It’s been a dozen years since we were up on that Swiss mountainside and a fellow Village Camps employee walked into our backcountry cabin to share with us that America – New York City, to be exact – had been ‘attacked.’ “What?” our group of international teenagers and adults all exclaimed. “Why?” Collectively, we felt confused and frightened. I had hoped to spend many years abroad but this news, along with the fear mongering that followed it, brought my wandering feet home. The Austrian couple, whom I had met while backpacking in New Zealand and then spent a few pristine weeks living in the Austrian countryside with, questioned my decision. “There are family weddings and births to attend to,” I told them, as my familial loyalty always gets the best of me.
Upon touching home, after fourteen months abroad, my feet traversed that city that never sleeps. Walking city block after cement block, below towering skyscrapers, my aunt and myself were determined to see the devastation up close. I needed to draw my own conclusions and gain my own clarity. However, there was little left to view at the World Trade Center – only a wooden fence surrounding its deep scar with a rectangular hole cutout for eye-balling its harrowing remains. I felt no clearer - only more confusion as I strolled past street vendor after street vendor, hawking 9/11 memorabilia. Trauma made consumption; tragedy turned commodity. None of it seemed right.
I returned to California to ring in the passing of another Gregorian calendar with my immediate family, as we snowboarded and skied, rested and partied, in Lake Tahoe. As I had intuited, my brother and his new girlfriend had just announced that she was pregnant with my parent’s first grandchild. Life goes on, it always does. Soon, I was whisked away to my next gig – working at Astrocamp in the mountains just above Palm Springs where I spent the year living communally with a group of twenty-plus, like-minded peers.
Life in Idyllwild was ideal. I climbed rocks and mountains, grew intimately acquainted with a southern California night sky, taught young people that “all that matters in this life are the stories you create” because “the Universe is made up of stories,” danced my ass off during our regular theme-parties and was introduced to the magic prose of Rumi by the now well-known, non-duality philosopher and you tube mystic, Ben Smythe. Yet, something was missing – perhaps, it was the diverse culture that only a city represents or, maybe, it was the graduate school degree that I was hell-bent on achieving. Whatever it was, I again returned home – only this time to San Diego.
Aware that I was emotionally stunted, I committed myself to the mirror that only intimate relationships offer, as I bobbed and weaved from job to job, house to house and neighborhood to neighborhood. Two long-term, live-in relationships later and I felt disheartened by what I had found. The reflections that came back were moody and judgmental, finger pointing and blaming, shaming and guilt-ridden, escapist and afraid. Although I understood all of this behavior to be past, current and/or inverse images of me and I recognized that the only way out of these shadow-sides of myself was through them, this wisdom certainly didn’t - and doesn’t - make for an easy ride.
However, I began to cultivate respite, as well as a fuller sense of on-going contentment, when I remembered how to listen to my heart. This body beats for dance; this Soul breathes for music; this Spirit thrives for community. Still, it took years for me to un-learn the heavy conditioning of my mind; a nefarious voice that easily tricks me into believing that I don’t need any of it - not the hugs or the inquiries into my well-beeing, not the shaking my shit out and the letting go, not the feeding my human desire to bee heard and seen - and that, instead, a television and a house filled with gadgets and technology could easily fill my needs. “As If….”
Over the course of all this time, I have continually entertained notions that I would leave San Diego – that there is something better somewhere else. And, every time, I simply come back to the old adage that “no matter where you go, there you are.” So, instead, even as my local actions have consistently expanded and contracted, I have chosen to dig my feet in and root deeper.
Twelve years after the fall of the Twin Towers and I wouldn’t say that I am any clearer or wiser or closer to the truth about this life and the nature of evolution. However, what I have experienced has been an awakening of sorts – an unfolding of my own personal mythology in which all is connected to everything else and what happens to this planet, as well as to all other living creatures on its surface, happens to me. My commitment to my family remains, only now my family is no longer only those with whom I merely share immediate blood relations. My family is the air I breathe, the water I drink, the birds that soar, the fish that swim, the serpents that glide and the food I eat. My family is you and my Soul is free. For all this I would die willingly.
