The promises we make ourselves… I go to a strange withdrawn and almost broody place when I’m around family or “parents,” and my goddess confronted me with it, so I’ve been sitting with that. I have no legitimate reason to dislike my parents or family, id est there was no significant abuse or substantial neglect, but I have completely let go of immediate relatives, which is my entire maternal family, to the point of a kind of “giving up” on them, but what exactly have I given up on, and why do I have such an aversion to the version of family that I grew up with?
I feel like the obvious answer could easily be interpreted as selfish, but it could also be interpreted as a demand of experiencing life and searching for purpose in this mundane place… this life, and what they told me life is… and what I want my life to be… the potential beauty of what life could be… not settling for someone else’s journey, in the circle of settling for journeys, because I want to have my own unique journey, experiencing this life to my fullest, which is easily not someone else’s fullest. I willingly accept all the fullness presented to me, as long as there is an openness to fuller, but it usually feels more like settling for something less than what it could be because someone else is fine with just this. I never wanted to just be here until I just die, wasting my experience accomplishing someone else’s goals and reading someone else’s story.
Part of the reason I hated my childhood was because it was a painfully mundane and good-enough existence. All I ever wanted was the potential excitement of an adventurous life. I wanted to experience everything, good and bad, and always felt reduced to a kind of generic life: we have to do this, just because; we can’t afford that; ad infinitum. This is obviously in relation to our current life on the road and stopping to spend time with family, which I love, but am also strangely shut down to, like it’s an obligation that I don’t necessarily want to do, but it must be done. There is more dynamic to it than just that, obviously, but that is the gist.
I’ve got this new family, my partner’s family, which I am learning, and I’ve got this old family, my paternal family, which I never really got to know but am learning, and those are new, exciting dynamics, but I am still confronted with not being my true adventurous self because they are doing their things and I am doing my best to exist in them. Everyone is free to exist how they choose, without judgement, and I am perfectly fine with that, but when I get to the top of the mountain I want to keep climbing, and I have often felt like everyone around me is asking me to come back down because they’re cold or tired or bored or we have somewhere to be. It is strange to write that down, or even feel that, because a lot of souls in my life see me as someone who is perfectly fine occupying a space and reading or writing, which they view as non-doing, but that is the space I took on to go on the adventures in my mind because my reality had been reduced for so long that I had relinquished control.
The internal adventure, sitting quietly in the corner and observing human behavior, became my escape as a child while my family was sitting around doing good-enough. The obvious secret to happiness is being perfectly ok with good enough, and I am, but I want my overall experience to be something different, fun and strange and weird with laughing and smiles and deep breaths in deep places and not worrying about silly things like the things that everyone has always worried about.
My childhood wasn’t all just sitting around in the mundane. We did go on some extensive road trips when I was a kid that could’ve been epic adventures, but my ego wanted to stop everywhere and explore. That was never really an option because I was a passenger on my parents’ journey, and we always had somewhere to be, my mom always had a complaint or fear, and my dad always had work to get back to. There isn’t much that is fun about that for an adventurous soul who wants to stop and feel everything, take everything in, now, capture everything and write about all the beauty that I feel everywhere.
My parents didn’t get me, at all, and I didn’t get why they tried to cram me into the existence that they decided was even remotely ideal, but I did what I was supposed to, and I kept doing it, though I always had a difficult time pretending like I was happy about it. I became known for my grumpy and broody attitude, but that was never who I was. Who I actually am was never seen or recognized past how other people decided I was supposed to be; what life was supposed to be.
I always celebrated things beyond the mundane that most were afraid of or guiltily avoided, because I just wanted to live my life and feel everything in a world that told me I didn’t. One of the hardest things about being a parent is encouraging your little souls to have their own journey, whether you decided you know better or not. My parents didn’t give me that, so I took it for myself, to an extreme, if only to show them that I will be perfectly fine, and I have much better stories to tell.
Tangent. Feeling and Flow; day to day. We are not who we were yesterday; we are not children, suffering our parents anymore, but here we are, still reminiscing about our childhood complaints and allowing them to unconsciously affect our current relationships. My partner tells me I just see the negative in everything, but I don’t to that basic extent; I just want to enjoy a life that everyone else on the planet isn't also enjoying, right now. What I’m currently reading is confronting the ego aspect of all the never being good enough, and I understand that completely, so I am also sitting with that and trying to wrap my head around it.
Maybe I’m just the mundane person and I haven’t really accepted that yet because I have spent my entire life demanding extraordinary and no one can live up to that, especially mundane me? The girls just want to dig in the dirt and go swimming, I want to move mountains and cross oceans. All I wanted was for my parents to show me that, and I can’t teach my girls what I’ve been waiting to learn, and at the end of the day they don’t care to learn because they’re on their own adventure of silly games and collecting rocks and sticks and bones and insects. Observing them and feeling completely ill-equipped to be the dad they need just makes me feel like there was always something wrong with me, all the way back to all my overwhelming childhood feelings and anguish, but I just try to be as present as possible and love everyone here, while dealing with all my swirling ego shit.
I am also fully aware why most of those who I could call friends disappeared on me, and why those who could potentially be friends are a bit scared off by my energy, but I also feel like I’ve spent most my life pulling my energy way back to try to fit in to all this stuff that they tell you is living. I have been having a pretty hard time trying to find a happy medium there, and that hard time has been going on for over a decade. This feels a little like an emotional unravelling, but that’s where I am… torn between knowing that everything is beautiful exactly how it’s supposed to be, and wanting to follow my heart and desire at every turnout and dirt road, feeling like I’m missing once in a lifetime opportunities in a temporal lifetime of infinite opportunities, waiting for one of them to find my nature.
Ego, though. I am more than ok with this, with thus; I am aware of ego; all I need right now is to just sit back and breathe, and I feel like the only time in my life I got close to that was when I was at rock bottom, because I had no control over anything but breathing. I sit here writing in the light rain next to the Missouri River with a smile on my face, genuinely feeling the beauty of it all. I feel like I could sit here for days, sorting through my ego and laughing about how silly it all is.
This is an extraordinary life, living in a pop-up camper with this amazing family, drifting from place to place, staying when we feel like it, and happily leaving when the universe asks us to, in this moment it is the lawn around our camper getting mowed in the wee hours of the morning. The feeling that things could be better is fuel for this ego, but I don’t necessarily feel like things could be “better”; I don’t even know what better might look like, aside from doing more creatively; I feel like we aren’t truly taking the time to enjoy this, which is partially creative, but also ego not just enjoying this.
That has been a huge struggle for me because I always enjoyed thus by capturing it and sharing it with anyone who couldn’t see what I was seeing or feel what I was feeling. There is that part of me still flailing to find my purpose, but the secret is letting go of that. There is a kind of panic in not really knowing who I am and what I’m doing, but who I am is just beyond all those definitions and expectations, so I’m just going to dig in the dirt and swim for a little bit, and get back to writing about all the mundane things I’m processing without judging myself for its worth or relevance.
I have heard so many beautiful things about this place and the energy here. I feel it, but I have felt a beautiful energy in most of the places we’ve been, save the bigger cities like Denver and SLC. Aside from those two vortexes, we have done a pretty good job of routing through less traveled roads and less peopled towns. Sundance in Red Valley, AZ, was beautiful, though a confusing and overwhelming energy. The nearby Shiprock, NM was a beautiful example of a kind of defeated nature of Navajo Nation: depressing but strangely hopeful… nicht aufgeben… though there were plenty of examples of giving up and surrendering to the dust and sun… and fate.
The evidence of broken dreams and static government housing were abundant, but a lot of the landscape had a similar feel to various Southern California communities, with the obvious and well documented tainted history. People in places like the Salton Sea have chosen to live there, but there is also the argument that those in places like Shiprock choose to stay, like those of color choose to stay in the obviously racist south. Where does one go, though? Is it a barrier in the human mind that need be crossed, or government and society holding a culture’s face against the hot sand with a ‘Murica freedom boot? I actually welcome a deep conversation about that, but this very northern European family didn’t exactly feel welcomed there, for good reason… I guess.
Sundance itself was an amazing experience, and ironically the last of its kind in that location. I felt completely out of place, but was pulled into the energy by being included in a pipe handoff while I happened to be there by myself the second morning, leaning against a post observing the unfamiliar ceremony, not knowing exactly if I was allowed to dance, too, or if that would be disrespectful? They half laughed at me when I just walked over to a little group and told them I had no idea what to do with the pipe. They showed me, and just like that I was a part of it all, dancing in support every chance I got. The little dust-blown and sun-baked circle we found ourselves camping in just happened to be souls from Taos, or ones heading to Taos next. We were invited to pop-up on a property that is being converted into a permaculture farm, which is our overall plan, so here we are.
Taos has been more of a deep conversation than a deep feeling. This place is gorgeous, but we don’t feel that spiritual call that most talk about. I have felt restless and a little out of place, like the souls who live here have some beautiful secret that they aren’t telling me. That is kind of a negative way to put it, but it’s an odd feeling to try to describe. We have met some beautiful people here, and it has been an amazing experience. We are so very grateful for the opportunity to be here. Maybe the energy is a bit of an overflow from Sundance? I am personally having a hard time feeling like I belong anywhere but on the road to somewhere else, though the road is feeling more and more like beautiful things that we are missing because we belong moving.
At very least I feel like we achieved a kind of purpose here by helping in the garden and sharing Kambo with the beautiful soul who is hosting our pop-up family on this beautiful property. My Love jumped into serving with me, and everything went like we’ve been practicing for years, when this was actually our first time, not just together, but with someone who wasn’t already part of our Kambo family circle. I have had a lot of souls ask if I would serve them this medicine, but I have found this strange sort of phenomena where those who need the medicine the most fit perfectly into the contraindication don’t-dare list, so I have found myself trying to gracefully explain to people that I just can’t serve them, which I guess is the part of being a practitioner that I need to understand better right now. That is also somewhat defeating, though, when I just want to help as many people heal as possible.
A lot of these posts are likely going to start with one thought in one place and end up with something completely different in another place, because this beautiful little family moves around a lot, and these beautiful minds are processing a lot of information. There is rarely time to stop and complete a thought, which I feel perfectly describes this adventure. I’m not sure how a lot of this will translate as a reader, but it is what it is, and we are all doing the best we can. The balance of family and creativity will always sway toward family now, and there is always a lot to do. I am strangely ok with that, after a lifetime of putting creativity and accomplishing something first. I think I already covered that, though. I don’t know what I’e covered anymore.
I mentioned in the last post about the rain surreally following us. That has continued, and we have already talked about finding a more solid structure trailer, which means a more solid vehicle, but we are still planning on rolling with the Splubaru and Dale for a while. Dale just requires a lot more trouble shooting after these little monsoon pockets we continue to find ourselves in, and though the weather hasn’t been dry, we have been given little pockets of clearing to take care of things. The universe has actually taken care of us a lot in those regards, and everything seems to work out perfectly. We left Taos hoping to get into the Colorado mountains to camp in our element again, after a couple weeks of community, but an unexpected detour and a storm pushed us into Crestone, CO, and a full campsite that happened to have one spot left. We have been taking more time to go on little adventures, and found some in that little corner of Colorado, and right when we decided to scrap camping at 10,000 ft and just burn all night through to WY, the universe slowed us down real quick with a blown bearing in one of our wheels in Grant, where we found ourselves thoroughly taking care of.
Through a quick series of conversations and phone calls, a local mechanic named Cody had our part on the way on a Friday evening, and we were taken in by a Hostel named Two Bridges with limited space because all the rooms in the nearby Bailey were booked. It feels strange writing that down because it all went so perfect and really deserves its own post. In the morning we were on the road again like we had just decided to stay in Bailey, Colorado.
Then we were off to WY to pop up in a park in Wheatland that allows free camping, which on a Saturday had plenty of spots. I suppose not many people are spending summer weekends at parks in Wyoming towns when there’s a lake right up the highway? These are the kind of little gems we need to find more of, though it is wonderful to have little slices of wilderness to ourselves. We have covered a lot of ground in the last two months, and it is really starting to hit me. I feel like we spent a lot of time in Colorado, and accidentally got to swing through the southwest without really dealing with the unbearable heat, but I keep looking around and saying “we’re in Wyoming” out loud to myself. That vacation feeling is starting to fade, and this is starting to feel like life now. We have one meetup with family this week in the Black Hills, and what then? What’s next? I feel that. There are loose plans, but we can go anywhere and do anything.
I still feel like I need to go back and recount the journey. There are a lot of photos I skipped over, and a lot of story we haven’t shared. Nevada welcomed us with an abandoned community at the top of the first pass, then spit us out with a violent wind storm. We dropped anchor in Delta, Utah, with a pretty serious case of burnout, but discovered a geological wonderland. Spent a week in the hills above SLC and visited some Kambo Fam, then crammed a quick day near Moab. We said hi to Colorado by accidentally finding Doc Holliday’s grave, then spent a week in Colorado Springs with the mom, trying out a new diet and starting some fermenting and mushroom foraging. Spent a couple days in an empty campground by a beautiful and less peopled reservoir, then a couple days in Durango. Got a radiator cap in Cortez, CO, after a little panic. The rest I think you can put together, but so much happened in between. This post suddenly has a “HEY! We’re still alive” feel to it. We are ALIVE, though, not just, but a little suddenly.
It has been over two years since I worked with anyone in the creative world. All of my creativity has been isolated to my partner, who hasn’t had much drive to create, and two young girls who create like a Jackson Pollock painting. It has been so long since I have written anything significant that I am not quite sure what to write anymore. So many significant things have happened just in this last year, and I have just sat with all of them, without any of the documentation that I normally give freely the the interweb. I have struggled pretty significantly with not making things too personal, id est “professional,” and also with the importance of sharing the significance of my personal experience, thus relatable, and the reviews I received were always mixed: too much; not enough; too much; not enough; ad absurdum.
I still have the ache to just write and take photos, but my camera feels meh and the words don’t seem to come out. It is as if I have finally embodied just appreciating this experience of life objectively and am feeling each moment of it, relinquishing all control and desire to do anything with it, while fighting with the feeling of complete uselessness because I’m not accomplishing anything. There is a certain loss of identity and purpose smashing against feeling like I’m not even just enjoying things properly because there is always something to do or plan or fix, and those things are outside of the routine of my life, so the learning curve just keeps getting sharper and steeper and I can’t enjoy the drive because I’m holding up traffic and we are late to our next camping question mark.
At this point I should probably catch you up on what exactly is happening, and initiate the shift in this space, which was supposed to happen months ago, but actually doing it has created so much anxiety that I don’t even know where to start. My partner has somewhat explained it on her social media, but I have said little to nothing in my adjustment flail. My last couple posts from over a year ago were a glimpse into the existential crisis that has been going on for a while, and the beginning of my journey into retreating all my work to prepare for a journey like this one, the aftermath of finding my father’s body, which seems like a strange striking point considering I haven’t really even mentioned it in so long. That was it, though. When that happened, suddenly the dream of just driving and looking for somewhere new began to materialize. We started searching for new circles, deeper spirituality and healing, a life of exploration and adventure, and an escape from the enigma of California.
I talked to my boss about our plan to get out about a year after my dad died, but even then it seemed completely unrealistic. Five months later I sat an intensive Kambo training and managed to survive as a level 1 Kambo practitioner, but my relationship with that medicine has been … tumultuous. There were idealized and fantasized plans around our escape, involving documenting our adventure and sharing it with the ether, searching out beautiful little spiritual communities to find ourselves and share this medicine, and truly exploring creativity amongst the beautiful souls we come across, but so far we have been occupied with getting used to this lifestyle and bickering with ourselves over how things are supposed to be.
My last day of work was May 31st, which was really my last day of knowing what is happening next. We have since been on the road to some extent, but have been primarily moving around to visiting family and friends. While we have been on the road for a month and a half, there is a part of me that feels like we haven’t even started yet, but we are doing it. The universe found us a little pop-up camper we named Dale, after the beautiful soul we got it from, but we still found ourselves stuck in California for a bit. When we did finally cross the border into Nevada, we drove about as far away as we could get in a day, then we began to meander to our next definite destination, trial and erroring along the way, trying to find our rhythm and routine. There have been some adventures once we drop anchor in places, and a few stops during the drive, but I feel like we are still unable to really explore and appreciate because we are in a kind of vacation mindset, in which we have destinations and events and deadlines, though there is a little more grey area than before.
There is also the routine deadline of getting to the next first-come-first-serve campsite in time to get a spot, especially not knowing the site or the landscape, or how many people are likely to be there on a Wednesday evening in July. Everything has turned out perfectly fine, like it does, but the stress of dealing with that question mark is still taking some getting used to. The expensive aspect of all of this is booking spots when we want a guarantee, and not shopping like we’re on vacation. Once we get our grasp on the dynamic of all of this, I imagine things will chill out a bit. It has rained a lot, which we didn’t expect since everyone and their grandma complains about how dry it is, and it has been strangely warm in the places that should be cold, and strangely cold in the places that should be warm.
We have changed our diet significantly on our journey to something we’ve wanted for a while, but we can only do so much in a pop-up that is constantly moving. My earth goddess has finally found her spark in foraging and fermenting, which is amazing for our health and much welcomed, but where we store things and how we do things are still up in the air. I have found myself reading books on healthy eating instead of spirituality and creativity. After reading a half a dozen books on art therapy, still feeling the need to officially apply my photography to healing, I enrolled in an online certified course before we left and haven’t touched it.
Things just haven’t gotten comfortable enough to really do what I planned to do, which also applies to blogging about our adventure. We wanted to include things outside of our creative routine, like little videos, but I haven’t felt that calm of mind and freedom to even try yet, spending pretty much all my energy on being present with my family, vacation mode, or in a kind of existential crisis, flailing to find purpose and meaning. Whatever is happening, I need to feel like I’m good at something, which makes me feel useful, and right now I’m trying to get good at this lifestyle, so getting good at the creative aspect of this has been pushed down on my to do list.
My creative dilemma stems from feeling like I don’t have anything more to say. I feel like we need to start something entirely new as a home base, but starting over is beyond daunting, and figuring out a way to change what we’ve established seems impossible.
I have had so many tabula rasa moments in my life, the last huge one was when I met the soul I’m doing this with, and having a second chance at being a dad, and it has taken me years to wrap my head around that. I honestly still feel like I’m in the learning curve aspect of that, and all these additional learning curves are just making me feel dizzy. I’m having a really hard time letting go of everything I was always trying to do, but still doing it with a different voice, which was the same one I had before with less philosophizing with a hammer, as Nietzsche so eloquently put it. I know I have used that reference many many times, but that’s kind of my point with having said everything I need to say, and I’m just an old guy trying to be a dad now, so I have the freedom to negligently repeat the references and silly jokes. The biggest problems we are facing with the new platform is what to call it, and what to call ourselves.
My instinct wants to run with lAvaNyamaya, which has the divine double meaning, but I feel like we already did that and it fizzled out. We are also no longer Sven and Maya, but the universe knows us as that, and we hate to give up pseudonyms that have served us so well and have so much meaning, while also tired of feeling like we are hiding who we really are. Sven and Maya also have a lot of negative attachment and storyline, but it’s the storyline that got us here, so do we hold on to what we know and see what that evolves into, completely, or do we start over with a different approach?
In the meantime, while we passively put energy into that decision and actively put energy into what we are doing, we have been to a dozen different beautiful places with only a couple instagram posts to show for it, so I feel like we are missing the feeling aspect of the adventure on top of feeling like we haven’t started yet.
I imagine there will be a big catch up photo post next, but I wanted to get the feeling post out first, which I have been writing for about a week. I finally started writing in the morning mist of a picnic table next to a pile of bones just north of Blue Mesa Reservoir, and now I’m watching the sun rise over the Animas River in Durango, still a little blown away from the trek over the million dollar highway, which we didn’t really stop on, but already plan to go back to. I also feel like I just start to get into the groove of writing, then I glance at the clock and start to panic because we are already late to start packing up to head to the next spot. So that’s what we need to do now, and I imagine the rest will happen when it’s supposed to happen.
