We made it to Portland. Now to begin, it seems. We’ve been so focused on getting through the cold and arriving at our first major destination that things seem a bit surreal now that we’re here. The transition from traveling through the plains all day to setting out into a crowded city is abrupt and has me scrambling a bit to get organized. Still, we’re starting off on a great note already.
Tonight we went over to a friend’s place for a delicious home cooked meal of slow-simmered pulled chicken tacos. When we got there, we were greeted not only by Marshall and his roommate Nate but also his dad Mitch who’s in town visiting for the first time from Santa Fe. Their projects and passions were scattered around the home and provided learning opportunities left and right.
I just learned now after coming back to the bus that Nate has a really cool social photography project. He sends someone a camera and an original piece of art, and asks that person to take any pictures that inspire them and send them back with the camera in exchange. Art for art, inspiration for inspiration: zero dollars cost.
It’s something that I’m realizing comes up all the time, Money. What is money really? I think people confuse it with health or with purpose or with social connection. It’s none of those things, but it is potential. It’s stored value in the form of paper that says (or is supposed to) “I have made value for people, and they back me in using it to get another thing of value.” Money opens doors for experience. We should realize that’s where its value lies.
While I unfortunately didn’t get to see much of Nate’s photos, we did get the opportunity to watch Marshall bring out and test his self-made audio synthesizer. He’d built a box from oscillators and voltage controls that engineers the amplification of sound from the travel of electrons themselves. Part of it was even built as an ant farm.
Watching and listening, I was drawn away to think about intuition. “It’s really funny, but you have to give it a little love for it to work right,” he said. That is funny. I think a lot of us feel that way about life, that we kinda have to do little ‘nonsensical’ things for our lives or work to come out right. I think a lot of real learning has to do with not worrying whether the things you try are ‘sensical’ or rational if they feel right. That way you are able to try new things see patterns with a perspective others might have written off from the start. Perhaps that’s what ‘keep an open mind’ refers to.
Whomp whomp whomp whomp whomp whomp whomp whomp his music brought me back to reality and practicality as something always does. He’d been talking about making some money to help support his thesis and I thought “I’d pay to learn that.” So I told him about the website SkillShare.
SkillShare is a site that helps anyone be a teacher to the people around them and get paid to do so. The way it works is anyone can post a ‘class’ that they offer to teach, with popular subjects ranging from soldering circuits to changing brake pads on a car to playing Settlers of Cataan. Then others in their community can come and take the class and pay the fee if they’re satisfied.
He and his dad Mitch thought that website was a really awesome development. “Things are opening up a little bit,” Mitch said.
Maybe they are, I like to think so and I do think so. Pockets of awesomeness are bubbling up everywhere. So long as we’re willing to look beneath the surface we so often draw for ourselves.