Al is ...

Al is sipping a tall decafe mocha with whip.

Al is writing about "high-semantic storage" and other things he doesn't fully understand.

Al is eating a drumstick at his desk and trying to imagine world peace. The drumstick is really good.

Al is reading Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years. (His friend Karen Croft did a lot of the research.)

Al is going downstairs for an iced latte.

Al is on a conference call with a bunch of very forward-looking people.

Al is thinking he'd like to be in Maui, bobbing in the waves of Napili Bay right about now.

Al is taking Bodie for a quick walk in the courtyard.

Al is trying to arrange an interview but his subject doesn't have the bandwidth for that right now.

Al is ready for the weekend. Oh, wait, this is only Wednesday.

Al is chowing down on leftover pizza, his workday done.

Al is at the yoga center.

Al is.

The Red Belt

My wife and I recently returned from 15 days of intensive martial-arts training in the Arizona desert, near Sedona. Eat breakfast, train. Eat lunch, train. Eat dinner, train. Go to bed, start again.

A couple of times we even trained before breakfast.

Several times along the way we decided we didn't want to do any more, but we kept going anyway.

Earned red belts in the end. Never mind the white, yellow, and blue belts that usually come before that in Dahn Mu Do (similar to Tai Chi). Not that we went to Sedona seeking belts. We didn't even know about them until we were there. And we didn't particularly like the idea that there would be a test at the end of our stay. This was our vacation, for God's sake.

But of course once we learned about the red belts we couldn't very well go home without one, could we? Not on your life.

Best part was the stuff we did with swords. Wooden swords that we gave names to, carried everywhere, and slept with every night.

It took us days to master the Vortex Sword form, and I still messed up when it was my turn on stage. I left out a move and ended with my back to the audience. Damn. A quick, impromptu move set things right, but still.

The whole Vortex thing takes about three minutes to perform and seems ridiculously easy now.

That's just the way of things, I guess.

Then again I still need to refine my footwork, and there's a new twist our local instructor shared with us — twirling the sword like a batton to change directions with flair.

I'm working on it.

Work in Progress

I struggle sometimes, because I don't trust my own perceptions.

Should I?

To me the world looks flat, but pictures from space show that it's quite round.

On the other hand, don't try to tell me what to think. I trust my own mind more than anyone else's.

Except when I don't.

The strange thing is it's easier to disbelieve than it is to believe. Disbelief is safer somehow. To believe is to put yourself on the line.

I like to think of myself as a spiritual person. My intuitions, when I trust them, are almost always good. I should trust them more. I think.

I think of the time I was first in line at a red light and thought, Don't be in a hurry. It was an odd thought because I had no reason to be in a hurry. Then, sure enough, a car came speeding through the intersection from my left, two seconds after my light turned green and his turned red.

But I also think of the time I told my best friend he should look for a new job in Roseburg, Oregon. I don't know why I thought of Roseburg -- I'd only been there once -- but he did indeed find a job there. Only it didn't work out and he quit soon after he started.

Good thing he doesn't really remember me suggesting Roseburg.

I've been trying to increase my awareness through yoga, and I look forward to Mondays in particular. On Monday nights, the center where I train holds a special class in which we do 103 Chun Bu Kyung bows. Think of it as an exercise in sincerity and humility. An active meditation. Whether you believe in the Chun Bu Kyung — an ancient spiritual code that begins and ends with one — doesn't really matter. Everyone ends the night feeling calm and peaceful.

Or energized.

You have to trust your own experience.

Sometimes our instructor will ask us to consider a question while we bow. "Ask yourself, 'Who am I?'" she told us recently.

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

I was getting nothing. And then ...

You are God's creation.

I don't know where that came from, but it made me smile.

Later I would wonder if it was a message from the cosmos or just a random thought, but in that moment, I was happy to be God's creation. I felt his pleasure in what he had created.

And in the next moment I realized I was also my own creation.

Think of it (me) as a collaboration.

As a storyteller, I know a little about creating characters and having them take on a life of their own. I love that.

I think God loves it, too.

Shedding Tears

My wife and I have been married 30 years now, and the last time we checked, our auras were almost identical. And yet we’re very different. Her goal is to cry less; mine is to cry more.

Tears come to her easily and often. Sad movies. Sad songs. Parting from relatives we may not see again for a year or more. Random acts of kindness. All these things bring tears to her eyes.

Me? When I was a boy I cried a lot. Now, hardly ever.

Breathe in, breathe out.

A woman I know said she would choose joy over enlightenment. I can respect that. We know what joy is and it’s pretty cool. Enlightenment is more mysterious.

Beyond emotions?

I don’t think that’s it. I’ve been beyond emotions (or pretty close to it).

The great thing about my wife is that she feels things. Deeply. I know sometimes she wishes she didn’t. But I love her for it. Everyone does. For her, it’s frustrating to have the words she wants to say get stuck in her throat. She’d like to have more self-control than that. But I think tears say more than words sometimes.

Still, no one wants to be a slave to their emotions.

As a young boy I cried over things like striking out in baseball. The ball was small and hard and I was afraid of it. Afraid of failing, too. When it was my turn at bat I would just stand there. Finally a classmate said, “Just take a swing. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

Good advice.

Breathe in, breathe out.

I learned not to cry for silly selfish reasons. In fact I learned not to cry at all. Almost.

A few years ago I cried uncontrollably when I thought I was going to lose my job. As it turned out I kept my job while others lost theirs. Then I began to think of them as the lucky ones ...

The most enlightened people I know are not beyond emotions. They feel joy and sadness, but are not controlled by them.

By not crying I appeared to be in control of my emotions, but I was not free. I was controlled by them in a different way.

I cried, for the first time in a long time, during an initial energy checkup at the Dahn Yoga center in our neighborhood. My aura changed dramatically. I don’t really remember what the headmaster did or what all we talked about, but I came out feeling a lot of compassion. For others and, surprisingly, for myself.

Since then I’ve learned that a new friend at the center carries in his wallet a picture of himself as a young boy.

“It reminds me that I need to take care of little Louis,” he says.

At times, Louis explains, he has denied himself things he wouldn’t keep from his worst enemy.

When I finish writing this I’m going to find a picture of little Freddy (my nickname as a boy).

Breathe in, breathe out.

Lately I’ve allowed myself to cry more. I cry listening to Sting sing “Fields of Gold” and watching the romantic comedy “Love Actually.” I cry rubbing my wife’s hand in yoga class.

“While you are crying, watch yourself,” the headmaster tells me. “Ask yourself why you cry.”

Good advice.

“When we purify our emotions we can cry less,” she says. “When we have a deeper soul's connection we will cry more.”

Such Small Hands

Where to start ...

Summer 2005. I'm sitting on a yoga mat in a tiny hole-in-the-wall training center — in a strip mall, between a camera store and a post office — and my heart is opening in a way I seldom let it.

In one sense I'm not doing anything I haven't done thousands of times over the past 29 years. I'm simply holding my wife's hand. In this case, however, she is lying on her back and I am rubbing her fingers, pressing each fingertip with my thumbnail — an acupressure technique we learned weeks earlier.

My heart opens as I feel how tiny her hand is in mine. It's like a child's, and I know she has the same innocent spirit she was born with. At the same time, I see the tiny spots on her skin that give away the secret that she, like me, is already 50 years old.

Then, in my head, I hear the words our instructor spoke when she first met my wife: "Such small hands, but they hold so many people."

Now I'm crying because I know just how true that is.

I see us growing old together, older and grayer than we are now. Already we have been together longer than we've been apart. I think about the moment when her spirit will slip away and it breaks my heart.

Yet in this moment I am more alive and more thankful than I have ever been.