In a week, I’ve moved from coastal North Carolina, over the Great Mississippi, through the rolling, nestled cove of Hot Springs, Arkansas, the land reminding me of home, and finally shot out into the great wide open of Texas on the Fourth of July, a place that feels incredibly dissimilar to everywhere I've ever been.
I had a breakdown in my car, crying for a solid hour, feeling lost and out of sorts. I started a new meditation practice. A mysterious rash appeared on my back. I stayed in a shitty motel and saged the fuck out of it (and me). Back in the wilderness, I tried a medicine from the Amazon that reconnected me to my body, heart, spirit, and the earth.
In Pisgah National Forest, I sang songs with a dear friend from back home, camping on top of a waterfall and watching meteorites dart across the sky all night. He has a way of putting everything into perspective and has, again and again, served as a crucial reminder that there is no separation between my daily life and my spiritual life, that you do the work every day.
I took my car, who was not too fond of me at the time, up narrow, steep roads to the top of a mountain in Western North Carolina, where a shaman lives; we talked about mysticism, psychedelics, crystals, hemp farming, Asheville, and adolescence late into the evening, and I fell asleep beside his mesa, an elaborate altar laid out on the floor. (Things you only hear in Asheville: “I was vegan for the 10 years that I studied shamanism. I follow the intuitive diet now.” These people speak my language.)
I drank homemade moonshine in eastern Tennessee, the smoothest I’d ever had, which instantly, seemingly magically, cured me of a UTI. I talked journalism (“I really just want to write books!” we both agreed) with the woman who hosted me, Pepper, another writer who went to the same high school as me and, coincidentally, as we’d learn years later, is my fourth or fifth cousin, our families both emigrating from Italy to Pittsburgh in the early 1900s.
More miles down the road, and I was digging as deep as I could, shovel in hand, into the thick red Arkansas mud for two days in the heat, mining for quartz crystals near Hot Springs. Sweat was dripping off of my forehead and rolling into my eyes, my entire body and hair covered in dirt, hands bleeding, eyes and smile widening every time I found another one, as if it were gold, these clear-as-glass, geometric treasures growing in the dirt.
Life on the road is accelerated. Think about every important person you’ve ever met, the changes in jobs and homes and lovers and how that’s all affected you over the years, and then imagine them as a tightly-bound series of vignettes, strung together within a matter of weeks. These weeks have felt like they hold the weight of years. When you wake up in one city and go to bed in another, life begins to blur together. It’s almost too much to process. Each day holds its own gems of experience that have shifted my perspective and awareness and fundamentally altered who I am. It’s rapid growth that you don’t get while staying in one place, no matter how connected to the rest of the world you feel by peering through a screen.
This acceleration was enhanced by the total solar eclipse this week, which always brings a sort of quickening, as if pushing or pulling you through a portal into the next version of yourself, putting you where you need to be, leaving you stunned and raw.
As my car I entered Texas, I felt as if I had driven into a different country. It was the first time during my travels that I felt an indescribable sort of panic, feeling so far away and removed from everything familiar, and way too far from the coast. Speed limit 75. Crazy drivers. Big truck tracks going off into the mud in the strip of grass between highways. Nothingness everywhere. A lonely sort of nothingness I hadn’t ever felt. Billboards for guns. Texas is like “bam!” Texas is loud and brash. The sky really is bigger.
I woke up with the “what the fuck am I doing?” thoughts that have a way of occasionally springing up in a violent sort of frenzy. Why am I in a motel room in Texas? Themes from a conversation/argument with a friend the other night rippled through my head. He is one of a few people I’m close with who is not totally in favor of me doing this. “What is it all for?” he asked. “Are you gonna come back to reality like the rest of us?”
I’m doing this now. That’s all I know.