Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature, this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

This is the fifth and final installment of an ongoing series. If you haven’t already, please begin with The Climb: Part I.

We step onto the massive stone body of the Sioux, what appeared to be the ruins of an age-old epic battle between titan and medusa. We sense a profound air of sacredness as our feet plant themselves on the monument—talk about standing on the shoulders of giants; they don’t get much more giant than this.

Looking up, his visage towers above us. It is indescribably massive—we had just seen Mt. Rushmore before coming here, being only a twenty minute drive away, and felt the obligatory awe and wonderment and pseudo-patriotism that comes along with seeing the forefathers staring off into the horizon.

“Wow, George, Abe, Tom, and the other guy—who is that again? Wow. Okay let’s go smoke a bowl.”

Mt. Rushmore was mildly impressive, though cliché had certainly eclipsed genuine admiration, like seeing Niagara Falls after watching Superman II a dozen times as a kid. But this—this is different. This is intense! It is overwhelming—his face is eighty-five feet tall, his immense proboscis looming forty feet above us, nostrils flared in proud defiance. It is absolutely breathtaking.

I stand there, wrapped in reverie as I attempt to internalize what is happening. I think of the whole escapade, the delicate precision of circumstance that placed us exactly where we are. I think of Aphex’s birth at the inception of the very idea to leave home, as well as her role in our decision to climb up here. I think of the randomness of deciding to move to Oregon, and how surprised I was that I had chosen Oregon—almost like throwing a dart at a map. I think of the tragic irony of Kate’s decision to stay behind, and how my transportation somehow manifested through her decision. I am most definitely in some sort of Kerouacian bardo realm, on the road in-between lifetimes, dying to myself while being born for the very first time. Read the rest of this entry

Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature, this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

This is the fourth installment. If you haven’t already, please begin with The Climb: Part I.

Here we are, still as the petrified Sioux we are perched upon, waiting to see what will become of us. I look down to my companions. Sean is directly behind me, Nena (a squat Russian hippie girl who was accompanying our cross-country journey) a few yards behind him. We exchange exhilarated grins. None of us can believe we are where we are. I think of the absurdity of it all, sharing such an intimately pivotal and defining experience with people I hadn’t known before a few days ago.

It was another string of oddly threaded circumstance that brought us together to share this experience, commencing with Kate’s decision not to move to Oregon with me. In so many ways she had been the hinge of my decision—I would not have been able to make such a drastic decision alone. I was too accustomed to fear to do something so bold. But she had come to the conclusion that it would be in her (and my) best interest not to come with me. She broke my heart. I was hoping that, after nearly two years of unilateral desire, this would finally bring us together, forcing our two souls to merge in the crucible of a single big experience.

So when she withdrew, I felt a tremendous rug being pulled from beneath my feet. But this decision had already snowballed, having reached such a momentum that I really felt that if I allowed this to fall through, no one—including myself—would ever be able to take me seriously again. So I was going to do it alone, picking up my roots and transplanting them to the other side of the continent. I would wait to see what happens. This was going to be a challenge, to both my personal integrity as well as to my faith. Read the rest of this entry

Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature, this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

This is the third installment. If you haven’t already, please begin with The Climb: Part I.

The Climb: Part III

It was quite literally because of Aphex the Cat that we were up here, perched on this mountain-sized monument carved deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota. She was, when it comes down to it, the one who made the decision to violate the clearly posted NO TRESSPASSING signs to become a little more acquainted with the famous Sioux’s massive effigy.

I had paid twenty dollars to see this monument, which I first became fascinated with while watching a documentary about its construction on the Discovery channel. It was a privately funded tribute to Crazy Horse, a massive statue carved from an entire mountain. I remember hearing that the United States had offered the family in charge of its construction however many millions of dollars it would require to finish the project within the next ten years. The family declined the offer, however, as they did not believe it was appropriate for the U.S. government to front money for a tribute to the Native Americans. Read the rest of this entry

Note: This piece was originally written almost ten years ago.  Though my voice, my style, and my realization were still fairly immature (compared with the ever-so slightly less immature voice, style, and realization i now possess), this piece is a celebration of one of the most sacred experiences of my life, and wanted to share with you all.

The full piece is rather long, so i have decided to serialize it into five consecutive installments, which will be published here throughout the week.

The Climb: Part I

“One day I will leave this world and dream myself to Reality…” Crazy Horse, 1874

We are surrounded.  On all sides, a horde of mechanical dinosaurs roar their thunderous roars, ricocheting chaotically off the rubble. The stone wall of the mountain reflects the noise in all directions, flooding our ears with liquid concrete, entombing us in sonic opacity. It is a symphony of white noise that shifts and undulates with each movement of the head. There is no way of telling where the industrial growl is coming from; it sounds like they are everywhere. As our paranoia approaches a boil, so does the intensity of our aspiration—we had come this far; there is no turning back now.

Where am I? I am somewhere in between dreams, surfing the turning page in between chapters. What am I doing? I am fleeing a former me, reaching for a deeper I, struggling to create myself anew, molding my self into something meaningful, something real. In a flash I had seen my own Face, and I yearned to chisel out some vague likeness within myself. Read the rest of this entry