Are you ready to walk with me?

Aug 23, 2022

5 min read

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.

There has been so much give and take between acceptance and resistance, moderation and excess, communication and silence, patience and urgency, self-devotion and self-destruction.

I have moved through sickness, poverty, scarcity, injury, worship of myself, rejection of myself, and almost every space that exists between those extremes.

Sometimes I can see the wholeness of it.

Sometimes I cannot.

And I am learning that my perception changes depending upon what I am consuming, what I am creating, how rested I am, what medicines or substances are influencing me, and what kind of environment I am living inside.

So I keep returning to two questions:

What am I consuming?

What am I creating?

My life has become an experiment in finding balance inside extremes.

I have seen myself in saints and sinners, in people overflowing with love and people overwhelmed by fear. I have experienced moments that felt ecstatic and moments that felt terrifying.

And somehow all of those angles continue returning me toward one center.

Life changes.

Sometimes the shift is graceful.

Sometimes it feels harsh, violating, confusing, or completely unacceptable.

Sometimes an experience shakes us to the core.

But occasionally that fracture becomes the exact place from which we rebuild our relationship with ourselves and with the world around us.

My spirituality has taught me to believe that prayer matters... not because prayer gives me control over reality, but because prayer changes the way I meet reality.

Faith becomes meaningful when it becomes embodied.

When truth is not simply spoken, but lived.

I have been far out there.

I have been broke.

I have been sick.

I have lost resources trying to survive.

I have trusted people and felt betrayed.

I have experienced situations in which helping someone seemed to cost me more than I knew how to afford.

I have lived through illness that frightened me deeply. At times, I tried to understand those experiences by connecting them to larger events happening in the world. Some of those connections may always remain questions rather than facts.

What I know for certain is that I was afraid.

I was trying to understand what was happening to my body.

And I was trying to survive.

My life has carried me through military service, trauma, medication, alcohol, exploitation, grief, fear, suicidal darkness, and moments when I felt spiritually resurrected.

I have walked beside saints and sinners.

I have sat with hustlers and people living with disabilities.

I have loved people who felt like angels and people who awakened my deepest shadows.

I have run with wolves and sheep.

I have looked toward the hawk and the serpent.

I have built entire worlds inside myself.

And I have watched some of them collapse.

I am that I am.

And you are who you are, said Mary.

The earth has remained one of my greatest teachers.

Plants, ceremony, breath, silence, music, friendship, food, water, movement, prayer... the simple things continually return me to myself.

For the last several days, I have chosen sobriety and have been attempting to create from the ground rather than constantly reaching toward the stars.

There is something different about beginning from the earth.

Something quieter.

Something less performative.

Something that asks me to stay.

Because sometimes everything feels too real to me.

Too interconnected.

Too immediate.

And I become exhausted trying to explain what I perceive to people who experience the world differently.

I do not need everyone to understand my cosmology in order for me to build a meaningful life.

I need safety.

Community.

Stability.

Food.

Shelter.

Creative work.

People I trust.

And enough quiet to hear myself clearly.

That is why housing matters so much to me right now.

I want a home that feels safe.

I have experienced that sense of safety with you before. We have also experienced conflict, distance, misunderstanding, and lessons that perhaps neither of us knew how to navigate at the time.

Maybe we needed distance before we could understand the value of what had existed between us.

I do not know what the world is going to become.

None of us does.

I feel tremendous change around me, but I do not want fear to become prophecy.

I do not want anxiety to become certainty.

And I do not want spirituality to convince me that other human beings are disposable.

If difficult times come, then what matters is that we remain grounded enough not to turn against one another.

Prepared enough to help.

Clear enough to recognize when someone needs food, sleep, medical care, emotional support, or simply another person sitting beside them.

Fear can become delirium.

Stress can become rage.

Isolation can distort our perception.

Exhaustion can make the world feel like an enemy.

That is why preparation, community, rest, discernment, and compassion matter.

Not because we are preparing to survive everyone else.

Because we are preparing to remain human with them.

I want to create something from that understanding.

Programs.

Events.

Products.

Spaces for people to reconnect.

Pathways toward wellness that do not depend upon terrifying people into transformation.

Fear rarely creates the kind of change I want to participate in.

Love might.

Belonging might.

Beauty might.

Music might.

Food might.

A safe room might.

A hand might.

The sentence “I am here” might.

I have spent portions of my life feeling watched, scrutinized, interpreted, and misunderstood. Whether those feelings came from actual experiences, past trauma, or moments when my nervous system was overwhelmed, I know how exhausting it is to feel as though privacy has disappeared.

So now I want to build differently.

Quietly where necessary.

Publicly where useful.

With discernment about what belongs to us and what belongs to the world.

I want to plan the events.

Create the programs.

Build the products.

Design the pathway.

And I want to do it without exploiting sacred information or turning fear into marketing.

If housing with someone we trust becomes possible, then we can explore the actual rules together... lease requirements, permitted absences, the landlord relationship, household contributions, and whatever is needed, so that whatever we build rests on something real and sustainable.

I still feel called to go into the world.

To write.

To perform.

To pray.

To create.

To become visible in certain moments as an expression of transformation.

But I also need somewhere to return.

A home.

A ground.

A place where the performance ends.

Where I do not have to save the world.

Where I can simply sleep.

What I am offering is not an apocalypse plan.

It is a life.

A home base.

A creative partnership.

A place from which we can build something that helps people remember their humanity.

Something devoted to wellness rather than fear.

To regeneration rather than destruction.

To love rather than flames.

So I return to the prayer:

I’m sorry.

Please forgive me.

Thank you.

I love you.

And then I ask you... not as a prophet, not as somebody claiming to know what happens next, but as one human being standing before another: