Analysis Paralysis

I often feel like I’ve lost my voice, but I really never found my voice.  I thought I did.  In my thirties I yelled with that voice at whoever I thought could understand it, but I really alienated more souls than I helped, even though all I was doing was trying to help…in my own little version of philosophizing with a hammer, but with healing through creativity. I was confident in that philosophically creative excursion because everyone always said that one finds their voice in their thirties. The realization that little to no one was paying attention just made me yell louder because I thought that was it; now or never.

I struggled with that for over a decade, until I finally rested… much closer to never than now….. now… I feel like never would be a vast improvement to the lack of inspiration I feel.  Right after I posted about probate being over and my roadtrip back to Nebraska… a month and a half ago… I wrote a post about a huge paradigm shift in my creative equipment, but quickly reverted it to draft because I felt stupid.  I used to put so much importance on being loyal to Canon for over 30 years, and switching my creative flow over to Sony felt way more important than it actually is… especially when what I hope to do with it seems like a distant dream.  I’m getting too old for dreams.

Hiding that post, and realizing that my voice should be focused on way more important things, kicked me back into creative apathy.  What is the actual point?  Maybe I’m still stuck in that Bufo existential crisis?  Maybe this is what never feels like, and I have completely missed the opportunity of now?  I just want to accomplish something significant, something my kids and grandkids can be proud of, but I am far from excited about it, and no one around me seems to be either.  Maybe that’s just the energy of middle America?  

I wanted to do a whole video in San Diego with “Maya” and I talking about quitting our lives and living on the road.  I had the whole thing planned out with a voiceover talking about the magical and exotic land of… *camera opens to us sitting on camping chairs in grandma’s garage*… Chula Vista, California.  That didn’t happen, like nothing really happened on the road like I planned it out. There wasn’t time to really do anything amongst the constant stimulation and movement.  

I’m grateful to have learned to truly live in the moment with my family, without the constant need to capture and edit and post and maniacally check on likes and responses, but I also feel like we have almost been left with nothing to show for it, including this kind of lack of excitement to keep moving forward with any kind of passion. I’m still not sure if this feeling isn’t simply a kind of guilt that I missed that opportunity, or more importantly, didn’t have the courage and talent to truly capture it. 

Living in the now with my family, and appreciating the now of my family, was kind of the nail in the now or never coffin. And I feel like enough dirt has been shoveled on said coffin that my nails are raw from scratching at the Edgar Allan Poe metaphor.  That didn’t make any sense, though taphophobia beautifully describes how I’m feeling creatively. 

What am I doing, going on and on about my own experience? How selfishly silly of me. The whole reason why we’re here is because of the girls and their desire to experience school, which we couldn’t do in the state of absurdly strict rules and regulations cleverly masked as liberal freedoms. The girls are absolutely thriving in school, thanks to my partner’s homeschooling preparation, though there were some pretty rough learning curve moments in the first couple weeks where the world may or may not have ended just about every night.

V is getting into futbol. Both the girls are learning piano. A cat adopted us, named St. Thomas of Tabasco… at least that’s what I call him. With school and my new boring job, the adventures are few, and the creative accomplishment fewer. I still don’t feel like there’s time for anything. Maybe that’s just what getting old feels like? Maybe everything will slow back down in ten years when the girls whirl off into their individual human experiences? Maybe there will always be something making us feel like we don’t really have enough time?

To quote the immortal Spiros, “You work, and then you die.” Work for me looks like writing this while sitting on the back of a FedEx bulk truck behind an Omaha Target, waiting for a pick-up window to open. Not nearly as romantic as living in an old movie theatre, but there is some poetic ring to the irony of this existence. Sadly, there are probably only three people on the planet who can truly appreciate that I work for Federal Express, and we bank at Wells Fargo.

That certainly makes me smile most days, which is all any of us can really wish for in this life. I really do plan on posting more than once every couple months. I really do. Creative accomplishment is in the doing, not the talking about doing, and when you have grown accustomed to the doing not being did, doing the doing is difficult… regardless of why we’re here… and regardless of what we’re doing. 

I feel like there have been a lot of maybes in this little update, but maybe this is what evolution is?  The kids grow; we grow; things change; we do the best we can to keep up and keep going... keep searching for our voice and place in this world. 

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.