My latest example of travelling without going anywhere....

 Last night my wife and I had a little dinner party with a few friends of ours. She made a wonderful ethiopian platter for us to share. The spices involved in ethiopian cuisine are just about as exotic as it gets in the food world...unless you're into hard core things like roasted locust coated in cayenne and chocolate... we're vegetarians, so no bugs for us!

 The spices from africa, and india, which ethiopian borrows from extensively, serve as telescope into a far away place i can only imagine... it makes me appreciate the labor and resourcefulness that must go into creating such a sophisticated array of flavors. When you consider that this food comes from a place that lacks much of the material wealth and resources we take for granted, and yet still conveys such a powerful sense of soul lacking in our every day western culture "cuisine", you can really get a sense of what it means to be truly human. I think that for me, you are what you eat holds some serious gravity in a sense. Its just one more way of connecting with the intrinsic value of the world around us, of the life we have.

 Of course the conversation immediatly focused on ethiopia, and its connections with christianity, judaism, and rastafarianism. I have long been interested in reggae. i even named my son Marley! Naturally, my interest in reggae music and culture finds me learning about rastafarinism and its roots going back to ethiopia, and the story of haile selaisie, Jah Ras Tafari.

 Somehow we turned the conversation into a discussion about buddhism and the lessons i learned about self-fulfilling prophecy, or the power of positive thinking. Then the talk evolved into the Beat Generation poets and the play my wife is writing the script for. Then william s burrough's obsession with bodily functions due to a lifetime of serious narcotic abuse somehow was the segue into dessert...

 Now, if you want to talk about travelling without going somewhere...get yourself some chocolate-avocado pie. You read that right.

My wife  got the idea from a movie we saw last summer,"Go Further". Woody Harrelson and friends make a documentary in which they mountain bike something like 1,600 miles along the west coast, meeting all kinds of wild-at-heart activists, tree huggers, and every day americans like you and me. They talk about the environment, agriculture and all kinds of other important issues. At one point in the movie, they are on their tour bus making a chocolate-avocado cake.

I'm pretty sure they were engaged in a sort of...let's  say: "self-induced, transcedent space-time journey" of their own at that moment...i mean really, you'd almost have to be to think that one up!

 All i know is, that chocolate-avocado pie certainly takes me somewhere when she makes it. And that's without the optional "self-induced transcendent space-time journey"!