Finis; Initium

 The fight with the facebook bots continues, so my last post link didn't get much traffic, and with all the court stresses and distractions, I didn't have the energy to find a tricky alternative. In the initial post, two of my photos were flagged, and I knew a review would take a while before the post would go back up, so I just created another post and deleted the first one. The second post with the same photos had only one flagged photo, and I was pretty tired at that point, so I asked for a review and was about to call it a night when the flagged photo came back reinstated, like in minutes. It was as if the AI bot simply zoomed in to investigate and found all the bits successfully blurred.

So with that unexpected win I made the post transfer over to IG, where I rarely get flagged for anything because my work is pretty blatantly non-sexual and non-offensive. When I checked my notifications in the morning, everything was fine. When I checked my notifications the morning after that, everything was gone, and there was a note on my account that my post was linked to an inappropriate site, this blog, and I was told that if things like that continued, facebook would no longer recommend me to people with similar interests. HAS ANYONE ON THE INTERWEB FOUND ME AND MY WORK BECAUSE FACEBOOK SUGGESTED ME?

No. That's a pretty resounding and confident no. I have been haggling with facebook about my work for the better part of a decade. I think if they recommended me to someone interested in photography or fine art nudes, things would look quite differently for me and mine. I simply do not believe that facebook would ever be like, "hey, check out this guy's work with his amazing partner and beautiful family that we have religiously taken down, then put back up a few days later." I don't see that happening. Not just that, but I refuse to pay facebook's absurd prices to boost my posts, because the thought that they want my posts in other people's feeds is absurd, even if I pay for it.

Ok, so apparently I needed to rant about facebook again, and I will passively fight with them by making a post of what I have always referred to as pretty boring things, but these pretty boring things are pretty significant, on a trip that was beyond significant. At this point you should probably go read the last post if facebook didn't let you before. 

I'll wait...

On the morning of August 12th, I dressed up nice, drove an hour from our little mountain town, and walked into a Palm Springs courtroom that I had only attended on zoom for the last three and a half years, since my father's passing happened amidst the chaos of the glorified flu pandemic. The month before my final distribution date I was given a list of deficiencies for my case, not of which I was even remotely prepared for by county self help. I scrambled to get all the deficiencies satisfied in enough time for everything to be mailed and filed, except for one significant deficiency: a debt I settled for my father's estate back in 2001 that never got closed out by the company I settled with.

In my initial conversation with them, they seemed very willing to help, confessing that they had no idea what I was talking about, like they have never actually settled a debt in the probate process before. They very quickly disappeared on the conversation, though, as have most people in this ridiculous process. Looking back into the emails, they also disappeared on the initial settling process because the person I was interacting with went on vacation, so I actually sent the paperwork in on my deadline, without their officially accepting my offer.

The courtroom on this August morning, which shared the significance of my partner's dad and grandma's birthdays, was packed with just myself and a lawyer. The clerk actually thought I was a lawyer because of how I was dressed. I honestly feel like a stuffy lawyer after representing myself for so long. I handed the judge a packet with all the information regarding the settled debt, the email conversations, an account payment history ending in an adjustment that resulted in zero, and a letter from the company explaining that the debt was settled. The judge seemed confused and said that "this looks like the debt was settled." Yeah. He asked me, under oath, if the paperwork was real. .....Yeah.

He then went on to congratulate me on satisfying all the deficiencies. He told me that most cases that he sees with lawyers don't get through all of that in the time I did. I just candidly pointed out that this has been three and a half years of my life, and I flew in from Omaha to be here, so I was pretty focused on getting this finished. There was a chuckle. I had a similar response when he asked me if I knew what comes next? I had been so focused on this that I hadn't had the time or energy to see past it.

Motion granted.

It's over; just like that.

I spent the rest of the day finishing up estate business in the desert, then had dinner alone at the pub I helped open, manically going from tears to laughing and back again... until I found myself at Mephistopheles' house having a beer and talking about loosing our fathers..... still wearing my lawyer suit.

The next day I had an eye appointment in the town where I went to high school, and immediately started heading for home (Nebraska) in Sancho, the Ford I would've never purchased, but is one of the few lingering remnants of my dad. This was the fourth time I drove the distance between SoCal and Omaha in about five weeks, and this time I did not take the quickest, or the most efficient route. I took 66, and explored as many abandoned spots that I could while still keeping good time home, which is hard because the southwest presents an abandoned gas station or hotel at about every other offramp, forget about what you might find heading down any one of those dirt roads.

That last little road trip was a much needed exclamation point to the California paradigm, including. I got to see so many spots that I had always wanted to see, and the only thing missing was my beautiful little family. They had to be in Nebraska, though, because the girls started real school for the first time ever as I was heading back, and I was lucky enough to video chat with them as they were heading to drop off. So much has changed, and is so rapidly continuing to change that it is pretty hard to even stop to think about how I feel about anything at all anymore.

I cut north at Oklahoma City, the furthest east I've ever gone on 66/40 (aside from being my father's child passenger, heading back to Amish, Indiana), and managed to make it home in under three days, to my missed little family and new life... and new equipment, which will be another post. Everything going on since will be another post as well. A part of my brain has opened up, and everything is on the very edge of what it has supposed to have been. Life has been pretty rough since 2020, and that has nothing to do with the pandemic.

While We Wait For Life, Life Passes

I feel like my life has been on pause for the last two and a half years.  We have done so much as a family, and evolved so much as human beings striving to become the best possible versions of ourselves, but there is a part of my brain that is still staring down at my father’s body, stuck in the nightmarish void of everything that followed.  The last couple years with my family have been all the highs and lows of a forever changing life, generally for the better, whether we liked it or not, but under the deep psychological shadow of this probate court process that may or may not come to an end in the morning, when I walk into a Palm Springs courthouse for the first time because of Covid and the convenient legal “zoom” process that was created as a byproduct. I don’t even know what to expect at this point, so I have taken on the philosophy that served me well when I was working in a high volume kitchen: Prepare for the worst; hope for the best. 

I have found that approach, everything becomes a pleasant surprise because rarely is anything as bad as the worst that you prepared for. I must admit, though, that this process has presented many a situation that I couldn’t have prepared for, because I didn’t know most of these scenarios existed, nor do most of them make any sense to me now, but I have jumped through all the hoops, I have danced like a good little monkey for this Dali-esque law system that angers me beyond reason, and not because I don’t understand it, but because it is an unnecessarily complex man-made absurdity that absolutely embodies everything I don’t like about this existence. 

Why didn’t I just get a lawyer? Why didn’t I just hire somebody else to handle all of this so I could mourn in peace… or at all? The money spent on that would’ve ended up saving us significantly in the end… in the maybe now. I do, however, significantly appreciate this experience, as with most others that seem miserable at the time. There is a part of me that has always appreciated getting dragged through the shit, just to feel the reward of making it through. 

It is all these little letter people and word events that compile the stories of our lives… our lives that are given to us to be lived, not for us to give to someone else to write. Had I hired a lawyer, my story would be very different, with a little less of life experienced and known, as only one who has experienced can know. That has always been my preferred story; without experience, the work is reduced to fantasy, to pointless day-dreaming that exists to add excitement to an unenchanted life, prevalent in today’s paradigm of living in our phones and zooming in our court appearances. 

I don’t need someone else’s imagination to distract me from my story, so here I am, staring at my father’s body in California, posting photos we took in Nebraska, to follow up a post from Nebraska with photos we took in California. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have the emotional freedom to finally look at grief? I have started reading again in Omaha, after getting stuck on a book about peptides for nine months that didn’t even quench my thirst for a deeper understanding of the Kambo process, but did help me understand peptides from a pharmaceutical application… so….. ok? 

The Omaha library actually presented me with a few amazing books (most the books I read aren’t ones you would find in a library). The first one was probably the best broad overview of the history of philosophy I’ve ever read, A Brief History of Thought by Luc Ferry, and the latter is an in depth look at correctly naming our emotions by Brené Brown, in which I have already discovered that my lack of understanding grief could very well be because I have lived just about my entire life in grief because I never lived in a world that made any sense to me, so grief is a very complex byproduct of simply existing. 

That might explain why the little emotion I felt in discovering my father’s body was resentment because he left me here, before I even realized the shit he left for me to deal with?… with a sprinkle of envy because he got out of the matrix, and I’m silly enough to think I have more to do in this… thusness… when instead I should be sitting with the much needed reminder from Luc Ferry, reminiscing about Epictetus and Aurelius:

“You are not there to change things, to improve them, or to correct them; you are there to admire and accept things. It is somewhat in this spirit that Stoicism encourages us to reconcile ourselves to what is, to the present as it occurs, without hopes and regrets. Stoicism invites us to enjoy these moments of grace, and, to make them as numerous as possible, it suggests that we change ourselves rather than the order of things.”  Pg. 46-7

Expanded Horizon

"Omaha, somewhere in middle America

Get right to the heart of matters

It’s the heart that matters more." 

~ Counting Crows

Of all the places I imagined we would end up when we quit our little mountain town and headed out into the world in a pop-up camper, Omaha, NE, wouldn't have even been on the honorable mention list. In fact, I would even go so far as to say it was on our "definitely no" list, for various reasons.

Yet, here we are, with everything, which took multiple trips over the last month. We are one probate court date away from being completely removed from California. Two years ago the possibilities were endless, and we were wandering around in search of a place that felt like home, and people that felt like community.  We obviously didn't find that in the time allotted by the universe before we found ourselves once again in the very place we were trying to escape.  We met some amazing people in San Diego, and our lives evolved dramatically, but we never really fit there. Once San Diego spit us out, our options were reduced pretty quickly, as well as time to decide on one.

Our options were basically reduced to Colorado, which is rapidly evolving into all the things we don't like about California, and Nebraska, which has some of the best schools in the States, so our deciding factor was the fact that our up-until-this-point homeschooled girls wanted to have the school experience. That, and the obvious cost of living difference. Needless to say, we were excited for our girls to have an experience that they wanted, but not necessarily excited to be in this specific place.

We are making the most of it, to say the least, still a little overwhelmed with the move and unpacking and starting a new job and getting all the final probate paperwork in order. I would give the probate process 2 stars out of 10: do not recommend. That second star is only there because when things do happen to work in your favor, it is borderline orgasmic. Aside from that little release of dopamine, it is miserable, much like many other things in life, for many other people. In a strange twist, I would highly recommend Omaha. 

It is refreshingly hilly, and the people here are all suspiciously nice. I'll write an official review after winter, but for the time being I am excited to explore here and learn the deeper history... maybe get inspired to shoot and write again... which feels like a distant, delusional past, a kind of made up reality that we create to compensate for all the mundane shit in life... but that creative life still aches in my soul like bullet shrapnel that the surgeon couldn't remove, from an epic event that I can't remember. I'm not sure I know how to do that when I feel like everything I've done is wrong to some extent, and my experience is negated by how I'm told things are supposed to be.

I feel betrayed by myself, and every choice I've ever made, but now I'm looking at the landscape of a new world, where no one knows my name, or where I'm from, or what I did, or why I did it. I don't feel the need to defend myself here, or explain things that most people don't understand. I feel free to just be me, whether you like it or not. I can just be a grey clown amongst these shades of brown. I can smile, and people smile back. I can acknowledge the strangers who wave at me without assuming they think I'm someone else.

Here we are, back again at the place where we have infinite potential, not limited to what we're told. This city is not that big, and the traffic is not that bad, but to some who live here, it is almost unbearable. 

I think you'd better turn your ticket in,

and get your money back at the door.

Everything will always be as beautiful as you want it to be.

Here we go.

*These photos are obviously not from Omaha, but from our stop in Oceano last year, where Weston shot Charis. In an ideal example of how my creative drive has been stalled, I held on to these photos to attach them to something written and significant, but nothing ever came, and now I feel the need to write something, and I don't have any significant photos to go with it. I went straight to Peru after this trip, then to San Antonio, then Grandma passed, so many things to write about, but I'm still staring at video from our first trip into the unknown two years ago feeling as if I've been crammed into this creative void, where nothing looks or feels quite right.

Breathe

After documenting the recent CKPI training in Ireland, I had the pleasure to mentor this beautiful soul. You can find his workshops online at breathwaveireland.  Something about this voice is otherworldly.  He had sent me this video to get my opinion on the project, but I wanted to share it here because I believe it is very worth sharing. You could say I am at the beginning of my breath work journey, but I also feel like I am at the beginning of a lot of journeys. I would even go so far as to say I feel like I haven't even started yet. I am ready to go.

 

Letting Go, Circa 23

At first, there is the identification, 

"I am the body." 

As the mechanism of surrender continues, it becomes quite obvious that, 

"I am the mind that experiences the body, not the body." 

As more feelings and belief systems are surrendered, there eventually comes the awareness, 

"I am not the mind either, but that which witnesses and experiences the mind, emotions, and body."

p. 254

Eleven

Sitting on a wooden deck next to a tambo, serenaded by the deep amazon rain, I turned the pages of a book that I could only truly understand at that point in my journey. Every day that goes by, I realize more how perfectly it all fit together. Letting Go was the accidental theme, but it has been lingering since I first sat with Kambô, which just defined a feeling I had been struggling with for years that culminated in finding my father's body. Bufo crammed me into an existential nightmare that led to me abandoning my work altogether. Tepe pulled me out of the nightmare, but left me in a new question mark, especially with my work. Sitting with Aya in the Peruvian Amazon left me with more questions than answers, and I still don't even know how to articulate those questions, or what in this universe would understand what I'm asking... but I walked away from that inspired to really do the work that I love and know I'm meant to do, which was primarily inspired by spending so much time with Gabe..... all divine integration.

At this point in my journey I am left with a kind of futile emptiness, which is really just what life is, and our journey is finding beauty in that. I got all those experiences that I longed for my entire life, but I have once again circled back to this, feeling like the life that I long for is drowning in an ocean of egos. That's it. That's my light bulb. These amazing plant medicines aren't cheap, nor are they as readily available as they should be for the betterment of humanity and this world that we are destroying, which is all starting to feel like the Catholic Church charging the masses for salvation. I hear so many stories about beautiful healing journeys with these plants, and I feel like I exist to document and appreciate those stories, while coming to terms with the fact that I'm not actually supposed to have one of my own, because mine doesn't look or feel like any of that which is described. My biggest conundrum in all of this is realizing that there is nothing to heal. All the traumas and pains that everyone is wallowing in and trying to heal don't exist anymore, but in our memories of them. Everything happened exactly how it was supposed to in order for us to become what we're supposed to be. By holding on to and thinking we need to heal something that only exists in our memory, we are really negating our own existence. If you could go back in time and delete or change an experience, you would return to a completely different reality, and the only guarantee is that your new life won't be any better or worse, it will only be different. You can keep doing that for all eternity, searching for the perfect existence, until one day you'll realize that you truly appreciate and miss the original story, and you'll understand how much precious time and energy you wasted searching for something different, thinking it would be better.

It is not our experiences, or at worst, traumas, that we need to heal from, but our own thinking that those experiences and traumas are important enough to keep us from thriving in our best possible existence. It could also be argued that our greatest trauma is thinking itself. It is our egos, in their inflated selfishness, having all of those silly experiences. We are the everything and nothing that is watching the ego flounder with all of the ego-made problems and issues. The plants are trying to show you something past the ego, often times by smashing you in the face with it. I'm not saying that anyone should stop doing the work, or stop trying to heal what they think is holding them back. I'm just saying that I hope one day you also realize that it is not healing what you've been through that is holding you back; it is the you who needs to be healed that is keeping you from living your best possible life.

I recently read that it is incorrect to say that we create abundance. Abundance is already there. We create limitations.

Ocho

 

 I have obviously done a horrific job of maintaining web presence. So much has happened this year that I don't even know where to start. This place is still sitting in the ether, though, so hi.

Last summer we took a little road trip up to Oregon. I recognized this intersection when we drove through and thought we should stop and show how much has changed in the last 8 years.

Acate

I haven't actually recounted my journey with Kambo on here in any way, aside from how I found the frog, and a brief overview of my first inoculation experience, and how Bufo messed up my head, which were both almost two years ago in Dormiveglia and Entangled, with retreated photos from over a decade ago that seem completely obsolete now. Along with my mind being blasted open by that whole experience, I had the overwhelming drive to go through all of my photos and retreat them, only to realize that there were far too many to go through while still managing to maintain a full-time job, family of four, and also searching for a way to move forward with my work. 20 months and a whopping 7 posts later, I have abandoned my still present drive to retreat everything, and am still searching.

Fast forward 9 months from those posts, or rewind 11 months from now, I drove away from my Kambo practitioner training with a plan to talk about how life changing of an experience it was in a post, but by the time I got home, all of that was put on the shelf for various reasons, and in these times my creative shelves are absolutely stuffed with projects that I may or may not ever get to. To be honest, just about everything that has happened in the last year or more has been written about very little, if at all.  I am a certified Kambo practitioner, but few know it because I just kind of hinted around to what was happening in my life now, and generally just posted what I imagine were confusing photos of folks hugging buckets on social media, amongst my fine art work and random quotes or rants. That was something seriously significant in my life that I simply left for people to figure out, amongst other things in my creative flail and learning to just live in the moment, like the fact that I quit my job and we quit our town and were living in a pop-up camper on the road, which my partner hinted around at on social media, but I just kind of didn't talk about for a couple months.

Aside from the people who existed in our little circle, no one really understood what was happening, and I was dependent on the fact that no one was paying attention. I could also argue that even people inside our circle didn't really even know what was going on, and it wasn't until a month and a half into our journey, almost exactly a year after Entangled, that Familie Zuerst rolled in, kind of explaining what was going on. By that time, the souls who were paying attention to what I wrote had wandered off because it had been so long since any words hit the ether. After I finally did get something written, I did a decent job of updating, in my vague and poetically obscured way, about every week, until there was another gap between August and January, a gap we lovingly call San Diego and caretaking for Gram Cracker. The adventure on pause, but feeling over, as we spent months around Christmas flailing and searching for connection and purpose outside of caretaking, in a city that was not on our list of places to hang out for 6+ months.

Maybe I need to learn to tell better stories? Maybe I tell stories perfectly fine and I need to manifest more readers who appreciate my take on everything? Maybe everything happens the way it's supposed to and I should just write when things come up organically, and not force them because something happened? I think my biggest problem with writing about what's going on, especially the significant stuff, is that I always just put it all out there, and I have been gradually learning to experience life as it happens, instead of how it applies to a potential story to tell. I journal more instead of posting everything to social media or blogs. There have been bouts with the negative self talk of my voice not really mattering, but Ive shifted into how important my voice actually is, so I am learning to direct it better. On this platform my voice is obviously just words, but I have been kicking around getting my actual voice out there, right about the time I lost my ability to form words properly because of some traumatic dental work, which I am also yet to write about.

What I do know is that when you don't regularly remind the world that you exist, you cease to exist on some level. I also know that when you don't let your readers know exactly what's going on, they are left to assume and fill in the gaps of the story how their conditioning allows. I am strangely ok with both of those. I think that's why I had a block on doing our travel blog and youtube channel while we were on the road: I don't think I was ready for the pressure of the constant update because I'm so far removed from that, and creativity in general. 

Back to the point. When I walked away from my first experience with Kambo I had this feeling in my gut that this was something I could do, and it was something tangible. I spent my life trying to help people with my creativity, and that went severely misinterpreted. This was something that came with an immediate physical response, and also fueled creativity on a spiritual level. I have also always been turned completely off by how most of the spiritual practice, that I want to believe in, is presented. This medicine leaves no room for hoo-haw spiritual bypassing or the toxic positivity which taints most spirituality that has been so tragically diluted in the west. This is all very real poison pulsing through your veins, gathering toxins and panema, and purging it out in one way or another.

I sat with that feeling for a while, dealing with so many other things in my life. When I did have a conversation with my Goddess about it, she showed full support, and it didn't take much research to find training, though the universe did help a lot in lining everything up, and the closer we got to my doing this training, the closer we got to knowing we needed to get out of where we were. The training that found me was with Rainforest Healing Center, and it was in Salt Lake City. My very first Kambo experience was on 4/3/21, and the training started a year and one day later. Still floundering in my father's passing, I spent three days driving out there in Sancho, the Ford Hybrid that he left behind, which was ironically also dead, but we were able to bring that one back.  I camped in my car in Ballarat, where I was greeted by a wild donkey as the sun set, Then I camped at a hot springs in northern Nevada. It was amazing to just be on the road and live in my car, but I did have a destination, and was cramming for a presentation that I had to give with my medicine sister, and I was also repeating necessary information in my head that I needed to memorize a little deeper than I would lines for a show. With every mile and quaint little Nevada mining town, things started getting more and more real. 

By the time I got to SLC, I was quick to realize that it was way too cold to car camp, so I got a cheap room and crammed some more. The day of arrival at the strangely themed rental, I ran around from shop to shop trying to finish up finding the items required for training. Then I was in it, surrounded by strangers, and everything felt great, aside from some off vibes I got from one of the trainees, and that played out in a pretty epic way that I don't think I'll ever be comfortable writing about, but I will certainly never look at Salvator Mundi the same. This medicine can bring out some darkness, and when you are sitting with it twice a day for over a week, with no real food but protein shakes and avocado, that dark is pitch black. I purged a lot, on a lot of levels. There was a ton of information to process, and just about every minute between doses was spent in class type talks, flooding us with information, and studying. After day three I called home and said I didn't think I was going to make it, but by my last dose on the left, I finally started to feel like I was getting it.

I could've easily gone another week with the beautiful souls I found there, but after our heart dose initiation, which did not bode well for the wall I almost pushed myself through, a final exam that I am still a little shocked I did so well on, and a beautiful last meal, a la the medicine sister I did my presentation with, we cleaned up the house and everyone dispersed back into the real world. I had a long drive home to really sit with everything that happened.

It was such an amazing and healing experience that I didn't want to go home. I wanted my family to meet me there so we could just disappear, but there was still a lot to do, and I had agreed to work another month at the job I was leaving behind. It was so difficult to take what I had just been through back to that place that I spent my whole life trying to escape, but we did it, and we got out, and the first significant destination we had when we hit the road was to introduce my family to my medicine family. I initially did this training to serve my partner and myself, but when I did start serving others, each sit has been an incredibly rewarding adventure of its own.

Come sit with us!


* All of these photos were taken by Omar, the master practitioner who did the training.