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, 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 second installment. If you haven’t already, please begin with The Climb: Part I.

The Climb: Part II

I begin to think of the incredible sequence of events that brought me to this very precarious point in time and space. I remember getting off the phone with Kate, a tall and freckled beauty with closely shaven copper-red hair and a long, slender, graceful body that belied her clumsy mannerisms. A newly un-closeted (and highly enthusiastic) lesbian, she was one of my very closest friends, and I had the terrible misfortune of being completely and hopelessly in love with her.

Exhilarated by our decision to abandon all we had known and move somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere we had never been. When I got off the phone with Kate, I was anxious to immediately call someone else and share my excitement.  So I called my roommate Allison, a bulimic chef who I happened to be living with at the time in Boston—which itself was ridiculous, since she lived in the room directly next to mine and I could have just walked over or yelled through the wall if I wanted. But I called her anyway, and I told her everything. I told her how we made a drastic life decision to leave school, to do something new. We didn’t know what, and we didn’t know where—but it would really be something, and we were going to do it together! I told her all this, and she expressed her happiness, how wonderful this would be for us, how much we will grow because of this, how….

She suddenly interrupted herself. Read the rest of this entry

A year or two ago i recorded this piece with Ken Wilber during one of the live conference calls at Integral Spiritual Center, and i found the discussion to be absolutely fascinating. Synchronicity has long been a defining texture in my own spiritual path, and was a topic which, until this call, i had never heard Ken speak or write about. Although i can certainly understand his silence around the subject, still i believe that the Integral vision can give us a much more lucid understanding of how synchronicity actually works, beyond the deeply confused interpretations offered by New Agers, Quantum Meta-Physicians, and peddlers of various consciousness-scams such as The Secret.

Do you think the Integral map can help us to better understand the energetic mechanics of synchronicity? Is such an inquiry even useful for integral practicioners? Let me know your throughts!

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Read the rest of this entry