Kamakura Train from keauxgeigh on Vimeo.

On the train returning to Tokyo from Kamakura.

Daibutsu, Kamakura, Japan from keauxgeigh.

Benzaiten Shrine, Kamakura, Japan from keauxgeigh.

Second of two clips:

Cat chasing camera strap, pt. 2 from keauxgeigh.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

What should I make of or say about the 25 year spanning dance between me and my cousin? It’s all weird, strange pieces fitting together, unpredictable reactions, outright confession, none of it really uncomfortable, some unease perhaps, nothing inappropriate, lots of figuring out and often independently being on the same page. There has been tension and frustration, denial and revision, too. All of it making some weird sense and resonating in echoes of memories that are not ours.

She gave me another piece of the puzzle of us I’ve been putting together through the years, and I also gave her an important piece of the puzzle she’s been putting together, and it’s the same puzzle. She told me she’s always had a strange, resonant attraction to Japan, in particular the cultural history and Kyoto. She says that when she went there, she felt a very strong connection to the city. How I could not have known this for all these years is beyond me. My own attraction to Japan is well-documented and out in the open, and that we never discussed this same resonant thing in both of us is pretty fucking odd (denial?). For me, the connection I felt is to the landscape. It's just wildly exciting to stand on Japanese soil, breathe in the air, and it's just comfortable and familiar, like I belong(ed) there.

That jigsaw piece completed such a large part of my puzzle that I had to share it with her. She didn't have that part of the puzzle at all, even though I thought I had mentioned it to her years ago. It was basic to my thesis that we had been a couple in a past life and we had a really good relationship. I mean really good. Mm-mm good. Spiritually good. Now I'm fine-tuning my scenario with a locale and thinking it was in Japan. Along with a bunch of other unrelated, amorphous impressions and foo-foo mystical conjuring, it just all makes some weird, perfect sense.

We've been admiring this newly completed section of puzzle for several days, and she's really happy with it; relieved. I haven't struggled with my attraction to her because it's always been easy realizing we are first and foremost cousins now. The attraction is something from something else completely, and what that was happened and is now past. She had a more complicated time with it, as it persisted through her having relationships, me having relationships, she getting married and having kids, and now my pursuing the monastic path. But this theory is making a lot of sense to her, too, and it's helping her feelings a lot.

She's not just my cousin. We're just cousins now. There's nothing weird or creepy about the love and connection between us. Being cousins just defines how we behave towards each other for the rest of the world. I found tucked at the back of a bookshelf here, the copy of Illusions that I got for her when we first started working all the weirdness out. That's probably why I thought she also figured out the past lives/past relationship thing.

And tomorrow I fly to Japan to meet up with Madoka, with whom I also feel a connection that goes beyond our scientific knowledge of the way the world works. Beyond genetics, biology, chemistry, evolution, DNA, and is fully unprovable, subjective, impression-based, imaginary, and who is to tell me it's not just as real?

Cousin Gary (moving portrait) from keauxgeigh.

My cousin Gary now lives in mainland China. He returned to Taiwan when he heard that his grandmother on his mother's side was very sick. I shot this portrait at the airport when he left.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

To my parents, everything is about finances, and right now I'm a gamble, a risky investment.

I'm not a product. They didn't go to a store and put down some money knowing exactly what they were going to get and what to expect. That was my upbringing. They put in money to raise a child, and a child was raised.

Now they're pumping in money with a hope, but no guarantee that they will get what they hope for. Despite what they told me to my face, they didn't even try to hide it from other people that they don't want me to enter a monastery. Now they're pumping money into completely unrelated schemes that will magically make me not enter a monastery.

I try to make sense of it as I book a flight to Japan, not even thinking about the cost or shopping around. Buy a Japan Rail Pass. Book two nights at a guesthouse in Kyoto; other nights that I'm not staying with Madoka in Tokyo may be in random cities across Japan as I make use of the unlimited travel on the Shinkansen from the Rail Pass.

Spend, spend, spend, all charged to them, and the justification and refusal of guilt comes from reminding myself that this is their investment. They're paying for a chance that something will come up and I won't enter the monastery, and willing roulette ball that I am, I roll and roll, where the wheel stops, nobody knows.

I fully intend to end up back at the monastery. They lose. There's Madoka, but although I think there have always been feelings between us, and I've occasionally thought and wondered about us, we have a history of nothing happening. Nothing short of a dam breaking open would change anything, and the dam on my side is pretty sturdy.

I want to be back at the monastery by the time the monastics return in mid-April. If I stayed in Taiwan into April, I would need to leave the country again to renew my visa again. Also my parents are supposed to be here at the end of March/beginning of April and I wouldn't want to be here at the same time as them. Too weird.

My cousin here in Taiwan is really important to me and my life. She understands certain aspects of me pretty well, and wants to know me as much as anyone is able. She comes awfully close to hitting what this weblog is about, but without an express reason for its manifestation, she wouldn't actually guess it.

She's very supportive of anything I choose to do, but in her heart of hearts, she doesn't see me as a monk. I smile at that because I know what she sees is right, she just doesn't see what I see as the alternative. I may still pursue the monastic path, I may even be good at it, but she will know that something is still just out of alignment in that.

Sometimes I get so tired of this, and mornings are still the hardest thing – when I'm most vulnerable to my emotions. It verges on panic, not wanting to be here but realizing I'm a failure at doing something about it. The feeling fades as I go about my morning routine, and is long gone by the time I start morning sitting.

The odd thing is that the people who mean the most to me, the monastics, and now even Madoka, tell me to listen to my heart; do what's in my heart. They don't know what it means to do what my heart tells me to do.

I get tired of this, I get fed up with this, but that's an emotional response to what I still think of as inevitable. It's not an emotional issue anymore. I see it as my journey now, my investigation having perfected impermanence, non-attachment and non-self. Have I perfected impermanence, non-attachment, and non-self? I don't have to answer that. I won't answer that, it's rhetorical. It's a trick question.

Life is my laboratory, my playground. I don't take it too seriously, but the "fact" or tangibility of the manifestation of reality comes with certain characteristics that make the laboratory experiment difficult; going on the rides at the amusement park a challenge. Those I'm still working on. Hypnotist? Magician? Manipulator of reality? Manipulator of illusions?

I've been playing with my cousin's children a lot lately. Whenever I play with children, I start acting like a child. I'm finding it's not a far stretch.

I hope that constantly going "ew" at natural baby stuff is not bad for their self-esteem.

So today was the day that I was supposed to, by my own theory, thank my mother and show her gratitude. I didn't.

In fact, she insists on continuing to test my practice by offending me with her ignorance about me and my life, and meddling into what she cannot meddle and controlling what she cannot control.

She thinks my life is a rubber band and we're having a tug of war with it. Why do I even bother? I should just let go of it and let it smack her in the face. If she wants it, she can have it. Just don't expect me to live it.

There is a lot I'm grateful for, and every day I consider as many things as possible that I'm grateful for, including the air I have to breathe, the food I have to eat, and the health to breathe, eat, and walk.

And with much thought and certain caveats, I can even say that I'm grateful for existence. But it is without contradiction that I can say that I'm not grateful for the fact of my birth.

I'm done with relationships, but if I were interested in someone, the key to getting involved would be iPods. We'd trade iPods for a day, put them on shuffle play, and if at the end of the day, what we've heard is acceptable to each other, it's a go on the relationship.

Of course, anybody willing to do this in the first place to determine the viability of a relationship is probably automatically OK to be in a relationship with.

At the monastery, I thought about the pointlessness of material life. Now I think about the monastic life and have feelings that it would be pointless, too. The whole enchilada is pointless. Which is, naturally, the point. A point which I knew all along.

Why do I even want to change? Do I even want to change? What am I doing? What am I doing here? It always goes back to that. And to get back to that, thinking of entering a monastery is just a distraction. Entering a monastery is just a distraction. Entering a monastery is just a distraction?

Maybe if I wasn't so self-absorbed about suicide when I quit my job, and if I knew about the extent of my aunt in Japan's plight, I would have been motivated to be more selfless. Who cares that I didn't know then that I would still be around two years later, broke, and about to enter a monastery? 

Maybe I could have pushed up my timetable with the monastery so that I would have had savings that I could have sent to her as part of my liquidation of assets, a requirement for entering a monastery. If I wasn't ready yet, maybe I could have gone to visit her and given her some support. Let her know I haven't forgotten her and appreciated her selflessness so many years ago. 

Maybe. As it is, time has taken its course, and I had no idea what her situation was until my cousin here told me, and now I have nothing to offer. Maybe I'll think of something, if I don't use the "here and now" as an excuse to do nothing. 

My natural individual tendency is towards non-action (including with my own life). Things just happen in my world and I'm really not involved with any of it. A good stance in my own personal philosophy, even a good stance in "pure" Buddhism, but not a good stance in Engaged Buddhism (the monastery's philosophy), sometimes called Humanistic Buddhism, all an outgrowth of Mahayana Buddhism. 

I'm caught between wanting to be more engaged, helping, and being philosophically comfortable doing nothing and lacking self-motivation to move from that position. Buddhism, btw, has nothing to do with anything. I don't know why I insist on constantly getting all religious on yo' ass.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

I've been here for about a week and I came here without a plan, and that was probably a good thing. Or at least it sounded like a good thing at the time. Now, I should probably start thinking about doing more than hanging out with my cousin and helping her take care of her kids.

Really, I'm perfectly happy doing that. I'm not so much into travelling for touring around, but rather just to go places to chill and vibe with the place. To some, there might not be much point in that, I understand. I mean, fuck you, go to your fucking tourist spots, you wankers! *sigh* why am I even trying? I lost my "edge" a long time ago.

The problem is when extended family is involved and they think I'm bored and start getting antsy about not being good hosts. They don't know I'm happy as a pig in mud sitting in a wireless coffeeshop all afternoon. Or walking around all afternoon, maintaining my "practice".

Right, the practice. And that's another thing. They have no idea what this "practice" is; they are, after all, relatives of my parents. I really would like to find the adoption agency they got me from or get verification that they did, in fact, find me on a rock in Michigan.

It makes me wonder what my "practice" is, what's the point of this when everyone else is in the maelstrom of living life? What practical use am I to my cousin, harried as mothers are raising kids? To my aunt in Japan with whom I stayed for 4 months in 1992, who was doing really well back then but has since gone bankrupt and, I hear, is living in destitute conditions.

My parents mentioned she was "having trouble", but didn't say anything about losing everything, including her building and allowed to live there until she dies only by the kindness of the new owner, that she has plastic covering breaks in her windows and can't afford heat in the Winter.

What practical use is the monastery when it took so long to even have a reaction to the tsunami in the Indian Ocean? It's only in retrospect that I realize how little reaction we had. It took people in the surrounding community calling to donate money for the relief effort for us to realize we didn't have one.

I don't know what the monastery did. If anything, I wasn't in on it. I didn't feel a collective spark that a tragedy had occurred and we had to mobilize to do something. I didn't feel it individually, either, although I will from now on. As a private citizen, I'd feel helpless and detached, but at the monastery I should have been prodding them, "what are we/you doing?".

Instead, my "practice" is sitting in the morning, sitting in the evening, and walking around all day in peaceful mindfulness.

Fuck.