Florence, OR

(I'm going to upload pictures and video when I get a chance -- it is so fucking beautiful, words aren't even right for it, but my Acer notebook is too slow for fancy visuals, and I'm way too impatient.) So here we go...
The only general comment I can think of about being alone right now is that it is the most painful experience in the world. But the pain of it stems directly from love, and that's why it's necessary. What a drastic swing to go from being with others, living with others, talking to friends, making mutual plans, to disappearing away from the network and retreating into the quiet heart and noisy mind What a trip... it's like, GAAHGG, why am I doing this? And when I sit with it (or bike with it), listening to some music and letting my thoughts work themselves out however they want to, suddenly I start crying, hating it, feeling it knot my stomach -- alone -- because it makes me love people so much. All my people, the shining lights and mirrors that help me see the world and myself. They give me things, I keept thinking. All these things because love likes to leave trails of evidence wherever it is summoned -- little things that might be absurd and made of plastic, or beautiful and made of blessed crystals, or used and worn or new and expensive. I am realizing that everything in my life has been a gift, and I don't know why I am so blessed. Well, there have been all these periods where I was so trapped in stress and pain I was doing to myself that the profoundness of others only reached me here and there. It happens, I guess. Those periods always made me wonder if I'd pull back out into this open place of love for all people, and here I am, so I guess I always have. But it takes this, for me -- forcing myself into a place of solitude where all I hear reverberating inside of me are echoes of everybody's love for me. It wakes me up, like, suddenly, and I want to get out of bed and run downstairs and make sure everyone is alive and safe and that they know that without them I'd be a bag of bones, cold blood, and a dead spirit. When you love, it becomes really more important than anything that they know how much you love them. I sent my mom and dad a text today telling them -- really -- this is how how love works for me, and I don't know if it's the same for everyone.
Generally, I have these people in my life who I interact with and talk to and plan things around, which is usual, but then people notice me maneuvering away from them or dipping out early to do things, oh, or getting anxious around them if I've spent say more than 8 hours straight with them. And usually I associate that with a need for solitude, "to work on a project"...usually my tag line these days is that I really need to organize my poetry, but it's so much deeper than that. What I need to start saying is that the only way I will appreciate them fully is if I can sit by myself and think their face and voice and humor over for a few hours, and my goal is to appreciate them fully. I mean, appreciate you fully. You know? You, the person X who touched my life. I want to think about it, and I want to feel it, because that pain makes me understand the gift of life.
I can be more extreme about it than that, too, if ya want. I have been rolling the idea of death around in my head since I was a teenager, because when I was going through my thing I was utterly suicidal, and in order to work the whole way through that one, had to start taking mental notes on what it meant to die. Coming out of that black hole was shocking because the emotion I experienced when I did was on the polar opposite end of the feelings spectrum. Apparently, the same human organism can almost take a knife to it's own existence, and then fall to the ground in love with every daddy longlegs and broken vase, all in a day, weirdly. The emotional world is always so much vaster than I think it is, thankfully. I get stuck in the motions and my feelings become tired, this beige hotel wallpaper, and I wonder what all the fuss is about. And then, it changes. I think of all the places on Earth and how different they all are from each other, and how different they are from themselves day to day, I mean -- imagine...where have you been before, like a crazy ass theme park full of heat and drunk crowds and rollercoasters and colorful, screaming children, picking apart your own idea of "fun" because this can't possibly be it, and yet it is fun and there you are...and then put that next to a quiet winter night, sitting alone in an attic lit with two candles, looking through old childhood photographs and wondering if you'd ever get to do it again (be a child) with all the same cast and crew. I mean, put the rainforests of South America next to a Baltimore crackhouse, or an Art gallery next to the Alaskan wilderness. And we've got all those world. I think the emotional world is like that, just as vast. When we start complaining that we've seen it all and it's all the same, probably it just means it's time for a three day hike in the woods. Anyway, this biking is a good call, right? Sometimes I have no idea why I need to do something until I do it, and my explanations become these weird fucking attempts to apply logic to my heart, like, "Oh, you know, I'm an adrenaline addict and I need to visit these friends," but this time is for my soul, and I plan to max it out. Shit. God I love it when I remember to love.
Let me ground myself, and anyone reading this, because I have a tendency to let go of points. They're pretty meaningless because the point is to share, but without a thread, the sharing turns into jumbled gobbledeegook. My thread is simple; it's where I am, what's happening around me, and how I'm doing on my journey. So you know how I'm doing, but you don't know what's up. As you may have seen in the video, I almost made it to Florence last night, even after detouring to check out a town five miles north. I biked around 70 miles -- too much for the first day. I was supposed to meet with my friends Sqrl and Re (hippies, can you tell?), but my phone was being a Bad Phone and so I just biked and biked and finally couldn't anymore. At 1:30am I found a spot in the woods by some abandoned tracks, and I fell asleep, happily, and clutching pepper spray. Just saying, fearlessness (by my own definitions of fear and humans) only exists in drug heads and liars. I have so many fears, and I am so happy I do. They are the right hand of my intuition and tell me what to do, and if they cause pain they only do it because they love me.
Sqrl did meet with me today and we walked around the beaches with his dog Stormy, and collected shells and talked about Eugene, festivals, love, our mutual friends.
At first I thought it would be weird to see someone because it would be, like, "cheating", you know? Like, I am on this spirit quest and must go through my emotions until I can accept them. But, look, bullshit. I think he got a lot of really great energy from me because I was SO excited to share my mind -- he was the focus of all of my accumulated endorphines, and I'm glad because he is a good guy who gives a lot away all the time. Interesting thing I took from him, actually -- his primary life philosophy is that you get back 10X whatever you give away, and he said, "literally", like with money, too. So he paid off his friend's fines today, and he got me a motel room for tonight so I could keep taking a break, and he isn't blue-blooded rich or anything because this is starting to sound like he is, he's just a great investor on a spiritual path. He is funny -- he has this all these great tattoos, long messy hair, really fucked up glasses that only a complete eccentric would wear. Let me think... strange eyes, kind of green. Here's a good one-- Sqrl has really bad posture in an endearing way, but his back is nice and it seems like in another lifetime he could be a dancer if he wanted. He said he didn't like being tall so he developed bad posture to be shorter. Ain't empathy a bitch sometimes. But his frequency is kind of over my head, and I think I'd need a few weeks of solid conversation with him to really understand a thing about how he operates. Which, is great, because he said that he and Re would be traveling down the coast this next week, and they wanted to keep me company for a day or two, if I needed it. So maybe I'll have some time to dig deeper.
Well, I think this is more than enough for now. I should go take care of myself -- take a hot shower and eat some food, since tomorrow I will be back on the road. Going south!