Buddha Camp '06: A Life-Changing Experience in Three Acts - Act I

As I was driving to pick up the Mrs., I realized I had forgotten to brush my teeth.

And, as I tore the Starbuck's cup holder that I might fashion it into some kind of cleaning apparatus, I realized it was precisely the kind of thing I enjoyed writing about here, in this vaste demense of sable with only the off-white witticisms to stem the tide of banality.

And so, I return to this hellish project, which I was much further into the last time I sat down to put electron to receptor, and which was much more complete before my browser unexpectedly and unexplainedly quit on me. All my work... se fue.

So here goes again. I hope you bastards appreciate this.

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I'm in the habit of possessing inconvenient bookmarks. I read a lot, and the bookmarks that I have and use are often misplaced, in use in some mid-read tome, or unweildy and awkward to the point of non-utility. I often tear off pieces of paper from nearby scrap sheets just to make a little marker for myself, as I did a couple of months ago while reading the preparatory material for my trip to Colorado for what would become a momentous experience in my life. The marker was pink, and traveled through many a fine book containing ancient wisdoms which would help me acclimate not to my physical surroundings, but to the mental and philosophical state I would be plunged into upon my arrival. It stayed in a fictional novel I'd brought along with me to the retreat, and stayed on the exact same page throughout my tenure there, and only just now finally made its way out of the book as I finished it, onto the bathroom counter, and accidentally into the toilet bowl never to be used again, ending my time with this rosy sliver of parchment, which had been through so very much with me, or had at least been with me as I went through so very much.

It feels very much like a marker. In time and in import. Now is the time to talk about my experiences up in the mountains. Now is the time to divulge what I learned and what I came away with. Now is the time to talk abou what I left behind. From start to finish, patient and dear readers, I give you...

SHAMBHALA: Path of the Warrior

I needed to graduate.

Badly.

Transferring to Chapman, while a cathartic transition, presented me with something of a timeline in which I would have liked to be done with my Bachelor's degree, as I had been working on it for approximately five years and was beginning to feel the pinch of a life less-lived than I would have hoped. The main things standing in between myself and a diploma were foreign language requirements (boo) and world culture electives (also boo). I satisfied most of the latter with a course on Asian art which, truth be told, proved to be one of my more favored classes and gave me a new perspective on Eastern culture, which I had previously shunned almost entirely finding almost no aspect of it interesting to me.

This left me with the

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Aaaaand that's about as far as I made it when the thing autosaved. Then I did a TON more writing, was feeling really good about where this thing was going, and suffered incredibly once it was lost forever in the ether. Net. Whatever. I just polished off two horchatas, I'm looking at a .jpeg of two hammers supercolliding, and I'm feeling frisky. Let's get this damn thing done.

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CONT.

So I needed an upper-division World Cultures credit, and lo and behold I found one being offered in the Winter Intersession (I enjoy saying that aloud) which I was not grossly underqualified for. Not only that, but it had to do with my newly-assimilated-interest... Eastern Culture! And as if to add more to the... thing... it was a retreat in Colorado! The whole thing, three units and a how-do-you-do, would only take me a week to do! Yee-haw! Little did I know just how profound that one week would ultimately become.

So I met with the professor organizing the hoo-ha. I asked any questions I could, and at the time I remember thinking I needed to sell him on me. Like I thought I needed to impress upon him my authenticdesire to learn more about Buddhism, when really my only authentic desire was to get the credits with the least amount of effort possible. Hell, to this day it's still the cheapest class I ever attended at Chapman. I got enrolled in the class and started upon the massive amount of reading that was required of me before I'd be heading up the mountains. Of course, getting enrolled and actually starting the reading had a bit of a gap in the in-between... I started reading the six or seven novels required of us about a week before I left.

Still... pretty much got it done.

And then I was off to Colorado. On my lonesome. The original plan had been to drive, alone, but all those concerned (about me, that is) were against the idea, so I ended up taking a plane. I got up at some ungodly hour in the morning, made me way to the airport, and checked in.

INTERESTING FUN FACTS ABOUT PLANES: You must arrive forty-five minutes before your flight leaves in order to check your bag. If you don't, you'll have to take a later flight, which could throw someone's schedule into a bit of a flux, whic is pretty much Jesus Freaks if you have a schedule involving a meeting time in Fort Collins, a shuttle reservation from Denver, and a plane leaving from California. So I had to take a later flight, which wouldn't have bothered me so much, if I wasn't so damned worried about the damned Shamrock Shuttle.


Here's the thing about the Shamrock Shuttle. In Colorado, if you don't live there, have family there, or really have any means of getting around besides a plane going over most of the state and really only setting down once in a small area, you can get from one place to another (namely Denver to Fort Collins) by way of a Shamrock Shuttle, a notoriously heavily-booked shuttle service that leaves from the canvass-wigwam glory of Denver International Airport. You must make reservations well in advance for the Shamrock Shuttle to guarantee yourself a seat, and you will then pay the driver on the way back from your destination whenever it is you actually return.

Thing is, I found out once I was forced to take a later flight and thus would miss my reservation, Shamrock Shuttle does not make same-day reservations. So, if you have a reservation with Shamrock Shuttle, and you're going to miss your Shamrock Shuttle because of some Shamrock Situation, then you are Shamrock Shit Out Of Luck.


So I was a little reticent about the entire trip from the shaky get-go. But on the phone the lady assured me I had a good chance of getting a seat, and not to worry. I rode a plane (rode a plane, rode a plane), got into Denver, bought my ticket, and was informed that the Shuttle arrives every hour on the hour, and leaves twenty minutes after the hour. It was 11:15, and I had not yet gotten my luggage. I was already nervous about missing the meeting time at the Hilton, so I was hoping to get the first shuttle the hell out of there and be on my way toward Fort Collins as quickly as I damn well could be. I took my ticket and my carry-on (containing one (1) stolen blanket) and ran to the baggagae claim.

Now I don't personally subscribe to the school of smart-looking, sleek, and efficiently-designed luggage. I prefer the large, amorphous black bag approach to travel accoutrements, so once I had laden myself with extremely heavy, awkwardly-proportioned ballast, wrestling with the carry-on I had already situated on my person, I began my spirited waddle toward the proper port I was meant to meet the Shuttle at. I plodded across the entire terminal, found the correct exit door, and walked outside into... snow.




Now, even to a jaded California boy like me, actually seeing snow falling as soon as I arrived was kind of a neat way to set the tone for my stay. The information I'd recieved said something along the lines of "pack warmly just in case it snows, you never know. It'll be cold, no doubt, so dress warm, but also bring some snow stuff just incase." So imagine my surprise when, as soon as I set foot into the open, nature greets me with a big, blustery, parking-lot encompassing "SNOW, MOTHERFUCKER!!!" Unfortunately, being in the rush that I was, I had precious little time to stop and stare at the Christmas miracle, and quickly proceeded in my wuest. I plodded across lanes of traffic to reach my loading zone where, Gods and Jupiter, the Shuttle was waiting. Vertebrae beginning to fuse, I was almost to the shuttle when I realized...

I didn't have my ticket.

FUCK. Where was the damn thing? I had it in my hand the whole time. I bought it, went to get my luggage...

and totally let it fall to the ground while I was negotiating the bags.

Quick as I could, shuttle shrinking in the distance, I scurried back the way that I came. Manuevering around my fellow travellers, who had ceased being my "voyaging comrades-in-arms" and had assumed the roles of "motherfuckers in my way", I frantically made my way back to the claim area, where I found my ticket on the ground in the exact place where I'd gotten my bags. I collected it and headed for the third time down the path to where the shutle waited, back aching more and more accutely the longer I hefted the unforgivably large and unwieldy baggage. Out of breath, sweating (despite the cold), and in pain, I finally made it to the loading zone, ticket in hand...

Just as the shuttle pulled away.

And I mean just. Like, just as my foot hit the concrete of the small island where the shuttle was parked, it pulled away. Close enough for the people inside to be able to see the expression on my face. I wasn't upset. I would have been upset had the thing been gone the moment I exited the terminal. To miss it by that much, as I told a porter who asked if I needed to be on that shuttle, "it's only upsetting if it's inconvenient. When it's that pathetic, it's just funny."

I went back into the terminal, into the warmth and bustle of a major international airport, got a jacket from my luggage and read until the next shuttle arrived, which wasn't all that long anyhow. I still had plenty of time until the meeting, and I stopped letting the anxiety of travel get to me. Things would be okay. I'd just keep my head down for a week, enjoy the relaxation, and get home a few credits richer and a few cerebro-vascular migraines lighter.


When I finally did board the shuttle I'd be riding to Fort Collins, as I sat there waiting for the other passengers to arrive that we might get a move on, a fellow rider asked if I was there for "Shambhala." It turned out that a good number of the people aboard the bus were fellow Buddha-campers, and I said hello and made my acquaintences, then promptly buried my face back into my Lovecraft. I listened to their conversation intermittently, joined in every now and then, noticed two particularly vocal guys who said something amusing every now and then, and basically rode the entire time either staring out the window or reading my book. We transferred shuttles, made it to the Hilton, and waited for the charter bus that would take us the final leg of the journey, up the mountain and to the Center.

On the bus, I would read The Lurker at the Threshhold almost the entire time, pausing only to engage a few asked questions and to help attempt to push the damn bus out of the snowbank it got stuck in. The bookmark that found itself in my stopping point when I exited the bus would not move for my entire stay at the Center.

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Well... this is an awful lot of tale, isn't it? Methinks I'll dole these gems out over a period of time. Sure, there's a part of me that wants to bang the whole thing out now, get it out of the way and moving on to more important things, like two pictures which I'd particularly like to post and comment about as soon as possible (dealing with, alternately, technology and a contractor's worst nightmare), but another part of me realizes that's it's four in the morning, and I'm not even close to being a third of the way done. This will have to be broken up over time, and I think, in the end, more will come of it from the wanting. In the meantime... I don't know. Go read about poop or something, God only knows what you people do.

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Off and runnin'.