A year ago I resolved to pursue personal truth in the haze of what distracts us from it: our expectations, the expectations of others, and the limitations we impose upon ourselves. I had suffered from a kind of fear that disguises itself as discipline, loyalty, or sensibility, and I had just begun, through personal upheaval, to gain a sense of how great the cost of that fear might be for a mortal human with limited time.
I resolved therefore to mold myself, without apology, into a more quintessential me in 2015: to take food from my overbearing superego and feed it to my undernourished id, striving without fear to take on whatever challenges my unencumbered, naked proclivities would lead me into. While scary and painful at times, the results of this endeavor, even in its most reckless manifestations, were mostly positive…
WINTER
Meaningful gain is predicated upon meaningful risk.
There was constant motion. A restless, writhing creature was struggling to break free from its chrysalis, yearning to leave behind its former existence for something better. Something unknown. The spark of life within me, that indestructible core of being, was building itself a new body, partly from the broken pieces of a life that, ultimately, was not meant to be. A beach in Tulum. A ski slope in Seven Springs. An apartment in Wicker Park. A warehouse in Camp Washington. Valuable lessons were learned in all of these places and they all had to do with risk. Taking chances. Going for it. The feeling of having lost so much engendered a sense that the consequences would now be somehow lessened. I let my senses fall into the discomfort of unfamiliar territory, and the obscurity of isolation. I let my body fall into the pull of gravity. I let my heart fall into the web of chance. I let my mind and hands fall into the design and construction of a complex machine, under a ridiculous deadline, with a team counting on me.
The mixture of assorted success, failure, discomfort and pleasure experienced during this experiment yielded in summation the sense that, no matter what happened, I was ultimately going to be okay.
I could do anything that I wanted. I was free now. The irony of that freedom, however, is that while it can take us anywhere we wish to go, the real challenge is to return to the quiet of home and become truly present. Once victorious in al-jihad al-asghar, the devoted then turn their attention to al-jihad al-akbar: the greater struggle.
SPRING
Everything is emergent, but nothing is new.
It was nice to stand still for a moment. The prize of Winter’s Jewel sparkled with its brilliant, cold light. It was a light that I would use to illuminate the darker corners of my own nature. There is a hunger in many of us that expresses itself as a desire to move outward, to seek novelty, because we think that this is living. While exploration is vital to a meaningful life, it is also possible that we who pursue what is outside of us are in many ways retreating from what is inside of us, and we are held back from actualizing our potential so long as we fail to strike a balance between the two.
The world is one place. It doesn’t matter if we are in Ohio, or Tuscany, or Sichuan. Flowers bloom in spring. Sun shines in summer. Leaves turn in fall. Snow falls in winter. Waves crash on sandy beaches. Water tumbles over rocks. Stormclouds swell. Lightning strikes. Cities rise from the desert, the forest, and the coast. Civilizations emerge, develop, collapse, and recycle the artifacts of their cultures into new conduits of human endeavor, art, architecture, music, and dance. Meals are shared by family and friends. Laughter is heard. Love waxes and wanes. The moon drifts across the heavens. The sun sets, and the sky opens to reveal the stars. Those stars, and the vast expanses of emptiness between them, reveal that the collective human experience throughout all of history is but one iota of the cosmos viewed through a tiny, imperfect lens. At the same time, looking inward instead of outward, we are faced with the same infinitude of possibility, and the same futility of ever reaching all of what lies beneath, between and behind the folds of the universe that exists within us. [excerpted, 21 April 2015]
The fluctuations of temperature, scenery, culture, movement, and emotion flowed into me as I inhaled this new life. The warm, buoyant breath that filled me left me feeling indestructible. The only place was here. The only time was now. The only frontier was right behind my eyes. I exhaled fire. A pit of unresolved anger and hurt revealed itself, and would take its toll, on health, on friendships, on finances even. It bubbled and spat, molten, heavy, and hot. It burned coming out. There was no running from it; there was only confrontation. Old scraps of paper, fallen leaves, broken promises, dead branches, and memories of prior ambitions that had crashed onto the rocks of circumstance, all filled the chamber of my reckoning. All of it was highly flammable, and for me being so filled with fire too in that moment, it was a hazard. Sorting through this tangled mess was at first easier than I expected, because I was lucky to have amassed some treasures too: knowledge, character, honesty, empathy, and passion. These were solid masonry, and a foundation easily built upon. I had assembled enough heat, light, and gravity to make the center of my universe right here, my plinth a towering pyramid at the junction of the land, the sea, and the sky, touching everything at once, and drawing down heaven to drink from the firmament.
SUMMER
Great falls begin at great heights.
We all have our weaknesses. The view at altitude is breathtaking, but it’s lonely. I was susceptible in this moment to a kind of love, or infatuation rather, that burrows into the fortress of the unbreakable soul and exposes the fragile, yearning heart of an abandoned child at play. Pride is a consequence of too much self-seeking, and a love that serves pride can only end in ruin. I met a darling, inquisitive, beautifully awkward girl who was so enamored with me that her adoration just melted all of my defenses in a matter of weeks, maybe days even. We were together constantly. She rushed to show me off to friends and family. We spoke of many adventures we would take together. We remarked at the oddity, rarity, and gravity of what we were feeling: two balanced aspects that simultaneously negate and fulfill one another’s strengths and weaknesses in a harmony of spiritual and emotional resonance, vibrating, scintillating, piercing through the aether and echoing its perfection to the ends of existence itself. I may be paraphrasing there. She told me over and over how thankful she was to have met me, and how much she loved me, and in the height of escalating intimacy and deepening affection, she suddenly vanished. It had all been a delusion. The withdrawal from heroin could not approach how ecstatic this once felt, and how agonizing it had become. A fog of confusion, filled with clawing, deafening noise intruded into my life, and the air was sucked from my lungs as I fell, headlong, into a dark obsession with how this could possibly be.
After two seconds, an object in free-fall is moving at about 43 miles per hour. The cool, still water of several glacial lakes in the wilderness of Ontario was a soft enough landing, and one with much opportunity for reflection. Here I exhausted my body swimming in cold basins, climbing rugged peaks, and leaping from intimidating cliffs. I exhausted my mind trying to figure out what had just happened. A labyrinth of thought, memories, words, pictures, and me: seeking understanding in the center of it when I should have been seeking refuge at the edge.
The object of my affection and I had built a sanctuary on a foundation of sand, and it had become a sinking prison. Escaping from this maze of desperate perplexity was traumatic: ruminant strings of hope, faith, and emotion tethering me to a future once so quixotically imagined, now burned to cinder and ash. When I finally saw the horizon I fled, in pursuit of the setting sun. Maybe there was something left of my lost summer to be captured in a place like sunny California.
AUTUMN
There is a part of us that cannot be destroyed.
There is so much to busy the mind, the hands, the feet and the eyes along the Southern California coast. I gave myself a busy itinerary with very little idle time. I moved four times in one week, hoping to shake the specter of what I was forced to leave behind. I washed myself clean in the pounding surf at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Sprained ribs, I emerged from the water with a spirit of renewal and redemption, an entity I would come to call Sum’ketv. Just in time for Halloween.
Sum’ketv (SOOM-kit-uh) is a Muskogee word meaning lost. I was not lost in the sense that I was without direction. I was lost in the way that money has been lost when it is gambled away. I was lost in the way that The Black Pearl was once lost to Jack Sparrow. The harbor where I made my berth had become less relevant, for all of the ocean is connected. I was simply a vessel, but a vessel with great capacities, filled with great treasure, and imbued with the ability to create within its hold a life as free and wondrous as the open sea, if only I could harness its tides, winds, and currents instead of fighting against them in a futile attempt to retain absolute control.
Control and permanence are illusions. I have walked through the ashes of civilizations that could not fall. I have cleaned the bones of immortals. This, too, is amusing, but destined to end. [in the voice of Sum’ketv, October 2015]
It didn’t feel nihilistic, like the numb despair of the hopeless or the cold rage of the disenfranchised. It felt more accepting, like the observation of the Zen master who simply asks: “is that so?” It was accepting the hurt, accepting the joy, accepting the adoration as temporary that brought some measure of peace. Those are states of our lives, not traits of our lives.
The circle of life is more likely a spiral, approaching the same vicinity again without ever touching the same place. Though the Earth has revolved once about the Sun, it has not returned to the same location in the cosmos, and it likely never will. I feel like I’m writing the same passage as I wrote a year ago, and yet I know it’s different. I know I’m different. I know that I’m still very much the same as well, and the work I have to do is still very much the same. Seeking without fear remains my goal moving forward, and it will remain a difficult challenge, even as I am better equipped for it.
What emerged for me at the conclusion of 2015 was that these risks are still very much worth taking. The consequences, while dire at times, are not fatal, nor are they inexorable. Pride doesn’t necessarily precede hubris, nor trust embarrassment, nor love loss, nor loss despair. Acceleration doesn’t necessarily precede havoc. If it does, however, I can survive that. I already have. Skis pointed in the direction of travel, knees bent, leaning forward, inhale, exhale, and let go. There is more out there, and in here, to be encountered in 2016, and my resolution for the New Year is to welcome whatever comes, and fear nothing.
Bring it.