Devil With A Blue Dress On

It's been wonderful getting back in touch with my family and friends. On Halloween I took my twelve-year-old niece and some of her friends out trick-or-treating. They were dressed as a fairy, a demon (my niece, appropriately enough), a 1950s era swing dancer (broad polka-dot skirt), and "Little Black Riding Hood", with a couple of feather masks thrown in for good measure. (It was a diverse group: one black girl, two hispanics, and my niece who is 3/4 white and 1/4 Japanese.) I wore my blue samue and a matching blue hachimaki (a wide Japanese headband usually tied at the back). I looked like a sushi chef, or perhaps the Karate Kid going through some mid-life crisis. (Maybe not too far from the truth...)

It was kinda strange to be wearing my monk robes around my sister's family because they don't even know about my Walkabout yet. But I told them that I was dressed up as Zen Monk Ichibuti, which was appropriate enough since during my Walkabout on the East Coast I had been corresponding with my niece by e-mailing her brain puzzlers that I always framed as experiences of Ichibuti's. (For example: "Zen monk Ichibuti visited the SashimiSmashi Samurai School. He saw that it took seven samurai with seven sharp swords seven minutes to slice and serve seven Caesar salads. How long would it take sixteen samurai with sixteen sharp swords to slice and serve sixteen Caesar salads?" Hint: it's not sixteen minutes.)

As I've been visiting with family and friends, I've watched myself slip back into the old habits of this familiar lifestyle. My self-awareness decreases as my distractions increase. I'm as scatter-brained as ever, but then again, I was pretty scatter-brained as a monk too. Any sense of inner peace that I may have cultivated from my experiment on the road is rapidly dissipating. It's harder to remember to practice mindfulness when the mind and body react to familiar stimuli in their previously conditioned ways.

But I've been careful not to set myself up with too many expectations. My transition out of the monastery eight years ago taught me that insights can fade, and new ways of being often give way to the old. Letting go of transformation itself may be the most enduring lesson after all. Already, my Walkabout is beginning to feel like it was a dream. Did that deer really wake me up behind the Dollar Store? Did that "hooker with a heart of gold" really pull a coat out of her purse for that cold homeless guy ridiculing her? Did Terry really die? If I hadn't written these things down, then I would be seriously questioning my memory now, for many of my experiences seem surreally dream-like.

Speaking of dreams, I had an interesting one a little while ago that humorously reflects my continuing angst about this whole monk experience. (More on the angst itself at a later date.) I dreamt that I was in a small town musical revue. I was experiencing a lot of anxiety, partly due to the fact that I couldn't remember the words to the song that I was supposed to be singing, but probably more because I was exceedingly uncomfortable in my blue dress with its multitude of blue balloons attached all over it---an all-too-familiar shade of sky blue, I might add.....


"Are you going to get a job?"
---my Mother