Travel Log Brazil 2012 Part 1

 by Tina Erwin

         I had never been to Brazil but since my husband is captain of the Cajun Express, an oil rig 150 miles off the coast of Brazil he flies down there literally every month. Google Cajun Express and you get some idea of how complicated oil drilling can be. He works for Transocean and they have oil rigs all over the world. They provide the oil platform for the customer, such as Petrobrass, Chevron, BP, Exxon, Shell Oil etc. His ‘hitch’ is 28 days on and 28 days off the rig. It is a grueling schedule. When you’re ‘off rig’ you are also expected to attend training and conferences. However, this particular time he had to go to a conference a week after his hitch ended, so to my delight, he invited me to join him in Rio for a week while he waited for the conference to begin. Since his company lets him keep his frequent flier miles, my flight was free. The company also paid for all hotel and food bills. Transocean is one of the most generous companies I have ever known. But back to Brazil, I thought I would share my impressions of this huge country.

         Brazil is an enormous country. Fully half of your flight you are crossing the vastness of the rain forest and the plains of the Amazon. You can’t see it because these flights are always at night but you can track it on the plane’s televisions. When you awake, you can see that as you near the coast, there is rugged, sometimes hilly but always green, land that stretches for miles in a westerly direction.

         For a city of 12 million people, the Rio de Janeiro airport is quite small. It’s confusing, very warm and humid because it is not air conditioned, and eternally under some type of construction. The airport is your first clue to the sagging and tired infrastructure that is trying unsuccessfully to support this gigantic city.

         Driving from the airport to the Copacabana Beach where the hotels line the beach, is an eye opener. The traffic is grid locked on narrow lanes that clog the arteries that are the heart of the city.

         However, what immediately strikes you, are the encroaching and sad Favelas that seem to line every road. Like a choking vine that strangles a tree, so are these Favelas literally choking off the life in the city. A tremendous percentage of Brazilians live in these red, cinder block, ramshackle, structures called Favelas.

         You try to get a sense of the city as you drive along the roads in your jet lagged stupor. What wakes you up from that sleepiness, are the eerie flocks of great vultures that glide and swoop overhead. These are ugly birds with shabby black feathers and a ten-foot wingspan. Their scanning territory is the hopeless feeling Favelas. The birds patiently circle overhead waiting and watching. The symbol of their presence is brought up close and personal as these birds perch on the streetlights that line the streets of the city. They sit there with their mottled, saggy, hideous faces and watch and wait. The symbol was so intense it sent shivers down my spine.

         Our hotel was quiet, well run and ideal for its view of Copacabana beach. From the 16^th floor the view out to sea is amazing. All the amenities are here, generous amenities yet it still feels as if I walked onto the set of a 19^th century play. Life is slower here, less hectic, more comfortable offering welcoming smiles and simple courtesies. You feel yourself relaxing, letting go of the unrelenting tension of life in the United States. Here, really, what’s the hurry?

         Everything on an oil rig is flown there by helicopter. When your rig is 150 miles at sea, you have to plan ahead and schedule everything around when those helos fly. They bring in all supplies and they fly all personnel on and off the rig. If the helos don’t fly or are cancelled, you don’t go anywhere. And so on the day I arrived, all helos for my husband’s rig were cancelled. However he made all the arrangements to get me to the hotel and to an amazing party that night in honor of his division’s outstanding safety record. So I went to the party without him.

         I’m always amazed at who I get to meet when I travel. This particular evening I met a company man from Transocean, who gave me his view of Brazilian life and culture. He obviously loved these people, loved the country and appreciated what an amazing opportunity a guy from Omaha, Nebraska was given. He even enjoyed learning Portuguese.

         He pointed out that Brazilians seem to him, for the most part, quite happy. There wasn’t the sense of depression or anxiety you find in large cities like New York or the hectic frustration you feel in Los Angeles. Americans somehow think that to be happy you have to have that uniquely American lifestyle. But that’s not true. Not everyone wants or needs that experience. Each of us ends up where we end up for that particular experience.

         As I watched Americans and Brazilians partying it up that first night I marveled at how productive people can be when they choose to work together. And on a rig not working together is deadly. Oil rigs, when run correctly are fine. The issue is that everything has to work perfectly to stay safe. Sometimes life on an oil rig is profoundly dangerous. Until my husband got this job, I had no idea how much effort went into each gallon of gasoline. Even if we never need gas/diesel for cars again, we will still need oil for the sheer volume of plastics and other oil/lubricant products that we use without a thought.

         Imagine being off the coast of Brazil and drilling in 7,000 feet of ocean to the sea floor and then drilling another mile underground – through what amounts to one pipe – or a string of pipes. It’s like sipping oil up through a 10,000-foot long straw and hoping the platform that enables you to do that stays absolutely stable. ≈≈SHUDDER≈≈

        

Stay tuned for part 2

KS&L 67 Independence Day

by Tina Erwin

       What does independence day mean on a spiritual level? Perhaps it just means the freedom to be spiritual in any manner we wish. Maybe it is looking around the world and noticing where that freedom exists and how it was gained. Maybe it is looking around ourselves and noticing what we had to do to be free from that which has tormented us emotionally for a very long time.

         Either way we look at it, gaining independence either from a petty despot, or an emotional prison requires some type of effort, some type of sacrifice. We cannot define independence if we do not know what imprisonment looks and feels like - obviously a polarity issue.  So we have to fight for what we believe in, we have to fight for what is the right thing to do and sometimes we have to have help to achieve that independence. 

         Often, it is extremely difficult to remove a powerful despot as we have observed throughout history - we just have to have help.  If imprisonment is the norm, how do we have any conception of what freedom feels like unless we are aware enough to know that we long for it? If we are numb to our situation, we stay in denial, we stay in a place of fear. 

         If we choose to come out of that situation, it can be really, really scary - most people at least know what the torture routine is. If we have to leave what we know to understand something new, we have to have a whole new level of courage and the number of people who have that level is not as high as we think or would like it to be.

          Emotionally, we have to have help to remove that emotional despot/monster who has tormented us, sometimes for life times. Help that is often costly in what we realize we have to leave behind. Imagine that the people who left Europe for the United States had nothing but their courage in their pockets. Most of them had modest means. Yet they longed to know what it would feel like not to be imprisoned.

         People who declare their independence from their secret torturers, their old fears, their guilt and sadness also arrive usually with little more than their courage in their pockets. Yet, it is that very courage within them that gets them through as they accept help.

         So just maybe the bottom line for any type of independence is the very, very, very first freedom of all, courage.  So to all those courageous people throughout history, to all those who have fought for their emotional freedom for themselves and/or others, Happy Independence Day now and for always.

      

KS&L 378 Returning Home

by Tina Erwin

         Recently, I returned to my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. I was attending a book signing. I found being in Greensboro, after all these years almost a surreal event. I left North Carolina one chilly day in October 1972 to join the Navy and I never looked back.

         I returned to the houses I grew up in, the neighborhoods I walked, and noted with quiet pleasure that the trees I had loved as a child were still standing. Neighborhoods change, become different because people make a neighborhood and people change. Thomas Wolfe, in Look Homeward Angel was right: you really cannot ever go home again, you cannot return to those places of childhood with the same eyes. If you think you can, then you have not evolved as a soul, as a person.

         In this tool of transformation, I have had the opportunity to return to the past, perhaps to give it a healing look and then to decide that there really are no ghosts to move on, maybe they are all gone now, buried in the past of memories held close and the wisdom from experiences hard won.

         It wasn’t just returning to old residences, or seeing old memories in a new way, it was more than that. I think perhaps it was looking back over a lifetime of traveling, meeting people and building on a childhood rich in variety of experiences and emotions. For me, it was amazing to look out a window, see all of these beautiful trees and catch a glimpse of a rain shower washing the day, followed by a light shaft always piercing the grey of a cloudy moment.

Fascinating how we all change and yet in some way, we are the same person. I feel I am different because of what I have lived and yet I am still that same little girl who wanted to visit all of those far away places with strange sounding names. I am still visiting them, still traveling and still sharing with family and friends. Perhaps at the end of the day, that is really what mortal life is all about, traveling down that road of experiences, sharing it with the beloved ones in our lives, aware, poignantly, that who we have with us is a gift of momentary time. Going back in time can move us forward into the future because we have come to appreciate the past in the context of the present. When we can do that, we can feel we have advanced down that long road of soul evolution and the happy acquisition of wisdom.