Without Return

            It’s been six months since the tour has ended and five months since I have been home.  Without wasting a moment, I hit the ground running.  The first morning I woke up back in my own bed, I was off.  Made breakfast, grabbed my bike and set sail in search of a job.  I had been in touch with old work associates and bosses from the days with the city.  It wasn’t what I wanted to go back to.  Our hope was to raise enough money on the road to work on the film and books for at least half the year.  That didn’t happen, obviously.  RISE made just enough to complete the tour and get us back home-with a tiny bit of change left over.  Despite my pre-tour feeling, going back to the city was a safe bet. 

            Safe bets aren’t always the right way…then again, is there a right way?  Some presume.  These days, I don’t want to be one of those people.  The tour taught me that much.   Homecoming was interesting.  It drudged up a lot of emotional content that was very much apart of the shadow side of my ego.   What I mean was, the victim aspect of said ego was quit disappointed in turn out.  I know, poor little me, always the victim.  In truth, the people that I shared space with in the two weeks after my arrival were the ones I was supposed to spend time with.  Now, I’m not saying it was preordained, but life is one big divine sonnet being sung into existence.    

            Truth be told, the only thing to be expected was that life would be different.  Of course I changed while out on the road, but so did everyone else.  Did I really believe that people looked at me as some kind of hero, anticipating my return with the intention for a grand parade?  Get real.  No one cares.  I was just a man living my life.  All those I left behind, well, that’s all they were doing.   I can’t speak for anyone else, and I don’t want to be the asshole assuming.  I’ve played that part before, and I’m sure I’ll do it again; today, I chose a different role.  I’ll just tell you about Thomas Brown, and the man who returned home to phoenix.

            People ask me, “How was the tour?”  To be honest, answering that question is the most difficult task in the process of the journey.   How do I explain it?  How do I emote how the experience has changed me?  At this space and time, it seems much too impossible of a feat to attempt.  So I stare blankly at people, while fumbling over my words. It’s frustrating, because I do want to share.  I need to share.  I don’t want to wait for a probable future speaking engagement.  I don’t want to wait to put it into a book that someone may or may not read.  I want to share its personal truth with the people I know. 

            It is because of this inability to share, that I must admit, has created a dramatic disconnect between what I have known as friends and myself.  I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there is this intensity that continues to flow through me.  The world that I walk through, the world that I see is completely different from the world I knew on Saturday, February 25^th, 2012.  The answer is simple, the world I walk through…the world I see…it is different, simply, because I am different.

            I recently spoke with a friend I met while on the road.  Stephanie Sammuels, our New Jersey Jewish mother, and now the patron saint of RISE travelers, filled me in on her perspective of who Thomas seems to be.  She told me, while I was staying with her and her family, that I had that 100-yard stare.  Though physically present, and polite, I was detached and focused.   Being thankful for the grace given to us by The Sammuels clan, yet not allowing myself to get to close.  The mission was still at hand.  I suppose she was right, and is still very correct.  I feel that demeanor is still very much a part of me.

            Somewhere, deep in my core, the road is still with me…the mission is still beating within me.  As I went dormant after my return in terms of RISE, it seems the dragon has awoke from its slumber.  I do have a mission; it is a mission without end.  It is a mission that may just be a lifestyle.  There is a path that I have ignored for far too long.  It is the path, my soul yearns for, but my ego has been too frightened to walk.  Frightened, because it is a path that will contain extreme moments of solitude. 

            This path was introduced to me when Marc died, but I lacked the courage to step away from the life I knew, no matter how toxic it was for me.   The road I walk is one of self reflection.  It is a path of humility and spiritual renewal.  It is no way a place of perfection or mastery; but a place eternal exploration and evolution.  Though I have an outline of the process, I understand the need for malleable flexibility.  RISE was the doorway to returning to this path that I ignored eleven years ago.  It is beyond the concept of suicide.  Suicide is just the symptom of a greater problem.  My path will run parallel with that larger issue.

            There is no projected outcome; there are only levels of growth.  Like a fractal, there is no true beginning as well as no end.  I don’t expect anyone to understand.  This blog post isn’t meant to lift a veil.  I’m not here to be a wise teacher.  My purpose is to play a part in the great drama of existence.  Anyone that may learn or be inspired through witnessing me, do with it what you will.  I promise to do the same.  I walk through this world as an equal to all I encounter.  I walk with purpose.  I walk to be a part of something great than I am, as I walk as myself.  No matter what happens tomorrow, I will walk…with the intention to never stray again.

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.

Worlds Collide

As long as I can remember, I have been accused of over thinking.  All too often I allow the supposed rational logical perception of my mind to over analyze a situation or subject to no end.  My simple human mind desperately fights for understanding.  We all do it, I happen to be one of those individuals that have found myself in a self deprecating habit, when I dig to far down the rabbit hole, I make myself sick.  Sure, an analytical mind is needed for problem solving and innovation, but when emotions are swept up into the equation, it becomes volatile recipe.

I usually find myself in this self inflicted agony when thrusting into the maze of mind while contemplating the matters of my heart.  I seem to have found myself near the edge of the very tempest of said confusion.  Why haven’t I fallen in, to be emotionally swept away into the madness?  History.  At long last I feel I may be learning something from my past.  Time will tell, but at this moment in time I still have my feet firmly planted beneath me.

What is the meaning for all this confusion?  What clutter of thoughts has my mind all jammed up?  Not to sound cliché or simply submit to some age old archetype, but when a heterosexual male usually finds himself twisted and contorted mental or emotionally, its usually a safe bet that a woman isn’t far behind.   It’s not what you think.  Having ones mind congested isn’t always a bad thing.  In fact, the answer I would be searching for has already revealed itself to me, and continues to do so.  I’ll get back to that in a moment.  I sense you would like finer detail.  You want the meat and potatoes.  I get it…no one likes to be jerked around.

What is the source for all my confusion…well, it’s me.  The inspiration for the source is a woman who I am quit fond of.   Her name is Jessica, the woman who took us in for almost a week while we stayed in Austin, TX.  As I have mentioned before(in an earlier blog), I met her briefly six years earlier.  I was extremely intrigued, but was dating another woman.  The depth of my intrigue was so great, I knew I would surely brew up trouble if I followed my curiosity, so I never perused even in friendship. 

Time turns, and as it does, it tend to bring up things from the past.  For whatever reason, this time around there was no excuse to disengage.  Upon my arrival to her home, my intrigue once again was in abundance.  She was easy to talk to and talk we did.  We resonate on many levels in the human experience.  Love, artistic self expression, passion for the world and it’s inhabitants, and with a gentleness and compassion that leaves space and desire to understand that which is foreign to us.

You might be asking yourself, “what’s the problem?’  Well, despite our many similarities, there is one dramatic rift.  A divide that is much too wide to reconcile, while we both stand at opposite ends of the spectrum.  The issue:  I am into monogamous paring, while Jessica is very much into Polyamory.   Still wondering why I am confused?  Yeah…so am I.  Its not really confusion as it is acceptance…or lack there of.  We are both very fond of one another, but there is no way for it to work.  In the end, the differences of our needs are far to vast.  Though I must admit, I did delve into the idea of a polyamory lifestyle.  My conclusion?  Well…it’s just not me.  Not at this moment in time.

  Sure, I’ve had my share of conditioning in this life.  Being monogamous wasn’t an issue my initial programming.  Need more…this isn’t the venue for painstaking detail, so I’ll keep it simple.   Polyamory doesn’t compute in my operating system.  First, I have my own strange idea about vulnerability.  I don’t see myself capable of being %100 vulnerable with another human being if I have plan B, C, D, & E waiting in the wing.  Second, who has the time…those who do…fantastic, but I don’t.  I’m a busy man out on a crusade…ok, not that busy.  You get the point.

Alas, the obviousness of the truth is so loud it is defining.  It had been there all along, only I chose to ignore it.  It’s what happens when you let those chemicals flow in the brain and run boldly into the oasis of emotions.  The honest truth:  There is no Jessica & Thomas romantic partnership.  Friends…yes, but not lovers…not anymore.  For me, Jessica was a part of the RISE tour, a very special aspect.  I will cherish my experience, and what I learned in the time that we had.  In this moment, that’s all there is left to do.  

The Mighty Fierce is LIFE

I have something I need to get off my chest.  There is this unquenchable desire to convey these feelings.  What ever you do, don’t be alarmed.  If you try to absorb the words as they are, I’ll do my best to express what it is I am feeling in a coherent matter.   I am feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety and fear.  Fear for what?  The fear of following a dream; not just any dream…my dream.  I am in awe at the depth of surrealism one can constantly travel.  Each new experience provides the opportunity to dig deeper into the great and magical of void of the mystery.

I feel for the first time in my life, that I am beginning to live.  Its difficult and strenuous, but at this point, I have already been overwhelmed by the rewards, love, and support.  It is interesting how an individuals passion, when followed through becomes more than the individual.  It becomes community.  There are no true words, nor deeds that could show my true gratitude for such an amazing collective.  Those I know, those that I will meet, and those that I will bump into on this journey.  Well, I guess the one way to reciprocate is to continue.

I am freaking out, and it is amazing, profound, and necessary.    Not only is it necessary for me, but for the journey.  The amount energy I feel could be akin to a nuclear reactor…maybe.  It is a rhythm that is oscillating and resonating higher, louder, and richer with each passing moment.  Will this feeling subside?  Will it transform?  Yes.  This is my new life, and I intend to at least learn how to pay attention to it.  The RISE experiment hasn’t even begun, and yet I feel such change.

I am fully aware, that I have not comprehension as to what I am about to do, experience, and find while out there in the great wide open.  The road, the culture, and weather are all great characters of the narrative that is RISE.  My relationship with the three will grow like any interpersonal relationship that I share.   It will certainly ebb and flow leaving my saturated in feelings of both joy and despair.   The journey with Zac will be both tightening and straining as be travel through the wilderness.  It will remain on our shoulders to be true to one another as well as to ourselves.

The great paradox of both dichotomy and communion will reveal itself as we travel as we move from great metropolis to the country and back again.  As time goes on, I anticipate that the very thing that makes them different will be that which binds them together.   Already, as I walk through the city of San Francisco, I am witness to the very laws that govern the most relentless aspects of nature.

I stand upon a nexus.  On one side, I see the man who has traveled the path that lead me to San Francisco in 2012.  On the other, I see a person who is now constantly morphing through the abstract realm of infinite possibility.  The three of us now stand together.  I hope my heart and intention remain true.  You the reader will be witness to what I will become.  I am sure I will be as I am now…many things to many people.

To those who I have experience…thank you for walking with me.  Whether it was a singular moment, weeks, years, or lifetime from the bottom of my heart…Thank You.   For those that await our intersection, many blessings and we will see each other soon.

Chapter’s End

Saturday, February 11^th was my last day as a City of Scottsdale Parks & Recreation Leader II.  For those of you who don’t know what that means…in a nut shell I was a servant to young and old within the community of Scottsdale, Arizona.  A willing servant, just to be to be abundantly clear.  I have worked for the COS for over 14 years.  Looking back on it know, it does more than blow my mind.  I have to admit, I wasn’t your standard recreation leader.  If you really know me, you know that I am not the model of excellence or example…at least not for the hollow plasticity that is advertised by status quo of mainstream acceptance.  Whatever the hell that means.

I’d like to believe that I did everything I could to stay genuine for the sake of the relationships that I built with kids, parents and other patrons of the public.

It would be nice to say that I was methodical and concise in the rhythm to my madness, but truth be told, its difficult for a person like me to exist in an atmosphere of an institution like a city government.  I’m not one to be weary of taboo; in fact, you could say that I am an advocate, if not an out right instigator.  What can I say…it must be my karma.

 I wish I could say that I did my absolute best.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the moxie to deliver such a deep and bold face lie.  I know that I could have done better.  The upside is to this sobering reality is that I know that I could have done better, and I intend to learn from my mistake.   I take with me an infinite pool of un-jaded knowledge from thousands of youth.    I have been blessed to have the privilege to learn from so many young folks.  From first grade to seniors in high school, all whom have been my greatest teachers.  I learned so much about my lack of patience, and how to change that.

My time spent wasn’t just working with the youth of the city; I also had the chance to learn from our community’s elders and middle aged professionals.  I will always appreciate the stories you shared and the encouragement to do what I needed from this world.  Your words will be with me as I travel across this country.  To all of you…young to old, know that I am here becomes of the time spent.  Community patrons, coworkers, and bosses, thank you.  For all of my complaints, and egocentric hissy fits…I appreciate your ability to deal with them.

Know that I carry you all with me within my heart, mind, and soul.  I will never let go the memories of the time we shared & the lesson’s learned.  With all my heart…thank you