HappyFeet Travels

I enter into my 36th year humbled and amazed. These past twelve months have been a time of upheaval, precarity, despair, and loss. I walked into the void where things fall apart, and that nothingness has left me directionless. I don’t know if I want a guiding star because I am falling into the deepest, darkest places that I thought I had visited in the past. I need to work these things out, or begin the process of discovering them. I want to confront the darkness, my fears and insecurities, and become the person I have always been.

The pain that exists there, cob-webbed nooks in my lifetime of travels, will creep around inside me forever. The emotions that are wrapped around those locked-away places are twisted and gnarled, like a rope that a tree has grown over (or a knotted muscle from an old accident). The ropes lead to other places, tangle together, creating walls and rooms. In one of those rooms I scream and I cannot hear myself. I look on through a thick, stain-glassed window.

Luckily, that window can open, and I am on a journey that will lead me to that room where the shrieking me is. Do you know where the monsters are in the darkness of your memory? I used to scare myself silly as a child, having frequent dreams of trapdoors, imagining dead people walking up the steps from the mortuary. I was afraid those visions and I’m afraid now. The adult that never confronted what scared him most is currently trying to find out what the hell those horrors are.

This 35th year seeps into my life’s journey like the experiences I had in Atlanta about 10 years ago. At 25, my life imploded, I betrayed my best friend, lost many others, and sunk to the bottom of the pit of loathing. I spent two years climbing out of that hole, traveling alone in Europe, living alone in Greenville, not dating, learning to love myself, and eventually traveling across the country to land in San Francisco. I arrived into the present without a job, room, or clue. My mother, always the prophet, predicted that I’d fall in love with someone in SF and never move back to SC. She was right on both accounts.

So, ten years later, I stand alone again in the endless darkness of the present moment. Every action I have made led me here, where I’m learning to breathe again. I didn’t realize that dealing with my shit would be a lifelong thing, but know now that it is. I am preparing myself to be up to the task to find myself in the moment, to relish the emotions that come and go in the emptiness.

Today, a simple phone call set me off. I could go into the details of the phone call, but it would be a waste of time. Instead, I began to breathe and observe the emotions and present feelings. This led to an hourlong process that happened mostly in public, in my heart. I was angry, why? Because I don’t express myself that well. Why? Because expressing myself is bad. Why? Because it makes me feel dirty. Why? Because I’m a failure. Why? Because my (biological) parents got rid of me. The last answer came to me in my room as I wrote in my journal, and I instantly began bawling.

I didn’t cry because it was all an illusion. I cried because it was an obvious discovery that finally crept out of its musty hole. I know that I’m not any of those things, but I am all of those things. They are the ropes that have tree trunks grown around them. Hard to find, pull out, and discard. I can deny this all I want, but know that it is true. It is also not true. There’s just the conditioning that goes with forgetting where you are at the current moment.

Which is headed to my 36th birthday. This past year, I have observed the metaphor and symbolism of the things that come into my life. Why did the woman bless me last Thurs. when I sat in a bar and focused on my heart via breathing? Why did that butterfly die on the trip up to Oregon? Why did the body worker give me a seed to nurture myself 6 months ago? Why did I find the tarot cards, and pick the 7 of pentacles, a man with a hoe? What am I planting with all of this, what will grow from it? How are my friends, community, and family providing the soil for this transition to grow out of?

What is in store for year 36? I am lost, sad, broken, yet alive, observing the seconds, and connecting with the atoms of the universe. I’m a mess, peaks and lows come when they want to, but I am here. The world falls apart, people die and are born, and I am pushing those stain-glassed windows open to hear the beautiful sound of my screaming. Years ago, I dreamed of my niece, Anna, standing in front of a collapsing building. She had no idea that things fell apart behind her, and just smiled as the wind gently blew her blonde hair. I instantly woke up form the horror of that toppling building.

I failed to notice that my beautiful niece stood firm, unwavering, and in the moment of her own happiness. I was that building then, and now, but I am about to be that grounded child. Like Roland at the end of the Dark Tower, I am starting the story over. Except I have a magical item with me this time. It is the clue to find the balance of falling in this endless void and illusion. It is the fact that I live, I feel, and I am here.

Last week Rob Brezny gave me yet another totem to carry, feel out, and savor. My horoscope (I usually take them lightly) from last week fits my current circumstances:

Please speak the following series of declarations at least once a day in the coming week: “I want to drink in the brilliance of someone’s beautiful eyes today. I want to dream of the kind of intimacy I will someday be worthy of. I want to learn to enjoy everything that I do and everything that happens to me, even if it’s not what I expected or thought I needed. I want the end of every story to be quickly followed by the beginning of the next story. I want to go home to a home I have never known.”

These excerpts are from a letter/journal I kept on the recent Oregon trip. I wrote this letter for my best friends Todd and Mark

I’ve been waiting for this trip for months now. Haven’t been on the road outside of the Bay Area for a long while. Rent was too high, I was too poor, and my life fell apart. But you and Mark know best what that urge to move feels like. Headed to a festival makes this trip even more enjoyable. Getting there via a veggie-fueled bus and performing acts just like icing. Guess I don’t have to mention mountains, clean air, and trees…. Dunsmuir, CA

Jonathan and the universe gave me a gift a few hours ago. A buttefly hit the windshield back down on Grant’s Pass. [While taking a break at a rest stop, I wanted] to take the butterfly wings off of the windshield to put on my altar. About to pluck its wings, I saw that it was alive! It’s abdomen was smushed pretty bad. I peeled it off and put it on a piece of moss I had just picked up. It wasn’t flapping its wings, so I knew that its life i this reality was over. But it refused to die, twitching legs for most of our stopover. It eventually died, but I couldn’t bare to take its wings.

So the universe gave me a gift: beauty dieing. Nature’s infinite circle of renewal. Once again, death came to me in a pure form, and allowed me to test the waters of grief. The death of the butterfly sent a direct metaphor to my center of being. Quines Creek, OR

Magic does happen in the world. We drove into the Oregon Country Fair (OCF) with no nighttime/employee wristbands and no parking stickers. 24 hours later, we had 5 wristbands, one extra and two of them gifted to us for free, and two parking passes. I feel that the OCF is a special place for me to be at the right moment.

Walking through the OCF is like being in a faire land theme park. Booths, gates, and artwork line trails and fill meadows. Raw lumber and branches hide alot of the architecture and gates blend in to the forest. This lifestyle is vibrant, creative, and all-ages. The OCF celebrates its elders and many families are present. Day one of the OCF

Tired tonight after ding six shows today and staying up most of the night last night. I spent most of the night in a solemn mood. At one point an Iranian musician showed up to the place where I was hanging out at and began to drum and sing traditional Middle Eastern music. I began to think about the tribe of Ishmael and the wandering lifestyle of the Roma. My inner fears began to open up, and I realized that I was a bastard who had never seen my mother. I am the landless people, I thought, the child of Abraham cast out into the dessert. My current life changes had even made me tribless. I felt like the lonely wandering monk once again.

I left the sweet music and walked into the craziness of the Saturday night fair. At one point, I came across a tree that had an altar under it. Someone was randomly kneeling in front of it. The tree seemed out-of-time; it had a strange quality to it that nothing else had. I knew the night was over when I walked up to a jug band that had an inbred violin player. Bald, cross-eyed, and drooling, he played his violin held out in front of him. The washboard player was staggering drunk, and the guitar player wasn’t too far behind him. Sunday, July 11

After a week of magic, tests, and travel, the veggie bus crew points its compass south. After a lazy morning on some property (Pica Flores) near a creek by the McKenzie River, we spent most of the day looking for veggie oil and processing it for the drive home. Travel goes slow when you run on veg, and I enjoyed every bit of the work that goes into being a fuel bootlegger.

Two nights ago, at Pica Flores, we had a group dinner. The matriarch of the property asked for everyone to introduce themselves. I said something like this: “Hi, I’m Russell. Last weekend was my first Country Fair. This whole trip has been filled with miracles and the fair lived up to its myth from when I lived on the East Coast. I’ve met nothing but kind souls with big hearts, so am humbled by all of your good deeds. I’m currently going through a shadowy life change, and am currently tribeless, so this trip brought much needed medicine into my center of being. I thank you all.” Thursday, July 13