Otis Funkmeyer, The Ph.D. of Popping

ok… so i am writing now because i dont want another month to pass… and because i feel like my emails have been, at least for me, heavy and i am feeling very light and happy right now so i can express light and happy things

i have to say, getting all of your emails has just been incredibly warming… i just read so many thoughts and ideas and experiences that my heart is just warmed perfectly like when you roast a marshmallow just right… lol… i also happened to read 2 other people’s travel experiences and it was so exciting for me that it allowed me to let go of any ideas that writing about my trip is somehow arrogant or self-indulgent… yay…

it is also interesting for me because i feel like the emails i just read express the whole circle of life as it were… i found out about graduations, marriages, depressions, deaths, celebrations, travels, confusions, insights, and a lot in between and i guess i just feel grateful for being able to experience it all.. i read a story just yesterday about the goddess kali in indian culture who is the destroyer (boy i hope i dont get this wrong lol) but represents all of life… all of the things i just wrote… and that the hindus have decided that the only way to deal with kali, rather than loving or hating or anything else, is just to honor her… to honor life…

so this is how i feel right now… it’s a very special thing we are all experiencing, being alive… and after hearing about an unexpected death, as im sure we all have, its a reminder (at least for a minute) of how special it really is…

anyway.. back to lightness..

i am in sinai, egypt… the real-deal holy land.. im writing from an internet cafe in dahab and ive been in egypt for about 8 days… i spent the first few at a rainbow gathering (basically a hippie/traveller/nomad group) world healing retreat in bir el ugda which is a wadi (valley) in the mountains of the sinai… we ate only raw food and rather small quantities of it at that (veggies and fruits) and the most amazing thing for me is that i wasnt hungry at all… and then i get back and starting eating rice and pasta and im hungry hungry hungry… anyway.. the gathering was nice but it made me realize that in a certain way i HAVE found what i am looking for…

i accept now that i am jewish, or that i will identify myself as jewish, regardless of what people think about my mama… but at the same time, that it’s ok for me to define this on my own terms… the thing i realize now that i have loved about being exposed to judaism is the sense of community and the joy and the dancing and the singing (as i have probably mentioned before) and the zest for life and the shared sense of history and culture and worship… and this is enough… so i do plan on incorporating judaism into my life but in a way that works for me.. and i guess what that is remains to be seen…

while in sinai, where there are no chairs and normal means of reclining, i have also been forced to sit on my butt all the time and have realized exactly how inflexible my hips and ankles are… i have been feeling for a while now a real desire to really be doing hatha yoga and so i have started doing this in earnest… over the past 5 years of getting to know my body through dancing i am much more aware of exactly where the tightness is and i can feel it loosening already… it seems like the hardest part is changing the muscle memory which is locked in tightness… the reason i thought to mention this is i wanted to pass this along to those of us who are always trying to “get in shape” or “exercise more”… i have stumbled upon something that i feel is REALLY working for me…

i tend to overcommit myself.. i get excited about exercising and i say “ill do an hour of yoga a day”.. and this is going great so i say “ill also do 15 minutes or cardio” and this is great too.. so then i say “ill meditate for 20 minutes a day” also.. and this is all great!!!! and then 3 weeks later there comes a day when i REAAAALLLY dont feel like doing it and the next thing i know 4 months have passed and i havent stretched once… so… i made a new deal with myself about a week ago… 1 sun salutation a day.. i will commit to doing a single sun salutation (this takes about 30 seconds or 1 minute) for a year.. and i will not allow myself to add to this commitment until a year has passed… because what often happens to me is i get really excited and then when i dont do what i said i was going to do 1 day i get discouraged and beat myself up and blah blah blah and i stop… and i have found that doing that 1 sun salutation gets me in the mode of having a focus on my body and stretching more throughout the day anyway… but when that day comes along when i dont feel like doing anything, i will (hopefully) do the 1 sun salutation, feel like i accomplished something, and go on to the next day…. less is more they say!

speaking of less is more and other paradoxes, i also read a book called “the dancing wu-li masters” about quantum physics–its history and connection to spirituality… it is amazing to me this whole wave-particle duality… if you don’t know it, or you know it but dont REALLY understand it, i suggest you google it because it is simple and amazing… so basically, at a subatomic level, everything is both a particle AND a wave at the same time… for me, this has become a good working metaphor for life… classical logic doesnt work at all because it’s based on this OR that, one or the other, what are you going to do with your life, how will you make money, etc etc etc… but the world is actually both this AND that.. the sum is greater than the parts… i like it anyway

so the rainbow gathering… yah it seems like people who are searching for something…. travelling as a means of trying to find meaning… which i guess also describes me… BUT! so i met this guy there.. i like this story… this italian guy who had started a few businesses and they all failed and he was $50,000 in the hole… and his sister had to put her house up as collateral for the bank and the clock is ticking and the pressure is on for this guy… so he starts consulting, doing programming work, for an online casino in london… the casino is almost bankrupt and somehow after a year or two he winds up as the CEO… he just cashed out his shares of this place which now makes a cool $260 mil / year.. and the guy is like…. UMMMMMMMMMMMMM.. now what???? and it just blew my mind because it’s like a real life example of that game you play to figure out what you should do with your life of “what if you had more money than you knew what to do with… then what”… and i meet a guy like this in real life..

and BAM!… i knew what i would be doing.. i would be creating dances and performances and articles and screenplays and living out these ideas i have in my head… and where else would i want to do this but LA… and i realized that i dont care about travelling anymore for the time being… because in a certain way i have clarity (i SURE HOPE THIS IS NOT ONE OF MY SHORT LIVED GIANT PROCLAMATIONS LOL!!!) and i feel that extending my trip indefinitely and this and that is sort of denying this clarity.. being afraid of actually putting myself out there, so i will just wander and see the world and be a great adevnturer etc… it reminds me that i was talking to a friend in jerusalem when i was all confused about judaism and he said to me, the interesting thing about your plan of “no plans” is that you have sort of denied the possibility that life wants you to STAY somewhere for a while… and i said… PSSSSHHH (this is what you say in israel when something blows your mind)…. so… that’s nice…

anyway… after that… i have watched life have its fun with me and i wound up travelling with the 2 people from the rainbow gathering who i was hoping to travel with because i connected with them the most (this happened in an almost comically synchronistic way)… and we travelled first to ras abu gallum and then to LAGUNA outside of ras abu gallum in sinai, egypt… which is… without a doubt… the most peaceful, beautiful, memorable place that i have EVER been to… this is the first place that i have been in my life that i know i will ache to get back to… there is NO ONE there and it’s a laguna on the red sea with a bedouin host and you stay in bungalows and your meals are taken care of and it costs about $8 /day for everything and it’s surrounded by a coral reef and you go snorkeling if you want and have freshly caught fish for dinner and etc etc etc etc etc… it’s ALSO funny because my camera battery died just as i got there and there’s no electricity so i have no “captured” memory of this place which makes it even more special for me… i just.. wow.. it was just the most amazing place i have ever been… the water was incredible, snorkeling was even more so, the sunsets even more so, the bedouin hosts much more so…

speaking of which, a lot of you have asked about “the situation” and all that… i have spoken with lots of israelis and lots of arabs and some are racists and most are not, and this conflict is BY FAR the most confusing “issue” that i have EVER come into contact with… the more i learn, the less i know, and i just want to bury my head in the sand… in my humble opinion, it will take a global consciousness change, the return of the messiah, or an alien landing on the wall separating israel from the west bank for this thing to ever end… i will say no more..

SOOOOO.. the other thing that got me thinking about my deep commitment to judaism was that in tel aviv i met these christians and i liked everything they were saying too… basically, god is good and as most of you have said, they are all saying the same things anyway… love your neighbor, be happy, be kind, be faithful… so at 3:38 on february 18, 2006, this is good enough for me…

and with that, i think ive said enough… i am off to cairo soon enough and well see what happens…. love you ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL and thanks for listening..

brit

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shalom chevre (friends),
so it appears that in calendar time pretty much a month has passed since i last wrote… it’s interesting how that happens… one day you are saying “i should probably write people soon” and then a month has gone by… and you are like (you are me in this case) “wow.. how do you update people on a month without boring them to death”… and so you are like “better just go for it…”

i left you off about to head to jordan, which i did.. i spent about a week there travelling with 2 friends and had a wonderful time.. we did many unique things that hundreds of other people were also doing at the same time we stayed in the famed wadi rum desert in a bedouin tent for a night and before going to sleep entertained the bedouin’s family with my dancing and my friend’s beatboxing, which was a huge hit for the 7 children… we then spent a few days in petra aka the most beautiful, unimaginable thing i have ever seen… google it for pictures.. basically, the nabataean’s carved buildings into mountains.. like crazy, massive, beautiful greek style buildings… into mountains… and then we finished this off with a night in amman where i met a new friend of a friend and was wined and dined middle-east style… i almost wrote right after that… at that time, the big thing on my mind was poverty… the bedouin family and a worker we met in petra, a wonderful, beautiful, friendly phillipino woman named mona who left her 10-year old son because her husband died to come work at a hotel in jordan for 5 years for the privilege of sending all of her paychecks back to the phillipines while she dined on ramen the whole time… and i was thinking.. what is this… i gallavant around the world, making friends say “wow it’s so beautiful what you are doing”… and then there is this… but as life so often does, it moved on and i forgot about all that stuff that i had felt “so deeply” for days… what is that? …….

so then im back in israel and i get to talking to a lot of people which i have been doing about this thing called shomer nagia, which means “keeping touch” which means not touching people of the opposite sex until you are married, and then only touching your spouse… it’s fairly common among orthodox jews and it struck me as the most fascinating, bizarre practice i had ever encountered… so i get back and get barraged with these people (moves in mysterious ways) and after a lot of debating and wondering and reading a great book called “the magic touch” (amazon it), i decided to try it… so i did that for 3 weeks until yesterday and it really really (for the time being anyway) gave me a whole new understanding of touch and flirting and the ways i manipulate people for touch and am manipulated and the games that i play… cuz basically, i really dont want to play any games at all and im looking for any and all ways to accomplish this… i could write on and on about this stuff but that book i mentioned is really well written and really short and if this sparks your interest at all, check it out.. basically for me, hooking up and getting physically involved with people as a means of starting a relationship has more and more started to make my soul shudder and im trying to figure out how to proceed from here… because at least in america, it’s just normal… and as much as i hate to admit it, i have a great fear of not being normal… but we’ll see… speaking of which,

i came to tel aviv yesterday (which is where i am now) to kind of get away from religion for a little while.. i felt a little inundated to say the least… and i had this grand plan of going to a club and just dancing it all out and having a great time and i did that but there was an emptiness to it…. i have a tendency toward great, short-lasting proclamations, but it sure did feel like something has shifted… like a big part of my self-identity in terms of “going out” and so forth is falling by the wayside… it just doesnt do it for me anymore… as much as i loved the dancing, which i did, i would have enjoyed it as much by myself in my room and probably would have enjoyed even more just talking to other people about life, which a club environment is sadly not conducive to…

other than that, i did a bunch of other stuff… went all over eretz israel with a friend i met the day before we left so that he could sightsee before we left and spent shabbat with a bunch of crazy (in a good way) chasidic guys who where the circle fur hats and sing like ive always dreamed people might sing…

the more important part, to me, have been the real back and forth i have been feeling about judaism… i spent a good week or two “yeshiva shopping” as they call it, which is, checking out schools that teach torah… there were aspects that i just fell in love with and felt like oh my god this is for me… i have to drop everything and im going to move to israel and that’s that and then without fail some comment would be made, about other religions, or how you have to practice judaism, or arabs, or “chosen people”, and i would just kind of shrink back and wonder what i had been so excited about.. this process has continued for me through today… of elation followed by confusion followed by calm followed by new elation etc… and i want to write about panicking and what do i do, but the process of writing it makes me realize “it’s ok”… im sure everybody’s going through something right now….

i also had a little epiphany about my dancing which was…. so, the show that i made in november was an autobiographical one-man show combining dance and monologue.. i combined them because i felt like i couldnt say the things i wanted to say through dance.. couldnt adequately express my soul… i realized that this is not exactly true… it’s more that the form i am currently working with is not enough for me to express those things and that ultimately, im going to have to abandon the form and find my own path.. this is probably THE scariest thing for me because i feel like im betraying my teachers and the dance by doing so, but regardless, scary as it may be for me (and im sure you may wonder what is scary about that… just believe me, for me it’s scary), i know sooner or later it’s what im going to have to do…

so, i feel…. ok.. kind of between ups and downs.. ive been reading a lot lately and just finished “jitterbug perfume” by tom robbins, solidifying mr. robbins as my favorite author.. i recommend this book more than i can say… i would like to create work at that level… whatever the work ends up being.. i feel like im moving in a direction, but not as fast or as clearly as id like, and im really praying right now for a teacher and a environment that promotes growth… i feel like how i had been living is not going to cut it anymore, and that a change is gonna come… but we’ll see… like i said, i have a tendency to strong, short-lived proclamations…

so, the “plan” is to go to egypt shortly, but even writing that i shudder a little at that plan word…. i feel like it always cuts off what the moment is presenting… i thing im rambling as a way to try to find a hook… i would really love to write something that you felt compelled to respond to… ill try this one…

i have a real fear of groups and allegiances and signing onto things… one of the things that made me feel ok about yoga/yogananda is that it’s a spiritual practice more than a religion/set of tenets… but i am really feeling a strong pull from judaism.. and an almost as strong push… for those of you who have dealt with these things, what conclusions have you come to in your own life… i hear so many things.. you need a discipline.. you need to just live… you need a teacher… a teacher will just try to turn you into them… follow god… there is no god… etc etc etc… there is a concept in judaism of hevrouta (im sure i just butchered the spelling) which means learning with a partner… almost like the stereotype of 2 jews arguing back and forth… it’s how the mindset works i think… that’s how you find truth is through discussion… so i guess im asking for you to be my hevrouta… what have you found for yourself??

so, if you read this whole thing, thanks…
much love and even greater gratitude for your presence in my life
brit

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