And so it goes...

The Story

I am currently in Tauranga, New Zealand, a busy town compared with the rurual places I have been staying. After traveling through the northern region, I made my way to the Corromandal penninsula, a rugged beautiful combination of coast and mountains. I parted with my french friend and drove south. I have had so many interested conversations with foreigners I am meeting in hostels. There was an English couple who had been traveling for the past 9 months, driving through Cananda, working on organic farms, and now doing the same in New Zealand. I picked up a hitchhiker who spoke of his troubles finding work in his small farm town and gave him a ride to Auckland where he is hoping to find work. I met three German girls, Johanna, Julia, and Patrica, at a hostel and have been giving them a ride/traveling with them the past few days. Out paths will part today as they will leave to work on an organic farm (a very popular option for traveling and living for free with about 4 hours of work a day). I met Jason from California and will be meeting him in Rotorua today and traveling with him for a while. One of my favorite activites thus far is to find the local mountain and conquer it with great fury. The panaramas have been amazing looking out over a combination of the ocean, mountains, and tiny islands.

One of my best experiences thus far was the jam session I attended last night at a local Irish Pub (with no Irish). It was an open mic/jam session format where people would come up and play original songs and others would come up and create instrumental jams. I was fortunate enough to be able to play bass most of the time and was overcome with joy at the opportunity to play with such great musicians. It felt so good to play with talented musicians after not playing bass for almost a month. We created melodious harmony till 2 am and were forced out of the bar...I left with a large smile on my face and struggled to calm my excitement for the sake of slumber.

The Reflection

One serious problem I have found with travelling is that my English must be simplified for communication with foreigners to the point where I fear I will no longer be proficient in it when I return to the USA. It is hard to formulate lessons learned as there have been so many encounters with new people and new places. If anything, it has encouraged some of the perspectives I have been having lately.

I have been contemplating the intimate relationship between perspective, value system, and experience. It appears to me the three cannot be discussed indepdently for they have an unseperatable connection. Our perspective could be defined as our outlook, our approach, internal reflection, and general frame of perceiving reality. Value system is simply the things we view as holding value, they are the basis for how we make decisions, it is how we declare good from bad, etc. Experience includes everything we experience from our senses. Our perspective shapes how we experiences things, our experience then shapes our perspective - confirming, negating, confusing. Our value system affects how we experience, we choose certain experiences over others because of what we value and it thus confirms, negates, confuses our value system.

I struggle to say there is a correct perspective, it seems each one is shaped by experience, and that each persons experience is valueable because it is their only basis of knowing. My real problem is how to say that a value system can be valid. Because I by no means can say that a murders value system for killing is positive but that is because it conflicts with my value system. I suppose much of it comes down to the belief of whether we are simply material or spiritual creatures and whether or not there is a purpose in life.

I am out of time. (sorry again for the typos)

Let us share with others our fruits of contemplation
Karl