San Juan: Glimpses in Time: (Travels Through Shadow and Light)

By Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut

From my home in San Juan, a lovely sector of central Tibas, situated just north of San Jose, Costa Rica, while the candle flickers I commence the writing of these varied glimpses.

Warning! What you are about to read are personal memoirs! They are much to do about self. They amount to a large group of random thoughts, sporadic observations.

I always feel I am somehow supposed to write my thoughts down what a big ego I must have because (I like to think that) if you put them all together, they form a loose-knit way of seeing the world. They are a part of my worldview. Everyone has one of these whats your view of the world look like?

I am going to be a world philosopher when I grow up, you see. That is what my intention is, since I have always been preoccupied with how to see things, how to process things.

How odd is life anyway. Thats why my interest in philosophy to figure out the oddness of life. Normally, I think philosophy can be pretty dry and boring. But, for me, its terribly exciting.

In this book, what you are about to delve into will resemble the form of an ongoing story. It will consist of a sequence of six weeks of shadows and lights (i.e. days and nights). After that time, wherever I am at with it, I will stop, and simply and abruptly start to write another book about something else I know not what.

Here though, I will (I suspect) be sharing with you a series of ideas, dreams, fears, logical thoughts, illogical thoughts, wonderings, wanderings and general psychobabble. I say that because I intend to impart thoughts and ideas about whatever might be in my ongoing existence in being.

This could be anything, I assure youas of course it could be for anyone.

Exactly what will appear in the pages that represent the next six weeks of my life, I do not have any idea that, for me, is going to be much of the fun of writing it!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 2, 2004
• ISBN: 9781418453961

Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut

Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut is a philosopher/writer on issues such as worldview, philosophy, personal memoir, spirituality, science, psychology, and many other general life issues. He is the author of 36 published and unpublished books, most written while residing in various locations between Central America and Indianapolis, Indiana. Michael now resides in Indianapolis with his wonderful wife, Tanya, their two German Shepherd’s, Teddy and The Bear, along with a large number of other animal, botanical, and biological life.

Book preview

One

Day 1: Tuesday: After the day of travel…

Today was the most recent in a sequence of my days in the deepening maze. I came to profounder metaphysical (beyond the external, physical) understandings: I saw again that life was not what it seemed to be.

Today I fully settled back into San Juan de Tibas, my other home where I reside six or seven months out of the year.

Today, let’s see…what did I do? I went out and patted the heads of kids, winked at not just a few pretty ladies, broke up a fight in the park, counseled some who were struggling, nurtured a human or two back to the shores of greater reason, healed the sick, raised the dead and other general and miscellaneous stuff…

I played the roles of God and Man.

(Some of that was true.)

And today I lived fully, had the best day of my life (because each day is my new best day) and touched the fragile edges of both pain and bliss. I wondered about it all, marveled in it all, got in touch with all that I could of it.

I am not sure what new marvels await my attention when the replenished sun rises – perhaps just more of the same, which would be fine with me. I will be there, whatever befalls me, and I am quite sure that my realization of even the brushes of death is not illusory, but very real.

When I think about yesterday, I remember it offered me the sensation of great unrest from my helpless crouching place in the sky. We encountered that wonderful thing called turbulence up there.

A frequent flyer, I sat next to a first-time-ever flyer, a young father of two, from Waterloo, Indiana, who wondered out loud if all flights were normally this bouncy. I assured him they weren’t, and that he must have been somehow chosen to receive the blessing of a particularly rocky ride – lucky him!

I realized a couple of times that I was perched, precariously, out there on the farthermost outer limb of life. It felt funny for a minute – big, brave frequent flyer me – because I was a quivering coward for a second or two. I prayed a quick prayer to catch me up on recent sins.

We never know until we seize a slight glimpse of the face of death…what we have at work within us to face life with…

A while ago the floor moved, ever so slightly, from beneath my feet. I was yapping on the phone at the time, to Stephen, my best friend down here, who quickly said to me, "did you feel that?"

I said I did. What was it?

We were both a bit freaked out, but the weirdness is not an uncommon one; in our world right now, right here in the first month of the year 2001, many have already perished in huge earthquakes at opposite ends of the earth.

It turned out to be a little earth tremor…just a baby one.

It felt odd though.

Tonight, the winds blow viscously, and all manner of hell is unleashing itself right outside my pounding doors and windows. I finally gave up sleeping and called a loved one two thousand miles away, waking her up from her wee hours sleep, to tell her I was freaked out just then.

She told me not to worry, and of course, she was right. After all, what is it that I can do, at 35,000 feet, for instance, while inside an elongated chunk of metal and being whipped about so? And how can I, by myself, steady a moving floor? And what is to prevent a gust of wind from blowing me wherever it wants?

This earth does what it does. The planet stirs. It was doing it before we (emeralds among all living life manifestations) got here, and I suspect it will do it after we ultimately wipe ourselves from the face of it.

We, the newcomers to life, exhibit a propensity to settle in the path of it’s never ending flow of lightning storms, earthquakes, tornadoes, tidal waves, monsoons, gully washers, volcanoes, sea tempests and general terrain freakiness.

We wonder why we are not always spared when a great tragedy befalls us.

What kind of a God would let this happen to his children in the first place? we reason aloud. But we ponder it so because we do not understand that the laws of life and nature are not interested in us; they will operate as they are already programmed to do so, right in our midst, while we – great and powerful human specimens that we are – will not manage to find a way every time to put a stop to them.

We are not invincible, like we think we are.

…I remember that I introduced myself to someone on the plane yesterday in this manner: Hello, I’m Michael Jean Nystrom-Schut, the metaphysical writer.

A deadened response followed the intro, since I labor in near-total obscurity. I was not offended. Ego cushioned me.

I was really just practicing saying what I want to hear come out from myself, but, in reality, I am not that anyway – I am a hollow impostor in a world of cheap impersonators. I am really nothing of the sort. This is not false humility; it is true.

What do I truthfully want to call myself? Whatever it is, it is in reference to my illusion of thinking I am that. In reality, I am not that.

So what is it that I am? I am just a small part of an infinitesimally greater part. I am an obscure earth dweller, and you? You, too, are one of those things also.

Do you know your status? Have you located your place? Did you know, for instance, that the planet Jupiter is 316 times bigger than earth, and that it has, not one, but 14 moons, which circle it?

And did you know, that in the greater scheme of things, the planet Jupiter is itself nothing, in that it is just a pretty big planet whipping around the sun – small, dying yellow star that it is – in a fairly small galaxy (the Milky Way), one of thousands of galaxies in an ever-expanding Universe?

It’s cool that life is so greatly represented here on this hot green and blue ball, but surely we particular humans – in this time and space in our human history – don’t monopolize such an existence. In still other spaces, many galaxies away, there must dwell an abundance of existence, a plethora of other us forms, undiscovered perhaps yet for only a century more, or maybe two centuries more.

Maybe we’ll meet some of them soon…

I continue to be up and away from my bed right now, as the wind remains in an endless pattern, wailing and spitting wolf-like moanings and howls.

Spooky is what I’d have to call it, yes, spooky, and if I weren’t such a big, strong man, I’d be a scared little baby boy right about now, and, no doubt, one with a substantial load in my diaper drawers…

Two

The wee hours of second morning light…

Daylight should be arriving in the next few minutes. It appears I will be around to see it; I can’t sleep, and I am tired of trying to do so. I am drinking apple juice, and when I am not doing that, I am writing, and when I am not doing that, I am going to the bathroom; Michael is so tired he does not even seem to get the connection…

My eyes are blinking on and off, and now I guess I am wondering why I don’t go to sleep just now, but I am too tired for sleep. Do you ever get that way?

What a night that was. I felt small, while everything else looked big. I felt young, while everything else seemed old. I felt short, and everything else looked tall. I felt something like a friend of mine, Darnell, who told me late last night that his whole life had fallen apart in just the past month. He had lost his girl, his business had fallen on its ass, his best friends had grown distant…and he now says he’s generally become bummed out about life.

I sometimes get in that mindset all in the course of a single day! When I see it coming I make room for it. He did too. He said he was laughing about it all because now that he’s bottomed out there is no place farther down for him to fall

He’s lying flat, on the rock, on the bottom, and there’s a sort of a comfort in knowing that there’s not much else that can happen to him – kind of like gallows humor…

I didn’t tell Darnell, but I can think of a lot more bad stuff that can still come his way; what a fatalist I am, huh? There’s no end to what life can toss at you; that’s part of the bad, part of the ugly, and that will be coming right at you from time to time.

I like to plan my chaos at times. I will break all the way down in the course of a given day, so that I can come all the way back up the next day. It’s called life – in the fast lane – and it’s part of the way it is…we need to get past it, just get over it, for once and for all.

We need to quit being whiney babies about everything.

Secular humanism suggests to me I shun the bad stuff, shy away from it. Rather, it suggests, I should gravitate towards the good stuff, move into that realm of things.

Right – how nice a thought!

But how impractical is it to do so. It’s really not that way, real life that is. It’s a mixture of a variety of things and so we just need to work with all of this stuff that’s handed to us; just work it out.

For example, I miss my loved ones. Do you ever miss your loved ones? Where are they right now? Do you know? Are they safe? Are they happy? What are they going through?

Isn’t it true that if our loved ones are in trouble, are struggling, or hurting, are lost in some form of perdition, that we cannot ourselves know full happiness or peace?

Then why do we so desperately try to find it? Why do we think we can know it so intimately, so often? If we love someone else besides ourselves, we open ourselves up to the pain of that love – and the more we love, the more people we love, and the more deeply we come to love those people, the more potential pain there exists to visit upon us.

Naturally, that’s providing we really, really love them, but of course we do, don’t we?

Thus, with a simple test of love, I am capable of seeing that it is impractical to merely shun the bad, and grab the gusto in the good; it just doesn’t work that way – they go hand in hand, bad and good. They are opposite ends of a spectrum.

So, embrace all of it, I say.

Three

More early light of the 2nd Day…

So many – verbally and non-verbally – have commented to me recently about my shell. I seem to have a small following whom admirer this shell of mine – how very special that is to me.

I mean it. My ego perks up when I sense that I am in the spotlight. It does so just in the same manner I am able to perk another’s ego, by shining my great spotlight onto them.

We are so very into ourselves, it seems. From our vantage point, the universe begins and ends around whom and what we have come to know as me.

From the very beginning this seemed so. When we were shriveled, shrunken newborns, and for quite a spell to follow, we interpreted our existence, and everything in it, from the perspective of all things emanating from us.

We were birthed as smooth, little ego-bags.

Do we really think we have come to emerge so much farther from that? We grow up, and become shrunken, wrinkled ego-bags.

To truly see our place in the universe we would have to know something about the universe. We would have to comprehend some of its widening dimensions. We would have to know about its capabilities. We would have to know about its nature, it essence.

If we could grasp even a small part of that, we might be able to return ourselves to the place in it that is appropriate for us to be. But we seem to struggle with this little task. Such a little thing, and we struggle fiercely with it.

So everything becomes for us, How are you? I’m fine. Have a good day. You do the same. What’s going on with you? Oh, not much, I have had the sniffles lately, and I also have a big project coming due… And on and on and on…blah, blah, blah…

Totally unaware of the vastness of everything around us, we are enveloped in who we are, what we are doing, and how things look from where we sit. As far as I can see it, the narcissism I see in the world is a runaway rampant train, and, at this point, I don’t even know what I am going to do about it anymore…

Did you get that? Yes, I suggested that the problem (and subsequent solution) had something to actually do with me (…me, me, me). More narcissism.

Of course it doesn’t…does it? Am I responsible for the way things are? Well, not all of it, perhaps. But I should break off a slice of the problem and work on it, so that I can do my duty, do my part, for God and country.

If everyone would just do just a little tiny bit, just touch one person today, what a better world this would be… Is that true? Sure, it’s true. So maybe we need to be a little bit self-centered. What are we going to fix if we don’t think it’s up to us to do the fixing?

…I am very tired from no sleep. I stopped and popped my head into the mirror for a passing look at my shell a while ago. It didn’t look so good. Something is going to have to give with that, because the way I look and feel right now, I am accumulating no one to the fan club on this particular day.

That’s a bad thing, right? If no one joins my fan club, then my ego suffers and I struggle to think of myself as a viable entity in the human race. If I don’t feel good about me, then how am I going to go out and win others to the path of finding their bliss in life?

I simply have to get pumped up and feel good about life, or else there goes the whole show.

What I am about is having (being, doing) a full participation in this great thing called life. If I can do that, I can hold my head up and demonstrate to the world that all is good; I can whip off a colloquialism such as, "Yup (or maybe yo!), it’s all good! Ain’t life swell?"

If I share my ideas with people, but my life shows them that it is not in alignment with those ideas, then where will that lead me? Where will it lead anyone else?

Blind leading blind into blind alleys…

Thoughts are powerful direction-changers. I pick and choose the thoughts I will dwell upon; I know those thoughts will influence me in the direction of my ultimate outcomes. I have a wide repertoire of thoughts from which to choose, on any given occasion, in any particular day. I know lots of things. I have unlimited numbers of thoughts.

So, which ones will I wear in my mind today? Will I dress up? Will I bum it? I get to do all of this choosing. Good for me; I get to make a big bouquet of thoughts, and present them, as gifts, to those with whom I come in contact this blessed day in the kingdom. God be praised.

My choice of thoughts will either underpin my existence in life, or undermine it. How about some metaphors? OK. I can either eat junk-food thoughts today, or I can feast from a great buffet, complete with fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, nuts and other nutritious entries.

Will I slam down a couple of cheeseburgers? Or will I feast on wholesome nutrition?

Am I what I eat, like they say? Am I what I think? That’s something else they say. I think so, all of that… I think all of that which they say might be true here.

Four

10:30 in the morning…

I should have fun today. That fun should not harm anyone else. That fun should prove life affirming. That fun should be real-felt. It should be spontaneous, genuine, profound.

My friend, Glenda, tells me all the time, "Aye, Michael, you make I laugh!"

…So I am supposed to do this for her, for if I do not do this, if I cannot do this, if this does not manifest itself within me on this day, what does that speak of in me?

What will that address in my very existence? What will I declare as my personal opinion of the thing called Life, the Being called God?

I simply need to make Glenda laugh…

Much is made of being good. Too much is made of it, in fact. I am not concerned with being good. Life, for me, is not a battle between good and evil. I am enveloped in the awareness of God. I see, I have a consciousness, I understand, that God is everywhere, in everything; God is all things.

Is there a place where God isn’t? I think not. Thus, there is no hiding from God; in the matter of hiding from God, I suggest it is not necessary. My oneness with God assures me that hiding is not necessary at all, thus I can celebrate the Presence of God in all things, all places, all people.

Why run from the giver of life?

If I can truly see that God is in all things, and that God is the giver of life, I needn’t run. Instead, I am quite free…even free…to have some fun.

There I said it.

I am free to pursue pleasure, and I shall do just that.

I am free to indulge in all things that enhance the consciousness of this oneness. Life is a celebration. I am celebrating many things, but the many things are really one thing; everything is in God – God is in everything.

I am not a pursuer of the concept that God is everything, although quite clearly I can think of nothing that God isn’t. The star that is farthest out from the center of the universe is from God. So is the innermost atom of my internal being.

So, as far out, and as far in, as I can imagine, I can imagine God.

While I do not celebrate the trees as God, I celebrate God in the presence of the trees. It is the same with the mountains, the rivers, all of animal life, all of human life, all that spans the galactic spaces of existence. It all bears the mark of God, the touch of God, and that’s a good thing, right?

And it is the reason that I shall set out today, with absolutely no fear, or hesitation, towards seeking happiness, joy, peace, fun.

I know that when it comes to me experiencing life in all its fullness and intensity, it can effortlessly be obtained and practiced through my growing conscious union with the being many of us call Allah (alias God, Dog – God flipped, the Kosmos, the Universe, Life, Big Papa).

Five

Later still, on the 2nd Day…

Seven weeks ago I had stepped out of an Indianapolis-bound airplane and into a rental car. It was cold. Hell, I was cold.

The car warmed up slowly. The windows taunted me with the words, "Scrape me first, polar-boy." Damn it, I felt like shit.

My warm sunshine of San Juan was a briskly faded memory now. I was back up north, and in the thick deadness cold of winter; it was zero degrees temperature and I was wondering out loud about my sanity, common sense, and path of my individual journey…

Some (illusion of) time passed, doing so swiftly, as time always does. Nearly fifty days transpired.

And then a few hours ago, I peeled off my winter coat and scarf, and breathed in the warmth of the day; it was 82 degrees at that moment.

The sun beat down upon my head.

Sorry to all of you people of Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. I am selfishly glad to be back in this. Now the memory fading from me is one of cold again. How time passes; sceneries change; life moves to us, then from us.

Life is a series of passages. Usually, they are subtle. Sometimes they are marked more distinctly. Always they move us forward, into new time, into new space, into the future.

Deep into one life, I then leave it for another. In reality, that is what we all do with each new passing day. When we nod off into the slumber of our deepest delta rest, we emerge to embark upon life again, from wherever we remember leaving it the day before.

So the time passes and with it goes our lives. We experience a series of experiences – some of us for a long time, some of us for a brief respite.

There is no rule here, of course; it’s all sort of a grab bag deal…

I sometimes get freaked out with the passage of time and space. At the wonderful wedding of my son, Andrew, and new daughter, Laura, last weekend in Cincinnati, I saw loved ones from the past – older versions of them now, for time, as it did with me, has scuffed them up a bit.

I focused and re-focused a few times before finally being able to get some of them in my minds eye.

Later on in the evening I somehow reconciled the old model with the new model, and, Presto! They were back in place. These mental games are some we use to protect ourselves from the awareness of the ever-persistent passage of time – mine included; I’m no vampire.

If they aged, I also had to age. I can’t let that happen. So my mind caught up on their images, and things appeared safe and comfortable for me again. How handy…

I can only imagine what some of them went through upon beholding my new image…

I am positively projecting fifty to seventy good human years upon the happy couple in their spiritual journey together. Naturally I am going to say that these two young people are absolutely fantastic human beings.

It’s great when we can find someone to travel along the journey of life – not an easy thing to do. It’s greater still to know that none of us travel the path of life alone. I have but to look up into the sky on a bright night and see that, among so much else, we are, most definitely, not alone…

I used to call that a groovy thing.

Six

A sunny afternoon…

I have been once again left spellbound by a special woman up in that cold north. She took me by storm, just like before. There is something about the soul of her. Blended together with my soul, they are coming to know one another in some unspoken and intimate way.

Can it continue?

Manifestations of this knowing abound, as I understand that I am so much richer that she is in my life.

The price I pay for this great appreciation of our intimacy is to lose it when I return to the tropical Southland (going back and forth from Indy to Central America several times a year).

Here I sometimes maintain a count of the days when I will return into her presence, and yet, she follows me, too, wherever I go.

In fact, she is very much like a Phantom, lurking about in the darkness of this still, peaceful night.

Yes…she is quite Phantom-like.

Seven

Slumber land (from down under)…

It’s such a crazy world up there. That’s why I come down here. I drop into this abyss, deep into the resources of the quiet spaces. It is here that I gain my strength. It is here that I know peace.

I enjoy the solitude of this place. I gather in fledgling thoughts like so many chicks brought back under the roosting feathered body of the mother hen. I rest in this place. Who can dare bring harm to me here? There is absolutely no one who can harm me here. Let them try; I am invincible.

At first the turbulence of the outside world – so loud is it – becomes even a bit more nerve shattering than before. That’s because the noises, the thoughts, the variations to sanity are clamoring for attention. They don’t want to be left out in the cold – they demand attention.

But they get attention less and less now. There is, more and more, the sound of less and less.

I might have chosen contemplation, or mantra, or breath, as my vehicle of meditation. Whichever one, they are bringing about the desired response – I am at peace. Can’t touch me now!

I know many who say they personally have no time to meditate. They say it’s foolish waste of time; what’s television for six hours a day?

They say their busy lives, with schedules and commitments in great abundance, give them nary an opportunity to bask in such a pleasured place.

I know, of course, that by not going into this deep abyss, my woes only multiply. I can never know tranquility when I try to know it with a troubled mind. By making time for meditation, I am clearing the way for thoughts to become more ordered, more structured, more manageable.

I need that; everyone to stay sane needs that.

…All I seem to be able to hear now are faint mechanical noises. I don’t even know from where. It’s nice to actually not know that, and to not be on a need-to-know basis all the time. Amazingly, from this place, I am in a vast and empty room of aloneness. Here in this room, I have the chance to carelessly sashay around a bit, see what I can see, feel what I can feel.

Mostly just now I am at peace.

Praise be to Allah, no drug has brought it about – not one from across the countertop, or one from the street. It’s hardly necessary to be drugged, for, in this state that I now exist, the effects of a great tranquilizer are steadily at work.

I no longer need a drug; my drug is this beautiful process itself.

It’s priceless. It’s from God.

…I have now receded to a place that is similar to the one I know just before falling off to sleep. I have given up the ghost, given up all ghosts, in fact. Boo! I scared them off! Imagine.

I have surrendered to the onslaught of interaction and provocation. I have stepped off the larger path, and on to a singular path. No one now is in sight of me. I am in sight of no one.

This is not to say that I am alone. Not by a long shot. In the embrace of the Loving Universe, in my extreme quiet and solitude, I am at home now with God. I am laying around the flickering, orange-blue fireplace, on a giant, furry rug, with Dog.

Eight

Shadows of the 2nd Night…

I have some rather strange thoughts about Jesus in my mind today. Some days I think about Buddha. Today, it’s Jesus.

Did Jesus accept himself as his own personal savior in order to enter into the kingdom of Heaven? To me, it never made sense that it could only be a matter of a simple acceptance of Jesus as one’s personal savior. Jesus, himself, suggested he was one with God. In understanding that oneness, we come to understand that we are inseparable with God,