The Big Two-Niner
From the minute I hit twenty-nine I knew that it was real, that the game was afoot, that it was truly time to get crackin'. Our twenties—indeed the whole of our little lives on Earth—only last for so long, and despite the fact that I've been practically the youngest guy in the room for most of my life—always hanging around with the old guard in an effort to try and catch a glimpse of those old golden days of music and art, a world when time moved a little more slowly and, as a people, we knew how to be a little bit more honest with ourselves and perhaps even mean what we say—recently I had become increasingly aware of that fact changing. Suddenly I found myself in a new crowd: the millennial crowd, specifically, and there have been times when I looked around and felt downright ancient. Now understand: youth does not matter to me. I'm older than I know, and I feel this fact, as many of us do, drifting around my deeper consciousness. There is no question anymore that my soul reaches back beyond reckoning. I'll bet yours does too.
But there comes a time when cosmic consciousness or not, a certain imperative asserts itself. If I were a woman, perhaps I would feel the need to create life. As it is, my need is to explore it, seek it, merge with it. At twenty-nine years of age, I rejoice at the profoundly sweet and sensual nature of our world. I feel its heartbeat in all things. I hear the wind, feel the rain or look up at the stars, and I know them, boom, immediate and solid. And as of my last name-day in this decade of my life, I also know that if I don't finally stretch out my wings and buckle down and get to the heart of it all—bust my ass in a way that relatively few of us understand how to do anymore—that the opportunity to do so, in some way, would be lost to me.
I am a wanderer, and my way is not straight or narrow. Yet I wander with a fierce kind of intent. On the winter solstice of 2015, I knew in my heart that if I spent one more year waiting and learning as I went, leaning on a false sense of “plenty of time for this and that,” that I would end up manifesting a life that those critical of my path and doubtful of my chance of success have all, in their devious way, hoped I would. Exactly, perhaps, as they have. And this notion was not acceptable to me.
The truth is that life is wildly difficult, or rather that it is wildly easy, but takes an incredible amount of effort to do correctly. And the difficulty is proportional to the amount one cares about one's life, and indirectly proportional to the time and energy one spends working on it. Thus, the more one cares about something, the harder it becomes to really get right, but the more familiar and easier it becomes with practice and experience. So I figured, well I've been given the infinite blessing of a life and a free will to live it with, why not see how far I can take it? Why not show those who have felt, at one time or another, that I'm nothing but a lazy collection of excuses to try and explain why my reality isn't the way I want it that my reality is—finally, at long last—exactly the way I have designed it: built of a joyous heart on a foundation of gratitude. I don't care how hard it is to pull off. I know it's possible to get it right.
So what do you do when you're an old soul just burning to find those old ways, and longing to reconnect with your old loves? How do you work it so that your very presence says welcome to your potential collaborators, your fellow dreamers, your future blood-kin? How do you present yourself and attune your life to its fullest can-be and light up like a rocket—go for it in a way that no one has ever taught you how to do?
Being clever and smart is a terrible stumbling block. Where others have at times needed to spend tremendous effort in planning and developing their work, I have, for the most part, lived a life of abject procrastination, usually waiting until the last instant and then blasting out a project in its entirety—3D printing an idea from start to finish in a matter of hours. And usually, this process has been more than sufficient to get me through whatever task lay at hand. I fear that at times my intelligence has made me lazy, taught me that my “good enough” would always slide me through my world, would always be enough to impress without really having to ever work that hard. I have suffered from a lack of follow-through my whole life, often struggling to really care enough about my work to ever sit down and work as though I were afraid of actual failure should I not do so. Twenty-four hours in a day, and how many of these do I ever really use to my benefit? Maybe a few here and there. But the question ate at me: who is the person waiting for me to fire on all cylinders, to hit on all sixes, to engage life with a full broadside and bombard adversity with the uncompromising and terrible firestorm of a true ship of the intellectual line? What indeed was I capable of once I jettisoned the training wheels that let me coast through life easily, unhappily, and without challenge?
And so there I was...am. A fighter, in fine enough shape but nowhere near ready for the big match. As such, I knew that I had work to do; I'd known that for a long, long time. But unlike before, this time there were hard numbers reminding me I had places to be and people to know.
Twenty-nine.
One year. I had one more year of my twenties, that strange and wild decade where one “discovers oneself,” and although I wasn't yet the man I had unknowingly set out to become at the start, I felt that my experiences of the past nine years had slowly formed (and often, pounded) me into a subject ripe for the exertion of some real effort.
In fact of all the things I might now possess, it remains my worldview that, truth be told, I hold the most dear. Not my ability to play music, or my capacity to manipulate the written word, not the sense of creative expressionism (or whatever you want to call it) that informs my preference of environment and modes of behavior, not the aesthetic or emotional choice of tone with which I strive to influence my world. Really, anything that I subscribe to as an idea of a “self,” while perhaps mildly interesting, pales in importance when I consider the lens through which I know this self and everything else I might perceive. That lens is my chief and only real possession. It is ultimately the only part of myself of any real merit, and I've been grinding away at it for a good ten years now, since that moment back in high-school when I first considered its existence.
This lens reflects the light of myself—indeed, of everyone else, besides—as a servant. It collects this light in the understanding that service to others is the highest possible act, the best and finest and most wonderful gift we have to offer one another and ourselves. My lens knows well the conditions that describe the living universe in which we exist, with each energetic body vibrating within a knowledge of a greater love: a higher, wholly stunning force that defies our limited experiences on the ground. Peeking through this lens of a thousand thousand days and nights spent playing music, reading, searching, and feeling, interacting with anyone and everyone on the way, and one can see that we are supremely interconnected, truly one whole, as a field of cosmic mycelium sewn before the mechanism of time was ever devised. Our energy tendrils about one another until we are essentially no different.
Love is our imperative, our gift, our challenge.
So the question remained. How was I going to get my act together, take what I'd learned and—though I be the only one in my world at present whose lens described such a particular view—dig deep within myself and find the fuel to power my secret dreams? I first had to find my allies.
People are fickle. I'd learned that fact that long ago, and it has remained true on a near-daily basis since then. To count on anyone for anything is a recipe, sooner or later, that will ensure disappointment and maybe disaster. Even the down-to-Earthiest people among us have days when, for whatever reason, they just don't care to get your back. Because everyone's fighting their own battles, and their battles are hard, and they get harder the more one cares about them. So reaching out for friendships, relationships, companionship, and any other kind of people-ship surely was not the answer to my own issue. Now, I love people, so I knew that letting go of the desire for them was going to be difficult. But I also knew that holding onto this desire and living the way I'd been living was even harder, so that one had to go.
How to care about my life in a way that allowed me to actually prioritize and itemize my goals and dreams? What came first? Was it my physical body: running, working out, getting the positive reinforcement and confidence I needed to overcome other obstacles? Perhaps. Getting really fit had long been on my short list of things to do. But then so had performing music, writing, learning other languages, building a savings (now relabeled under “get out from under soulcrushing debt”), staying well-briefed on world events, cultivating personal and spiritual power, cooking, reading, restoring old knives...if I spread myself too thin—the classic mistake of youth, and my veritable calling card—I would become overwhelmed and shut down, do nothing, and then be forced to spend my energy regrouping for another try. So what was most pressing?
Part of the challenge for me has been figuring out a way to become a solo artist. As a horn player, someone who fills in the cracks of music, weaves melody in and around a band and lifts up the whole, I hadn't done much towards working to become that whole in its entirety. As a writer, I hadn't shown much of my work to the world, feeling perhaps a sense of incompleteness pervade my writing...the classic “it's not finished yet.” I was not finished yet—yet realizing I never would be had spurred me to accept my words as they were, as an image of a particular sketchy frame of a life lived in that moment. I didn't need to bother with my magnum opus, with even finding my voice. I just needed to keep doing, and doing, and somewhere along the way it would all fall into the right place. And then, as Philip Glass has said, the challenge would become shedding my voice once I'd discovered it.
The winter solstice appears to be an important time in a number of different cultures. A time of rebirth, a time of renewal, a time of freshness, of restoration, of honoring a more divine ideology, a more heavenly walk of life. I don't know what any of it means. I know that in my heart I seek a place or a moment of brilliance, even as I pursue my innermost desire to seed my own fallow fields of feeling with an experience full of truth. Truth that comes as love, as joy, as anguish, as anything...truth that comes as people who give a damn.
What I have been looking for, primarily, are people who care as much about life's winding ways as I do. People, like myself, who are not content. People, like myself, who do not fancy settling for other people's answers or explanations. I know that they exist—I exist, and I can not be the only one like myself in this regard. There have been countless souls before me who have lifted up all the many walks of humanity by their desire to know their world and the people in it. So, being ready to step up to my own plate and really begin carrying my own weight as a sovereign soul, I have resolved a few things.
I am never giving up.
I will always try harder.
I will listen and observe, watch and learn, feel and think, and when the time is right, speak and act.
I will remember to engage the other side of myself, the no-mind self, as often as possible.
I will have no expectations. None.
I will honor my gift of life with gratitude, humility, joyfulness, and above all, with sincerity.
I will open myself to the world and its people, offering my heart on my sleeve and feeling every pain and hurt to the fullest, while remaining uncalloused, unjaded, and unshaken.
I will bring music and art with me and express myself in every way I can, growing with it together even as it flows through me.
I know where I come from and where I am going.
I know where I am.
I know who I am.
I know who I am not.
I submit myself to the yielding universe to act in accordance with my higher function.
I bow to my former and future selves, and to the selves of those I meet, as equals.
Everything I know through the lens of a human being is limited, and therefore incomplete.
My completeness comes from the universal truth of Divine love. I feel it always.
Aho metakuye oyasin!
I pray the hardest for those who have endeavored to hurt me or to cloud my path with hatred or dissimulation.
I am a servant of the Secret Fire.
I will not compromise my self and mission, lest I be made nothing.
Compassion is my compass, my shield, my sword, my ship, and the ocean upon which I sail.
I take refuge in the great Sameness I share with all things.
I cannot be touched by darkness without first giving my consent.
I shall never do so.
Everything begins with the breath.
I shall bless my brothers and sisters, that I might free them from suffering.
I shall embrace my own suffering, that I might grow and better grok my world.
Grok the world, baby.
The way ahead is as ready for me as I am to walk it—“welcome back.”
I trust that by my third decade, these truths shall be tested and be made all the stronger in their trail by fire, and the rest shall fall away, unneeded and unheeded, as I cast out into the ripples of a life made new each moment. To Infinity and beyond.
If we've not met, know that it will be my great pleasure to do so. If we have, I look forward to doing so again. Regardless of our current life's path, know that you are no stranger to me, and that I miss you, and I welcome your company warmly. May your path be everything you desire, everything that you need to complete your circle, and may you be blessed, as I am blessed, with the knowing that you are deeply loved. Aho.