X Marks the Spot

What I don't know must be shown.

For strength, I am humble
Impressed upon me by a knowing
A certainty of direction
I must follow the inside track

Where the air is condensed
By force of movement
The fever begins

Silent of hunger
Yet devouring inside
The moment lingers eternally

Master now of wind and flame
Dead wood screams as it crackles
In the light of dying embers
A reflection is born

A manifest of destiny
Untainted by fate
The truth of an illusion
Creating still space in time

We reflect upon it’s meaning

Encouraged to look beyond the plain
To the place inside the picture
The heart beats
Certain of connection

Creation
Always creating
It is like a burning

{Photograph of the White Mountains off Hwy 395 in California. A snow covered peak is illuminated by the last rays of soft, orange light at sunset.}

On the road…

Flashback - 2004

It’s the running that kept me silent. All the dark places and reasons for things I wish I didn’t know. There exists a need to dominate, the fear of uncertainty like the necessity of a challenge. There creates the need to forget. I have been good at that until now. Narrow goals along lonesome highways propagated across my time. Convinced of needing more, I fought against my forgetting. A battle gaining strength in conflict. And for some reason, today I spoke and so stopped running.

It is so tempting to look back; to see what I’ve written; a short history of the mind and heart. Another human caught in the struggle for clarity. A clouded vision. Does it ever clear for more than an instant?

I had to move out of the city. The constant smells left me tired and frenzied; too many thoughts in one crowded place. Stories upon stories, living and dying, never breathing. Never really breathing. Today my story begins. The past is in ashes. I burned it purposefully without knowing the reason. Now I understand. The horror of myself being too much to bear. A suicide of the mind. Perhaps the body can recreate something purer, saner in its place, perhaps not.

I left the city though it has not left me. I cannot connect to the nature I once loved. My mind is filled with human creation. Culture, ideas, construction, de-construction. I feel driven to be human. To create in reflection of my era’s existence the truth of this reality that fades so quickly; the explosion in the moment of societal drama. An excursion into the heart of the buzz to extract the lifeblood or a semblance of such. The grit and grim of the moment to moment. Such heights must be vaster and more perfectly complex than the most ferocious designer drug. Would the crash be symptomatically unkind? I must be a guest for balance in the unknown.

There is a slow dawning upon the imagination, as the understood life is stripped away, that all creation is a symptom of madness. There is no truth to be remembered, only ideas that make sense. Drifting as we will, the process forever the destination, I am reminded of myself. Aware of the self I marathoned to forget, I am unsure. That is all. I am left with only questions. I think I read once that these are the answers, but what does that mean?

A man rolls a thousand miles in the name of peace and I had to get out of the city because the smells were all wrong and the mind state too manic. Looking for work was an exercise in creating personas. The most deftly executed the winner of the daily grind. All come with captivating stories to share over coffee. The best of the best can out shout an entire room of studious actors and well meaning writers. Well, maybe not so well meaning. Next season we may be so privileged to see episodes of a future land where fat is in and thin is out; won’t that be exciting.

So, now it is done. I have spoken and might now find real sleep; a sleep that revives the soul and feeds the spirit. One lacking in static dreams and confounding voices. No thoughts demanding attention, endlessly droning, meaning nothing, saying nothing that I understand. I have tired of running. My legs are sore and my will confused. Purpose unknown, night has arrived to relieve me for a spell, at the very least.

{Photograph of our Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia that we traveled in. Black and white image of a camper van with the tent top popped open, nestled in the trees in a rainy forest in Washington State near the Pacific Coast.}

Choices

Which way to turn
To the left, to the right
Straight ahead
Or burn

All these pathways
Lead the same
Fortune lost
A tortured fame

One thousand callings
To forsake this hill
These choices find me
Standing still

I made a choice that year, in 2004.

A decision which has come to define everything since. I was working as a photographer and living in Hollywood. I was also performing solo and in another band. Things were going fairly well in many ways, but for reasons I won’t go into, we decided to sell nearly all our possessions and leave LA, and we did.

A month or so later, we decided to buy a van and travel. I said, “If I am to be a photographer, as this is what is happening, then I need to really be one. I need to do some serious work. Find out who I am.”

I had not intended to work as a photographer or to make it my art. It just happened. And kept happening. So I decided to commit.

And so, we bought the van and went on the road. We were also looking. Looking for someplace to live. Looking for who we could be or might become. Looking for America. We looked and looked and looked. And then, we came back home to Ojai and began again.

Nine Years

That is how long we had been married in the fall of two thousand and four. Much longer already than anyone thought I am sure. I have always been inscrutable and so, it has been challenging to hold the line with so much doubt and opposition. But I have held, bloodied and perhaps a little compromised, but I held.

I wrote The Soldiers of Everyday and sang it to myself. And when we returned to Ojai, we parked the van at Daniel Ash’s house to visit our friend Christopher Columbus and I sang it to him. Three days later, he died. And then I sang it at his memorial.

Daniel Ash founded the band Bauhaus and is a rather famous and infamous guitarist and singer/songwriter/producer who happened to move down the street from us in 2000.

And Daniel said later while we were all hanging at his house, wouldn’t it be good to record it. And I agreed it would. So we went to the studio and recorded it.

Many years later, it became this…

And then I crashed and burned.

But not entirely before releasing Life In Suspension by The Seraphim Rising. I was hanging by a thread, very rock n roll, but I went all in again and pulled it off.

It’s those things. The things you do. Not the infinite things you didn’t do or tried to do and failed, but the ones you actually do. Those become your life.

Your precious, precious life.

So take heart and have courage, for no matter how far we come or how much we do, the next step is forever new. Forever a risk and act of faith. As we endeavor to discover the unknown and create ever more into the magnificent sunset of our imagination.