Perception

I finally found how to describe how the New Yorker and other outlets covered me: I'm pointing to a brighter future. They keep looking at my hand. The New Yorker wrote how I have dirt under my fingernails, which you get when you dig deep. I can't blame anyone. It's no one else's responsibility for me to be understood. My book should help change this outcome, where I can clarify and state more comprehensively what I'm trying to communicate. I didn't make up the analogy. I think I heard it from Buddhism. Some quote Gautama as saying "I am a finger pointing to the moon. Don't look at me; look at the moon." Some Buddhist teachers say "The teachings are like a finger pointing to…

We invented washing machines and things like it to remove the need for backbreaking labor every day just to survive. We created vaccines to cure and anesthesia to remove pain. Why would anyone consider reverting to the Stone Age, risk it, or even move in that direction? Moving backward is the last thing we should do. Why give up on what we worked so hard for? Yet cultures remain that resist joining the modern world that we call indigenous. Why don't they get with the program? Some do, but some see our culture with its airplanes, longevity, and cell phones and choose their own, out of knowledge and experience, not ignorance or stupidity. Recording my third podcast episode with Alan Ereira, who has lived among…