I’ve never really considered the word ‘ambition,’ especially not as a way of describing myself as in ambitious or full of ambition.  But yesterday, when I came across a definition of ambition and tried it on, I suddenly felt a surge of power.  I felt compelled to act towards obtaining that which I most want to accomplish in this life.

Ambition: an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction as power, honor, fame, or wealth and the willingness to strive for it’s attainment.

Goal seem weak in comparison to Ambition.

Ambition seethes with power…a power to propel, whereas a goal seems more elegant and lofty.

I’ve always had goals, but I’ve never thought of myself as being ambitious.  And now when I think of my goals as helping me to achieve my ambition, I feel compelled to act to achieve those goals as stepping stones toward my ambition.

I wake violently from a dream.  In this dream, I had decided to go back to West Point.  I walk the hollow grounds of the Academy watching the new cadets pinging around the parade field.  I instinctually know that I have to get myself into better shape if I want to have any chance of keeping up with these young cadets.  I run and I swim.  But soon realize that my 40 year old body lacks the resilience it once had, so I abandon the idea.

I walk from the Academy gates with my head hung low.  I fumble with my gear as I walk down the street.  I pass by a young Jesus looking guy on the sidewalk.  He has a young man and a young woman with him.  As I pass, the bearded guy beckons for me to come toward him.  I reach for him, but he slaps my hands away and says, “Not so fast.”  He sits down against the wall of the building we are standing in front of.  I take his rejection to mean go away.  As I turn to leave the young man and young woman get to either  side of me and push me to the ground.  I try to fight off the guy first.  But while I am fighting him, the woman goes for my wallet.  I turn to fight her off.  Then the young man is back at me.  And the see-saw effect begins.  I fight one off and then the other.  Back and forth.  The situation seems hopeless.  In desperation, I force myself to wake up, so that I don’t see the outcome that I don’t want.

It is 5.30 am on a Saturday.  I count it as a lie-in to sleep until 5.30 am.  I get up, ready to begin the day in full.

I came across this interest blog post about the Penis Festival in Japan:

http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2009/06/george-box-presents-honen-matsuri.html

And Mark Vernon had this quote from Steve Jobs on his blog.  I like this quote because it fits exactly my current mood:

‘Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.’

peace out.

sometimes i feel like
the endless cacophony
of her words are crushing me

sometimes i fell like
the endless silence of her
cold shoulder is deafening me

I am awakened by the howling of my neighbor’s cat beneath my window.  I had intended to have a lie-in seeing how it is Sunday morning.  I don’t usually lie-in.  Perhaps my neighbor’s cat realizes this and is trying to keep me from regretting not getting up early.  I stumble out of the bed.  I might as well not let the cat wake everybody else up.  I walk down the stairs wiping away the sleep.  I am distracted by the dream I was just having.  It is the second one featuring my neighbor, Baz and his wife Katherine.  This time Baz is on his Blackberry yelling at his son because he is about to make us all late for the 15 mile Walk for Life charity event in which Ruth and I are walking.  Baz, Katherine and Daniel are meant to be our cheering section.  Perhaps it’s poetic justice that it is their cat who has awakened me from my slumber.

I stumble out into the back garden and make a few noises in the hopes of stopping the cat from howling.  It doesn’t work.  I go back in and walk zombie-like to the back room for a good old Austin Powers pee.  It is only after I come crashing out of the downstairs bathroom that is on suite to the back room, that I suddenly become aware of the fact that my mother-in-law is sleeping there.  I forgot that she is visiting us for a couple of days.  I slip out of the room, embarrassed, hoping that she hasn’t heard me.

Now that I am up, I head straight for the kettle to get my morning cup brewing.  I am trying to decide if I should use the quiet time to write, read, or upload files to my publisher.  As usual when I am undecided on what to do, I check my email and FaceBook for any messages.  There are a few comments about the photo I posted of Ruth and I on our way to Sean and Kath’s costume party.  And there are a couple of more request to be friends.  My mind now settled, I decide to read.  I am re-reading John Updike’s Rabbit, Run.  I am in the mood for some serious literary fiction and you can’t go wrong with John Updike.

It is not long before Brittany is awake.  She comes and watches me read.  It is Father’s Day and she has made a cool card for me.  On the front cover is a book about philosophy next to a pint of beer.  I chuckle because I am amazed how perceptive she is of my habits.  She has me sussed alright.  My son is as cheeky as his father.  The front cover of his card to me reads: ‘cool, talented, funny, clever, brilliant…’ on the inside it reads: ‘enough about me… happy father’s day.’

do plan on posting again.  I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks because I have been distracted or focused on other things (depending on your point of view).  Also I think I have become a little bored with my blog in its present form and content.  So I am in search of a new direction to take the blog.  I’m not sure what that is yet.  But I don’t think it will take me long to decide, especially since I am starting to feel the itch to blog again.

one day i took beauty
in my arms; she had
perdition on her breath
and her touch was salvation

so i assaulted her.

I am back down in Essex today.  My first meeting is at 1200 so I have a bit of time this morning to do a little scribbling before heading out.

We are fostering a young mother cat and her seven kittens.  At only three weeks old, they are so tiny and adorable.  It’s fun to watch them wobble about exploring their den and surroundings.  Feeding time is noisy.  When Molly climbs into the den with them, they swamp her until she lays down on her side and then the feasting begins.  Each of the little ones jockey for position, stepping on each other, pushing and shoving until they find their place.  Molly cleans them while they are eating.

It’s funny the many roles we play in a day.  My train mate (stranger sitting across from me) is a female business woman.  From her notes, I’ve gathered that she is a manager of some sort for HSBC.  She is preparing for a team meeting.  In the space of an hour, she played many roles.

When we first sat down, she brought her loose notes, and her notebook, and her laptop.  Intense and focused, she poured over her notes, made more notes.

Time passed.

She pulled out her blackberry.  I thought she was making a business call, instead she called her daughter to make sure she was ready for school.  Soft voice, mum’s voice… ‘I love you’ at the end.  Phone down, back into business manager role plugging away on the laptop inputing her notes.  In the midst of this transcription, she pulls out her nail file and moves into girly mode and starts doing her nails.  Then back to business manager.

Notes finally finished, she pulls put her iPod and relaxes to some tunes and does the soduku from the morning Metro.

Even her look suggests a women of a thousand guises.  She is wearing a black suit jacket, but underneath is a pink terry cloth top with a white t-shirt that shows just above the rim of the pink shirt.  She is has a small silver cross hanging neatly against her cleavage.  Her hair, short and spikey.  She sports a hard won tan and face that looks as worn a leather glove, not ugly, just haggard.  She is wearing opened toed shoes, pink painted toenails.

I reach my stop, which turns out is also her stop.  We get off.  She has three bags - a laptop bag, her handbag, and some large overgrown back that looks like may contain presentation gear.  Another role, that of the traveler or perhaps the wandering saleswoman…

I wonder how many other roles she will have to play before the end of her day.  Which leaves me to wonder, how many roles do I play in a single day?   And when, if ever, do I get to be just me, no roles, no masks, no walls or barriers?

Picked up the new macbook today.  I’ve had my eye on upgrading for a while, although I couldn’t decided whether to go with the MacBook Air or the MacBook.  In the end price and lack of a decent sized hard drive drove me away from the air, whose most endearing feature is it’s thinness.  Time Machine made it a breeze to move my old MacBook files over to the new MacBook and amazingly fast as well.  Of course all the things I had planned to do today have pretty much gone out the window as I have been playing with my new mac and wiping down the old one so I can pass it on clean.

I woke up this morning feeling the time to make a decision is now.  There are so many competing forces for my time, focus, and energy.  To try to do everything means to do nothing.  I have to choose a path on faith and intent.  But it’s so hard to know what is the right choice to make.  What will I miss if I go down one road as oppose to another?  And that is the crux of my problem, I want to go down all the roads, travel all the paths.  I hate the thought of being contained to one path.  Like this past weekend when we were hiking across the moorlands, it would have been easier to stay on the marked path, the one well trodden by others.  Instead, we chose to make our own path.  We ran into more obstacles/challenges this way, but that is what made the walk exciting.  The marked paths were teeming with people.  Off the beaten track, we saw only two other people and they were off in the distance, probably a pair of souls like our own, wanting to go the way less travelled.

But what are the risks when you go your own way?  What if the bold choices we make don’t pan out, then what do you do?  Is it better to play it safe, be on an even keel as it where?  The two sides of myself sit on either shoulder; one is whispering in my ear to live in the here and now and throw caution to the wind, the other sitting on my opposite shoulder is whispering, be sensible think about the future.  The thing about the future is there are too many what if’s and unknowns, and the ultimate destination is the end of all things.

I have made my choice.  Now can I live with the consequences?  Will I have the discipline and the tenacity to stay the course?

I’ve been slow to post these past couple of weeks, mainly because I’ve been out wandering and enjoying a little time off of work.  Over the weekend, I was out wandering the Derbyshire Moors with my good friend Ed, of Nak-ed-ape.  As usual, we past the walking time putting the world to right and philosophizing about this and that.  One of the questions posed was why do I like spending so much time outdoors in the hills and woodlands?  My short answer was because the outdoors, especially the mountains, are my spiritual home.  Going to the mountains for me is like going to church.  It is my place of worship.  I am guaranteed to be more centered and grounded after a day’s walk in the hills.

This particular trip, we did a 7 hour hike starting from the Moorland Centre in Edale, north up the waterfall, then northwest to Kinder Scout (there is meant to be a trail through the moorland here, but inevitably you loose the trail and end up picking your way through the trenches and mud sinks until you find firm dry land).

At Kinder Scout, we turned South and followed the Pennine Way back into Edale (I think at some point in the not to distant future, I will walk the entire Pennine Way which is 289 miles going from Edale to north going through Yorkshire Dales, up into Northumberland, across the Cheviots, and right up into the Scottish Borders).  Then today we did a 12 mile cycle around the reservoir trilogy of Ladybower, Derwent, and Howden reservoirs.  And now I am totally knackered!

Chow

We are off on a little mini break - some sweet time with the misuses minus the kids. We like exploring different parts of the country from time to time, so I suggested we check out Canterbury, partly because it gave me an excuse to reread Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and also because I wanted to visit a few other places that have been etched in my memory since studying military history at West Point. One of those being battlefield at Hastings.

I’ve been living in and out of hotels since January this year, so Friday night I had to drive home from Essex, unpack my bags, do my laundry, and repack for our 5 day mini break. I know I am a last minute kind of guy and this was about as last minute as you can get! All good though, we weren’t under any time pressures really i.e. no planes, buses, or trains to catch. Our last couple of trips together have been ‘let’s make it up as we go along’ trips. So this was no different in that respect. We had a general destination of Canterbury. The rest we would make up.

We set off at a reasonable time on Saturday morning. We thought the roads would be packed full of cars considering it is a Bank Holiday weekend. But actually, the motorways were fairly clear. We made good time down to Folkestone, which was going to serve as our base of operations for the trip. We would have stayed in Cantebury, but all the hotels and B&B’s were booked. Instead, Ruth found a spartan little B&B in Folkestone called the Rob Roy run by an old couple named Sue and Alan. It’s about a mile away from the town center on the A260. Not the most picturesque place, but we didn’t plan on spending much time there anyway, apart from sleeping.

We picked up a bunch of leaflets from the tourist information center as soon as we arrived in town. I hadn’t realized how much there is to see around the Kent Downs. We decided to spend the rest of Saturday kicking around Folkestone. Now I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems that in the area of Folkestone where we are staying, all the locals look like they got a bit of sea-dog in them. A fall out from being a harbor town I guess.

We set out to explore Folkestone by bike. A quick flick through the leaflets and we found a place that looked interesting - The Lower Leas Coastal Park. We could take in some sea and woodlands. Apparently, landslips in 1784 created the park’s basic formation and then in 1829 some enterprising nobleman decided he could make some cash, so he built a toll road to provide an “easy” route between the harbor and and the town of Sandgate. The park has evolved since then as a place for people to come and relax underneath the shade of pines, holm oaks and sycamore trees, or to lie out on the pebbled beach.

We cycled at a leisurely pace through the park stopping at several landmarks like the Leas Lift, which is the second oldest water powered lift in Britain, and the Zig Zag Path, which was built in 1921 as a new attraction and to provide work for the unemployed.

Beneath the Zig Zag Path is an amphitheater. I don’t know if it used for shows or anything, but it provided a nice grassy area to lie down on and take in some sun. We cycled through the park and onto Sandgate before turning around and finding a route back to Folkestone. It was nice to be next to the sea, rolling along watching people and ducking from seagulls.

In the evening, after we recovered from our ride, we found a nice all you can eat Chinese buffet called Kalala. The service was quick, the staff friendly, and the food was delicious, what more could you ask for from a buffet. After dinner, we were both pretty beat, so we headed back to the B&B to call it a day, play a few games and then hit the rack. End of day one.

thinking through this past weekend and i realized that i have either been very present or very dreamy… on the drive down south this morning, i started remember all the moving pieces of my life at the moment - things i should be doing, events coming up that i haven’t planned for, places to go etc… i devoted like zero time to those things over weekend, which then made me think, well what did i spend time on… mainly reading the catcher in the rye and researching how to hack my netbbook…that is after spending 2 hours deciding on which netbook to buy…

i thought about what my passion(s) are…my passion i concluded for the millionth time is literature - words, ideas, writing, reading, thinking… those are my passions… i get distracted by other things…is it because words, ideas, reading, writing require great tracks of time in solitude?  I don’t know, but am determined just to pursue my passion against the grain if i have to and to hell with all the other bullshit…

I have resisted the netbook revolution for as long as could, but this weekend I finally caved.  I like the idea of the netbook, light, ultra-portable, does what I need it to do, which is mainly emailing, blogging, and surfing the net for random things.  My main resistance has been not wanting to fool about with Windows again or to get to involved with Linux, and since Apple has been adamant about not joining the netbook revolution, I have resigned myself lugging my macbook around everywhere I go.

Until now…

I discovered that it was possible to ‘hackintosh’ a netbook, which is to say, I could replace the existing operating system with OS X.  And so I bought the Acer One Aspire 110.  I wanted the Dell Mini 9, but couldn’t get the 16GB SSD version for a justifiable price.  I spent some time over the weekend gathering the various hacks I would need to pull this off.  Hopefully by the end of the week I will have my very own ‘macbook nano.’

I am down south again this week finishing the last week of my current project before taking a couple of weeks off to explore a couple of places I have not been to yet.

I’ve been searching for a hobby or activity that would encourage us to get back out into nature again.  Something in our nature likes to have a goal, something that awaits us at the end of the journey, the prize or elixir as it is known in the mono myth of the Hero’s Journey.  The Great British Butterfly Hunt has become one of those goals for me.  There are 58 species native to Britain, part of the aim of the Great British Butterfly Hunt is to encourage people to engage with the beauty and fragility of Britain’s rich natural heritage.

Our first butterfly hunt was in the Ufton Wood nature reserve, which is local to us.  According the information board, Ufton Wood is home to 26 species of butterfly, that means we can potentially see nearly half of Britain’s butterflies within 2 miles of our house.

It was a nice morning for a walk.  The sun was out and patches of blue sky and fluffy white clouds could be seen through the break in the trees.  I had the feeling that it was a bit chilly for butterfly hunting.  The temperature being around 7.5 C at the start of the walk.  I don’t yet know the habits of butterflies apart from my faulty memory of my experiences of seeing them flittering about in the back garden or in the meadows of my childhood.

We had a copy of Collins Complete British Wildlife Photo Guide to help us identify any butterflies we might encounter.

About three quarters of mile into our hunt, we spotted a butterfly high up in a spread of trees with white flowers.  Two things I became aware of, one I didn’t have my binoculars with me to be able to get a good look at the butterfly before, nor did I have my camera with telephoto lens to get a decent picture.  The butterfly, however was cooperative enough to give us a good view of its wings spread.  It turned out to be a Peacock Butterfly.  I took a couple of snaps with my little digital, but couldn’t zoom in enough to be able to spot the butterfly from the flowers.

Cool.  Our first site-ing.

We continued on.  And further into the walk we got quick glance at a Small White.  And again having some bino’s and a telephoto lens would have been handing.  I make a mental note to include in our next butterfly hunt my field binoculars and my big Olympus 500 Digital SLR.  This could be an opportunity to combine several hobbies together - walking/hiking, photography, geocaching, and butterfly hunting.

I mentioned geocaching because along the way, we were also able to find a nearby geocache - GCN141 do you come here Ufton? laid out by Bumbling Fools.

So on our first butterfly hunt, we walked for 2.5 miles and spotted two species of butterfly.  On our next outing, I’ll be better equipped for sure, but our first one it was cool and gave some extra flavor to walking.

i am tired of  being a prisoner
shackled by time, held in place
by fear, brainwashed to believe
the should’s and should not’s
while my inner self screams
be true to yourself fight the good
fight and the universe will reward
you if you follow your own muse