Hello Everyone.

I recently returned from a five week trip through Southeast and Central Europe. I flew to London, then to Crete, where I met some friends, and then I caught a bus (alone now) into Albania. I snaked my way through Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Austria, into the Czech Republic, and then flew back to London.

Being a so called "environmentalist," you may already be chastising me in your mind for erasing any positive carbon impacts from my relatively carbon mature life in Canada, and rightfully so. But it has been a long year, and I haven't had a holiday in two years, and I came back a better person for it; however, I am still a hypocrite. But I am a self-analytical hypocrite. And the question I asked myself many times while I was away was this: why do I need to run away from Canada in order to put my life into perspective? I've been doing it for years. I did two months in Europe in 2000. Eighteen months in Asia in 2003. Four months in Africa in 2005. And now two months in the Balkans in 2007.

I realized upon waking yesterday morning that I have been caught up lately in what Buddhism would call the world of Hunger.

What is a Buddhist world? I hesitate to say I have any definitive grasp on it, but my basic understanding is that it is essentially a breakdown of the states of mind in experience. In the Buddhist construct, there are ten: