What would I do without the younger people in my life? Their dreams, focus, struggles, questions give me hope for the future of America. Those who flock to me, are curious about a life lived out of the ordinary. I have introduced you to Jamie before (July 25 & 26 entries). I met him on the street in front of my home through the mural this past February. Whenever he is in Bay Area visiting his brother and family, he will stop by. Jamie is in his late 30’s, an activist, union organizer and Black Lives Matter ally, writer, college teacher, avid bicyclist, and minimalist when it comes to what we need to live. All things I can relate too, and love to see embodied in the young or not so young :) This past Saturday, we spent time talking under the oaks, watching the balmy sunset from the deck, sharing a simple bowl of rice with vegis, and still more comparing notes till midnight… His Amtrak & Bike trip was a fantastic way of traveling on a budget, meeting people of all walks of life. All the while he was still managing to teach his on-line classes, his students curious from where he would speak to them. Below are his words. And I believe the "traveler from some far away land" he mentions, lives somewhere in all of us.

On the final day, a powerful feeling surfaces. It's been with me on all the trains, on the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago; on The City of New Orleans to... well... the city of New Orleans; on the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles; on the San Joaquins to Oakland; and now on the Coast Starlight back to Washington.

We enter a tunnel, and all goes dark in the belly of a mountain. We emerge into sunlight, slither along the edge of a canyon blanketed in evergreens, and there it is, a new kind of knowing. The land is alive. I am part of the life of this planet.

Have you ever passed through a fresh clear cut? Where forest once stood, an open wound. Where countless living beings thrived, death as far as the eye can see. Could our ancestors have conceived of such destructive power? It's as if an angry god rakes its jaws through the crust of the earth, trying to fill the bottomless hunger in its belly. Stumps and slash and red-black dirt spill from the corners of its mouth, pile and jut like graves.

This mass destruction unleashed upon the forest lands also on the billions of sentient creatures tortured and killed each year in the hell of U.S. industrial meat production. It flows through cycles of human trauma, violence, and death perpetrated by what Bell Hooks terms the "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." Sometimes it chews through me, making a wasteland of my spirit, hollowing my heart until I too may fall into this pit of bottomless hunger.

I can imagine a traveler from some far away land, where people care for living creatures, ecosystems, and each other—I can imagine this visitor coming here and, with great shock and sadness, asking themselves, "what has happened to these people? What kind of spiritual death are they experiencing to casually participate in such atrocities?"

Karina tells me that the German people had to ask themselves similar self-reflective questions as they struggled to regain their humanity in the ruins of the Holocaust and WWII.

Sitting in Karina's back yard on the Oakland leg of my trip, high up on the hillside, the limbs of the oaks hold me. Each curve and twist, the sunlight on their bark, the birds flitting through their branches—it all seems a miracle. The wind rustles their leaves, and they speak. You are part of our community, they say to me. Spread your arms, drop your roots, and heal.