Prelude From The Future
I had a choice to make: be the editor who cultivates the careers of the writers who find peace and come back every once in awhile from distant mountains, or be that writer who finds peace and comes back every once in a while from some distant mountain. For me it was clear from the beginning, and everything else has been fundamental in helping to build the foundation.
This is the house I have my earliest memories from, where I learned how to walk, talk, and begin reading:
It is 908 Alahaki Street in Kailua, Hawaii on the island of Oahu.
When you walk out of the house and make a right this is the view, and it is my earliest memory:
The only other memory I have that goes back as far is the one I have of the Pacific Ocean, and it is that fact gives context to this photo:
I think you actually see it now: on a molecular level, I really do perceive everything happening around me differently. It is why I followed my instincts and my palate to India. It is why I was able to listen for and know the sound the mountains make in Nepal:
The reason for all the work that I do — the story it is I am living that is my life— is to be a demonstration of the very real fact that we can do something else. We are so much more than they would have us believe, and the process of writing for me is to record/document my truth. Since way before I knew how to read or write, that has been my directive. The “something else” is literally everywhere. What I choose to focus more on now is the fact that we are seeing each other…and we are taking steps toward a better way. I am not living in this world thinking that it is going to be every single body. All I can do is what I need to so that I may get where it is that I am going. Simply. The farther along I go folks start realizing maybe instead of fighting it is more worth it to protect each other. And, just like that, we are on the same side. Things do become more peaceful after a while and that is the new normal. Maybe not everywhere, but definitely inside our own heads…and isn’t that really the point?
In order for me to get back from the rock bottom I hit that was just straight-up supposed to kill me, a whole bunch of folks in their their own respective narratives needed to also be handling their business. In hindsight I realize I did not keep going up the corporate ladder because doing so would have meant I was moving further and further away from my own personal truth. Being lodged behind chrome and glass would have killed me or, at the very least, turned me into a zombie. Other folks made their way in those halls because that was their directive, their truth, and their direction…because there have to be people there who receive the work of those who find peace and who come back every once in a while from distant mountain tops to share in the wealth that comes from our descriptions of life in the perennial world.
This work that we are doing is ushering in something new. In the most basic of ways I have never lost sight of it. And it is time that other folks around me, who are most definitely a part of who we all are, start believing in themselves and knowing full well who they are now, too.
We are here. We are everywhere. And the way that those of us who have been out in the world forever welcome us who are newly awakening is, in a word, something. Quietly. Over time. The beautiful, mysterious, and revelatory relationship of our people to this planet. I am talking about experience that cannot be imprisoned or enslaved or medicated away.
People make all kinds of presumptions about us — who we must be, who we are, and where we couldn’t possibly be from…according to them. But there is a thing or two about the world of knowledge that you feel when your mind becomes completely free. We affect change by living differently. Everything shifts. I take seriously all that was required to get me to this point because, objectively, it is not happening in a vacuum.
Change happens slowly and then one day you look around and nothing is the same. Which has got to be a good thing because too much has happened.
The stories from us are what they are because we have not fallen into the trap of taking hundreds of selfies with no meaning to litter the internet with. We do our best to always do more with less so that when the time comes we can be skilled at doing way less with so much more. There is something about seeing the mountains and the desert, unobstructed and without the borders of a frame, that completely changes you. And the hardest thing in the world to do is come back to “civilization.” But…the most profound message in all of this is that we are all connected. We have and are experiencing a unique opportunity to be a demonstration of just how special that can be.
