Pilgrimage #3

Learning to trust my intuition - the hard way, some would say.

When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in life. - Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Y2K. The band had just broken up. Matt, Josh, and I had moved from the little tenement apartment next to Congressman Barr’s office to a little brick house on Robin Lane in Marietta.

I was ambling through Barnes & Noble one day and The Artist’s Way practically fell off the shelf into my hands. I was still drinking and smoking, but I desperately wanted to quit. I was working through The Artist’s Way and doing my morning pages. Haji, the Colonel’s buddy with whom I’d just spent a week at Jazz Fest, had given me his book on Buddhist meditation and I had just started meditating in lotus position every day.

I had plenty of time to work on myself because I had just quit the best-paying job of my life (working as an editor for a pharmaceutical company). Almost all of my friends told me I was crazy to quit but (a) it was a pharmaceutical company and I wanted to be an artist, not someone helping get the world addicted to pharma meds; and (b) I was required to be there for 40 hours every week, with almost no work for me to do.

It was the easiest job in the whole world and I was making almost twice the weekly salary I’d made at any other job. (I had started contracting with this company on a work-from-home basis but when that contract ended, one of the higher-ups at the campus offered me a new contract — with the caveat I had to be in the office every day from 9 to 5:30.)

All I had to do was show up on time, clock in, and sit in my cubicle in an empty office on the ground floor until mid-morning, when my manager called me up to her office. At which time I would sit in Gwen’s office with her assistant and this computer dude named Eric and listen to the three of them tell stories until lunchtime.

Some of the stories were pretty good. I remember Eric talking about this time he was in a van with the Geto Boys and Bushwick Bill opened the sliding door of the van and grabbed onto the little hold-bar thingie above the door and started swinging himself in and out of the van as they were speeding along in five lanes of traffic on I-285. Gwen told long stories about growing up Dominican in New York City. Everyone laughed a lot.

But it was empty. Every once in a while I’d have to proofread an email or something but it was basically forty hours of eerie silence punctuated with daily sessions of loud talking and garrulous laughter where I was required to play the role of captive audience.

Julia Cameron told me in The Artist’s Way that once I started meditating, I might experience a temporary dissociation from consensus reality. I guess I’m sort of an extreme person in my sensitivities¹ —

Son coeur est un luth suspendu 
Sitot qu’on le touche il resonne...

but shortly after I started meditating every day, I began getting lost on my way to work. It was a three-mile drive from Robin Lane to the pharma campus but one day I couldn’t remember where to turn. I started panicking and had to pull over in the Big Chicken parking lot till my heart stopped pounding and I could remember which road I needed to take. This happened a couple more times on subsequent days, at different parts of the route.

The second indicator that I probably needed to get the hell out of there was that I started having mini panic attacks at work. When I first started working for this company and only had to go to the campus for a couple of hours every week, the contractors I worked with would always comment about how they must be putting drugs in the water because everyone there was SO nice. If you’ve seen Severance, the inside of the main building at Solvay resembled the refining floor at Lumin. Very quiet, very sparse, very few people. It was weird.

But I started spending an hour or so in this huge empty bathroom on my floor. I’d lock myself in the stall and just sit on the toilet with my pants still on, hiding out in a place where no one was likely to find me. Even as I was doing this, my behavior seemed very strange to me. But the giant, empty bathroom was the only place I felt “safe” at work.

Yeah. That didn’t seem like it was going in a good direction, regardless of how much I was getting paid. So one Friday in May I walked into Gwen’s office and just blurted out that I needed to quit.

Meditation / Instructions

Man, I was wired so tightly. I knew something — many things — had to change.

I was reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and I had certainly read Suzuki’s injunction to treat all thoughts that arise in meditation as clouds floating across the blue sky of mind. In other words, just observe without judging or attaching.

But I either didn’t understand or couldn’t quite get to that level of detachment yet. I’m not sure where I picked up on the idea of spirit guides but I really wanted one. I had met (made up?) a guide I called Big Jack or St. Jack and I was working with him to try to discover my best path forward in life.²

So there I was in my room on a sunny late spring day. From my journal:

Just meditated and felt and feel this overwhelming sense of sadness and aloneness. It seemed as though Big Jack answered me, but from a great distance. That today I need to be alone. That I shouldn’t meet up with G or jam with Lupo but that it is better to be alone. That I will know what I am to do, and soon, but that if Big Jack sounds far away it is because he will answer when I ask him questions but that it is better for me now to not ask but to go through this alone.

Why? What should I reflect on?

What you have learned.

Then I got the message that I need to get to a desolate place. Drive somewhere.

This made me feel tired.

But I was determined to learn to follow my heart and trust my inner guidance.

Driving everywhere and nowhere

It was already the middle of the afternoon. I had about ten bucks cash in my wallet. So I filled up a jug of water from the sink and went down to the walk-out basement where Matt had his lair. Matt was my old college friend and the bass player in the band that had just broken up.

Matt didn’t understand what I was doing with my life at the moment, but he was a real artist and a weirdo and someone who always wanted to help.

I asked if I could borrow his sleeping bag?

“Sure,” he said. “Where are you headed?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Off on another wild goose chase.”

This was my already my third pilgrimage of the new millennium — each of them the result of following a mystical prompt received in meditation.

Matt kind of shook his head but he looked at me with a big sincere smile and told me to stay safe or something to that effect.

I fired up the old green Taurus and headed out of town. In my mind, I was looking for a meadow in the highlands of North Georgia. It looked a lot like the field in Eton, England, where King John signed the Magna Carta, although I don’t believe I fully pieced that bit of information together until the day after.

But I had a feel for this mountain meadow and I had a road map from my previous pilgrimage to the North Georgia mountains, so off I went.

What I was trying to do on these pilgrimages is learn to allow myself to be guided. Part of the problem with this was that I didn’t usually have a clear picture of where I was trying to be guided to. Another challenge was obsessively looking for signs that I was on the right track. Road signs, the shape of a tree, billboards, the words in the song on the radio, you name it.

Don’t know how I ended up in Chatsworth. Drove all over everywhere and nowhere. And didn’t he ramble? Let myself release a couple of outcries for guidance but all in all much less hysteria and more trust than on my last two pilgrimages.

Went through a crazy railroad tunnel in Cartersville, one lane, wood planks bumping up and down under the wheels of the car. Got into Adairsville the back way and laughed to see the Waffle House and Hampton Inn where I stayed before climbing Rocky Mtn on pilgrimage #1.

Wandered back roads, scouting meadows. Saw Darrell’s Auto Repair and David Road and thought I was close (my birth name is Daryl and my brother’s name is David). But my turn down Iron Belt Road out of Cartersville yielded nothing. Found myself going back the way I came.

Got chased by dogs (two boxers, brown one and a black one) up a hill outside of Folsom. Got back in the car and started driving again. Stopped just outside of Waleska — a good turn-off and the car not obvious but the field was choked with knee-high kudzu too thick to walk through.

I wandered into Waleska a second time after stopping for a nature break at a T-road crossing, watched by cows on Mt. Olive Church Road. Nothing there. Turned around to take a chance on Little Refuge Road but there was no refuge to be found there.

Felt a call for Jasper on the map so I headed northeast out of Waleska on highway 108. It was getting dark and I stopped in the too-well-lit trucking parking back lot of a lone truck stop at the junction of Hwys 108 and 5. Had a good poop in the truck stop bathroom and bought a pack of smokes from the kind and wandering-eyed attendant.

Soon enough out of Jasper and found myself in Ellijay.

In a cloud

It was night and I hadn’t come close to finding my meadow. But I wasn’t going home empty-handed! I stopped and pulled out the map — it offered no guidance. Everything seemed the same. I threw the map down on the floor of the back seat and popped in Tom Waits’ Early Years, Vol. 1 for a little soul comfort. I started driving again, rolling slowly through the dark, quiet little mountain town.

No more maps now, don’t care anymore. All this way my heart has been aching, feel like I’m in mourning. Mourning perhaps the loss of the map I’ve used for so long to get around in the world = “my way” of seeing and doing things.

I saw a sign for Hwy 2/52 with another sign that said “Steep Grade Next 22 Miles” and I knew I’d take it. I didn’t know which direction it was going — for the next hour or so, crawling along a narrow mountain road in near pitch blackness (no streetlights on the back mountain roads of the South), I thought I was heading east and south but I’d realize the next morning that I had actually travelled west and a little north.

There was no other traffic up there but me at that time of night, so — despite the rhythmic intrusion of thoughts of peril, thoughts of doom, and thoughts telling me I was doing it all wrong — what were you fucking thinking, man?! — and the bodily fear that accompanies those thoughts (always: whether we possess the capacity to allow ourselves to be aware of that fear or not) — I picked my way slowly along that steep mountain road until I reached a little crescent-shaped scenic overlook.

It had started to rain and the road was dark and I felt so sad and tired, I pulled the car up close to the metal guardrail and stopped for the night.

So after all those perambulations, I ended up not in a grassy wet meadow but alone in the mountains. I sat cross-legged against my rear tire on the asphalt and meditated, eyes open, watching the blinking lights down in the valley and feeling the light rain tick against my cheeks and head.

The rain was coming down harder now, and I got back into the car and curled up in Matt’s sleeping bag on the passenger seat. I cracked the window for fresh air and tried to explain to the Great Creator what I was feeling. I planned to tell him about all the things I didn’t understand about my life. Why does it have to be so hard? I’m full of so much sadness and I don’t know what to do about it!

But, laying back on the passenger seat in all of that dark and stillness, I only seemed able to ask forgiveness of people I’d trespassed against in the past and thank the GC for my wonderful life. The rain got heavier and heavier and beat against the roof of the car and I feel asleep and slept mostly peacefully, waking every now and then to a roll of thunder so deep and hard it seemed to shake the mountain or even be coming from inside the mountain.

When I woke in the morning, the rain had lightened and I was inside a cloud. The mist covered everything. I was alone, hidden from view on my own private mountain range. I stepped over the guardrail and walked down a footpath. I picked a pink flower at the base of a tree, smelled the sharp, soft scent of the pines. A little further on I climbed atop a cement picnic table and suddenly I could see, above the clouds, two or three ridges across the valley in the distance.

“Funny how three extra feet of elevation can change the world.”

I walked back up to the car, feeling refreshed and lighter than I had felt in days. I rolled up the sleeping bag, pulled out my journal and pen, and began to write:

The clouds sit in the valleys in puffs, lagoons, and sea-sprays. And great long fjords. To the edge of perspective the mountains ripple like great fixed waves, green-black, a sea changed in an instant to stone and wood and leaf, fixed there for what the human mind terms “all time.”

When the higher clouds drop down then maybe you catch a glimpse of ridge closer by, a hump blue-black in the near distance. Beyond, all is swamp of cloud and the world seems small indeed. Only sound the constant rain, now dancing lightly on your head, on the green weeds, on the leaves of the trees beneath your feet, beating steady like the sound of far-off tribal drummers.

Why am I so afraid? Why, when I know that I am always taken care of, do I fear so much? Especially at times when so little is “at stake”?

I think this persistent sadness, this feeling of mourning, may be also a compassion for me — for all those years I lived in fear, tensed for an attack that was sure to come, on the defensive against life. Waiting for the mean, disciplinarian Daddy God to bring the belt down on my ass.

I guess growth always occurs incrementally. I realize how much of my God-imagination is still tainted by that father-figure projection. I can say that I trust, and I have certainly begun to trust (six months ago, there is NO way I’d be out here with less than five bucks to my name, having deliberately let my funds go to zilch in answer to “a message I keep getting”).

But part of me still expects God to go: “Ha! What are you going to do now?” — when/if I awake broke and jobless one day soon. Granted, I can borrow money from someone till I can get some source of income going, but I am giving myself a chance to trust the Great Creator wants me to write and play music, and that he will provide a way for me.

I mourn your life of fear, brother D. I grieve for all of the times you have wanted to stop living, the fear and pain and sadness and loneliness seeming too much to bear. I applaud your will to keep striving. You know that you were the vehicle of my birth and I thank you for forging on. Now let the dead bury their dead.

I got out of the car, stretched, and took one last look at the mountains and the valley below me. It was time to head on down the mountain. There was no way I could have anticipated what would happen next.

Read the rest of this story here:

1. I wasn’t always at Roderick Usher levels of sensitivity, but it often felt that way during the years of my transition from full-time alcoholic to sobriety.

2. I’ve been debating on how much commentary to add to this account of past experiences. I’m leaning towards just presenting the story as it happened and doing a separate post with commentary. What I will permit myself to interject here is that “spirit guides” totally exist. And many of them are not who or what they purport themselves to be. Mastering the art of discernment is crucial to navigating the spiritual path and life in general.