It's Time...

          The Last several months have been a constant morphic playground.  My perception of reality and how I walk through it is constantly fluctuating.  I’ve had a hard time grounding myself.  Its as if I have been spinning…out of control and with no barring of the horizon point.  Over come by fear and desperate for equilibrium, I lose more of a sense of a center.  My muscles tense up as I flail, pathetically gripping for control.

            What the hell am I doing here? Where am I suppose go now and how in the hell do I get there?  They are just a few of the many questions that invade my piece of mind.  A shift has been rising within me, with emotions that were so intense I’ve had no choice but to unravel.  Everything is crumbling around me, or so my ego perceives. The desperation leaves me with a bitterness that is unfounded.  Sadness, depression, anger seem to swell building a tremendous pressure.  The more I fight, the mightier the struggle endures.

                                                                                    …and then…

                        …snap…

            Have I snapped?  All the signs are there.  The build up seems to fit the profile.  Why does it all seem so different?  Where is the catastrophe and the seismic wake that usually leaves my psyche in ruin?

             Within these last months, I have been the victim of borderline masochisms through workload and self imposed exile.  I buried myself over my own vision and desires.  I forgot all about the freedom of intention and set a course for a methodical plan with absolutely no room for adaptation.  I engineered in my mind a plan of attack, so meticulous that every step was essential.  With it, I added task after task, until I became so overwhelmed, the very thought of my work load left me paralyzed.

            As the pressure I built expanded beyond my ability to contain, I made a decision.  Within two simple words I found my salvation.  “Fuck It.”  I let go.  The frustration and manipulation is way to much for me.  There was no need to control any of this.  All it has done is bring avoidable discomfort.  I have no idea where I am going.  I have no idea how I am going to get there, but…Fuck It, its all good.

            It’s time to take a load off, and to enjoy the world that my feet tread upon.  This can be done while accomplishing a passion that may be greater than who I am.  I know my intention, and I also realize that it will take a will to see it through.  Who cares what it looks like.  I’m tired of holding that weight.  I’m letting it go.  As long as I do what I do, I will get to where I need to be.

            Through formation of my spiritual discipline, exercise, curiosity, and fun I am learning more about the ever changing complexity that is me.  Why be attached and add more stress then already exists by merely existing.  The tao, or the universal flow, move accordingly.  Why fight against the current.  I don’t see cowardice in surrender.  Sure, there may be a giant waterfall awaiting my demise.  For better or worse, through tragedy and triumph, I seek to enjoy what I flow through.  I give up. I give up not on a dream, but on the doctoral perception to control the entire scheme.  

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.

My Dark Wilderness of Blinding Light

           

           The RISE journey is coming to an end.  Everyday we move closer to COSM: The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.  As the scenery has changed, expectedly, so have I.  In the beginning, I was so amped.  Filled with adrenaline, excitement, and the wonder of the infinite possibility that awaited me.  Each new day I reveled at the American landscape, and I have marveled at its amazing diversity.  As the countryside changed, so did the season as did the culture.  It has been a blessing to be a witness to this land I have known as home.  As everything has been in a constant state of metamorphosis that I am now accustomed too, I have become aware of the most important change:  The revolution within.

            Allowing the constant change of the outer world to become the norm, I am no longer as distracted by it as I have been for so many months.  This has allowed the appropriate space in my mind to take the leap inward.  For the past three or four weeks, I have finally reached the point of welcoming the silence.  It is still quit unsettling, and takes time to relax into.  It also brings a new layer to the tour itself.  I have kept to myself as much as I possibly can.  Sure, I fall into old habits and continue to distract myself.  Scanning the Internet, looking for people to talk to on the Facenet, or watching old episodes of LOST.  As time begins to move on, I am taking the time to go for walks.  During most of these walks, I have also refrained form listening to my ipod.  Just take a stroll and allow myself to integrate the ambiance of what ever may be in the environment.

            This has allowed me to have more conversations with myself.  Asking those tough question and peal away those layers that hide my many paradoxical truths.  Its not always the most fun or entertaining exercise.  Truth be told, it can be down right frightening.  The more I peal away, the more questions I ask, I begin to realize a simple truth…there are no definitive answers.  There is only the feeling of flow.  I know you’d like to have a more thorough explanation.  I don’t have one.  How does one explain an abstract?  There seems to be no sufficient language for feelings, only a feeble attempt for understanding.   If you need a better description, I would ask you to think of gravity, or to watch a flowing river.  Sit in silence and just observe it as it is:  the water, the rocks within and on the banks, and the life that dwells with the flow.  Watch every aspect and how it all interacts.

            As humans in an industrialized world, we have become so hardwired for stimulation.  We are constantly searching for gratification of the pleasure centers in our brains, that we have become distracted.  Maybe it’s just me, and it is my issue alone, but it’s as if we have lost the connection of self and the divinity of the living moment.  The journey inward takes time, attention, and courage to let go of attachment.   The path can be a dark, cold, and murky wilderness, but there is a silver lining.  The light is just above the dense canopy.  It splinters between each massive tree and thick brush to show the way.  The way isn’t a universal map.  It is dramatically different for each and every one of us, but its there nonetheless.

It has taken five to six months to transition into this new method on this journey, and as the tour winds down, soon I will have more time for solitude and self reflection.  This is a process that I do not intend to rush.  My journey home is still one that is in constant motion, and I am not married to anyone way on how to go about it.  I am willing to take what comes at me, what ever that is.  While I have many ideas, I am allowing myself to be without schedule and up for what ever change the flow decides for me.  All I can do is initiate the navigational coordinates of my intention, and through the power of will, I will be taken where I need to be. 

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.  

Through The Birth Canal

Just when I thought I was finally setting into a groove on tour life, I seemed to be shaken from a momentary lapse of comfort.  It seems the gravity of the journey, or maybe experiment that is RISE finds new ways of breaking down egocentric walls of what I am.  Being on this road, slowly traversing the diverse American landscape, I find my own diversity reflected back to me.   The dichotomy of beauty and ugliness in scenery, culture and most of all…that which is in me are becoming just as constant and compressed as my emotions.   It is so sporadic that one cannot anticipate what each day will bring on any given level in the mystery of life.

I wish I could articulate every emotional nuance.  GOD, I’m desperate to articulate all of this, if but for a moment, to have another understand, but alas, it seems futile.  I am saturated in an unfathomable amount of sensation.  Every fiber of my being feels overtly stimulated that I am raw…like skin scrapped, exposing the tender meat.   Know that I am not sad or depressed…I just feel as if all that I am is transparent.  That’s not the right word…if not transparent, then what?  Unraveling?

It seems that on every level of my being; spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, physically…a collapse is taking place…possibly on a molecular level.  I would use crude terms like breakdown or freak out, and I most certainly feel a fantastic fucking freak out approaching, but the conviction falls short at my desire to express and be heard.  I wonder, is this what it feels like to die…or to be born?  Though I have experience birth, I have no memory of sensation.  Of course I don’t mean this in any literal sense, how could I with out a reference?  Still, I feel some archetypal abstract shift from within.  I want to scream!  As if it would release some built up pressure like I was a teakettle.

In every Journey, whether it is a full life or small adventure, one is not the same when they exit, as they are when they enter.  I know I am near the exit door of this tour.   There is no way to comprehend what any transformation will look like on the other side.  I can only imagine this experience to be akin to the transformation of ones consciousness when traveling through their mother’s birth canal; leaving one world and entering another.  The process doesn’t end.  It will continue, and it is up to me to nurture the experience.

I don’t wish to distract myself with thoughts of the many possible tomorrows.  Instead, I remind myself to bask in the flame of experiencing now.  In this moment, I am tired and I am most certainly breaking down.  It’s nothing to fear, it is the most precious and genuine of feelings. I embrace it.  Everything seems so different now as I shed my old skin. The other side will be upon me soon enough, and I will do with it what ever inspires me in that moment.  This journey has tested me in every way imaginable.  What I do with it will set the course for the next phase of my life on this planet…in this reality.  I will command my ship as it rides within the flow.