We must run to others & not into solitude to find ourselves. Alone we starve or get eaten up.
I began this one a couple weeks ago on a trip, and let it lay for a while until tonight – I’m struck with fear that my wild mind and thoughts going out of control in the coming week. I feel so much better being alone today than when family arrives tomorrow. Thankfully I have the incredible band the Wood Brothers to speak to me: Wastin My Mind, One More Day, Laughin or Cryin and of course Never and Always.
My only chance of survival, thankfully My Muse will return tomorrow. And there’s nothing unique about how I’m feeling – we’re all A Little Bit Broken. So lets get Rollin On to Happiness Jones.
Out of the Wild
Another airplane movie. Flights bring great wisdom every time I’m high in the sky for some odd reason. But today’s wisdom cinema shows are not the usual suspects – not Roadrunner, A Star is Born, Shawshank Redemption, but a few oldies I nearly forgot about. Not a River Runs Through It, but close - Into the Wild. Christopher Johnson McCandless. Another confused youth, a candle that extinguished itself too quickly. Everything happens at just the right time. The rebel, endlessly fueled by family hatred, the searcher Alexander Supertramp another character from Virginia, another child of NASA, another who lost his way, consumed by a faulty mind and negative energy. On paper he began with both parents, then was given a choice around who he would side with, one zero or the other. Parents both living lies, like so many of us, not realizing the collateral damage we do.
Things that go quiet, again ring in our ears in a familiar tenor, the uncontrollable tinnitus. Only your physical being is easily beaten and repaired, the invisible insides are resilient in ways that can heal, protect like a deity or consume and destroy like a black hole. They can spread, transmissible across all dimensions – generations, populations, repeated, endless iterations. Secrets and fallacies destroy, the hidden truth fractures and beats us all over. Its never our friends that bring us down, its us alone.
Anger, then desperation, then guilt, all before pain, all before any sense of repair or thought of change being possible. Only to realize our own irrevocable nature. Unable to grasp salvation.
Many of us don’t believe we are worthy. Most of us are wrong in that regard but can’t be convinced. Not feeling strong, not being strong, unable to find ourselves when we are so close to cresting. Yet able to guide others to their exact destination, identity and strength, removing their blindfolds. But never our own, unable to put the oxygen mask on ourselves but able to do so for others.
A few months into his journey, Alex was on the same bridge as I, in the same park, looking at the same trees and waterfalls, both alone. Yet I was surrounded by what they call family and loved ones that day so long ago. Silent. The picture brings such a chill over my body.
What do we choose to leave behind, why would we not want to find ourselves or be found. Alone is the only way we feel comforted and secure, whole, unable to further poison or damage, taint the clean of others. We can waste away in many ways, day by day or swiftly drowned by a flood. Putting others up to do the dirty work on our behalf or sacrificing them without their knowledge all along the way. Intoxicated and hooked, judgement and control, systems and policies, -isms and -acies and -eties that bring no fulfillments or happies. Just zombie lines and lanes, lights and leaks. Wrongly thinking we might teach someone else a lesson. That its all a 21st century invention.
Do any of us truly know who we are, are we all simply stuck in the wild. Or wildly inside out? Or just where we need to be, alone way out there where the other wild things are. Into the darkness to find light and clarity from the fog. Some things you can’t escape. Nothing will make me an angel, not everything in this world.
Then pivoting, arriving, retreating to comfort, asking for forgiveness and another chance to destroy more. Always a bastard, bastarded by the previous generation without a choice, unable to change. Without a true identify, just a mirror and conglomeration of our own slow deforestation. Until we quit fooling ourselves and forgive, we must first learn to fish in order to fruitfully live.
Athletes want to be Hollywood stars, that want to be musicians, who long to be athletes, writers reading about how to be scientists or stars, the rich and famous wanting to be regulars and so many regular joes who want to be rich and famous. The stars looking down on us ready to swallow us up, at the same time we look up to them for answers. The moon and the sun, controlling us all in bipolar fashion no matter how close or how far.
We think being alone will lead to finding answers but they are only found with the help of others, for we cannot survive as one. Christopher McCandless could not, and while I’m not ready to think about it now, my friend Brandon Wright was dead wrong when he made the trek to Alaska as well. He has been gone for over 10 years now.
The weak want to be strong again, the strong truly want to be empathetic. Be older and mature when you’re younger, wiser when naive. Should we be oblivious, it seems so much easier than anything else. We carry secrets when we need others to know, try to erase the weight of what we carry, but the buzzing will never subside. I want to be sane, but have no way of moving on if I rely only on feeding myself. Its all so mixed up. And then something snaps, you go back to a place you never wanted to, the hallucinations you can’t ever escape. Pain that alone will overtake. Run when you should stay, speak when you are silent. Fight when you surrender and love, forgive, move on when you are filled with hate and rage.
I must have been 7 or 8 and its funny how 35 years can go by yet feel like yesterday. Yet, there can also be so many holes, unanswered questions or missing pages in between. I have no idea how we got there or any memory of the day we left my grandmothers, landing at a family friends home. The Johnsons, who became my godparents and so much more, about 15 minutes away from the home we shared with my grandmother up until that day. No idea if we arrived late in the night or early afternoon, but I remember we had a nice dinner before bed. Perhaps it looked like a regular day from 100 feet above. Dinner was bland as usual but more than nourishing enough and made with love.
That evening, things zoomed in for me and every moment burned in my head as if I had a photographic memory. I will never forget the fear and sadness in my mother‘s eyes that night, the blinds opened at just the right angle and the full moonlight was perfectly illuminating. Horizontal lines on the wall in the background. As we laid across a small room from each other on two twin beds I pretended to sleep but I watched as her eyes were drowned in tears that rolled slowly down her cheeks. Yet she was silent and still. She didn’t wipe them away, almost paralyzed from fright. I was scared also, but felt other emotions as well, angered and enraged - just not sure where it originated from or was directed at. Yet I never asked a single question that next morning or ever after. And my mom showed no sign of hurt, pain or fear that next morning or ever after. I say she showed, and that is the critical word in the sentence.
Why didn’t I ever ask? How did I come to be, what was she thinking as the plan, what happened that day which led us to a new home away from my grandmother, a divide never reconciled? I often wonder now if I wanted to continue creating my own answers, and enjoyed the fire that burned inside me as a result of my inability to ask fundamental questions about what had happened. I wanted to be an avenger, or some misguided revenger. Or was I just too scared, or too afraid of the answers, unwilling to hear them and process them. I was and am sure the answers all were rooted in the problem for nine months that nobody could see, directly and indirectly, and for years the problem was and is me.
What I have told myself, is that I was overwhelmingly afraid to know the truth, and out of some twisted consideration, didn’t want to create any further shame, discomfort. My mother had a similar misguided approach, look away until the injured in the wreck are dead and there is nothing to be done but clean up the bloody mess. Maybe it was all a bad dream. And instead of facts and a healthy processing, I forged a different narrative and weaponized this day. And I began to fight just as she did every day. But she was fighting for me, I had no reason to throw punches or kick and bludgeon anything wrecklessly as I did. I sought out and killed every snipe in the forest. So many things we have never spoken or written of, the things we kept to ourselves, are anything but trivial.
I became a master of compartmentalization, of narrative creation and burying more emotions as bodies than the local gravedigger. Mental manipulation, internally and outwardly. I found a negative energy and was creating chaos while entropy was increasing all around me for no reason.
From that long night, one of the few I didn’t just escape the pain or gravity of my situation through sound sleep, I added this discard or back turn to other feelings of hurt and it all drove me to think and act wrecklessly (and with something to prove or avenge). I was sticking it to anyone and anything in my path or looking for the recognition, attention or acceptance to fill those unanswered questions through the first 42 years of my life. Taking it out on the innocent, on myself, climbing mountains or accomplishing achievements with the wrong fuel in my engine, water in the gas tank, only to feel further empty at the finish line. Yet alcohol is a fuel derived from a rotting apple, or a grape ready to burst, so many things left for dead and full of decay and they react in a new way with the help of the environment around them to become something sweet, pure and full of positive energy. Just the right wild yeasts, balance of nutrients and harvesting, patience and process through many hands and skills. We yield a transformed product in form, shape, beauty and complexity.
I will never ask. Never know, and also never be able to trust the answer if I do ask, for the behaviors are also learned, germinate from the seed, the apple laying under the tree rotting in the hot sun and picked over by flies. For there was no understanding of the seed, who or how it was sewn, until the apple fell out of the tree in the first place, only to be bruised, damaged and decaying in energy and capacity for so many years. And it was on another airplane that was the only time I saw more pain and tears than in my mother’s eyes that night I was 7 or 8. This time they were flowing through me as I rushed home to my grandmother after learning she had a stroke that was likely fatal. Fatal for her and futile for my efforts to ever ask her for clarity. One of the only true squanders I feel in a life of so many others, well at least I tell myself the others were trivial or insignificant.
But what really happened, and who and how am I? In the end its simple, young lovers do stupid things not realizing the consequences of actions. Then shame kicks into deceit, hiding ensues, or running and we lose clarity, lose our way and can’t figure out which way is north. Or we just head north and never look back, trying to leave it all behind. Some things just turn out bad, some people do too. When I read about generational trauma, the ability to influence both genetically and experientially during pregnancy, childbirth and early life, the costs of alone, I understood a little about who I am. Someone driven by and to all the wrong things, looking for the bear, running towards pain and suffering, and who wouldn’t return from the wild.
Some days I think the challenges are behind me. That I’ve grown, that my holistic, comprehensive process has yielded an internal victory. Others, I truly feel helpless and if I had to count the game is very tight. If I had to call who is winning or would become victorious in the end, its an unfortunate judgement. I just don’t see the bright side when I should. I see that so often in others too and while I feel I can help them, I cannot for myself. In the midst of life, I feel in death.
Instead, I / we need to take another step up the mountain and keep climbing. Fueled by what is in front of us and not what is behind or inside. Its not time to step on the bus, but time to step off and out, not to rot in the field or on the vine. But I do nothing other than feel I need an army to stand by me, to help ease my misery.
Yet I shake, wondering if I do say something it will be so demonstrative that I will only add to our great divide. Fracture further into dust the broken pieces of our relationship. Or will I be able to find more of the truth, perhaps its within me. I remember some horrible things that happened just before we left my grandmothers, but they are not clear to me. I have no way to fill in those holes with truth, because I never spoke up.
See you tomorrow Mom, drive safe.
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