Liberalis

Act One: Seeing Yourself in Others
I took a little run-away to Salt Lake City two days ago and got back yesterday. Being in the big city has always made me a bit nervous and stressed out, as I'd soon remember. But in seeking to re-invent a more-positive attitude, I thought, "Ah, a great opportunity to learn to love and appreciate people better". And so it was. After donating plasma, I seek to return to my campsite via rail. I lug my bicycle up the train's stairs, and my guess (and attempt at positivity) was soon proven correct that I just missed the first train for a reason. Enter Cody Supertramp: A wild-haired, bold-minded, brave-heart with a road bicycle of his own too! We begin naturally at talking about each others' bicycles. I learn that he has ridden/walked his bicycle all the way from New Jersey. A young man stifled by the suburbanite culture of the east just like myself! He tells me of his bicycle breaking in Kentucky and him walking all the way to central Tennesse. What I read of his account echoed sweetly of the reverent awe that I found myself in my early travels -- namely that people are good, that they want to help, and that they hold a great capacity to love. I share an excerpt of his song

Culture shocked. The kindness of people out here is unreal. My family out here feeds me, clothes me, gives me rides. A guy at work gave me 20 dollars when funds were low. Another bought me my favorite flavor of Rockstar. Another gave me half a pack of cigarettes when I was out and yet another bought me a pack today cause he could see I was having a bad day. Even the cop who caught me hopping the train, let me off with a warning and thanked me for my cooperation. I love it here, finally surrounded by people who are as compassionate as I. I've lived here for 4 months, and feel more at home than 28 years in Jersey.

Cody found what was there all along, the road just brings it out of us, and out of others. He said essentially that by wandering, he found what he needed. He now knows a lot more of what he wants to do in life. Not all who are drifters are running away from something lesser. Some of us are running to something greater. 

Act Two: And Just What Do You Want?
Next morning, I wake up and descend the hill while my sleeping bag and materials dry. I didn't walk but three minutes but I see a school bus parked just outside the trail-head parking lot. I immediately realize what kind of person this bus belongs to. I see steam coming out of a vent fashioned into the roof. I see the bus's original district faded on the side. And what caught my heart the most: A "Little Tikes" brand step stool, fashioned to look like an oak tree. Children! Oh, how beautiful!! I come back an hour later and I see A man and three children outside the bus. I call to him, "Hello! I think the way you live is beautiful". He introduces himself as Charles Wallace, and I soon find out that his beautiful life was shared between him and his wife, and his seven children. . . and his two large dogs! We share spiritual conversations, iPod pictures, a bowl of chili, travelogues, how Christ said we should become like little children -- see life the way they see it -- and talking of finding that woman that I'll cherish through life and eternity. He says that his vision became impaired in one eye and he was not able to work for a year. Eventually they realized they were just bemoaning their misfortune and not living. I so admired their dedication to God, and their great children. He suggested a radical change in my life, and while I felt I was where I was supposed to be, I defintely understood the kind of woman I wanted to share my life with after that point. 

Act Three: Nirvana
Woke up before sunrise, wanted to wait until it was warmer. Plunged back inside, completely enveloped and sheltered. I was comforted by the light passing through my sleeping bag, bringing out the red and orange tones in my skin. Eventually poked my head out, it was mid morning and I was surrounded by sparkling white, I laid there on my back looking at the sky, the winter branches spread across big blue. If I live to be a thousand I should never forget those branches, which stood bravely overhead and with beautiful peace, mirroring my mood at that precise moment. But it was more than peace, it was freedom. It was a peace detached from anything and everything. I thought that maybe it was time to go home, even if just for a little while. 

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And as for Mr. Wallace, you can only guess what the bus'es faded letters read: 

Liberty School District 

Wild Inheritance

Instincts long dead became a live again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the the youth of the breed, to the time where the wild dogs ranged in packs though the primeval forest, killing their meat as they ran it down. . . In this manner had fought forgotten ancestors. They quickened the old life within him and the tricks they stamped into the heredity of the breed were his tricks. They came to him without effort or discovery, as though they had been his always. And when, on still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolf-like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. 

- Jack London, The Call of The Wild

(From October 15th) . . . Cooped up for two days, mostly inside. Feeling myself in a hibernation-like state where desire for food is faint and unrewarding, my body closed up in a patient waiting whilst my soul openly suffers. My sleep schedule disorients, I could sleep all the time or little. It would seem to make no difference. I step outside, not for but a moment. I do it with heart, with intent. I ride out in the afternoon sun past landfill mounds, truck stops, and railroad tracks. I pause and begin my re-connection. Bare feet in deep grass. No thoughts, no inward dialogue. Resonant peace flowing within, mirroring the landscape without. Midwestern winds rippled along tassels of marsh grass much like dancing water in a steady mountain stream, and the slow river sat, shining, placid. Bold Michigan winds poured through a willow tree opposite the marsh, not caring how or why the wind moved it, but bravely being and holding my affectionate gaze. Felt my body changing. Reawakening now that I was back among the living, the breathing, the being. . .

Not as stark as this, but there is these two existences, distinguishable always. As I re-connect with Nature, where I put my feet on raw earth, a kind of spiritual resonance begins to sing again -- as it always has with each return to what is good and sensible -- A genetic agreement with the experiences of ancestors, long passed, though alive still. These two beings: The life of recent man, and the life which bears the essence of ancient, or older, man. One carries an inconspicuous dissonance, the other a warm resonance, familiar and edifying. True, we often find ourselves in the life that is carved out for us, but sometimes fail to recognize the identity given us of our fore-bears. Be still, and find it instantly. Or, coming back (returning home) from an anesthetized and fallow reality, patience and persistence in wildness will bring it back ever-so-steadily, much as Buck in London's tale experienced. Harking back to older ways of living, thinking, exercising and eating bring us back to the vitality and hardiness that our ancestors enjoyed, even those a few generations back. I myself have Eastern European ancestors that were living a subsistence agrarian lifestyle as late as 1880, so the reflection in the pool is undisturbed, clear, not as muddied by the times of the Industrial Age as many of my peers. I have not forgotten the tricks and feelings they understood. Through a mindful state, it has been relatively easy for me to "remember back" and allow "domesticated generations," with their overemphasis on ease and capital, and an unfortunate disjointed-ness to fall away. Those who would teach us our culture and "our place," may help us become who we will be, but can never take into account who we once were. Thus cultural training -- or conditioning -- must always be viewed with cautious discernment, favoring our temporal (ancestors) and spiritual (The Great Spirit, the Creator) heritage as a moral point of departure and foundation: A wild inheritance. As I reconnect with the earth, plunging into soil, I feel my hands are their hands. Feeling the beauty of nature unimproved, my heart, their heart. My eyes, their eyes. I see what they saw: A thousand gifts, all pointing to God, from whom all flow: sight, smell, fruit, flower, animal, vegetable, earth, river, sky. 

Temperance

You are as a tiny flower in desert autumn
Late blooms in the warm coolness, beautiful and so perfect,
Formed by God -- petal and pistil
Yet. . . I cannot quite pluck it up and keep as my own
It gives inspiration, a tie to God, and I return it the gift
Of breath, gratitude.

Wasatch Valley, Utah

A Passion

"To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to come closer together, to find each other, and to feel: That is the purpose of life" - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

If there's one thing I would have to stick to my guns on, if all else was taken from me spiritually, would be that God is totally aware of me and cares deeply for me, and also this: 

Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

For on this hangs the faith of all men. We must want. Not in the way an animal wants, wandering to and fro seeking the next source of sustenance, driven by the will to survive. No, we must desire with great intensity things that give life and light, uplifted by the will to live. Is it remarkable that the mere mental processes of desiring beauty, of visual grandeur and of calm simplicity, feeds us in and of itself? It is something that has haunted mankind as a whole since creation, a seed that we carry with us all, a constant companion. We call it passion! Once it begins to sprout, we must either grow with it, or it overtakes us, for its potential is that of a mighty tree. Some men have never been happy with merely dreaming. Some women have never been content with merely serving. I believe that the more we allow passion to take root in our spiritual soil, and bravely scale its mighty branches, the higher heights we can attain. Sometimes I feel it over-taking me. It makes madmen of all who embrace its awful design. You will forever be "unreasonable," "freaskish," "obsessed," and "a dreamer". It is never done with you, only you can be done with it. I am so grateful that as a  tender boy of eighteen years, I took to the road and wandered its strange path. Though it was a short three weeks, it in a way led to a renunciation of the world, such that I will never again take the easy way, the comfortable life. I have no choice now but to follow my passions. The seed of mad wonder has already taken root in me. I must either entwine my soul to it or be destroyed by it. No matter that others may not understand or see me as dangerous. We are all the captains of our own ship, possessed with our view of the sky, as only a natural result of where God has put us. Excepting the north star (for those of appropriate hemisphere), of course others shall insist on different passage, for the position of the stars in their sky differ from those of your own!! The sky read marvelous and terrible things for a man named Prince Siddhartha. A prophecy given of him, early in his childhood, declared that he would either become king, or would become a spiritual leader. He would witness 4 signs of suffering in this world: An old man, a sick man, a dead man, and an ascetic. For so much of his life, clouds were covered over his sterile and comfortable existence. His father-king had done everything he could to make his life excellent and free from suffering, even the witnessing of suffering, so much so that when Siddhartha, at the age of twenty-nine, saw an old man, decreped man, he was overcome with grief and shock. He had never seen genuine pain before. Once the glorious stars, Avalokitsevara's ten-wondered universe of dark and diamonds, came to his view through the clouds, burning in his eyes, a grand passion grabbed his bosom, and carried him far away, to a new life -- a condescension to the sufferings and pains of man. Through his new life as a self-deprived vagrant, he eventually became enlightened. He is now known as the Buddha (there were many before him, and many after him, but to his people, none were greater). His suffering during his spiritual journey brought him to a way to be freed from and rise above it. I will talk more on that later. But the following is a letter I sent a dear friend:

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading today, and things have been so peaceful. I think of John Muir, Vincent Van Gogh, Neal Cassidy, or Everett Reuss, about how they had SO MUCH PASSION and many stories of how it consumed them. I feel a strong kinship with their madness. Everett Reuss gave 3 years of his life to the painted desert -- experiencing places such as Monument Valley, Shiprock, Zion National Park, and hole-in-the-rock, and associating with the Utes and Navajos -- and finally, the desert took him at the tender age of twenty. Reading his letters . . . about what he lived make my soul and body burn, like my passion for life is too big and I don't know what to do with all of it, and it hurts a little, like being love-sick. It's very hard to describe accurately.

I thought about that morning that was mine, passing swamps and fields in the early light. 'Twas a business trip. At one point, we crossed a vein of swamp water that fed the estuaries further inland, and trees marked where the river-bend and fields of wild growth, teeming in the fresh morning sun, merged together. It called to me, and there were times when we passed fields to the right, grasses exploding in light as if covered in a tender dusting of morning frost. What I felt as the light danced between trees that raced along my eyes led me to wonder, "do the other people in this car feel what I'm feeling?! Does it make them marvel, does it fill their body with vision, does it set a tingle to their spine and an ember to their hearts???"
The sun setting fields in white majesty, glorying God and singing purest hymns (for who can find a more complete song than grain heads caressing one another in the wind?), the swamp trees decked in moss so richly, wisely, twisting their way up to heaven, caught in yellow morning light. I see so much beauty and kindness and joy and sadness that at times it is too much to bear and I must temper my feelings as to not be overwhelmed or to not unsettle my fellows, unable to truly share with them how it affects me so (Everett Reuss said that, above all, this was his greatest torture. His isolation in his love-affair with this grand world was more acute than mine). . . And so, I want to shout, but must whisper most times, or keep quiet, it smoldering inside all the while.
I now turn to an experience I had during a trip to upstate SC. I caught a ride with a woman and her friend. Their lives bore no resemblance to the comfortable ones of their peers. The one I had originally contacted, Suzie, holds a Masters in Sustainable Communities, has traveled far over this small planet, and has compassion for all living things. Suzie is a self-titled misanthrope. She finds it hard to believe in humanity. For her too, life seems too much to take in at times. She bemoaned her HSP and how it makes it self-imposed isolation and acute suffering all-too-easy. I told her that she is able to experience life on a deeper level than most. That great suffering brings great love. It makes one more human, I said! "Think of the great people of history, who lived such lives of pain and sorrow. Look at how much love they had. Look how much they changed their world forever! Think even of Jesus Christ. It is said that he suffered the pains of all men and women. His ability to feel was so great. He was the most human human to ever walk this world"
Pleasure and pain, love and grief are so divinely designed, so intimately intertwined. Each are force-pairs. We must not be afraid to feel, lest we forfeit the purpose of life.