learning, loving, and living together, Susan…

This is Susan and me at Lanikai Beach a couple of years ago.

Her name is Susan.  She’s been my girlfriend for over 5 years now.  We live together in Honolulu with our dog, Jake.  And in the last few weeks, she has developed progressively worse pain in her upper back and down her right arm.  A week ago Sunday, we ended up in the ER at 3AM, because the pain was so incredibly excruciating.  Every painkiller the doctors gave her didn’t work.  They kept trying more powerful ones.  They didn’t work.

At 7AM that morning, Susan was taken in for an MRI.  At 9AM, we got the results:  she has a herniated disc in her neck.  Their suggestion:  surgery.

After several trips to several doctors to get several opinions, Susan decided to go through with the surgery.  It is scheduled for this Thursday.

And that is why my dream has taken a detour.  At first, when all of this started happening, I thought it was an interruption to my big dream, because I haven’t had the time or energy to pursue it.  But as I’ve watched Susan suffer in pain, I’ve felt my heart grow.  Beneath all of the sleep deprivation and emotional exhaustion, there is deep gratitude, because all of this has shown me that one of my biggest dreams has already come true: I have someone incredible to share my life with.  Tragedies and heartache are never fun in and of themselves, but they carry with them great treasures.  You just have to open your eyes to see them.  This has made me see what is truly important in life: people.  Susan.  Love.

This has not interrupted my dream; it has brought it into focus.