What the experience has been for me to have spent three years alone in the desert, there was only one time that one person visited, which is a funny thing to say, because what does that say about me?
Well, it says about me that I'm the least likable person on Earth, but that I did prune away a lot of human relationships that I didn't wanna drag along with me into my heavy trip of extreme extremism.
And so there were definitely some folks that I really did hope would come by and visit, even in my times of need and extreme health crisis and whatnot, and it was just too far away, and people were just busy living their lives.
I could be very depressed about that experience, but I kind of designed it that way, so I'm not bitter about it, I accept it.
It just meant for me that was an extreme experience of hermitage.
I got what I signed up for, which was total isolation and that definitely put mileage on my mind.
The struggle that we all have to be the masters, the guardians of our mind space, or thought space.
I've mentioned it many times before, you don't have to be a shamanologist, as it were, to go to any Skid Row area of any modern city and find people who have been hacked, basically by whatever you wanna call them, they have successfully hacked human minds so that they can take full advantage...I would like to say the word possess them. But that's a little bit too culture bound.
So that struggle, that being in public, being in society, it helps for that struggle to be easier to repress. It always has to be repressed, because you can't go to work and be screaming at your childhood traumas unless that's your job. That's great if you can find a job like that.
Most people are forced to repress their screaming inner child for whatever reason that inner child is screaming, you have to silence it in order to be in public.
And so there's pros and cons. I'll start with the cons. We have a lot of unprocessed wounds that only seem to fester more and more without various forms of very holistic healing.
Then the pros of that, we're not all just broken and fetal all the time, crying and unable to serve any higher purpose than our own suffering.
So striking that balance of healing and participating in society.
Being alone for three years forced me to experience the absence of not just the energetic force field, of a buoyant group of people who support each other emotionally and have fun together and play games and dine and dance and sing, and all the things that I hope we're all doing to stay as a community.
Just as a society, to stay cohesive and sane and and kind and courteous, and having things to look forward to, and not having too many regrets.
Once you fade out of that, or you stray from that, or you get shunned, or whatever puts you on skid row, you're at high risk of having total deterioration of that force field of protection on your mind, and then it just spirals into hell on Earth.
Not I wasn't born on the street, but I was a street kid for a number of years on and off.
I've always, since then, pretty much tended to in one way shape, or form, to live on the street or be without normal household shelter.
A lot of my life has been spent weaving in and among people who had lost their minds for whatever reason, to drugs, to alcohol, to trauma, to real, biologically determined mental illnesses and whatnot.
I feel like I have been able to stay on my feet and land like a cat on my feet when I fall from life circumstances, as I have many times.
But this process that I'm explaining, I don't know how many people spend more than a few days ever in their life really alone and I spent three years alone.
I did have conversations with people but I had no regular daily communications with anyone, maybe some business here and there, and some friendly phone calls here and there.
But I was content to do what I was doing. I talked about it, documented it at length.
But it does intensify that struggle to be the master of your inner sanctum, because this is where it comes full circle with this point, is that when you're alone, you're not distracted from those inner battles.
You're not distracted from them by someone showing up and striking up a conversation with you or inviting you to go out or telling you it's time to cook for them, or that they're cooking for you.
And all those ways that we hold each other's attention in this volley, even if it's fighting, even if it's toxic, abusive, whatever, it's still having an effect, for better or worse, is still having an effect on pulling us out of ourselves to have to be aware and attuned to, situationally aware to social cues.
That consumes bandwidth that is therefore then not available to those shadow patterns of the mind, whether you give them sentience or not. I certainly do and I'm not gonna go too much into that spirituality piece, not here but however you explain it, the phenomenon exists. The mind is very fragile the mind is very hackable.
There are forces out there hacking mind and if you don't believe me, go to Skid Row, where I've spent a lot of time securing my mind from mind hacking stuff.
I think I've done alright.
At least I'm a high functioning wacko at this point. But going to the desert for three years by myself, put the wackometer in the red, but I don't threaten people. I don't threaten myself. I just like to be a humble gardener and try to green the desert, which I was able to do to very small degree.
But now, because I have been extricated, I don't wanna say liberated, but I've been extricated by circumstances that I'm not gonna go into detail about.
But I am mobile again, and I am reuniting with my tribe, my tribes that I've been associated with in my public life, in my engaged in society life, really in underground communities that are very tribal, tribalistic, in a good way, not in a bad way.
There's mutual aid and there's care and concern and support and having each other's backs. Doing things together and just keeping each other in that volley of social conversation and social activity so that nobody sinks into the abyss of themselves, lest they be attacked and dog piled by forces that they can no longer fight off on their own.
It's like being in a gang. It's the idea of being alone in a rough neighborhood, gang land. If you're not in a gang, you're easy prey. So psychologically speaking, that is the dynamic I'm talking about.
I think if you don't understand that, or you don't believe that, then we can have the conversation privately. We do know that all too well. And that's why people are terrified, usually of being alone, and for a good reason, because that's where their demons hide, that's where they're most vulnerable to attack.
And you can take that metaphysically or figuratively, or however you want, let's just call it negative thought patterns that we all endure to some degree or another.
And we're not all Zen masters or trained experts at meditation, therefore we have to fight them off like flies with the flies swatter.
And the beautiful thing about being around people is that it's a collective effort, and it makes the job a lot easier, and it just consumes and absorbs the bandwidth of attention.
Because you can't be overly attentive to the screaming inner child or the screaming demonic voices, if you will, you have less time and attention that they can seize upon.
That's what, again, is so beautiful about just, I mean, it's so obvious, it's such a no brainer. That's why we seek and yearn for those connections.
It's a real shame when we lose them or that we don't share them, and then we shun, or exclude people.
And then there's cruelty, one of my favorite teachers of what you could call shamanology, made a statement about this.
You should learn in childhood learn to not be cruel. And if you didn't learn that in childhood, something really went wrong because it's to be expected that immaturity in childhood development is gonna lead to different forms of cruelty.
We really hope that there are mechanisms in place at all levels of age, that there's intervention in that type of cruelty. Whatever it is to where you mature by saying, you know what I could make fun of that person because for how they look or how they talk, whether they're smart or not, but I'm not going to because I understand the cruelty is harming me and harming everything.
And it's not just a cheap thrill to put someone down. There's a place for comedy. There's a place for satire, a place for poking fun at each other in a playful way and being cautious and careful about taking that too far.
That's the difference between cruelty and being playful. Hopefully we're good at saying things like I was just playing and then it works.
Sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes people take things very seriously. But I'm just again saying that right now I'm reintegrating with society and thinking through all of these nuances of what the fabric of society does to keep people sane and to keep people from being cruel to themselves or to others. Or just becoming instruments of malice.
That's really important that we do not ourselves become instruments of malice, nor do we let anyone that we care about, and even strangers, people we don't care about...
So charitable works, of course, come into play with just, wow, there's a lot of lost souls out there.
And gee, how could you expect them in that distraught state of human ecology and ecology of the mind out there?
On Skid Row it's very rare to see people beaming loving light and positivity, but they are out there.
So this reentry experience of culture shock, of being alone for three years and then reintegrating.
It's really nice.
It's really nice to have a break from the inner battles that are intensified in that experience, that crucible of aloneness, to be back in the volley of conversation and for attention to be absorbed in this beautiful, sort of array, this kaleidoscopic array of beautiful, smiling people.
And beautiful, in a sense of just showing up in a collective public space of whatever a household or a backyard party or concert or whatever it is, a restaurant and just enjoying each other's company and keeping each other afloat.
A good metaphor for me, it's like the tendency, the nature of the beast of the mind, is that, really, you're always sinking into the shark infested waters, and you are forced to tread that water to just stay alive.
And some people, they do really well, and they can navigate and perform very well relative to others.
And then some people are just barely, barely able to stay afloat by kicking and screaming and just trying to tread water.
But we all have to move. We all have to tread that water, otherwise we will sink into the abyss.
It's waiting for all of us, and dementia is waiting for all of us at some point too.
So it's inevitable that we will lose our minds.
The question is, what kind of fight do you put up for your mind between now and your inevitable inability to put up that fight at all? If you live long enough to deteriorate just from old age.
So we're treading water, and then I like the idea of, okay, so we're all treading water in our own battle, but maybe there's a way that we can help each other stay afloat.
I've seen a lot of circumstances where ants will form a raft with each other to stay afloat when it rains, or if they're trapped.
And I've seen that even in my own life, not just in nature documentaries.
I've seen ants perform those tasks of engineering, civil engineering to survive in water and supporting each other to do it.
So I know there's all kinds of different examples in nature of mutual aid between and among species, if they sense distress and they render help.
And that is what we do for each other to just be friends and to be engaged with each other.
I'm so humbled by those three years out there.
I just beam appreciation to everyone, pretty much everyone. I mean, every day I say probably, I don't know, at least ten to a hundred times “blessings be to all”.
Blessings be to all.
I don't have to say it like a mantra, words repeated until my mind is numb, although that would be very useful if I really got stuck somehow.
But, but if I ever feel a negative thought or a judgmental or critical thought about anyone, I immediately do a redirect and say, blessings be to all.
Because even if I have a reason to justify, be mad at them for wronging me in some way, or just need having a reason to dislike them.
I still just wanna bless them, because whatever they're doing wrong, needs blessings to be done right.
So blessings be to all. And I just have that profound sort of new lease on life and that near death experience, kind of reboot, that Scrooge effect, the Dickens pattern is what some people have called it.
How do you shift and change after you have been just literally brought to your knees of almost total demise.
I was turning to dust in the desert one day at a time.
And it was extreme the pain and suffering and disability that I experienced at the most extreme pits of not despair, but pits of just being just destroyed by the elements.
If I wouldn't have been extracted, and I had to spend another summer out there, looking back at having been extracted, I say, I don't know that I would have made it.
Getting out of there probably did save my life, and now I have to reintegrate.
So some of the comedy here, just anecdotes of so now I'm this caveman.
I've been out in the desert by myself for three years.
I still had an Internet connection. I was able to stay up with technology, and I was not isolated from communications, but just the public routine.
There was a lot of culture shock to relearn things like signing my name on paper even, that's rare for most people anyway, but.
To be under pressure to perform tasks like that it's almost like forgetting what glass is, and then walking into glass walls and doors, because you don't expect there to be a barrier there.
There's been some, some antics, almost that ridiculous on my part, just some funny vertigo situations.
But luckily, at least driving is very fish in water kind of thing, like riding a bike.
I'm very cautious when I drive, so that snapped right back together.
But just a million things of reintegrating, trying to think of, oh, just the other day, realizing how dangerous it is to ever be in a rush at any level, because I would have been walking on the sidewalk if I had been a few minutes earlier.
But now I'm remembering, oh, what it's like to be in society and civilization be a few minutes late for an appointment, and then the peril that you put yourself in to hurry in this treacherous world of objects, heavy metal, objects, flying at tens of miles an hour, more than you could ever dodge or ever anticipate flying in all these directions around you.
And you can be operating one of those death machines yourself, but to be a pedestrian and to be in a hurry, or to be in a motorist, or be in a hurry, cyclist, whatever it is, it gets really scary and really dangerous.
For me to have to reboot a lot of that when I actually walked off a sidewalk because I was a little bit late.
And so if I had been a few minutes earlier, I would have been walking slowly and I may have just had no reason other than to walk on the curved path to the sidewalk.
But what I chose to do since I was late, was a foolish maneuver, but we would all do that without thinking for the most part.
But it had been so long since I had done that. It wasn't lining up for me, right? So I make a straight line as opposed to a, curved line to get through a parking lot to a door and I'm just thinking about okay I'm a little bit late I need to get to that door I'm gonna make a straight line. At that moment, I could have been run over.
That's why j-walking is illegal, because you could be doing it very distracted, and then get run over.
So I could have gotten run over. It was just a little driveway, so it wasn't highly probable.
I’m just thinking through these things that we take for granted.
As someone who was in the desert for three years, yes, when I looked at the door and I wanted to be through that door now. So what did I do? I went in a straight line and didn't follow the sidewalk, and I could have been run over or hit and injured.
But the sillier thing is that I just walk off the curb, and I don't really adjust my footing so I could have injured my ankle. I could have twisted an ankle or fallen or hyper extended and caused an injury to myself and luckily I just was able to shrug it off.
Then I was thinking, now three years equals a hundred million times more surveillance cameras and drones and mobile devices.
So now everything ridiculous is recorded.
It's funny because I get to the appointment and I couldn't figure out how to get in the door.
I knocked on the door and I realized how quaint, the people in there think that I must be completely insane and they've got to be worried about me because I knock on a door and I don't know well that looks like it could be some kind of intercom thing.
It's not really that well explained. And as technology evolves, if you turn your back on it for a minute, next thing you know, if they don't recognize your face, you don't get to use the restroom or something. So you never know what's gonna happen next.
If you step out of it, you come back to it, and you feel like you're on another planet where or you were in a time machine and you were teleported to another place and time.
So luckily, I'm surviving this process and trying to be as cautious as I can.
But this is just a friendly reminder, a PSA.
Don't rush and just get there as early as you can and occupy yourself. I'm taking this advice myself, I normally am very, extremely early and punctual to almost anything I possibly can be.
And so this was just not so gentle a reminder, but luckily, not too extremely painful.
But these things are what I'm dealing with. So it's a comedy show unto itself, of going from three years in the desert alone to feeling like you're in the future on a bizarre planet.
I am used to being in the sand, this sandbox is very forgiving. I can fall on it, I can roll on it. I cannot twist my ankle in it if I'm careful about not stepping in burrows and whatnot.
But things like concrete and the concrete jungle, I've lived my life as a street guerrilla, it's a concrete jungle gym for me. I'm very spry in the concrete jungle and always have been.
I'm not clumsy. But coming out of the desert, I feel very clumsy and I am very clumsy so I'm just trying to get that spry ninja urban jungle gym self back and it's all there but it's gonna take a little bit of time.
Hopefully I just continue to improve.
Things like, oh, I just open a car door and then scratch it on the curb, stuff like that.
I mean, we still all do that kind of stuff all the time, no matter if you did it a thousand times, but absent mindedness, and then things happen.
So here we are in the world of high stakes and high hazard and toxins and poisons.
How does it fuel to go from fresh clean air to being just crushed, soul crushing smog and soul crushing fumes and toxins everywhere that are very acute after having not experienced them for so long?
Luckily, I'm not having panic attacks. I'm not having any kind of extreme reaction.
But part of me does wish that I could just be back in the desert.
But I've got some work to do, some missions to accomplish that are above and beyond my personal narrative of wanting to detach and liberate myself from civilization.
There are people who need my help, who have asked for it, and that have those callings, the call of those duties has kept me out of my own mind and on purpose, with higher purposes, to serve people and movements that are bigger than myself, and to be a part of that fabric where it's just so nourishing and invigorating, life affirming, to be eating food together with people and sharing that experience of the culinary arts and hospitality.
And me being able to give back and roll my sleeves up and apply myself to people's properties, and do what I love to do, and that's to be of service with permaculture.
So I'm back in action, and some cobwebs and some rust need to be worked through.
There were some bleak moments, and I guess I'll say that probably the most, not so comedic, but the more dramatic or the darker tone, I'm not gonna go too much into it.
It's very personal.
What I will say is that. I wasn't deluding myself being out there alone, saying, I'm willing to meet my fate out here.
This is a beautiful place to live and die.
I had all that engineered in my mind that this is the hill I'm willing to die on.
And if I have to do it alone in pain, I will.
And I almost did. For for various reasons.
I said I was done with civilization. I was done with society.
I only wanna interact with people who I love and who love me and who are willing to come on my land on my terms, and that it ended up being one person.
So shout out to that one person. Because what does that say about that person and me?
It says something very important.
There were a couple of other people who came out to deliver me things so that I would survive.
But because it was off grid and off road, and most people have two wheel drives, it was not feasible.
It was only the one person who rented a four by four who actually came and hung out.
That, again, was by design. I cut myself off. I made myself an island.
No man is an island, except for me. For three years, I was an island.
And so the dark thing that I'll share, one of them, but kind of in a very simplified way is that my dreams, my ambitions, my creative aspirations as they began to die they became sour and were rotting in my mind.
The idea of I should have accomplished more with this endeavor. I should have been more acknowledged and recognized for my work in this field of music or art or film or whatever, all these things that I tried so hard to be successful at, to be independent and freed by financially, that I would get the attention that I desired.
Just enough to break free from the nine to five and to pay my bills and support my creative pursuits, not to be decadent whatsoever.
I could be the most frugal and humble, non decadent, starving artist.
As long as I can just pay my bills and not have to work, I will sleep under a bridge, in a car, in a truck, whatever, just to have that freedom so that I can feel creative passions and express myself in a way that's in service.
That's been the prayer. But when you end up in the desert alone like that, you start to see that, well, making this trade off, I'm really starting to die to the world, dead to the world in a lot of ways.
And so this is dark. But at one point, I was a very I wouldn’t say, virtuoso, but I was a very dedicated guitar player.
And I recorded many albums, several were respected among certain fans of certain genres and whatnot, an icon of sorts, to a degree, an underground icon.
I just started in all that time alone, think about how that journey of being a guitarist, it was like a vessel. It took me places, for sure. Took me on tours. It opened doors for me.
It didn't make me rich. It didn't make me famous. But it took my life in directions.
It allowed me mobility in certain directions. One thing led to another.
Then I was able to buy my way out of the system and buy my way onto land.
But the mixed blessing of that is that, okay, now here I am and because I wasn't financially successful enough, I kind of just have to settle with what I'm left with.
So I got to a point where I didn't wanna hear guitars in movies or music. I still had power, my solar power, still had my devices and my collections of films and music.
But it started to...like the walls closing in on my dying dreams.
I don't wanna hear guitars. I'll turn them off if I start to hear him, because it just pains me to be reminded that I failed in that pursuit.
So again, it gets grim. It can get very grim and very like you shouldn't be that self obsessed and absorbed.
It becomes all you and your regrets and your good memories, your bad memories, certainly I had a very powerful and potent dream life and that was my refuge.
Though waking life was often demoralizing and really very much like Jacob's Ladder, almost in a way of just feeling like things are being torn apart or taken away, and you're holding on to them.
So I just didn't wanna be triggered by the sound of guitars, because it make it would make me feel like, oh, there's no way now to have a second chance with that, I can't pursue that anymore it's done. It's over. I just don't want to be reminded of it that because I failed at it and that's pretty dark.
Then the same would be for the various other endeavors that I wanted to pursue, love and relationships.
I guess a lot of people in solitary confinement, or people who are in outdoor prison camps, and people are put in holes...
I put myself in that experience knowingly willingly. I didn't read a lot of books about it.
I didn't have a lot of preparation for it. I wasn't really intending for it to be as protracted as it was.
It became a financial sort of a dilemma that kept me out in that strange state for that long.
It got harder, not easier to enjoy life.
This is just so few things I'm mentioning here, but I have to document this because, not everybody who gets out of prison or gets out of solitary has a platform where they share their insights on what they experienced.
So I have to do this, and this is what's coming out, and there's much more.
But I think this is in a good way, and a good spirit of healing and positivity and making it be worth something to have done that.
I don't wish it anyone. I really don't wanna do it again. If I have to spend time alone. I want it to be very short durations. I'd like to be reintegrated with the tribe and enjoy the tribe, as I always had.
This episode, this chapter, I guess it was my walden's Pond.
It was my Thoreau experience, and believe me, the beauty of nature and the beauty of the wild animals that kept me company, that was what I had to look forward to.
But it was all my worldly desires and all of my social climbing aspirations that began to sour and and make me just not want to be reminded of them and tune them out more and more, which maybe the good thing of that too is that it allowed me to focus more on just meditating in nature.
It's hard to let go of dying dreams.
There's this song that goes, as I fall through the years and the dreams disappear, while all the rest are gone, I'll be holding on.
I think that's how it goes. I don't know who that is, but cheers to them for saying that.
Because I’m at the age where you start to feel like man, all the dreams I tried to pursue so hard when I had so much energy of youth, my whole life ahead of me.
I've got to do some triage now and go, maybe only half of one of these left is gonna be even possibly realistic.
So humbling my dreams and salvaging them and purging them and saying, god, I just wanna have very, very achievable goals and very small and achievable dreams so that they don't have to be something I'm disappointed in myself over.
I'm glad to be back with my tribe. I have the land. It can be useful in a lot of ways, beyond myself.
And now I'm back in service. Now I'm back in that volley of attention among friends and a tribal sort of setting a village.
Wherever I go, I don't have to be alone if I don't really want to.
It makes me wanna be kind, makes me wanna be appreciative. Makes me wanna be silent.
I'm able to just sit and be still and be present, be mindful.
A lot of spiritual traditions, they put people out of society so that they can fight their inner demons enough and come back and be better people.