The Road to a Place Once Known as Home

          

           This is my second round with this particular blog.  My first version was pages filled with a play by play of my journey home.  Almost endless content empty of any true power of the abstract that is emotion.  It was apparent to me, that this was no way to convey elements of my road back to Phoenix.  Though there is nothing more that I would rather do than share every thing that I experience on my way back to the land of my birth, it would take far too much time to recite...and to be absorbed.

            As Zak took a four hour flight from Philly to Phoenix, I opted to spend the next month and a half on the road.  I would use this time to reunite with old friends, new friends I found on the road, and to reflect on what I have just put myself through.  I was still riding the high of both finishing the RISE tour and meeting Sharon at COSM;  I was filled with a nameless emotion...an overpowering buzz.  I couldn't define it...I couldn't contain it.   I was a beautiful mess of joy and curious uncertainty.

            Adding to the intensity of overwhelming vibration, my first stop on my road back to Phoenix was Algonquin, IL.  My intention was to meet with two old friends of my brother, Jessica & Joe Buccheri.  Though he didn't know my brother for a long time, Joe and Marc's friendship grew fast and with great depth.  The two might as well been siblings...there love and respect for each other was apparent.  The two men entered one another's life during a time of great upheaval and transition.  On the surface it seems that Joe was the one who made it through the fires of his crucible.  Arriving at Joes that first evening was another act of cosmic poetry written in the stars.

            I spent three days in Algonquin.  Joe and I shared stories of the past eleven years.  We talked about Marc, Joe talked about the passing of his father, and of course...I had many moments from the RISE tour to speak about.  In our conversations I told joe how Marc and I grew up on Chicago Cubs baseball.  To help me pay tribute to Marc, Joe suggested we take a tour at Wrigley Field.  Doing so gave us the opportunity to spread some of Marc's ashes at the legendary ball park together. Spending that time with Joe and Jessica just after the tour was a precious gift I will always be grateful for.

            My journey after leaving Illinois was saturated in the unnamable emotion.  An exhausting and exuberayting feeling that overwhelmed the senses.  I continued on revisiting new friends that I made along my travels.  In Atlanta, I reunited with Haya (my soul sister from COSM) and Iris Bolton (one of the founders of suicide support group).  Iris invited me over for a discussion and to participate in one of her drum healing sessions. 

            After 20 minutes of sitting under her grandfather drum while she played, i had a spectacular feeling of my consciousness being dramatically altered.  Iris, and her work, has been a major inspiration for me.  She was the only individual who has integrated ancient wisdom traditions into the subject of suicide and depression.  since my time with her, I have had the pull to walk the same path she started over twenty years ago.  The first step on that road leads one to the core of their personal being.

            As I continued along my way, I connected with other great friends and supporters of the RISE tour: Raela Marie Villanueva in Pensacola, Frank Campbell (another pioneer in working with suicide survivors) in Baton Rouge, LA,  Marian Trattner & Jessica Tartaro of Austin, TX, and the wild roundtrip mini journey to be a part of Zak's wedding in Denver.  Each person I revisited help bring a new level of understanding in the wake as RISE passed through.  It was the beginning of journeying inwards.  As the road to Phoenix intensified with emotion, I was supported with a friendly reinforcement...Shawn Daukarus was heading to Austin to travel the final 15 days with me.

            A long time friend from film school, and philosophical kindred spirit, Shawn  flew out to Austin to help my decompression back into the world after tour.  In many ways he has continued to do so.  Once we arrived in Norman, OK to stay with my family, Terri and Tinker Owens;  I would not only reconnect with my family, but begin my Tai Chi and Qi Gong training with Shawn.  Despite Shawn's caution, I was ill prepared for the door I was opening within my own heart.  After the first lesson, I was already beginning to feel energized.  By my fifth lesson,  I found myself breaking down emotionally mid session. 

            Shawn would tell you that once one begins to move energy or chi more fluidly through their body, emotional energy begins to rise up to the surface.    I'm still a beginner, both in practice and philosophy, but I can vouch for his sentiment.  I am still learning how to pay attention to those feelings that pop arise when in practice.  As the two of us continued to travel west, I felt as if I was being unraveled, only to be rewound.  Who I was before the tour seemed hidden, underneath the veneer of what I experience during the tour, and what I had gone through on the road to Phoenix.

            Originally the plan before returning to Phoenix, was to make one last stop at the Golden Gate Bridge.  For me, it was significant in ending a journey like RISE at the place where we began.  Return I did, but as plans do, they changed.  I had made contact with an old friend who now lives near Huntington Beach, CA.  i made contact with Nicole Nelson, my friend and a woman who dated my brother, back when I was passing through Chicago.  The last time I saw her was at my brothers funeral.  Though she was a friend from childhood, and I hold many memories of time spent together, the last image I have of her face is one of pain and sorrow.

            Shawn was witness to our first interaction in eleven years.  I can only imagine what his perception of that moment was.  From my vantage point, we looked like two dumbfounded friends who forgot how to communicate.  We just stared, smiled at one another, and repeated, "I can't believe you are standing here."  There was a sad beauty that intertwined us together in the moment.  Meeting with Nicole on that final night of tour after seven months held a poetic gesture of rightful purpose.  As it is in life, the two of us had undergone so much radical change over the past decade.  Besides the love we both had for Marc, our evolution has taken to a similar state of awareness.

            Nicole and I shared a similar conscious weirdness.  Not really weird for us, but for those that accept life as it is without much mystery, Nicole and I are most certainly out on the boarders of fringe territory.  To help you further understand, both Nicole & I in our own way, and for our own reason's, had set out on a spiritual path in order to expand our understanding of who we are.   A master author couldn't have written a better ending to the RISE tale.   As it was in the beginning, providence had a role in the end.  Spending that last evening of life on the road with Nicole was a gift far greater than what I could have planned or hoped for.

            To simply reconnect with each other, the three of us walked to a local spot for dinner.  We ate, had a few drinks and inspired many laughs through expressing our stories.   After dinner Nicole and I took our own journey.  We walked along the water and connected more through conversation.  After an hour we decided to rest at a small dock.  I invited Nicole to help with the spreading of some of Marc's ashes.  Agreeing, I put some of the ashes in her hand.  We sat in silence, as Nicole meditated and offered positive intention into those ashes and moment.  Before she cast them into the ocean water, she turned to me; with tears in her eyes, she thanked me.

            The road to a place once known as home...this statement isn't to say that Phoenix isn't my home, it always will be.  The journey after the RISE tour was just as life changing, and sense I left Arizona, I feel that I have died and been reborn several times.  I can tell you that this blog has done zero justice to express to you what I really experienced.  For that short coming, I'm sorry.  The story of RISE is not over, it is always in process.  It is just another journey within the journey of being.  When the journey needs to express itself...it will.  For those that share the road with me, even for moments...thank you.