Posts Categorized: Missions

Google, Apple, and Facebook are known for the unusual interview questions they ask prospective employees, ostensibly hoping to distinguish the especially creative and hardworking from the rest of us.  When I create my behemoth tech company (the freehoodship), I will subject prospective employees to a ritual meeting with death like the one I briefly describe… Read more »

For mission 26, what’s supposed to be my most spectacular yet, I’m organizing the important sounding “first international leaf-catching tournament.”  Why, you ask?  Well, ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved to catch leaves on windy days in autumn, and I’m pretty good at it.  Also, at the moment, I’m trying my damnedest to… Read more »

On November 9th I fulfilled mission #20 by helping my friend, Fedor, fulfill his dream of doing a week-long Street Retreat (organized by Faithful Fools) in San Francisco.  I spent the whole day, from 9am to 4pm on the streets, mostly in the Tenderloin, around the Civic Center, and in the Mission.  I talked to… Read more »

I’m currently reading through Emerson’s Nature in preparation for teaching another class this September on the American Transcendentalists.  In the chapter called “Language” he quotes Goethe (though Coleridge also said something very much like it): “every object rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.”  This truth, reality, phenomenon, or law — whatever you… Read more »

Trying to see the constellations that Alvaro was pointing out in the planetarium at Sierra College brought home to me again how much we see with our minds as opposed to our eyes.  My mind knows the Big Dipper and could therefore find it easily, but with many of the other constellations, my mind (or… Read more »

Mission #15 of my adventure involves giveaway.  At the moment, I’m not very good at it, which is not to say that I’ve ever been that good at it.  I can often give a thing away, but less often can I magically disenchant my attachment to the thing after it is gone.  For example, almost… Read more »

Whenever I meet people I haven’t seen in a while and they ask me what I’m up to these days, I find it difficult to answer.  I haven’t yet mastered a spiel to describe the Freehoodship project, though I must say I’ve never been very good at spiels.  Regardless, I want to be able to… Read more »

Two days ago, I did mission #13 with my friend and Oracle, Robin Hill, and her students in an art practice class at U.C. Davis.  Before we began by crossing a pedestrian bridge over Highway 99 into Oak Park, I talked to the students for an hour about The Freehoodship and my hero’s adventure project… Read more »

We don’t have enough understanding in the world; we have too much.  Look at ourselves: our understanding just standing there to the point of under-loitering, and in the same junior high caliber cliques and around the same old mini-marts of meaning.  Do you understand?  Of course you do, but do you under-walk or under-saunter or… Read more »

Mission #12 on my 2013 adventure asks that I learn something from nature.  For the American Transcendentalists, nature and the soul are the two great teachers of the human being.  In my case, I think I’ve gotten most of my lessons from the soul, and not enough from nature.  Is this because my soul has… Read more »