THOUGHTS on Intellectual Credibility

A good friend on mine posted on his blog "THOUGHTS" an interesting article about having conversations with those who are "typically" educated (typically meaning graduated from high school and went on to successfully complete at least four years in college). For a man such as he, a man who has only completed a ninth grade education, I feel compelled to comment the chip on my own shoulder, being a college drop-out and only completing one year at an institution of higher learning.

The emotions I've felt, mostly short-comings with people who have had an education, haven't arisen in everyday conversation as much as I would defensively like to think. Usually the times when I feel like I'm mostly offended, offending, scoffed at, or pitied are the times in the conversation where people start siting credentials. I've found that due to my life experience and my observance of the world, through the reading of news and participation in politics and theology among numerous other things, I can and have carried very informative conversations with people who have no formal education at all, working at the bottom of the totem pole flipping burgers and serving fries as well as those who have obtained Masters and Ph.Ds from some of the most prestigious institutions in the world.

The one thing that the most enlightening people seem to have in common is their outlook on life. The people I find most intriguing are those who have worked diligently for what they have accomplished, whether it be finishing umpteen years of school or working their way up from cutting sheetmetal and welding to hold a very rewarding position in a large and successful company. The common thread is a work ethic, something my parents have instilled in me since I was old enough to start working at all.

I don't hold a high regard a person's perception of my education and experience unless I hold theirs in high regard as well. There are a great many people in this world whom I respect, regardless of whether or not I agree with them on their positions in various things. The people that have worked hard to obtain what they have, as I feel I have, are the people whose opinions of me are the ones I will consider. The ones who haven't worked for their standing in society, the ones who stop when they see their mission accomplished, those are the people who I hesitate to accept. Those are the people who cannot understand that one must be working one's entire life for a better understanding of self, which usually translates into hard work, discipline, and honesty.

Some of the greatest teachers in this world have been the ones who have had no education whatsoever. Some of the most spectacular and informative nuggets of information I've ever heard have been from bus drivers, waiters, and children, especially children, whose worlds are almost pure thought, untainted by external opinions and pressures.

Would I consider these things in making my own judgements on one's opinion? Absolutely. Wise men have talked about the honesty and irreverence of the "uneducated" for centuries as "typical" educations seem to lead to a certain arrogance that roughly relates to the attitudes of those who obtain power without earning it, like senators and representatives and presidents in an centuries-old republic who have been given something instead of earning it.

My personal beliefs support those who have earned their perspective. It's as simple as that.

The Early Morning Start

Whether it's climbing or for work, sometimes you gotta get up at the crack of dawn or before. I am up here at 5 in the morning waiting to pick up a co-worker from the bus stop for an exciting day at work. I love work.

Essence

We get to places in our lives, destinations, where we think we've got everything. Sometimes it's a passion for someone you love or something you love to do that pushes you into believing that it's invincibly strong. Usually when we wind up in these spots of pure joy, we thank God, we do the right things, and we take it at face value. We get lost in the moment, and we feel like nothing can stop us. Instead of thanking God, and facing the joy with humility, some of us, like me, fail to respect the fragility of these things. We see them for what they are, appreciate them, and then have a stupid lapse in judgement that destroys (or does it's damnedest to destroy) everything that you stand for, that you understood about everything.

I can't say I'm a perfect person, nor would I ever want to. There's no such thing. But, in a very big way, I am one of the rare people who has found pure happiness. I have been blessed in ways few people could even begin to understand. I have found a spiritually charged love and passion that flows through me more deeply than I even knew I had the depths to behold. And when I first found it, I couldn't even express it in ways I could understand myself. It's so much bigger than me, than anything I knew about the Universe or God or anything.

Despite all of these things, despite the promise of riches eternally, I made some bad judgements that hurt me more than anyone else has ever hurt myself. I thought even though that this thing I had found was so amazing, so overwhelming, that, when tempted with something that was inexorably tied to my past, I faltered. The hardest part, for me, was even acknowledging it. After some very traumatic events in my life, I became an expert at mentally disconnecting myself from things. I can think about people who have meant more to me and are no longer in my life for whatever reason, people I loved, people I had all the hope in the future for, and now they're gone, and I can't shed a tear. I want to, and I can't.

But this is different. The compartmentalizing of this is impossible, because it was so big to begin with. It was so overwhelming, it was like water filling a water balloon that can't pop. It just slowly rips open and the water winds up consuming every aspect of your life. What people don't realize is that if you add something to that water, if you taint it, that tainted water now consumes your life, too. I'm learning this the hard way. I have a life, and it's consumed with tainted water that leaked from the water balloon of my soul which was overflowing with joy and elation.

Where I go from here is inconsequencial. If I'm lucky, I will be able to make it right, filter my water, make it a place of happiness absent of sorrow. But it is largely obvious to me that had I not tainted it in the first place, life would be peaches and cream. This is my warning. This is the essence of the moment. Don't take the things that mean the most to you for granted. Don't fail to acknowledge how much those things really mean to you.

People are loved. We have families and friends who would buy you dinner and feed you even if you couldn't care less. But what we don't have is passion, because people don't take the time to wait for it or earn it. I challenge you, the reader, to respect the passions in your life. They are strong, like spiders webs. They are simple. They are beautiful. They are home. But, they are only distructable by you as it's your passion. Have faith. Love. Don't be afraid.

Warning

I spent this past weekend in a climbing oasis, and all I had considered all weekend was how great it was to be out with great friends and great rocks. I didn't consider the people that had come before me, both the brave and the foolish, who have lost their lives in pursuit of the thing that gave them meaning. Taken to a larger context, it doesn't have to relate to just rock climbing. What about the drummer who dies in a plane crash en route to a gig? One could argue that he died doing what he loved, too.

The point, I guess, is that we should not be scared of death. We should be scared of not living. Don't wait until you're diagnosed with cancer to start marking ticks off your bucket list. Don't wait until you're a grandmother before  you start pursuing true happiness and love. Don't let life pass you by. Play the guitar. Paint a picture. Visit Paris. Start a family with someone who makes you laugh and stay up way too late, and laugh and let your kids stay up too late, too.

Don't let life pass you by.

Vedauwoo

Wyoming is different. There's a real sense of freedom and independence up here. I love it.

My posse and I have been camping out here since Friday evening, and yesterday, I had the crack climbing experience of my life.

Vedauwoo is this fascinating Mecca of sharp rocks and cracks. There are cracks that will swallow you whole, and there are cracks that you can barely force your fingers into. The rock itself seems to be this conglomerate of millions of sharp pebbles glued together. It's amazing.

The area looks like God was simply picking up boulders the size of houses and trucks and dropping them all over the landscape, as if these boulders were popcorn. The formations of some of the more unique rocks I've ever seen, too. There is one formation called the "Nautilus", which is the picture I attached to this entry. The top of it looks like the ship from the Disney version of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea".

We climbed a route on it, a very stout 5.7. I think everything here by default should be rated two or three grades more difficult. Unlike normal or "slab" climbing, crack climbing is a much more involved. There are instances where you're forced to shove your toes deep into the crack and stand on just the friction created between the shoes and the crack. There are times where you'll put your hand in a crack and make a fist and pull all your weight on the sides of it. It's ugly and it hurts, but it's so much fun.

The only negatives I can find with this park: the people. It's not overcrowded by any means, but it is full.  We didn't camp inside the park, but I also did find a bit of trash left here by the previous parties. People suck. The only other negative is the park's proximity to I-80. There's a background noise associated with trucks and trains that seems to permiate the park.

That being said, this place is amazing! And being two hours from Denver, it may easily replace Moab as my go-to for climbing (although Moab is so awesome... have you read "The Rock That Changed My Life"?). It's good for families, too, with a huge variety of easy trails, mountain bike routes, and FREAKIN AWESOME rocks that everyone can scramble around.

I love Vedauwoo.

Sunset in a Park

I sit here in the grass, the greenest I've seen in recent memory. The BattleWagon is shimmering in the shade of the setting sun, whose golden rays delicately peeking through the leaves and needles of elm and blue spruce trees. The urban crowd jogs by or throws tennis balls to their labradors and their retrievers. The air has no perceptible temperature. I can't feel it except for the faintest of breezes.  The blue sky is marred by high and whispy clouds and contrails that slowly fade away. I am as the thermometer would indicate: not too hot nor too cool. I am. Simply. Minimally. Happily.

I could tie this into some existential meaning-of-life lecture, or I could simply let it be what it is, simply taking it at face value and not put too much pressure on this life-sized diarama of creation. For, as I'm sure we all know, putting expectations onto things that quietly yet solidly exist, we change our perception of those things. Sure, sometimes that perception grows into something more, an inspiring life experience that allows us to continue on with our lives with more excitement and vigor than we were previously conscious of. But, more often than not, what we wish to arise from such simple joys inevitably gives way to the imperfections hidden away within the portrait, the single fast food bag blowing accross the field in the distance, the music blaring from the parking lot, the homeless man reading his yellowed newspaper in the nearby bushes.

I am content, in this instance, to simply appreciate the beauty that is and not read into it. It is what it is. I am what I am. Together, right now, we co-exist, and it is splendid. It's an incredibly calming way to enjoy a sunset in a park.

Redefining Belief

Belief. What is it? What is the standard answer? The best defintion I could find on dictionary.com says that belief is "confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof." How about that? I'm especially a fan of the idea of having confidence in something exists, yet I can't immediately and rigorously proove it. So what is belief then? What's the correct answer? If by a standard grammatical definion we can't proove what a belief is, then the word cancels itself out by default. Doesn't it?

I don't think so. When I think of belief I have to go way back in my life to a time when I thought the only thing anyone was supposed to believe was in Jesus as God. I don't know why, but I always had this walking-on-eggshells feeling whenever I went to youth group or church with my best childhood friend. For some reason, I thought that God had blessed these buildings where people gathered one morning a week and sometimes Wednesday nights for youth group. Warped as that was. Thankfully this wasn't my parents doing, as I feel I would have grown up feeling a lot more guilty, albiet a lot more insincerely so.

As I grew, I started realizing that these church youth functions that I was attending with my friends weren't church functions at all. They were social gatherings. They were opportunities for me, the socially awkward, self-confidence lacking nerd from a small school in a small town, to go to the big city or to summer camp and meet girls who had no knowledge of how nerdy I was. I loved that part. I'd be lying if I didn't feel some sort of inspiration from them playing the delightfully emo songs that made everyone emotional. It's like Dashboard Confessional wrote all of the evangelical teenage hymnals, except the songs were about you breaking the heart of Jesus, not the heart of the girl you loved or had your summer romance with.

The part that offended the most about the big city social gatherings, events like "Acquire the Fire" or "Shake the Nations", was how much I didn't get at the time. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have stuck around. It's fun to get into joyous shouting matches with 10,000 of my new closest friends about how much "I love Jesus, yes I do! I love Jesus, how about you?!" and meet all of these beautiful Katherine Heigl-looking 17-year-old evangelist girls from nice suburban schools. I loved that part. But the parts that didn't register at the time were the stories about the American Christian Missionary who went to Iraq and told people they would burn in hell for not accepting the gospel. He cried recounting the torture he recieved, the ill treatment he was given in return for his generosity in sharing the word. He mustered up all of his strength and courage to talk about how he wanted to turn Islam into Was-lam. For some reason, I glazed over this.

I feel that when you're a teenager, you don't get lots of things. You think you do at the time, but all of us old fogies know that we knew nothing until we were almost 30. The only exceptions are the people who have had major life-changing things happen to them in the past, people who had lost their parents at a very early age or people like me whose only child dies before their first birthday. Or there are the soldiers who come back from wars after serving their four or six year tour, having memories of having to shoot a child who could have had a bomb strapped to them; the young men hardened by years on the streets of the biggest cities, seeing death, some causing death, before they're old enough to drive a car.

So much chaos in the world.

We grow up, and we see things differently, regardless of the positivity or negativity of the things that impact our life. It changes our perceptions. It allows us to grow. We see what seemed like a social gathering of friendly teenagers in our youth turn into a bigoted hate-mongering speech against not just a nation or a civilization, but an entire religion, a religion that shares it's roots with the one preaching it's destruction! It's amazing what a few years can do for changing one's perspective.

As I mature, I see that my parents did, in fact, take me to church every weekend. My church didn't have four walls and a steeple outside. It didn't have someone reading from some book. It didn't have a steeple outside. My church had a breeze with the scent of juniper berries. My church had the smell of a wet dog. My church made me tired and fed me sandwiches and trail mix.

So what do I believe? What do I have confidence in that exists or isn't immediately susceptible to rigorous proof? Well, maybe the answer is in the question. Spiritually speaking, maybe it's not good to know what you believe in. Maybe I believe in not knowing what I believe in. Maybe I don't believe in a thing, but it's how I believe it that is even more important than what I believe. I do believe what I believe in respect to the planet and everything living on it. I believe that beyond a shadow of a doubt. I also believe what I believe in respect to everyone else. Maybe I'm not putting this as eloquently as I would like, so I'll try again.

What do I believe? I believe that we are all tied in together. You. Me. My dad. Your brother. That guy. This lady over here. That one dude on the bus that one time. I believe that we all believe something, and I believe we all believe it together. I believe that we are all tied in to this planet, which is tied in to the galaxy, which is tied into the universe. Even simpler? I think I have this pegged now.

Belief, to me, isn't a philosophical matter. It's scientific. We are all matter. Belief is energy. When we cease to become matter, we become belief. Our souls are pure belief. Things that are destroyed become beliefs in our memories.

I will redefine belief here. I believe this: belief: n. purely positive energy created through will-power, prayer, meditation, and death.

So what is it that I believe? I believe that every thought and feeling I have is feeding into this world, so I will do my best to have the best thoughts and actions I can. And when I die, I believe I will become pure energy, and that I will be a part of the force that creates, nurtures, and protects the universe. The name for this belief, as best I've found, is Universalism, but you call it what you will.

Just believe it.