Appropriately Naked In April - Part III

The weekend following the Wailing and Sweat Lodge was something Wendie and I had been anticipating for a month or so. In previous posts I've written about how Stacey had recommended these books on hypnotherapy and past life regression by Brian Weiss last May. I ended up giving the first one, Many Lives, Many Masters, to Wendie for her birthday last June, then she liked it so much she highly recommended I read it. When I returned to Denver last July I picked it up out of the library, loved it, then read two more of his books within a few weeks.

The concepts and insights from those books formed much of the framework for what I got out of the second half of last year. Through Wendie and I, we then recommended those books on to my Mom, both her sisters, various friends of ours and of the family, and so it spread. These books were directly related to me seeing Ari while I was in Port Townsend, since he had studied how to do hypnotherapy and regression under Dr. Weiss as one of his first students. Through that experience I had visions of my life as a pirate captain among others, and started looking seriously at issues of control that I hadn't previously seen.

All of that is back story to the fact that Wend and I found out Brian Weiss was coming to Portland, OR to do a workshop two days before my birthday. Back in December, when I was staying with Stacey, she and I had decided to meet up in Central America somewhere for my birthday, since that was where I thought I'd be at the time. It worked out quite well that I wasn't for her situation, since she was able to take two weeks off to take the train from Springfield to Portland and spend my birthday week with me as well as attend the workshop.

In preparation for this weekend, Wendie and I decided that we'd listen to a CD she had of Dr. Weiss that guides you through a regression at home. He recommends it as a way to get used to his voice so that one is able to dive deeper with each session and gain greater access to the subconscious and, theoretically, deeper memories. So we played the CD Monday night while we sprawled on the living room floor in relaxation and allowed ourselves to be taken back.

Just as I had done it last fall, I was able to see visions of things, but they were murky. Last fall when I did the CD on my own I saw visions of choppy water, felt the sensation that I'd been bound up and tossed in the sea, and I could see clearly the city of Venice on the coast and the hull of the ship I was being tossed from. I also saw the year 1606 come up. Other than that I didn't know what was going on there. When I saw Ari, and had an actual person guide me through the regression asking questions in response to my replies, everything became much clearer.

It was then that I had extremely vivid images, as if from out of the eyes of the man himself, of walking around the captain's quarters, looking at his hands and feet as if they were my own, and theoretically, they were. His name was Alastair and his crew was mutinous because I believe the Spanish armada had cornered them so they blamed him as a scapegoat but couldn't muster up the courage to over take him. This pissed him off and made him extremely sad, to the point where tears welled up in my eyes, because he thought they had more strength than that and it disappointed him. I never learned who threw him overboard, the Spanish or the crew, or if in fact that was him I saw before. It certainly seemed to be.

Anyway, Monday night I revisited a few childhood days and got a vision of the clock in the hospital I was born in at the exact time I was born. 3:59am, I watched it tick over from 3:58. There is no time on my birth certificate, but my Mom tells me I was born some time around 4am. Along with that I also saw silhouetted images in the ancient middle east chilling under a joshua tree sipping on wine and talking in depth about philosophy. I got the impression it was me in a previous life then and Christ, but I also think that could be an image conjured up out of ego.

The next night we did it again and I had some much more crazy images. I saw red out buildings of a 1600's American Colonial farm. It was all in drawings though, like heavy crayon, and the images were of things like the corner of a building, or half a bench. I also saw what felt like Atlantis going to shit. With Ari I had seen myself as a worn, old, wise man that was spent after the chaos of Atlantis had torn the continent apart and was in the last throes of sinking. This time I just saw mayhem and madness.

The last image that I got was the clearest. It was of a man of some sort walking through the heavy iron gates into the arena of a grand Roman Colosseum. I don't know if it was the Colosseum in Rome, or just another huge one, and I'm not sure if the man I saw was a gladiator or a peasant thrown in there, but he was definitely there to die and not pleased about it.

We only ended up doing that for those two nights. I worked later that week, and we visited with friends in town, played board games, and I watched Clash of the Titans which was horribly disappointing, though still fun. On Friday evening, about an hour before we were going to get in the car and drive down to Portland Wendie got a call that drastically altered our plans. Before I go into that, I should return to the beginning of the week for a moment.

Sunday, I mulled around the idea a bit more of going to the men's group the weekend after the Portland workshop. It seemed to fit. Stacey would be getting on the train that Friday in Seattle, so then I'd be well positioned in the city already for Sage to pick me up and bring me where ever it is with him. The one obstacle was that Teresa wanted me for Tuesdays and Saturdays, but when I thought about that a second time I realized how ridiculous a reason that was not to go. Here I was, I year on the road now having quit my full time job, gone through pains to make sure I had no bills, made all kinds of observations during that year of money showing up when it was needed, all to pursue a greater understanding of myself, and now I was thinking of not going because I could miss a four hour shift at work that could easily be covered.

I sent Sage an email to ask him a bit more about it. Sacred Groves had been on suggested donation, so I sort of had the impression this would be too. Wend and I both gave a decent donation to the Groves and I figured if this thing was decent I'd do the same there. On Monday he wrote back letting me know it'd be $600, but assured me it was well worth it. I immediately wrote back telling him there was no way and started putting it out of my mind.

That afternoon I got a call from Ang. I answered because I thought it might be an emergency call to talk, but she was surprised to hear me pick up. Her Dad is moving from Toledo to Vegas and specifically asked if I could help him drive. He'd fly me to Toledo from where ever I was and pay me for my time, and I was free the week he was asking for. I told her that sounded perfect, and since I know what sort of life change this means for him, and indirectly for Ang, I got really excited that he'd asked me to help.

About two hours later I was checking email and got one from my friend Maddy in NYC. She too was writing to see if I'd be up for a job she'd heard about from one of her friends. He needed someone to drive a 24 foot truck from Connecticut to Utah, was willing to pay one way airfare home, all travel expenses paid, and $150/day expecting it to take about a week. All of this, and asking for around the end of June, just after my friend Josh's wedding which is my last commitment in America. I was stunned at the extreme similarities of the two job offers, and the perfect timing of them both. If the second one panned out that would give me the perfect amount of funds to live off of for several months in Latin America and the one way airfare to get me straight there without having to spend any of it in expensive America. I told her to sign me up.

I sat with those two offers on the table now and reassessed my situation. Sage tells me its $600 for this weekend, two totally random, well paying, perfectly timed job offers show up the same day; not to mention they are trucking oriented jobs which is a career I'm eyeballing seriously for when this odyssey is over. Since my phone was on already from talking to Ang I called Sage up and told him I'd changed my mind and was extremely interested in this weekend now, despite still knowing nothing about it. When the Universe points these days, I follow if I see it. Sage then said to me "well, if money is an issue we can see if you'd be eligible for a scholarship toward that tuition". Sweet.

I called the scholarship guy, Scott, that night. It was with a group called The Mankind Project, apparently an international group with branches all over the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, even South Africa. The weekend was dubbed the New Warrior Weekend, and was designed as a modernized adaptation of ancient initiation rites into manhood. He asked me what I thought I'd get out of the weekend and I told him I was hoping to get internal tools I would need when in Latin America. I gave him my full story about roaming the States trying to tune in to my intuition fully, and the spiritual growth I've been working on.

It turned out the tuition was actually $650, the Universe upped its ante, and before calling I got impulsive and signed up already paying the $150 deposit since time seemed of the essence. In talking with Scott it sounded like this was exactly what I was after, and he warned me that it would be physically, emotionally, and psychologically challenging. That egged me on further. I gave him full disclosure on my financial situation telling him I had a temporary job but a total of probably 30 hours for the entirety of my employment. I did have the full $650, with that income and my tax return, but that would be the entirety of my funds. I also told him, if it seemed fair to him I'd be completely willing to pay the full amount given my philosophy on being provided for, but that it didn't work with reliance on it so the tuition would certainly be helpful. I left it in his hands.

He replied simply by saying, you've paid $150 already so your balance is $500, how much of that do you think you can cover. The number $200 popped into my head so I said it to him without hesitation. He said okay, and it was a done deal, I was in. I don't know what would have happened if I said I couldn't pay anymore at all, or that I really needed my $150 back on top of not being able to pay anymore. I didn't even think about it, but it did seem like the most fair financial negotiations that I ever had been involved with, and after the weekend was over I wished I did have the funds to cover the rest it was so worth it.

So that brings me back to Wendie's phone call Friday evening. An hour before leaving for Portland the lady she was subletting from called to tell her she'd broken her leg down in California. Their arrangement was that Wendie got a reduced rent for the flexibility of being able to clear out of the apartment within a week or two's notice should an emergency arise and the lady needed her home back. The broken leg was her emergency and she asked if Wend could be moved out by Wednesday. She said yes, of course, in accordance to their agreement, hung up the phone and had a panic attack.

I was impressed with how well composed she actually was with the whole thing. Sure she was in hysterics, freaking out about the fact that here we were with plans to go to Portland for the weekend, someone to meet there and pick up, a workshop we'd signed up to volunteer at for free admission, and even with coming home early Sunday night she'd still only have three days before she needed to have a place to go. In her sudden rush of homelessness she maintained an amazingly cool head between heavy breathing and some tears.

Within two hours we scoured all the main public notice boards in town, she'd sent out something like 200 emails to every possible connection she knew in the Port Townsend area asking if anyone had a place for rent, or knew of one, and we even had time for a slice of pizza before the shop closed. I have to admit when I figured out the news through the reaction on her face on the phone I felt like this was really good news for her coming in a really inconvenient package. I kept reassuring her of my faith in that, and she was steadily trying to believe it and appreciated me saying it.

She was worried about what to do with me if she couldn't find a place by Wednesday and I reassured her again that that should be the last of her worries. I'm the guy who regularly sleeps outside and am well prepared for it. On top of that, with Stacey coming into town we had plans to stay the night in Victoria, BC Wednesday night anyway, and Seattle Thursday night so she could catch her train. Friday and Saturday nights I'd be gone at this crazy Mankind Project weekend thing, and if she still had nothing by Sunday I could either stay in Seattle with friends, camp out around Port Townsend to be able to go to my last two days of work Tuesday and Wednesday that week, and after that I could head off. That would free her up to just be her on a friend's couch in town, without the baggage of some backpacking brother in town as well.

By the time we did end up heading down to Portland she'd found three places she liked the sound of and had a slue of offers from friends all over town that, if in a pinch, she could crash with them until she got on her feet. She was being given the chance to refresh her life after this break up and get new surroundings, while also being shown how large a support network of friends she really had in town. On top of all that, she got some really great support from Daniel himself who called offering his help in anyway he could give it; including letting her stay back at their old place if she needed despite the awkwardness that might create. It was the good news that came in the annoying package.

That night we met up with Stacey in Portland and stayed with Wendie's friends Will and Abby, whom I've always liked as well, from when I knew them living in Seattle many years ago. The next day would be the workshop, then the hard work would begin of actually securing an apartment within three days.

I told Wendie that between the two of us it seemed like the Universe had busted open over us, and through that gash came a river of life. Our job was just needed to lean into it and float the rapids with all their intensity.

Appropriately Naked In April - Part II

The Sweat Lodge would be the second of these little exercises that would come along in April to conjure up some deep demons. I woke up paranoid about my hydration level since everyone had so heavily emphasized it the night before and I had drunk no water. While my sister zenned out, threw my things in the car, then emptied about a gallon of water down my throat. That filled about half an hour of the morning.

There was a community breakfast with others who had stayed the night on the compound from the Wailing. About half of them had stayed, the other half had gone home. One girl came back, a young cute girl who'd just gotten back from traveling around Europe, and the rest were just new folks arriving for the Sweat. Of the two other guys the previous night one had stayed. Another also showed up with the new group. Sage was the name of the man who attended both with me and later in the day he proved to play a very influential role in the rest of my month.

After breakfast we made our way to the Meadow through some winding forest paths. The entire compound was gorgeous. A perfect setting for such a spiritual retreat. Forested everywhere, little cabins and yurts strewn about here and there, hidden in groves and deep down out of sight paths. Of course, it was decorated as well with Tibetan flags, Buddha statues, and a variety of dream catchers, gates made of unprepared branches, you get the idea. I felt quite at home there.

In the Meadow was a fire pit stacked with rocks. We had an opening ceremony building the fire and lighting it, then did a round of introductions like the night before stating our names and reasons for being there. It was less of a collection of awe inspiring confessions this time, as much as it was a gathering of people out of curiosity to what a Sweat was for the most part. Again, I was among that group, but the authenticity of the ceremony still held for me.

Following introductions there was an element to the ritual I hadn't anticipated. We all sat down on a blanket with cloth and string among a host of ingredients and made ourselves some prayer bag talismans. It was a neat process, kind of like arts and crafts infused with the symbolism of ceremony. The ingredients were things like cedar, sage, cornmeal, tobacco, dried flowers, things like that. Each had a meaning such as home or family in cornmeal, purification in sage, or masculinity in tobacco. The meaning of the bags were to represent either what you were trying to attain or let go of. Externalizing the meaning to make it present for you as your body is challenged in the heat of the Sweat.

We then went through a gathering of blankets and putting them on the willow branch framed hut. It was a brand new hut replacing a nine year old one the residents there had been used to, so there was an emphasis on this particular Sweat even for the old dogs because of that. Once it was complete the ritual of entrance began. The hut was clothing optional, so most of us opted out of them. Wearing our talismans we went to each direction; east, south, west, and north, then placed lavender, tobacco, and sticks from the old hut into the fire that cooked our stones before crawling into the Sweat Lodge.

I found myself, while crawling in and finding my seat on the dirt floor, loving getting the dirt on my hands and knees. When I did sit, I grabbed a scoop of it off the floor and rubbed it into my skin. More people crawled into the hut so we had to scoot down occasionally to make room. Every time we did, I found myself taking up another scoop from in front of the few inches I'd scooted into and rubbing more on my face, chest, or shoulders so that I always had a piece of the dirt directly in front of me rubbed into my skin.

When we were all in, the stones came in glowing a deep red from within, and sat in the pit in the center. Then the front flap dropped down and we were all plunged into complete darkness. The level of darkness where even after ten minutes of sitting in it I still couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Just the glow of the rocks. The woman leading it poured scoops of water over the rocks to create the steam and heat the interior. It was an interesting first round.

There were to be four rounds total. In the first the heat intensified, my body coated itself in sweat dripping off me, I spit out phlegm that came up, and moaned, wailed, and whispered out summonings along with everyone else as we conjured up spirits to help guide us through our journey. It was an eerie scene. Something that easily could have felt staged for a creep show if it didn't feel so genuine amid the heat, sweat, and steam. Sitting naked among nine other naked strangers in the dark sweating together. I found myself rubbing more dirt on me, and whispering into the heat for Alastair, the pirate captain of the 16th century I had seen facing mutiny back in my hypnotherapy session. This all went on for some time.

It eventually died down. The flap opened again and the first round was over. Someone had to pee, and someone else needed more water, and soon all of us were filing out into the cold air again. I had to pee bad as well. My thought in guzzling all that water in the morning was that it would come out through sweat, but apparently that wasn't to be the case. It was kind of hilarious to me, though, to see all these naked people spilling out to every edge of the Meadow pissing in the bushes, whether squatting or standing, while others sprawled themselves in the grass to cool off.

When I was done, I turned to go back into the Lodge but when I took a few steps away from the dirt in the forest I couldn't help but drop down into it full body and completely cover myself. It was as if I just couldn't get enough dirt on me. I rubbed in in my hair, on my face, in my beard. I ground it into my arms and legs, my chest. Once I felt sufficiently covered, I crawled back into the Lodge. Ten more stones were brought in, and the flap was dropped back down again.

In this second round was the time to voice our prayers. Essentially this meant we went around, in order of our circle, and voiced exactly what it was we were purging from ourselves in this Sweat. This was the round that held the intensity.

For one, the heat was the most intense this round by far. It was so thick and palpable that often I had to lay out on the ground fully to take advantage of what I'm normally fighting when I camp out at nights on the road sides. The earth has a habit of sucking the heat out of your body which is why a bedroll is necessary, or at least a thicket of branches under you to give you some loft like what I usually do these days. Instead, I laid out on the earth this time to let it have some of the overwhelming heat my body was absorbing. When I felt I could take some more, I'd sit back up and could feel my head enter what seemed like an upper atmosphere of heat in the Lodge.

More than the heat, though, the intensity came from the prayers. They were composed of the dislodging of pent up guilt long buried in each person. Whether deserved or undeserved guilt. Voicing of things that had happened to them that previously had been too traumatic to speak of until the heat and the darkness both blankets you and smothers it out of you. I was one of the last people in the circle, so I sat and listened, sometimes on the verge of tears, as each person spoke or screamed it to the Lodge.

When it was finally my turn I, of course, had planned out what I was going to say. I opened my mouth, though, and found myself saying things far beyond my comprehension of understanding as I said them. I had to think back at what I'd said afterward to make sense of it.

I had intended to speak to my bad sexual habits. The bad sexual mojo I was calling it. But as I talked about it I found myself tapping a root that dove into a deep ancestral connection to this upheaval. Scouring over fucked up internet porn, toying with men using their attraction to a straight man as manipulation to gain sexual power, charging them to simply look or touch my body, bringing that false power into my relationships with women and exploring it through handcuffs and blindfolds. I've written more in depth about that history to put up later, but at this time it was the sudden connection that hit me to where all of that was funneling into me from.

I began talking about my father and his fucked up sexual behavior, and my mother's father with his many known infidelities with women as he traveled around the world. And his father before that claiming that "every red blooded American male has a right take a mistress", and down the line. In the darkness, in this vision of messed up male sexual ancestry, I fell all the way down the family tree, I so meticulously researched over the past decade, to the kings of antiquity that I am descended from. King Henry I of England and his brutal conquests, King Alfred of Wessex, Charlemagne and his conquest of France and Germany, and down to the Romans. I saw this connection of them raping scores of women with armies of men, raping lands of whole nations and cultures, and seeking conquest after conquest through out generations to best their fathers by killing thousands.

This vision went all the way down that line then all the way back up it again, through the ages, through my great grandfather, through my grandfather, through my father and landing in me. The message as it landed in me seemed to hit me square that now it was my turn. Would I perpetuate it, or would I finally work it out healthily and heal it at long last? I was hoarse in saying all of this, and tears were welling up in my eyes. It hit me as a reason as to why my life has been so easy so far. It seemed it was to add no extra burdens to this already titanic weight of culminated male ancestral history to clean up.

I felt spent when I was done spewing. The heat had fully engulfed me and I had to lie back down immediately once I was finished to cool off. Thankfully I was close to the end of the circle, and after three more women spoke the flap opened again and we could step back outside. I stumbled out and lay in the grass for a few minutes.

The third round was much tamer. It was a round of calm. Once the rocks were in and the flap was down there was a little bit of talk and then silence. I laid on the ground and just meditated in the dark. The heat wasn't nearly as intense either. We all just lay there in silence for a good long while.

The fourth round was light hearted. It was the round to go around again and tell what we were filling the space we'd just emptied with. With all that purging you need something positive to fill that hole with or it will simply come back or cave you in. I didn't connect as well with this round, but spoke of having a family and children and my coffee shop in a community. We then all sang for a little while and eventually opened the flap again.

There was a potluck dinner in which I got a chance to talk with the cute girl about her travels. I talked with some other interesting people as well, one of which was Sage. He was very excited about having another guy in this group of women doing spiritual work and told me about a men's group he'd been to that was meeting up two weekends from now. It sounded neat and we swapped info. I told him I wasn't sure how it would pan out since my temporary coffee shop job wanted me on Tuesdays and Saturdays, but I'd keep it in mind.

On the ride home Wendie and I were both silent. She had had a very intense day in the Sweat Lodge, and I was still mulling over both the Sweat and the Wailing. When we got home she went to bed and I took a long bath thinking again about that strange draw to Peru in the Wailing. It became very clear to me that ditching everything now to fly straight there was not the way to go. That part of the reason for being there was getting there. With that thought, I dried off and went to bed.

Appropriately Naked In April - Part I

I want to share some things about this past month. I'm talking about it as if its over and I still have one more weekend to go. These weekends, it seems, is when the Universe cranks the knob a little bit higher in the flowing river of intensity. Thankfully I'm given these weekdays to sit with it, go to work with it, and lend my support to my sister while the Universe cranks the knob for her during those days.

While back in Texas with Katy, she and I took to doing rune readings most mornings and tarot readings every few days or so. We just liked it, we were having fun. We both took it seriously as well, but mostly we liked playing with those "tools of fate reading" as they may be called. With those tarot readings we generally did full spreads and asked things like "what I needed to know about the path I'm on", "what did I need to know about the next week or month". Things like that.

I asked once what I needed to know with my visit to Port Townsend. I asked it because I was going strictly by request from my sister. She had broken up with Daniel, her fiance, and requested my support through the process; she even flew me up from San Antonio so she had a date she could rely on me being there. I wanted to gain any insights I could on how to support her best. Do I smother her with support? Do I just go to be there, but not be too invasive?

Again, I don't look to these tarot things as the end all be all of advice, I take them with a grain of salt. I do, however, generally find the cards giving good advice and I often will reference what they've said when I'm working out how to do things. For the skeptics, I grant you that this could be using the interpretation process of card reading as a tool to access my subconscious, much like the hand in the puppet methods of psychotherapy. Whatever it is, I find it helpful and it works.

Anyway, the reading clearly spelled out that I would be heavily challenged. That I would be facing a prolonged time when I would either make immense progress in my growth, or falter back into a terrible stagnance that would reverse all that I've done so far. As the cards lay out they give an inner self and an outer, or projected, self. Neither of them said very good things about me. The projected self called me a false strength if I remember correctly, and the inner self claimed I was an internal liar. Now lets get back into what happened this month.

The weekend of the first full week in April Wendie wanted me to go to these two spiritual growth functions at a place called Sacred Groves that she loves. I believe I've mentioned before my great disdain I've struggled to over come about psychologists, therapists, counselors, etc. That disdain doesn't necessarily carry over to these spiritual, self help, hippy things, but there's definitely still a wariness to them. I view them with the same adjusted view I've taken with the psychology field. They can be quite powerful and healing, or they can be utter shams, pathetically amusing, and a waste of time if you have no interest in the sociological aspects of how far escapists are really trying to go.

I have, however, been to things with my sister before like this (she is an avid pursuer of these venues) and have often been impressed with the authenticity behind the ceremonies and their affects. The times I have walked away from them feeling nothing but pity for the people who believed in it, my sister had felt the same disappointment, and usually more emphatically than I did. Still, though, whenever she invites me to these things I'm always curious to go, but wary of investing myself into it.

Sacred Groves is an hour and a half south of Port Townsend and has little cabins and yurts to stay in while there, so when we arrived we piled our stuff into the cabin and headed to the main building. I'll spare you the nitty gritty details as I feel myself starting to draw myself into giving them. The event we were attending that night was going to be a Wailing.

A Wailing, to the best of my descriptive powers, is a ceremony where I bunch of people assemble in a circle around a candle, or small symbolic altar of sorts, and create a space to really just grieve. I mean really dig in and get your shit out of you. This is something I'm often accused of repressing, yet claim as a large part of what this journey of mine is all about. So far my "spiritual sojourn" has consisted of tapping my intuition to the best of my ability and recollecting my past into something recognizable and tangible. This would be the first real step into digging around in the dark with vigor.

The room was large and circular with a domed ceiling crowned by a large circular skylight at the peak. There were about ten or twelve of us attending, three of us were guys, which was apparently an abnormally large percentage. We sat in a circle and introduced ourselves by saying our names and why we'd come. From that quick round I knew I could take this ceremony seriously and invest myself into it as people checked in with serious issues one normally doesn't disclose to strangers among others who checked in like me as "I'm here to support my sister and see what this is". A few guidelines were given for the process which essentially were don't try to comfort someone in the process. All of us are here to dig into deep dark places and comfort will only pull us out of it keeping it inaccessible. From there some music came on and it was suggested that we simply start by stretching to relax.

It took me a good half an hour or so of really trying to feel and then leaning into that feeling of tingling in my chest and face to actually get myself to conjure up tears. By the time I did I didn't know it until I felt my leg getting wet because they were streaming off my nose and chin. I found my lead in to getting there very interesting because it was focused around massaging, stretching, and basically tending to my legs and back, but primarily my feet. All of these parts of my body are the work horses in keeping me mobile and nomadic, or to put it in other words, they allow me to be on my own or keep me isolated; disconnected or free.

What came up in my mind when the tears started was an image of the front steps of my first apartment in Denver the night I got jumped in there. That that came up first as the gateway was fascinating to me as well. I was drunk, and two drunk guys followed me into my building. One got ahead of and behind me as I spun to see the other come in the door and caught me at the top of the steps putting me in a full nelson. The other came straight at me to work me over. This was my bad ass Mel Gibson, Lethal Weapon moment. I kicked off the top step, as the guy behind me held me, just as the other guy was rushing me about a foot away. I kicked him in the chest with both feet sending him flying back down the flight of stairs into the wall, and with that kick I pushed off him into the guy holding me sending him into the wall behind us. I slammed the back of my head into his face and he let go of me. They both then ran out of the building and I stood at the top of my steps in all my new found Brutal Man Glory, drunk and adrenalized, yelling at them that they were cowards and who were they to fuck with me. I then went to my apartment and just sobbed for half an hour for a reason I still have no idea of. Pride of bad assishness to weak sobbing in a moment's shift.

None of that actual confrontation actually came up when I started crying at the wailing. I just saw the empty image of the stairs and front doorway in the night and had that dream knowledge that it was that particular night I was seeing. Once I saw that I was also hearing the other people in the room yelling, crying, shouting and stomping. I could single out my sister's shouts in particular which helped transfer me to the stairs of the house I grew up in. The light from the kitchen reflecting off the hallway wall and my parents loudly yelling at each other from there. Then I could see my sister as a little girl leaning over the railing from the second floor yelling down at them to shut up and stop fighting. That vision then pulled back to my bedroom door barricaded with stickers covering it, the top of the stairs just on the other side. A thickness of dense, dimly protective air between the shut door and my bed where I could feel myself sitting as a little white haired boy that muffled the screams just enough to be in my head.

My brain then took me on a wild, rapid fire tour of all the places in my life that I ever had a serious melt down. Really, just any place I cried and unloaded from my teens until now. I saw the living room in Brooklyn where I saw Happy Together that reminded me of a disintegrated friendship I'd lost my virginity too in high school, the Denver apartment scene again, storming out the door at 15 kicking the door in (which my Mom still talks about as that one day I got mad), and so on. It was intense. Overwhelmingly intense to the point where I was able to unload several years worth of a tears reservoir. I just leaned into it and sobbed, drooled and let snot run down my nose and face on to my leg until the well was out and I felt emptied of it. During all of this my body was curled into itself in a protective posture; head hanging over my right leg bent under me. My left leg up with my arm around it to hang on and my back curled over me as a shield from anything behind me.

When I was dried up I impulsively, yet slowly, opened that defense up. It felt a release of everything I'd just unloaded, I could feel it leaving me out into the domed skylight above. Then a subtle shift occurred. I felt suddenly like a receiving satellite dish. My body was laid out flat, half on pillows, half on hard wood floor; arms wide, legs parted, and I began to convulse from my stomach. It was like a tightening of the muscles spasmodically in spurts. As my body raised with each convulsion and dropped again, the back of my head would drop on the hard wood floor beneath it. It was controllable, but uncontrollable. By that I mean that I could have stopped it if I wanted too at the expense of losing it altogether, but by letting it just work its mojo. I was just left to slamming my head against the ground and convulsing for probably 20 minutes.

The weird thing to me, was that in these convulsions I was getting incredibly strong powerful visions of Peru, seeing the word over the country in my mind, with visions mostly of Lima along with occasional Machu Picchu draws. I say that that was the weird part, after all this other strange phenomenon, because it seemed so unrelated. The impression was so strong, though, that I wondered if I should drop all the other things I have lined up to do in the next few months and just get a plane ticket to Lima first thing in the morning, or maybe even that night.

When I came out of that a sort of circle had reformed a bit around the candles that were going and I squatted into that. The women were singing a song now that people were slowly chiming in on about ancestry. With lyrics calling our grandmothers spirits to help us in our healing, then another set calling on our grandfathers as well. I got crystal clear portrait images, almost like highly skilled pencil sketches of each grandmother of mine one at a time; Mor Mor then Nana. And then the same of both my grandfathers; Papa then Mor Far. All of whom are dead now. The portraits were positions I had never seen them in in photographs, which I thought was interesting. This had a powerful resonance with me in a way of helping to heal the horrible sense of disconnect I have to my family. As it cycled through the four of them it then expanded to my great grandfather on my mom's paternal side, Pop, then my great grandmother on my dad's maternal side, Grandma Mabes; both of whom were strong personalities in the family. Then it continued on through my other great grandparents, and down the line into other great greats that I knew images of.

Then the song shifted to a different song about healing. As it did, those family images shifted to family alive now who are having problems. The first of which was my aunt who is struggling deeply with a host of health problems. Then came my Dad, then my sister, another aunt of mine, then another, my Mom eventually came up, as well as my cousins, then friends of mine struggling with personal issues. The over all impression I felt from it was that I was meant to help heal them, and use what I learn in this little odyssey of mine to help re-found the family. I saw a metaphorical image of chunks of cement shattered off of a larger cement foundation and could feel strings attached to each chunk pulling them back into one solid whole again. On that solid whole strong foundation I knew was where I was to build my own new family for the future, with my own wife and my own kids.

With that last vision I came out of it. My face was swollen and stained with the tears and drool I'd bathed myself in. As came back into myself again I was singing along with the rest of the group simple songs I didn't know the lyrics to, but was easily picking them up through mumbling a few verses. The ceremony drew to a close and after some hugs and goodbyes Wend and I retired to our cabin in the woods. We went to bed pretty much immediately and I journaled the shit out that whole experience still feeling the intensity inside me. Peru was also very heavy in my mind, wondering what that intensity was. I still had that compulsion to go get there now to find whatever it is waiting for me there, but instead I went to bed.

Tomorrow would be the Sweat Lodge...

The Art in Having Toys

Its been over a year now since I handed in my keys to my last apartment. I left Denver then with a pack weighing in somewhere around 65 lbs complete with a bow fire stick, snow shoes, and a compact military style folding shovel strapped to my pack. All of these little "accessories" I knew were extraneous in the back of my mind, but my dreams of living out Survivor Man for the year were wrestling with my practical knowledge on road walking travel from years earlier.

I bussed a good 60 miles, walked 20 or 30, and hitched somewhere about the same in the first four days before Todd in our mutual impatience to "finally get going" scooped me up for 257 miles of the 392 mile trek from Denver to Santa Fe. It was a glowing example of me shaking off the dust of stable living and basking in false glory of becoming a Road Dog. When we left Santa Fe about a week later I watched Todd go through the same giggling some to myself at that ridiculousness while still blind to still thoroughly acting the same way in my own right. And we both would for some time after our departure, its arguable that I'm still in those throes.

Anyway, I felt like writing about all this now as I was roaming around tech store to tech store in a car and comparing my wishes and wants of last year with this year. The past year has been far from 365 nights tucked away in shrubbery and backwoods, foraging for nuts and berries, wrestling bears to the ground for simple sustenance and survival. In fact, in December, while staying at my friend Stacey's house for three weeks in Massachusetts, I tried to count out how many days I actually spent sleeping in my bivy. I think I came to 51 nights from April 1 to mid-December. Since then I can tack on another week in Slab City and around the Salton Sea in California, a night outside Tucson, 3 nights around El Paso, TX, and 2 nights on my way out of Texas in February. All told about 2 more weeks in the past four months.

Survivor Man would be ashamed of himself to call the way I'm living now "outdoorsy", or worse "survivalist". The interesting thing, however, is that although that living style does intrigue me, this past year has been a realization that its not a priority to me. Having reconnected with 20 to 30 friends from all ends of my life whom I completely lost touch with over the past decade or two surfaced as the real meaning behind why I enjoy this way of being. These friends pepper the country, as well as a few other countries, in such a random pattern that keeping in touch with them on a face-to-face basis would be neigh impossible.

About six months ago I stopped updating this blog of my day to day activities. It was around that time that living this way stopped feeling like "a trip" and began feeling more like this was just what I was up to, in the same way that life changes if you go from a stationary job to one that ships you all over. I keep about three or four other personal journals along with this occasional blog and what I was writing just started seeming redundant. I think I also was falling into more of a nesting phase with the onset of winter which left me not wanting to be more private with my life. Once I returned from Europe at the end of November I slipped into a much more private way of being, slowed down my roaming speed considerably, and started adapting to making my life more comfortable while still keeping the freedom I had.

This was an incredibly interesting process to me that I was only half conscious of at the time. I also distanced my contact with Todd around that time as well. Half out of annoyance with him and what I perceived as his judgment and negativity, and partly because I felt like I didn't have much to report and was tired of reporting it all anyway. Not just to him, but to everyone at large. All of this feeling of need to report, of course, was completely self imposed, and compulsively so. A daring to keep up with the open book policy of self probing Todd set up for himself and a refusal to admit I wasn't up for it and it was wearing me out trying stupidly to compete, if you could even call it that. With this winter withdrawal I started looking over everything else I missed and was stubbornly refusing myself.

One of the things I was teased about in those first six months of travel was that I was jumping lily pad to lily pad in reference to always having yet another destination to see yet another friend somewhere else, or be present at birthdays scattered across the country. I didn't like this notion, or at least the teasing, at first while I was still claiming to be King of the American Outback. I reckoned in my head that these were just necessary, convenient, or rare opportunity stops to see people important to me or those I hadn't seen in a while. While in Europe, though, I began to recognize more of what I wanted, and what I was doing, was sewing up this vast network of friend strewn about over my years of wandering to start forming a base for me to finally settle down. Suddenly I really took a liking to that term hopping lily pad to lily pad.

Europe was an introduction to true detachment. My plans to head south into Latin America still run strong, despite seeming to always be pushed back a few months at a time, and hitching through the French countryside was a stark introduction to what jumping in a car is like when you can't speak coherent words to the driver. The very first ride I got was with a guy who spoke only French, and me only knowing English with spatterings of Spanish. We drove, chatting away animatedly, for a good ten to fifteen minutes having only the vaguest hints of what the other was saying. It took me quite a bit to figure out we were going no further when we reached his destination. Down south this will be a far more serious problem with the conditions starkly different along with the language.

The next day I caught a ride with two French girls going in the complete opposite direction that I was intending, but hey, they were cute. One of them spoke English and I ended up at a party with them in Lille where I resorted to breaking out a computer for an online translator. I spent a few hours talking with another French girl through typing it into the translator and interpreting what the funky translation was saying she was saying into what it was she likely was really saying. Such luxuries will doubtfully be found often in Mexico, Nicaragua, or Peru, and this was the height of my mingling with the natives over there. Down south I'll know no one as I did in Europe and my lily pads will dry up quickly.

As I said above, when I got home from all of that I had that winter feeling of nesting along with much to chew over. What was I doing? Why was I doing it? Should I bother to keep doing it, or have I uncovered what I was after?

On my walk cross country I had a moment on the second leg when Angie and I broke up on the side of the road. After she hitched home I walked another two days coming to the conclusion that I'd found what I had set off for and was stubbornly letting it get away. What felt like a courageous soul searching march suddenly felt like an escape to lick my wounds in the wilds and build a few more walls of isolation around myself. I called off the walk, went back to Denver to win her over again and three weeks later discovered that was completely premature. Not because we didn't work out, but because I had left yet another thing incomplete. I'd half assed just one more thing, and when I set off on this sojourn I made the same promise to myself to complete it as I ended up doing with that walk. The difference being that there was the distinctive end to that by hitting another ocean. This goal is far, far more vague and intuitive based.

What I concluded over December and January was that I was far from done seeking what I was after. Sure I'd reconnected with a ton of my friends and even family I'd lost track of, but it was clear that was just the first step to whatever I was doing. What I found myself picking over more was what I could do to fill in the gaps of what I felt was missing in my life wandering that I take for granted when stable.

The joys of being stable is the comfort, something I'd come to see as a dirty word. I'd been knit picking over anything in my pack to lighten the weight of it up, but had stripped myself down to a very Proud utilitarian lifestyle. Now the balance was to figure out what I needed, what toy or gadget did I need that could make this feel more like a life and less like something to grunt through as a sort of purge quest. It introduced weighing in what it is I'm valuing about travel life against stable life and how to blend them.

I miss movies, diners, late nights out with friends, I miss being able to talk to whoever I want to talk to when I need to and not only on Saturday. I also don't like having to call everyone I know in one day whether I feel like being on the phone that day or not. I like the freedom to go where ever I want to go, be at whatever event I want to be at whenever I feel called to go. This agility I will be very slow to give up again, but it goes in the face of anything like the home and coffee shop I've started decorating and day dreaming about in my head.

In the past few months I've considered revamping all kinds of things about how I'm doing things. I was considering a car at one point, carrying a netbook around with me to ease up the restriction in communication, and replacing my cell with Skype and a headset.

Its an interesting little internal conversation I've found myself in. How to live a practical nomadic life in a world designed with hard lines for settlement living. Lately I've taken to alternate history books which has gotten me thinking about what would political boundaries, and life in general, be like had any of the Native American nations, particularly the nomadic ones, been able to keep the advancing western armies back east.

Anyway, these are my ramblings for now. This coffee shops closing so its time to go.