If you want to know where you’re
headed, it helps to know where you came from.
It was strange adjusting to the country, not being able to see our neighbors and so on, but by the time I was ready to go to college, I definitely felt more like a country boy than a suburbanite. Any time I think of home, I feel very lucky.
When I became a young adult I moved to central New York to go to college. Then I moved to New York City to do my best to be a human who got the most out of life, however unconventional my methods and pathways with stories might seem. Usually, in my experience, the best treasures and lessons in life are often uncovered in the strangest ways with the best stories. The more unique, creative and imaginative, the better for everybody. Love. Love? Love... Love! You have to feel, express, breathe, share, and receive, and if love does find its way to you, you will be prepared to believe.
When I had arrived in the self-proclaimed capital of the world, I was a young twenty something, fresh out of school, learning to play the fool in the real world with more mysterious rules. Even when I started in the city, my favorite joys were exploring the world around me, listening to music, reading books, taking photographs, making notes when ideas and observations came to mind, and then occasionally exercising my creativity by writing about whatever stirred those mysterious synapses inside of me. I continued all three hobbies through my three years in the city, but by the time I was thinking about going on a journey, I had been feeding on wisdom, knowledge, imagination and creativity with an intensity that had never previously been thought possible by me.
Education had taught me that other smart people had learned that the benefits of human kind came from expressing one's mind. Whether, artistic, material or intellectual, the greatest steps in all of life serve experience through communication of a vibration in the universal imagination. That’s the way of creation. Everything’s tuned in through its own station. And those communications increase and speed up peace by allowing release of fearful mind disease, because the more you know the more your courage grows and you accept the overall flow of the reality show.
We began as one life, but somewhere in there we got adventurous and started exploring. The visible world wide web was still a few hundreds of thousands of years away. So we became separated by physical boundaries in the landscape: oceans, mountains, deserts, forests, jungles, seas and rivers. Our history is the story of overcoming those experiential barriers and evolving the potential of universal experience through sharing our expressions of inner truth. It all starts with movement carrying awareness to higher experiences of quality. Its arbiters are heroes, which are humans who wake up and move their bodies and minds through time to explore and apply the imagination of the divine. These heroes are anyone at any time in their lives who are fortunate enough to seize the opportunity life provides to explore its unknown mysteries, though they extend to infinity. See what you see, be what you’ll be, for being free is up to thee.
One key to my journey toward feeling free was to go to the New York Public Library and read everything I could read. Soon after I successfully completed university, I started realizing that my brain was a beautiful key to the mystery, and was here for much more than earning me some numeric test score intended to give some ever fleeting temporary form of happy. I’d been given the gift of understanding, and seeing connections that many others did not see. Comparisons of human existence are unnecessary and impossible. I was, am and will be the same as everybody. I do what I do to feel alive and make do. I have always been humbled by the sheer vastness of intelligence beyond my existence and comprehension exemplified by other humans throughout all time, coming from the beauty of a universal mind that couldn’t possibly be only mine. But whatever was in anyone else was also in me, and I was learning to let it shine. So I read books. I read the stories of life. I absorbed imagination and knowledge. I filtered whatever I learned through the lens of my reality, to find relevance in my day to day experience. I coupled that with an intense obsession with the elegant experience of eclectic music, and soon the synchronicity started to show itself in full force. Everything was adding up, but I didn’t know as to what. One thing I knew was true after three years referring to NYC as “here” was that I had to face some fear and go places that were far from near.
The best group of papered trees to inspire me was a book that taught me about the human tradition of the “hero journey,” Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss. I trusted this man with my soul’s imagination and experiential guidance because he had the reputation among humans as the most knowledgeable and wise in the stories of mankind. That is to say, he knew his way around humanity’s mythology, its explanations for how to live great lives through metaphors and poetry in ways that bring us the bliss of being personally. He knew it all, from Hindus to Mayans to the Middle East to Woodstock to Star Wars. Amongst all those ideas, he said that the most common story is the hero journey: leaving the known for the unknown, either because you’re uncomfortable where you are and want to escape, or because you feel a call to adventure in some foreign world, a place beyond your familiar sphere of experience. He told me everything to expect, from the tests, to the realizations, to what to do afterward when the journey is over and you return to the world you knew before, which will obviously be different from how you remember it. You face challenges, read the signs, accept aid from magic helpers, experience low moments right before transformative treasures, and bring those treasures back to society for the greater fun of everyone.
Even so, you have to do more than just go. You have to find a way to express this unknown which has become familiar to you through your unique adventure and convince society that it needs this new truth you have learned, because it doesn’t know that it needs what you have to give. Don’t worry. This is the story of all advancement. As much as you might fear the status quo or the decline of human intelligence, there are hearts feeding love to millions and millions of hearts, and they get turned on by innovation, imagination, and, when given the chance to dance, some romance.
The adventure I’m in took me to New York City for three years. That in itself was the story of a journey, but after a while I started to realize that New York City, for all it’s worth, is inherently not like the rest of the world because it is only one place. It may be a mix of everything into tall buildings, but it is still one city in one country. I decided that if I wanted to have the best life I could, I’d have to love life somewhere beyond that specific city.
At the beginning of 2009, the ultimate year of my generation’s decade, I became inspired to find a deeper, more diverse and challenging experience of the world than I had previously dared to pursue. I wanted to connect to the world in a better way, and use the life given to me in the best possible way, every day. Until then, I had been a pretty privileged middle class American with a few of those favored perks that come from life being good to you amidst all the challenges of surviving and thriving, because that’s what life needs people to do.
What’s next?
I don’t know, but by looking at where I’ve been, I might get a good idea that wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t tried to apply my imagination to this real creation tuning in through my particular personal universal station. The less I try to pin down the future, the more I open myself up to experiences where I will be forced to raise my quality as a human being. I learn how to adapt and improvise using my mental, emotional and intuitive powers growing inside to figure out the most excellent path through this ride, rolling around this map of life that’s everywhere around us and inside us. Wherever and whatever you go through, I hope great things happen for you.
Great. It’s agreed. We’re going to have a joyful, creative, and wondrous adventure filled with physical pleasure, mental treasure and mysterious awe beyond measure. There will be challenges to give you the joy of living life through feats which make your heart beat and your blood flow to your head with your feet so you can grow with life. Ain’t that sweet? The world’s love is always and never and everywhere complete. And there will be both physical and mental pain to make you appear to go just enough insane until you see the gain and move to a higher quality “sane.” Appreciate your soul/brain, or whichever word makes you happy, and explore yourself, this world, more deeply.
I see songs, poetry, and landscapes of beauty to free the love inside of me...
Therefore, if you want to know where
I’m taking you, you should probably know where I’ve been.
The journey I see stretched out before me began on an island at the edge of an enormous ocean of water. They named it Long Island. People tell me I was born in a place named Smithtown. I believe them. They showed me the piece of paper that says so. “Smith” is the most common name in America. It’s not my name, but it showed me that there were already plenty of other people like me who already desired and perhaps even received the treasures of life whose existence I had yet to even believe. Although my ancestors had been on this land for several hundred years by the time I came around, and the experiences of forests, farmland, meadows and marshes supposedly swam in the arteries of my family’s tree, most of the terrain had been conquered by strip malls and chain restaurants long before I joined the scene.
Everywhere around there is a land called the “suburbs.” In other words, I began the journey in a land of reasonably enjoyable and comfortable existence, the style of which has spread around the country and the world, and has been an enormous part of the one poem since the world almost ended itself about seventy years back. Luckily the world didn’t end itself, and now people live in many types of places. One of them is for people who want to live close to each other and everything that everyone else has access to, but maybe with a little space to grow your own grass, allow a tree and we to breathe, and sit in your own space without anything affecting your enjoyment of the best world you know.
The journey I see stretched out before me began on an island at the edge of an enormous ocean of water. They named it Long Island. People tell me I was born in a place named Smithtown. I believe them. They showed me the piece of paper that says so. “Smith” is the most common name in America. It’s not my name, but it showed me that there were already plenty of other people like me who already desired and perhaps even received the treasures of life whose existence I had yet to even believe. Although my ancestors had been on this land for several hundred years by the time I came around, and the experiences of forests, farmland, meadows and marshes supposedly swam in the arteries of my family’s tree, most of the terrain had been conquered by strip malls and chain restaurants long before I joined the scene.
Everywhere around there is a land called the “suburbs.” In other words, I began the journey in a land of reasonably enjoyable and comfortable existence, the style of which has spread around the country and the world, and has been an enormous part of the one poem since the world almost ended itself about seventy years back. Luckily the world didn’t end itself, and now people live in many types of places. One of them is for people who want to live close to each other and everything that everyone else has access to, but maybe with a little space to grow your own grass, allow a tree and we to breathe, and sit in your own space without anything affecting your enjoyment of the best world you know.
The
father of my father, that is, one of my two grandfather's, helped build the
first suburbs, named Levittown. After
World War II people were feeling good and decided to spend their time making
babies, but then they realized they had to raise these babies in a new society,
so they started building homes and highways so people could still be connected
with mass gatherings of humans (for better or worse) called cities without
actually living in them. Everyone could
have their own little space and be safe, without pollution and crime and
unknown neighbors. After all, the world
had almost ended, and most of humanity had a place to be with their
family. Even sweeter, you could enjoy
the gifts of a green lawn, still plenty of celestial sea spread as bright stars
in the sky of your suburb, the mix between city and country, the homes of
humanity. And all the comforting conveniences of cutting edge
technology. Electric refrigerators to
keep your food safe so you can keep living and tasting deliciousness, TV’s so
you can see the imagination and action of much of humanity, in an easy chair
where you can lounge and enjoy performances from all your favorite movie,
sports and TV celebrities, dishwashers to keep your eating places clean, and
affordable racing places to be that can move you wherever you want to see the
variety of ways to be in homes of the brave and lands of the free, with
courage, poetry, mystery and artistry.
American hero, poet and fellow native Long Islander Walt Whitman, the man who sang about the open road, probably wasn’t talking about going on a mystic promenade to the mall such as the one they named after him near his hometown, although mall is defined as a space made available for a public promenade. I’m sure if the most famous poet in American history were forced to go, he would have made the best of it, tuned into the unseen he knew was there, and recognized our shopping adventure as the “journey work of the stars.” Especially if we were there to buy his book. After all, it’s all one poem, and poetry's just one nutrient. We've gotta eat. And there are still little leaves of grass on the tiny lawns occupying the small strips separating asphalt parking spaces while we walk through affordable gateways to more places to see.
Ah, the magical poetry of suburban Long Island. I can see the rest of the world rolling its eyes, but when I look at this life as a prize, I actually feel blessed to be from there, even though I’m still glad I got out of there. Relatively speaking, I’m from the very average suburbs. As I said, one of my grandfather’s grew up there, and he helped build the first suburbs. Both he and my other grandfather (from way upstate near Canada) fought that big war that almost ended all life everywhere on the magic flying ball. Then he came home and tried to make a good life for his family while enjoying his life, helping people and having the occasional adventure in nature or on the job. Between that and the war, he saw a lot of gruesome sights. But he raised his children well. Speaking of which, my father didn’t fight in any wars, thankfully. But he did get out on many adventures in the wild, including working up near the North Pole around the time I was born. He’s definitely been through his rites of passage as an adult. I’m not interested in any violent wars either, so I’m making my own rite of passage. I think that’s what this is supposed to be. I don’t know exactly where it goes or what it will entail, but that’s what it is. There’s an enormous real world out there with a lot going on, and you can’t control or change all of it, and you don’t have to control or change any of it. But you can learn something about what’s inside of you by embracing what’s new. Then, if you show it, the universe will help you grow it.
Speaking of growing, after eleven years of growing up in normal average America, my family moved to upstate New York. We moved to the true country side, north of the New York State capital of Albany, where my dad had just been assigned to work. We lived in Washington County, named after the man on the most circulated piece of art and paper in the world. He was the first president of our country, and the leader of the rebel forces in the fight for independence against our parents, my ancestors, the tea-loving peoples of the magical musical language island of England. Our new home was right next to Vermont and not far from Massachusetts, both of which are in New England. My country is a young country, but if you want a few hundred years, the wise ways of the Iroquois, and the beginning of European American history, look into the Northeast. People had been giving thanks for food and friendship for centuries in that extreme country with every season experienced to its utmost degree.
American hero, poet and fellow native Long Islander Walt Whitman, the man who sang about the open road, probably wasn’t talking about going on a mystic promenade to the mall such as the one they named after him near his hometown, although mall is defined as a space made available for a public promenade. I’m sure if the most famous poet in American history were forced to go, he would have made the best of it, tuned into the unseen he knew was there, and recognized our shopping adventure as the “journey work of the stars.” Especially if we were there to buy his book. After all, it’s all one poem, and poetry's just one nutrient. We've gotta eat. And there are still little leaves of grass on the tiny lawns occupying the small strips separating asphalt parking spaces while we walk through affordable gateways to more places to see.
Ah, the magical poetry of suburban Long Island. I can see the rest of the world rolling its eyes, but when I look at this life as a prize, I actually feel blessed to be from there, even though I’m still glad I got out of there. Relatively speaking, I’m from the very average suburbs. As I said, one of my grandfather’s grew up there, and he helped build the first suburbs. Both he and my other grandfather (from way upstate near Canada) fought that big war that almost ended all life everywhere on the magic flying ball. Then he came home and tried to make a good life for his family while enjoying his life, helping people and having the occasional adventure in nature or on the job. Between that and the war, he saw a lot of gruesome sights. But he raised his children well. Speaking of which, my father didn’t fight in any wars, thankfully. But he did get out on many adventures in the wild, including working up near the North Pole around the time I was born. He’s definitely been through his rites of passage as an adult. I’m not interested in any violent wars either, so I’m making my own rite of passage. I think that’s what this is supposed to be. I don’t know exactly where it goes or what it will entail, but that’s what it is. There’s an enormous real world out there with a lot going on, and you can’t control or change all of it, and you don’t have to control or change any of it. But you can learn something about what’s inside of you by embracing what’s new. Then, if you show it, the universe will help you grow it.
Speaking of growing, after eleven years of growing up in normal average America, my family moved to upstate New York. We moved to the true country side, north of the New York State capital of Albany, where my dad had just been assigned to work. We lived in Washington County, named after the man on the most circulated piece of art and paper in the world. He was the first president of our country, and the leader of the rebel forces in the fight for independence against our parents, my ancestors, the tea-loving peoples of the magical musical language island of England. Our new home was right next to Vermont and not far from Massachusetts, both of which are in New England. My country is a young country, but if you want a few hundred years, the wise ways of the Iroquois, and the beginning of European American history, look into the Northeast. People had been giving thanks for food and friendship for centuries in that extreme country with every season experienced to its utmost degree.
It was strange adjusting to the country, not being able to see our neighbors and so on, but by the time I was ready to go to college, I definitely felt more like a country boy than a suburbanite. Any time I think of home, I feel very lucky.
When I became a young adult I moved to central New York to go to college. Then I moved to New York City to do my best to be a human who got the most out of life, however unconventional my methods and pathways with stories might seem. Usually, in my experience, the best treasures and lessons in life are often uncovered in the strangest ways with the best stories. The more unique, creative and imaginative, the better for everybody. Love. Love? Love... Love! You have to feel, express, breathe, share, and receive, and if love does find its way to you, you will be prepared to believe.
When I had arrived in the self-proclaimed capital of the world, I was a young twenty something, fresh out of school, learning to play the fool in the real world with more mysterious rules. Even when I started in the city, my favorite joys were exploring the world around me, listening to music, reading books, taking photographs, making notes when ideas and observations came to mind, and then occasionally exercising my creativity by writing about whatever stirred those mysterious synapses inside of me. I continued all three hobbies through my three years in the city, but by the time I was thinking about going on a journey, I had been feeding on wisdom, knowledge, imagination and creativity with an intensity that had never previously been thought possible by me.
Education had taught me that other smart people had learned that the benefits of human kind came from expressing one's mind. Whether, artistic, material or intellectual, the greatest steps in all of life serve experience through communication of a vibration in the universal imagination. That’s the way of creation. Everything’s tuned in through its own station. And those communications increase and speed up peace by allowing release of fearful mind disease, because the more you know the more your courage grows and you accept the overall flow of the reality show.
We began as one life, but somewhere in there we got adventurous and started exploring. The visible world wide web was still a few hundreds of thousands of years away. So we became separated by physical boundaries in the landscape: oceans, mountains, deserts, forests, jungles, seas and rivers. Our history is the story of overcoming those experiential barriers and evolving the potential of universal experience through sharing our expressions of inner truth. It all starts with movement carrying awareness to higher experiences of quality. Its arbiters are heroes, which are humans who wake up and move their bodies and minds through time to explore and apply the imagination of the divine. These heroes are anyone at any time in their lives who are fortunate enough to seize the opportunity life provides to explore its unknown mysteries, though they extend to infinity. See what you see, be what you’ll be, for being free is up to thee.
One key to my journey toward feeling free was to go to the New York Public Library and read everything I could read. Soon after I successfully completed university, I started realizing that my brain was a beautiful key to the mystery, and was here for much more than earning me some numeric test score intended to give some ever fleeting temporary form of happy. I’d been given the gift of understanding, and seeing connections that many others did not see. Comparisons of human existence are unnecessary and impossible. I was, am and will be the same as everybody. I do what I do to feel alive and make do. I have always been humbled by the sheer vastness of intelligence beyond my existence and comprehension exemplified by other humans throughout all time, coming from the beauty of a universal mind that couldn’t possibly be only mine. But whatever was in anyone else was also in me, and I was learning to let it shine. So I read books. I read the stories of life. I absorbed imagination and knowledge. I filtered whatever I learned through the lens of my reality, to find relevance in my day to day experience. I coupled that with an intense obsession with the elegant experience of eclectic music, and soon the synchronicity started to show itself in full force. Everything was adding up, but I didn’t know as to what. One thing I knew was true after three years referring to NYC as “here” was that I had to face some fear and go places that were far from near.
The best group of papered trees to inspire me was a book that taught me about the human tradition of the “hero journey,” Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss. I trusted this man with my soul’s imagination and experiential guidance because he had the reputation among humans as the most knowledgeable and wise in the stories of mankind. That is to say, he knew his way around humanity’s mythology, its explanations for how to live great lives through metaphors and poetry in ways that bring us the bliss of being personally. He knew it all, from Hindus to Mayans to the Middle East to Woodstock to Star Wars. Amongst all those ideas, he said that the most common story is the hero journey: leaving the known for the unknown, either because you’re uncomfortable where you are and want to escape, or because you feel a call to adventure in some foreign world, a place beyond your familiar sphere of experience. He told me everything to expect, from the tests, to the realizations, to what to do afterward when the journey is over and you return to the world you knew before, which will obviously be different from how you remember it. You face challenges, read the signs, accept aid from magic helpers, experience low moments right before transformative treasures, and bring those treasures back to society for the greater fun of everyone.
Even so, you have to do more than just go. You have to find a way to express this unknown which has become familiar to you through your unique adventure and convince society that it needs this new truth you have learned, because it doesn’t know that it needs what you have to give. Don’t worry. This is the story of all advancement. As much as you might fear the status quo or the decline of human intelligence, there are hearts feeding love to millions and millions of hearts, and they get turned on by innovation, imagination, and, when given the chance to dance, some romance.
The adventure I’m in took me to New York City for three years. That in itself was the story of a journey, but after a while I started to realize that New York City, for all it’s worth, is inherently not like the rest of the world because it is only one place. It may be a mix of everything into tall buildings, but it is still one city in one country. I decided that if I wanted to have the best life I could, I’d have to love life somewhere beyond that specific city.
At the beginning of 2009, the ultimate year of my generation’s decade, I became inspired to find a deeper, more diverse and challenging experience of the world than I had previously dared to pursue. I wanted to connect to the world in a better way, and use the life given to me in the best possible way, every day. Until then, I had been a pretty privileged middle class American with a few of those favored perks that come from life being good to you amidst all the challenges of surviving and thriving, because that’s what life needs people to do.
What’s next?
I don’t know, but by looking at where I’ve been, I might get a good idea that wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t tried to apply my imagination to this real creation tuning in through my particular personal universal station. The less I try to pin down the future, the more I open myself up to experiences where I will be forced to raise my quality as a human being. I learn how to adapt and improvise using my mental, emotional and intuitive powers growing inside to figure out the most excellent path through this ride, rolling around this map of life that’s everywhere around us and inside us. Wherever and whatever you go through, I hope great things happen for you.
Great. It’s agreed. We’re going to have a joyful, creative, and wondrous adventure filled with physical pleasure, mental treasure and mysterious awe beyond measure. There will be challenges to give you the joy of living life through feats which make your heart beat and your blood flow to your head with your feet so you can grow with life. Ain’t that sweet? The world’s love is always and never and everywhere complete. And there will be both physical and mental pain to make you appear to go just enough insane until you see the gain and move to a higher quality “sane.” Appreciate your soul/brain, or whichever word makes you happy, and explore yourself, this world, more deeply.
I see songs, poetry, and landscapes of beauty to free the love inside of me...
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