I’m lying in the dirt listening to the wind. My mind is being crucified to the cross above me.

I arrived here late last night. I’m all bald tires and jagged teeth. Prayer and a printed map got me here. 222-mile drive in silence, my old truck doesn’t have a radio so I listen to my mind and truck groan up the windy roads.

A little dog named Beegum barks at me at the end of a bumpy dirt road where the monastery stands deep in the mountains. A monk walks out and waves and tells me to park down the road with a thick Russian accent. I wear black jeans, black boots, and a thick black sweater, which is what I imagine Johnny Cash’s version of a cassock is. They refer to me as a pilgrim. An old priest relying on a cane more than his legs shuffles out, I kiss his hand and he blesses me. It’s late.

There are tiny shacks below, three to be exact. They call them cells. He says pick one you like and go to sleep. The three cells are named ‘faith, hope, and love.’ I take a step towards faith but double back to love. Maybe because it’s the thing I want right now. Maybe because it’s the thing that comes after faith and hope.

There’s no power, cell reception, or running water here. I pray my nightly prayer out of my small prayer book with a flashlight. I watch my ribs and stomach undulate in my peripheral with the whispers of my lips, the words act as a brush that has been scrubbing my soul every night for months.

I climb onto the plywood bed, listen to the cogs turn in my mind. Mischievous joy and sorrow colliding in the ocean of my mind until I fall into a deep sleep.

I wash my face and comb my hair with cold water in the dark at 5:00AM. I run into the Russian monk as I’m stumbling up the dirt hill towards the monastery. I ask him where I should go, he says “To the church.” matter-of-factly.

I push the door open. Incense, chants, candles, and the breath of God rushes my senses and obliterates my mind.

I kiss the Mother of God’s face, then I stand there and begin the great tango and wrestling with God. I light a candle and give him the sorrows and joys my mind excavates for the next four hours to the chanting of these wild monks who have dedicated their lives to the marinating in God’s holiness, to being digested in God’s stomach. They resemble less men in a high castle and more like holy animals, metastasized down into wildness. The priest looking like some strange bird poking his head out of the holy doors as he chirps ancient words out of a candle wax stained book.

Afterwards I talk to the only other pilgrim on the mountain with me in the dining hall. His name is Timothy, the same name of my late brother. He’s from the Santa Cruz mountains and when he tells me I feel a pang in my heart, how all those years ago when I lived in the same mountains I blindly stumbled past the thing I was looking for. A beautiful kindness and intense humility emanates from his eyes, he alludes to AA, alcohol, and anger. His intimacy with the topography of the underworld and how this thing we’re participating in ushered him out of it. He has this jagged softness and depth. I have an affinity for people like him, they’re a dream, I look up to them.

Honesty oozes out of him, he is tattered Carhartts and rough capability. The light in his sawdust eyes a torch ignited and carried through hell, now a great flame of God’s Love. Infinite mercy is his inheritance and he carries it well.

Then I’m climbing deeper into the mountains. Dust and sweat compounding on me. I’m at the top of the mountain in front of a humble wooden cross fashioned out of dead tree limbs. Before I know it I’m lying in the dirt underneath it. The loneliness being evaporated out of me in the hot sun, as I wriggle in the dirt and the wind.

My God, my Guillotine. My neck is yours. I am ash, and bones, and dirt, and rot. Purify me. I feel humility knowing the closest I’ll get to perfection is repentance. The paradox of when I make myself the lowest I am closest to the highest. I relish in it. I’m spit back down the mountain in the drunken blissful haze, cleansed.

The sun is setting, I make my way back to the monastery for the nighttime vespers. I’m swept back into what feels like endless initiation. The holy demise from the crashing waves of chants, candles, and incense. I’m waved down to the underground chapel by an old priest with a black eye from a fall. His blue and gold robes sparkle in the dim light, the eyes of saints painted on the ceiling watch me from their vantage above. The sacrament of confession, like my tongue is a dog in a race it begins to move.

I whisper the sins that this place has slowly been negotiating out of my flesh, I regurgitate them. I then place my head on the melted cross, a cross pulled out of the rubble of the first monastery that burned down where this one now stands. The same one Seraphim Rose used when he started this place over fifty years ago. I, like thousands of pilgrims before me, am extracted into the wellspring of mercy. I ascend back into the church leaving the tattered rags of my psyche below. Then continue my unraveling into sore feet and smoke.

After dinner the abbot sits alone at the end of a table. I nervously slide next to him, I tell him who I am and why I am here. “Death to the world, the last true rebellion.” I say. A film from a magazine published in the 90’s about how the true punks are monks. How punk rock got half the truth right in the rejection of the world, but they were missing the other half of the truth. I talked about how the piece resonated with me, how in my youth I was all tattoos and rage, but I had replaced the rejection of the world with the void. In my continued search for truth I discovered Holy Orthodoxy. The abbot lit up, “I was one of the two authors who wrote The Last True Rebellion.” Chills ran down my spine. “You’re the reason I’m here father.”

I court the wild for a bit longer on the steps of my shack, then crawl into bed. Sunday morning, after the twists, turns, and tangos of the last two days I go to the monastery for divine liturgy. The same prayers and songs I’ve been listening to for a year crawl into me, ancient but never old. Compulsively, rhythmically doing the sign of the cross over my body. A father with his two boys stands next to me. Sincerity, humility, and love emanates out of him. I can see the goodness in him through his rough blue collar exterior, and how that goodness has transferred to his boys.

The memory of me being washed in a thunderstorm in the Arizona desert comes crashing through the floorboards of my mind and into my heart. How it broke something in me that needed to be broken, communing with the wild angels of the desert is where I decided maybe I could be a father one day, and with the decimation of any bigness in me it’s where I started praying to God again. And all these years later, why I’m here with this knowing in my bones.

The siege continues on my heart, soul and flesh. Finally like God’s drunken lullaby I stumble up to the priest with arms crossed, and then he feeds me my God, to remember I’m the madness he died for.

I say my goodbyes. Then dirt is spinning around me, climbing down gears while climbing down the mountain. I head back towards the great big machine, feeling less like a human and more like I’m actively being imagined by God.

I have a cigarette loaded. It’s in the chamber. I want to smoke. My life is clean and sleek, all the dirt is outside. I scrub my hands with a ground up walnut soap that gets the grime, but there’s some stuck underneath my calluses I can never get to. I sweat and I think all day, my bed has been harder to get out of recently. Really recently I started to believe in demons more, the real ones. I kind of thought of them as an idea, like how an idea can get inside you, push all your neurons to one place and hold the blood and attention there. But now I think there are some ideas that breathe, I think somethings have access to our thoughts.

If it was Tuesday, a normal Tuesday I wouldn’t say anything. But I went to that cathedral, you know the one off Green Street. I talked to the priest, then there was the ceremony and I was dipped in holy water, whispered poetry and oaths. Then it came after, it screamed in my ear every time I looked at anything beautiful or miraculous. I realized my mind isn’t all mine. Exhaustion and chaos crept in. Horrible dreams too, something always sitting to the right, and when I asked it what it was it would rise up out of the floor like a tree expending the growth of its whole life in a moment. And my body ached, I could feel something watching me, trying to burrow into the back of my skull.

Thirty days. It lasted thirty days. Thought maybe I’d gone insane, no one would put it past me. I’ve always been a little strange. But I did pray, I prayed a lot. And in the midst of the blood I felt calm when I did. Then on my patio while looking at the patchy bullet holed clouds I prayed again and it fell off, or away, I’m not sure. A thing left. It was just me again.

I was paranoid for a week after, checking my mind like one would check closets for ghosts. If you had asked me if I believed in this stuff before I probably would have said yes, but the yes has a different texture after you’ve felt something trying to push through your skin.

Now to my priest this sounds blisteringly obvious, or to my agnostic friends I sound mad. But I’m not mad, and I’m certainly not agnostic, I know who I am and what I saw. I think there is something that’s really upset it can’t eat me.

I have this theory that writers and poets have some extra goosebumps that are attuned to this stuff, we operate in the ecosystem of living, breathing words, so maybe we brush shoulders with angels and demons on their commutes into their little celestial or infernal offices.

She sits on a couch possessed by an idea, like her dreams are made of plastic, she’s an advertisement. I need to be consumed, and in order to be consumed I need to be consumable. There’s that thought again she thinks, sin in just the right way at just the right time. There are rules to this thing. I don’t want to be loved like my grandpa loved me, I need to be consumed.

But they’re so hungry, I can see the way they look at me. Little monsters trying to hide in glass cages, and it’s all breaking because I want to be consumed. I don’t care that they’re monsters, all of them. Because I’m their dream, I’m the thing that animates the nightmare, I’m the thing that pulls the strings when they repose into flesh. They’re my little meat puppets.

I need you to be tantalized, I want my skin to consume you in the way you’re consuming me. I want to grind you down into ‘please’. I’m the light an optometrist waves back and forth, I am hypnotic, a light that goes in but never leaves. I’m the blue light flesh you asked for. I want to see you beg, and cry, and sweat.

I’m the memetic abirritation of desire. I’m the omniscient parasitical idea that slides in the back of your brain that you like, I’m the worship you worship. Don’t you want me to be the smell of home? Don’t you want home to be fresh ground pulp, the solipsistic fantasies you’ve had locked up in boxes.

It’s not my fault my flesh is the fourth dimensional box that holds your tiny desires. I want to encapsulate you, to be a pill you swallow but can’t throw up. No I don’t want to be loved like my grandpa loved me, because I want to be consumed.

I always found that the old ragged people missing fingers or eyes somehow had more to them than the ones with all their extremities intact. The missing had added more, a signature on their body of having had communion with this worlds harsh reality.

I never gravitated towards the clean and tidy white-collar folk, I love the dirty hermits, the grease stained yellowed teeth old guys hunched over in some dingy garage. I’m attracted to hard lives filled with grisly tiny demises over decades, because what’s left is real. You can smell the underworld on their breath, how they learned how to rebuild engines out of necessity. How tragedy had shaped their soul into these fantastic mystical things. I love the calm in chaos, the sputtering confidence of their stories, how what was an obviously painful existence had beckoned some sort of morose hilarity and wrinkle etched wisdom.

Little saints with sailors’ mouths, big hearts beating under raggedy exteriors. Saw an old-timer with a missing arm get the engine of a rotting Miata started in a junkyard once, then proceed to drive the manual transmission car up the narrow ramps of a trailer with no wiggle room for error, all while smoking a cigarette. It was a borderline religious experience, if getting on with it was a being.

There was also Uncle Spud in the little town I grew up in, only had a few fingers left and one eyeball I think, his pants were always falling down and had lost most of his hearing in both ears, but he knew how to trim a garden or a hillside, some strange irony in whacking weeds with his missing fingers. Yelling and muttering things, shouting and breathing poetry before hopping in a barely running pickup and disappearing down a dirt road. Tired old guardian angels dancing in the dust of his mythological tango for cold hard cash.

It’s the dogs, the dirt, the competence with broken things. Silver spoons are fragile because they’ve never been bent out of necessity. There’s this opulence in the burn marks and broken fingers, a beauty in things growing out of places they’re not supposed to. Little bugs you can’t quash, mischievous grins stolen from raccoons, the clanking and clamoring from their garages are the drums they worship God with.

Dirtbags and drifters have plenty to teach too, these little prophets are littered across this earth. There’s a holiness in their grease and dirt. A strange paradoxical purification. You should find one, give him your ears, commune with his mythological demise and rebirth, see what ancient wisdom he has scribbled in that grease on the floor.

I see it all the time because my occupation and hobbies have danger laced into them. Right around the six-month mark is where all the bruises and broken things come. When you’re just starting out you’re all wide eyed, aware of your soft doughy flesh and how the world wants to rip it away from you. You take your time around turns, more brake less throttle, yes you’re having fun but you’re as terrified as you are having fun.

But then you make it past a few sunsets, things get predictable, “when I do this, this happens”. Thoughts creep in, awareness of your own fragility erased with thoughts of an unchecked to-do list. How many people have had their last thoughts be just that? Some casual meandering of the mind the precursor to catastrophe. A liquid banality coursing through their brain before blood is on the pavement.

Sometimes we get twisted luck with little token Memento Mori’s, the grim reaper in an ambulance flashing by. That uncomfortable truth glistening from the blood on the dash of a commuter who’s driven that road a thousand times snapping us out of the metastasizing honey soaked malaise of our own false sense of immortality.

You must not forget the fragile nature of this thing, your mom knows it, and I’m sure she lets you know it all the time, but that’s a background buzz like she’s got these bees in her mouth. “Quiet, mom, I want to do a handstand.”

Now don’t shy away from danger, this isn’t an advertisement for bubble wrap, rather a reminder in cognoscente. I know as well as you do the most real things are closest to danger, sweet soliloquies dripping in mercilessness. We crave the exacting honesty of danger, to dance with reality, skim over the water of our own mortality at 1,000 miles per hour and get our beak wet. But you must never get comfortable.

You get caught in a drift you’ll die. You refuse the call to danger and you’ll never live. But you can survive in a throttle pulled back perceptiveness, the understanding that sometimes just because something has happened one way a thousand times doesn’t guarantee the same again.

Lions and tigers and bears prowl behind bushes you thought were dancing in the wind, blind corners with dead stops, unstoppable forces and immovable objects against our shattering glass bones. Chaos smells when you’ve lost your respect for it and it’s so very very hungry.

Let it rip, let it burn, but keep your back tense and your eyes peeled. Comfort is the tip of danger’s razor-sharp knife, the fuse to its quick kinetic ugly.

I’ll sit on a mountain and watch the clouds go by, cheer them on in my own quiet way. Their consistent drift over the horizon comforts me, even gives me courage at times. It’s productive to sit here and listen to the birds sing, I’ll lean in and almost make out the secrets they’re trying to whisper to me. Sometimes they’ll make me want to cry, overwhelmed by the sky to have the audacity to be so blue. I’m married to this dirt and these trees, I’m loyal to them. Our little meetings every afternoon.

I’m jealous of them too you know? Their secrets are so pure and holy, a tree knows how to be good, it knows how to grow up, I had to fight for that. Birds sing because they know how to let what’s in them go. I have to coax it out, beg my tongue to move. I feel almost a bit ashamed in their presence, how the secrets I whisper to them are usually dark and morose, an uneven exchange. Yet they never laugh or judge, just absorb them like they do the sun, dance in the wind, the trees shaking their leaves like some sort of funny dog asking for more.

I’ve spent a lot of time in quiet pale blue rooms trying to heal, as if I was looking for a sentence like a puzzle piece to make everything fall into place. You can’t really put things together in the dark, that’s not how this works.

It’s obvious to me now I needed a place to bleed, a little patch of earth I could court, something I could be honest with. I knew I was bleeding but I needed to see where the blood was pooling, I needed a place where it could all stop and congeal. It’s not like I hadn’t had some realizations before, but I hadn’t gone to a place that was big enough to hold those realizations with me. I needed to sit on a mountain top, the same mountain top, over and over to have things sutured into a bleeding heart. My eyes needed to consume the hungry waves of the pale blue ocean’s wet fingers thrumming against the shore, to think to the beat of wildness, to be consumed by beauty and spit back out covered in its slippery demise. I’ll walk off that mountain a little more myself, having given it something and taken something away.

On the edge of everything is a woman so rare that to even glimpse or breathe the same air would be a testament of your courage. They’re called border dwellers, dangerous seductive things. Red robes falling off like blood soaked waterfalls, sharp silver tongues.

Can you hear her voice in the wind, how she calls to you? A song of sweet and terrifying things that dances across the dark watered expanse of the unknown, not a lullaby, a song that wakes you up, beckons you. Where oceans move by monsters in the depths, the further you go out the deeper, darker and bigger they get. But the greater the danger the greater the beauty.

Can’t you feel it? Of course that’s how this works, the blood of the monsters you fear is the price of admission into her arms. You will never meet one unless you go to where the waters are darkest, black like space, but that deep darkness will be lit up with intersecting constellations of shared understanding of pain and wisdom if you can only get to the other side of the expanse.

Problem is most never meet one, you can get fragmented out there, more common to see limbs floating about, disembodiment, people becoming the monsters they’re fighting in the unknown. Nothing below your feet for too long changes a man, you just become the kicking, forget there’s anything else. Start drowning in nihilism, hatred, lust, you become the very darkness you swore to fight.

For the few that make it through, pull their limbs onto shore, there she is, there’s that song. Like some sort of warm wet fever dream, hot shining tears of “I understand” washing the blood off. But the thing being loved is not the same thing that started on the journey, muscles like mountains carved from war, fear eaters, butterfly stomach acid, look at you all jagged and lovable.

On this shore where what you thought would be collapse becomes expanse. And just like the lonely waters, you learn that beauty takes just as much courage as danger. Because she loves what you are, and what you are now is a thing that fights. So after she’s kissed your wounds, she’ll tell you to rise. And while you’ll feel the pull to go back to the comfortable known, it’ll all just look like rot from that shining shore, she’ll whisper to you “You are bigger than that”. Because that’s what they do. How they love is to beckon, they love you into continuous becoming. So you’ll turn your back on the ocean of what was unknown now transformed into known. Basking in a paradoxical shared ineffable understanding, you’ll begin to move towards the new unknown, only this time not alone.

These border dwellers love through truth, consume vulnerability. They feel like altars for your shame, pain, and fear to be burned in the fire of love. Rib cages transformed into ladders for the climb to heaven, spines straightened into weapons, tongues sharpening tongues into a linguistic structure of ascension. Existential execution, a religion relentless in the pursuit of truth through courage. Women ferocious as they are beautiful, elegantly dancing and playfully holding that power of danger and beauty as weapons to transform that infinite blackness of the unknown into what is good and holy with you. Their love is not a place, it’s a journey, starting at the intersection of all that you were, all that you are, and all that they know you will become.

The consummation of this love is the wading forward together into that dark night, the new shared expanse of the unknown. Making love to rage, the way being lit with the flicker flashes of integration, shared purpose, and interlinked constellations. Your symbiotic shooting galleries of stars tangoing in the night. Pretty shamans dripping in picture perfect violence, rising like the sun, dancing to synchronized beating hearts on the horizon of continuous unending becoming.

Like your skin is sewn into the bed. Bones replaced with metal, and you wish you remembered how to cry. Outside your door is a mountain and it screams at you. But you can’t move, and there’s something inside eating itself. It hurts to think but you’re not the one doing it anymore, just some dull hum of words like an old brick TV left on, an eternal newscast of dread. It’s a spell, some dead-end maze.

How does one escape? Do you even want to? Do you want? The stagnation grows in itself, accumulation like dead things behind a dam. Indulgent misery like vultures to carcasses. But you know how this goes, some part wanting to prove yourself right in the nothingness, that sweet oblivion how she sings to you. This weight is a whirlpool and it’s dragging you down.

You interrupt the newscaster. “Excuse me, I have something to say.” His dribble of nonsensical mumbled half-affirmations halts. Silence like falling, inertia like running in a dream.

“Is this your limit?” You drop the question in your mind like a coin in a wishing well, like poking a sleeping monster. The internal orchestra of lies stops, curling quiet. Little egoic tentacles rise up. These little spells you’ve cast on yourself that keep you sewn to the bed must be cut and cauterized with action. The mind, body, and soul must be synchronized to sever the spells.

You wiggle your big toe, the first act of defiance. “This is not my limit.” Upward thoughts swarm in like little troops to battle the spells. “This bed, this place will not be my tomb.” You pull, spit, strain and pray. Ripping the stitches. Rise up, a crawl, to a walk. A little voice: “Run you fool, run from this place.”

If you’re breathing there is a small flame in you, perhaps just embers, a fire deadened by the waters of sorrow. But there is no place too dark that can’t be exhumed by the light. The flame is fanned with movement. No matter how large that screaming mountain is outside, it will stay above you without the climb. Even if the steps are small they must be taken. Your limbs are yours to take back. Cede no ground, this is a war to be won cell by cell.

There is no hell that can’t be transformed into heaven. But the transformation is through kinesis. You are here to usher yourself through the darkness. A vision of you bathed in light at the top of the mountain beckons you. In order for the topography of anguish to transform you must watch yourself become. Action precedes thought, this is the important paradigm you must remember. In movement your body is showing your mind how to think. Movement breaks the chain, the phonetic loops, the loops of despair. The sorrow will ooze out of your pores, washed out with sweat and blood. Whether you stay chained there to the bed or begin to move you will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But remember that movement begets movement, generative momentum. With this little shift you step out of your thoughts into your body and then usher your thoughts up to you with action. Leaning forward and falling up. Seizing control, shifting to someone who is happening to life, not someone life is happening to.

You can only lie around and bleed for so long. Get up. Cauterize the wounds, then turn the scars into medals. In the midst of hell it tells you that you are weak, but a hell in hindsight will inform your soul of all the strength it possessed to get through it. Turn this kingdom of cold dead ash into a landscape of burning desire. You owe it to yourself to climb that screaming mountain my dear friend, and when you finally arrive at the summit, having washed the ashes from your psyche and healed into someone you’ve never been before, you’ll find yourself staring at the sun with a new pair of eyes and a fuller soul; the light glistening off your blistered skin.

Your greatest wounds are the source of your greatest healing. Whatever you’re most ashamed about, the things you carry deep down, where it’s darkest, sensitive bruises blackened by the kinetic force of things incongruent with what you know to be right, these will remain purple in the wet darkness. Healing requires courage, truth is the great mediator of sorrow, it’s both the incision scalpel and sutures that will heal you up and leave you saying “oh that wasn’t so bad.”

Our society is rife with contortion, twisted for the goal of love, the contortion ironically depriving you of the love you’re attempting to garner. Relationships with little black boxes of “no don’t look in there.” I love you and you love me, but who I was and what I’ve done is nobody’s business, not even my own. “I’m not my past.” Is that true? I’m my past, I mean not all of me is my past, but it certainly informs parts of me. Little things that ricochet around in the dark recesses of my mind, like some sort of temporal bullet of pain biting in the night, intrusive rabid hound dogs. Like buried living corpses, they must be exhumed and put to death with love and truth. Otherwise it isn’t love, it’s mutual projection, that’s all modern love is, mutually assured projection.

There’s this strange paradox of vulnerability and courage in love. Like exposing your neck on a chopping block with the wrong person, or laying on an operating table with the right person. The wrong person will be aghast, yell “Oh the humanity! You’re HUMAN? Why didn’t you tell me!” and leave you there groveling in the dirt searching for your head. But the right person will, not painlessly, but lovingly cut the rotting pieces from your being and kiss it all better. A little phonetic knife trick that says “I love you all the same, thank you for telling me.” While both of these scenarios are not painless, they are ultimately good. The first is good because after you’ve found your head in the dirt, you are free from a lie. The second, preferred option, is you are completely loved for you, not some stupid fantasy world.

A heavy tongue is made light with movement. It is a disservice to yourself and the one you love to not drag the parts of you you’re most ashamed of to the light (most of the time kicking and screaming), for these are the parts of you that need to be loved the most. This is how you honor your counterpart and yourself, to trust their strength to carry burdens you’ve held onto for years. Freedom behind the terror, the treasures of integration and love behind what we fear most. Tensions you’ve assumed are just part of you will melt when the walls of what you think makes you utterly leavable are exposed and destroyed with “I’m not leaving you.” So be brave, exhume, drag the shame, pain, and fear to the one you love’s feet. Give them the opportunity to love all of you. True love is baptized through the fire of truth, a love you know that will stay and you can trust, souls unraveling and basking in the sweet heat of mercy. Honesty unlocking your endocrinal code, lips whispering linguistic confessions like synaptic firing pins. Projection is cowardice, kill the slithering snakes of contortion. Omit nothing. Because if they can’t kiss your darkness, then they don’t deserve your light.

Sterile white, boxes, straight lines. White like laboratories. Oh you’re a little lab rat aren’t you? White like God’s recycling bin. Tell me does this make you feel something? White like the blood of cockroaches. Remember when you used to crawl? Remember when you were human?

Panamanian, I like that, reminds me of Tasmanian, I thought, staring up at the decaying airport ceiling. Modern architecture, modern design, modernity. Modern, Modern, Modern as in right now. But also contextualized as the future? And also an endpoint? The final resting point of all aesthetic evolution. Feels wrong. Open a blank page...that’s modern. Sleek, white, nothingness. It’s as vapid as the vessels it holds. I mean I’m just insulted, since when did reduction become evolution, take away everything, and it’s modern, take away everything... it’s what they think of you.

It’s just so uninteresting, unbridled from inspiration. As if the questioning of God’s existence grew out of the ground. Singular in its aesthetic in that it only gets interesting with decay. Add rot, add rust, peeling paint, and suddenly it’s at least honest. That’s the irony of the thing, a joke impressive in its twistedness, that atrophy is its only hope to make it beautiful. These square white boxes will only move me when they’re eaten by rust. This grey cement will only inspire me when nature cracks it open and begins to swallow it back into the earth. When we take modern art out of the museums and throw it away into meadows, finally it will serve a purpose, to inform us by contrast of how far we’ve fallen short of true beauty.

Design grows out of the human soul, it’s here to inform us of who we are. It is a reflective dance, create something beautiful and suddenly it beckons us to be more. Now look at what we’ve made, a dollar general? What does it tell you? You are cattle, something to be extracted. Your sweat means nothing, you are nothing. An animal wouldn’t live in a tract home, so why should we? Little grey sedans pumped out of factories assembled in four different countries completely disconnected from passion, but oh baby it’s so functional. That’s your new altar, it works so you worship it because you forgot what you are. Billions with amnesia of the soul, modernity is spiritual sickness.

Great big cathedrals built by hand over 400 years by souls screaming I exist. Monuments created by men who knew the thing they bleed for will live past them. Eternal beauty, the tangibility of stone turned into angels staring back at them. Paintings on ceilings like a fever dream of heaven. Something that reaches and stretches and sacrifices beyond the self. Communion with divinity. We do not deserve this until we remember what we are, souls crafted by God to the thrum of eternity, and there should not be a single thing crafted on this earth that doesn’t scream that. Burn the monuments to nothingness, and bury the ones who perpetrated this lie in the plastic white tombs they created.

They’ve stolen everything from you and sold it back as luxury. You’re in a grey apartment. You bought $80 plants that breathe in when you breathe out. Communion every morning, two blue pills washed down with caffeine, your neurons starting to move. But you’re anxious so you open a screen, consume a blue buzz, bathe those neurons till that feeling is in the background and your psychiatric communion has kicked in. $10 a month meditation subscription, a sultry voice sings out and tells you to breathe in plastic vinyl floors and recycled AC. Almost there, your neurons are all lined up...but there’s that feeling still? The blue pills and blue lights and beeps can’t drown it out. The plants, like you, in their little cages scream for home under a pillow of comfort, muffled conformity in a $1,800 apartment that your mom says is ‘nice’. But you’re magic because spells on your tablet bring food to your door, and look at all the tangerines at the grocery store, lined up in picture perfect order picked for your picking. And with the tap of your $60 keyboard that makes just the right noise, money backed by nothing that rules everything is yours...And so why are you so sad?

I was in Colombia with my little brother, the motorcycle rental place believed us when we said we knew how to ride, they shouldn’t have, but then we were off. The traffic is like jazz there, it’s all improvised little machines dancing through jungle streets. We heard about a waterfall from a guy named Howard with great big ears and mischievous eyes at breakfast that morning. Tensions high but hunger for adventure overriding concern for bodily injury we pulled throttle and joined the dance. Wind, sunshine, and glistening palms consumed by our insatiable spirits. Little colorful cars and bikes popcorned around the two timid gringos as we found our foothold. Then like magic as our shoulder blades relaxed the terrifying congealing mass of machines became rhythmic two-step intuition. We were dancing with it, and it felt so good.

Up, up, up into the mountains. Pavement turned to dirt, cities to towns and then shanties. Rolling grassy mountains with cows, Colombian farm houses with tan wrinkled inhabitants. Broken Spanish and charades from a smiling curious stranger when we got lost. Finally a ranch at the base of the trail to the waterfall. The sweet air climbing in as we slipped off our helmets, more charades with laughing kids at our silly dances trying to tell them who we are and where we’re from without words just winks and shakes.

I meandered over to a horse, pretty blue eyes grazed up me as I pushed my hand into her face. What I felt she felt too. An intuitive transference of energy and calm, a somatic melding of peace. My eyes, feet and skin felt the same truth she did, it’s embedded in the trees and dirt, it’s fluttering through the shaking leaves, sunshine dancing on your feet like angel wings. Not something to be bought but a pulsating gift right there at the source that’s so very very free. You don’t work for it out there, there’s no coaxing the calm, the calm is gravity, it’s in the dust and sweat resting on your lips.

In cities we’re two or three orders away from the source of everything, and we’re proud of it. Proud of the very thing that keeps us from the peace we so desperately long for. But somewhere along the line with a linguistic sleight of hand wealth became synonymous with the outsourcing of sweat. Pride definitionally twisted from ‘I built this’ to ‘I didn’t have to build this’. Drowning in excess convenience but starving for anything resembling something real. We’re wallowing in this pervasive ease, this greasy apathy. Is the end point of a thousand generations of struggle and blood supposed to die with the gurgled whimper of a soul drowning in gluttonous consumption? There will never be a pill that cures this violent disconnection from home. You don’t have an anxiety disorder, anxiety is the one thing in your life that isn’t lying to you. But go ahead, outsource, then outsource a little more. Outsource your love to an app, people consumed, swiping left on a bed you’ve turned into a tomb. Outsource sunsets to false prophets at their digital pulpits on the TV, filling your head with a mirage of what it’s meant to be free. Outsource the blood to the slaughterhouses, God to a therapist, and communion to pills. And you’ll pray to yourself in a little white cube, outsourcing sweat because it’s gross and it’s wet. The terrible twisted fate lies at the end of this house of mirrors, graveyards of gluttony, a tomb for shells of souls. And you’ll try to wake in this sleepless dream, but you’ve already been digested by the machine. Irony in the iron bowels of fate that the consuming has consumed all of you.

You’re in an old house at the top of a hill, your skin, like everything else you own, is worn and scratched, because it’s living a life. The dirt here isn’t just something reserved for you to be buried in, you live in it. It’s where toiling is prayer to God, regeneration through labor. It’s where every need is an opportunity to grow your capability, craftsmanship and love embedded in scuffs on a table you built with your hands. Your kids grow like the trees here, their confidence and sovereignty birthed in self-reliance. A love unified through all sunrises. Kinetic salvation, a fight in dandelion fields that crafts your soul to a choir of birds and an orchestra of angel wings. Where you live and die to the sound of God in the glistening sun, working your hands to the bones so the bones can feel the truth, of a soul not sacrificed but cleansed with sweat at the source of everything.