2003 – Tacoma (Washington) … (04/03/08)
After my 45+ day stint in the “spiritual wilds” of southern Mexico, I returned to the United States in search of a place of solitude in which to digest what I had learned and experienced there. Arriving in San Diego with five dollars to my name, I really didn’t know where that sanctuary would be found, only that San Diego was definitely not “it” …
Fortunately, I rediscovered a very old frequent-flier account for Northwest Airlines in my name — one that hadn’t been used in over a decade, and the only flight available for me that evening was to the Sea-Tac airport (located between Tacoma & Seattle, Washington). I had attended graduate school in Tacoma some ten+ years prior, and had also spent many a summer from 1994 to 2000 visiting there. How wonderful that I was being allowed to return Home again!
Rebecca Jean, the good friend who had graciously allowed me to sleep on her sofa during those previous visits, agreed to do so again — and I spent all of July, August, September and most of October there. It was at this time that I began to digest all that had happened to me the past two+ years — especially the implications of my recent adventures in Mexico. For the first time in my life, I engaged an early-morning Time of Solitude, where I walked to a nearby park (Wright Park — an amazing oasis in the north end of Tacoma), sat on a bench underneath a small copse of dogwood trees, and meditated/prayed for about an hour each morning.
I also procured a 3/4-time job at a local Shell gas station as an attendant/convenience-store clerk. It was here, especially during the grave-yard shifts I happened to work, that I had numerous encounters with some amazing individuals — “denizens” of both the city’s homeless and its counter-cultural communities … I learned an immense amount from these friends; lessons I still cherish to this day — about what it means to “succeed”, about how to be a “good person”, about what it takes to “survive” and about how to do so in non-traditional & meaning-full ways.
I was also reading alot during these days, mostly the entire works of Carlos Castaneda, with some from Trogyam Trungpa, Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist), and others mixed in. It was during one of these stints of literary immersion that what can only be described as an Epiphany hit me, and I immediately got up from the sofa and commenced typing, without pausing for sleep or sustenance, an 80-page outline of “The Way” — a treatise that was to synthesize the core beliefs and values of all the world’s religions into a manual that would give its readers practical access to the Inner Peace that their “masters” all promised.
After doing so, it became clear that, while Tacoma had been the cauldron where the ingredients for my new Life-Mission needed to be gathered, it was not the crucible were that Mission would take its final form. I needed to set forth again — to a place that was Sacred, where I could test the principles and Truths with which I had been blessed. I needed to both create and engage a grand social experiment. I needed to test myself what I had felt so long to be true: that Love need have no bounds, that selflessness was a practical concept that functioned for everyone, that “radical kindness” towards one’s foes was the most reasonable option to resolve any conflict.
And so, with humble willingness to go wherever I could best learn what was necessary to learn, I spun my finger on the globe (no kidding!), and it landed on the Big Island of Hawaii. This “coincidental” choice was affirmed over the next several days, as I began to receive “random” emails from people who lived on that island’s west-side, one of which was an actual invitation to attend a Harmonic Concordance ceremony there that November! Admittedly still more-than-a-bit skeptical, I resolved to follow through on this completely irrational method of choosing my next destination — saving up the money for a one-way ticket to Honolulu, and heading there in late-October with only a backpack of possessions and the $5.00 that Rebecca Jean had secreted into my carry-on sack …
… and the adventure started anew!
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