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.