Short update on the Retreat Valley. Big Papa Brady's house is nearing completion. I'm doing interior paint touch up. Tomorrow, the kitchen floor and cabinets. Coco's impossible cabin is nearly done. I say impossible because she started so late and had no full time builder. Just my man, Johneo. Who never gave up on it. Who is breaking his body to build it. Who is skipping days off to work on it. Who is keeping his commitment to his employer and finishing those cabins as well. He has help now from a real builder, full time. The guy showed up at the 11th hour and took it over.

If you are going to clean something, clean it. I'm thirty four years old and I can say that, after all these years, I am good at cleaning things. I am not someone who obsessively cleans or even cleans with regularity. When I do clean I do it well. People who are close to me notice. I am placed in the category of people who keep things neat. I dust my car, yo. When I wash dishes I do not leave food on the dish. There is steel wool under the sink for difficult jobs. I believe that I am good at cleaning several reasons. Reason one: I am a professional house painter who was trained in the homes of the ultra rich. Not just wealthy homes but ultra rich. I was forced to take into consideration very small details of each room. To make a mistake with paint in a ten million dollar home is expensive. To summarize, I notice small messes. Reason two: I lived in a commune with shared public kitchens. An hour after you would clean a space it would be a mess again. One is utterly helpless in trying to keep a house with fifteen room- mates clean. I have seen the depths of human squalor in the midst of hippies. I will never return. Reason three: I believe that one can utilize the act of cleaning to clean out the mind. Once the mind is clean, the outer world shifts. I will not get into the logic behind this statement nor the progenitor of the faith that sustains my belief in it. If you are not already a person who prays for peace in the world whilst scrubbing hardened egg yolk off of a spatula, no amount of explanation here will make sense.

What do I think my spiritual path is in this life? One question comes to mind, “What is the story you tell yourself about your world?” I am, as of late, trying to change the story I tell myself about my reality. I do this by planting mental seeds in my mind. Seeds like the belief that washing dishes while praying for peace will create the peace. The next question is "How is this possible?" It's too big of a topic to get into here. Most of us have heard the quote "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." Who said that? Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr.? What did they mean? How far do we take that worldview? What can we effect with that worldview? Just our world? Everyone's world? Did they know what they were talking about?