Chapter 6: The Sunny Shack

Summer 2013
Austin, Texas

After I began divorce proceedings, I needed to find a place to live, and nothing seemed to be working out. It took a good, long while for my human self to realize that the soul doesn’t worry about human things like where you are going to live, and sometimes you have to tell it, “Hey, soul, I know you’re doing your thing and all, but this human needs a place to call home. If we’re going to do this thing, I need to be comfortable.” In my new state of awareness, I was not praying to God, begging the Universe for signs or answers, getting angry with God or the Universe, practicing the law of attraction or creating a vision board. I was searching inside myself for a creative solution—a soul solution.

Simultaneously, my human self desperately tried to come up with a plan. Brian was out of the country, and I had four weeks to vacate what had once been our home. I had not yet come to a place where I trusted my inner voice in the complete way that I do now.

“Ha! You want a plan?” I imagined my soul lightheartedly laughing. “There is no plan. Only creation.”

Eventually—I am a slow learner—I stopped wasting energy on plans. Letting go of plans, goals, budgets, and expectations for myself was one of the hardest parts of moving from my human aspect controlling my life to living a soul-driven life. And it did not happen overnight. It was a long process with many steps forward—only to fall back down to the bottom of the stairs sometimes.

As a conscious creator—one who is aware of the true creative nature of the soul—goals, plans, and linear time become completely obsolete—something I had known so intensely as a child, for example, when I brought Mortimer into my physical world. When the soul creates, it is not to meet the definition of success that comes from an external source. The soul creates to express itself, simply for the joy of creation. It creates for the experience rather than the outcome. It’s totally different from how our parents, teachers, and coworkers showed us, where metrics are the norm. To authentically create, we must throw out the metrics.

I learned—the hard way as usual—the reason it is so imperative to let go of goals, plans, and the fear of so-called failure is because so often our soul’s creative solutions are beyond the imagination of the human. Our human selves cannot even fathom the possibilities and potentials. So when the human sets its eye on the prize, the goal, it narrows our vision so much, we cannot see the much grander possibilities and potentials our soul is presenting all around us.

Unaware, my human self drove around desperately from apartment to apartment, and nothing seemed to be working out. The last apartment I looked at that day denied my application because of the drug charge on my record from 1999. Embarrassed, I went back to my car, Ollie sitting in the passenger’s seat. I was hysterically crying when the phone rang. It was the realtor that my soon-to-be ex and I had worked with before. I wiped my tears away and answered the call.

“Are you still interested in an investment property?”

“No, I can’t do that right now,” was my human thought. It was a plan I had made with my husband when I had a job—to invest in something besides the stock market—and I no longer had a husband or a job. Then I heard a deep voice from within. It was not words. It was not a feeling or emotion. It was a deep, sensual, inner knowing that this was my creative solution.

“Yes, I am.” I tried to sound sure, but I wasn’t.

He explained the owners of the house wanted to sell it quickly for a low price because it needed work. What did I know about fixing an old, dilapidated house? What if it was in total disrepair and I lost money? I could be out tens of thousands of dollars. Yet the soul voice told me to go take a look and see.

I wiped my tears away and took a few deep breaths. I typed the address into my phone and drove to the house. The tenants still occupied the house, so my realtor and I could not go in. He climbed under the pier-and-beam foundation to check it out anyway.

“Lauren, I think we can make some money off this house,” he said.

Jimmy was also a recovered drug addict who had a real knack for Austin real estate. He was a father figure to me, and I trusted him. I looked at the house. It was a fucking mess, even from the outside. A broken chain link fence rimmed the backyard. When I peered through the window, I saw that a washing machine from the 1980s sat in the kitchen, which looked like no one had cleaned it since they put the washer in.

“Where do you put the clothes dryer?” I asked Jimmy. He opened the garage door, which was covered in termite holes, and pointed at the dryer inside. A family of cockroaches ran across the floor. And yet my soul said, “This is it. Buy it.” With Jimmy’s help, I made the offer. I went to the bank for the loan; it was approved instantly.

The situation reminded me of a woman I once knew. She had no credit, two children, and needed to get away from an alcoholic husband. A bank loan was one of her last options. She told me she met with a banker who said there was no way she could get the loan. Then something changed in the banker’s eyes—like someone hit the reset button on his brain. He shuffled through her paperwork once more and then asked to be excused for a minute. He came back with a loan check for $10,000—exactly what she needed to make a new start. She knew enough to know that when what you want shows up on your doorstep, you don’t wait around for people to realize what’s going on or that they made a mistake; you take your check and get the hell out of there.

I had the keys to the house in one week. Everything seemed so easy. That’s when I was able to convince my human self that this was not crazy. When things flow, when things fall into place with such ease and grace, that’s where the magic happens. When things get plugged up, it’s time to step back and reroute. Jimmy, his wife, and I somehow coordinated a plumber, handyman, tile guy, and electrician. There were a few hiccups, like opening the refrigerator and discovering it was completely covered in black mold spores, and a few triumphs, like fitting a brand-new stackable washer and dryer in place of the water heater so it wouldn’t be split in the kitchen and garage. I also had to kick out the tenant, who had been given a year’s notice yet still had the personality of the Unabomber. Regardless, we had the house up and running in six weeks, and I wasn’t too bothered I spent $15,000 on the renovations rather than the budgeted $10,000 because the price of the house had been so low.

We painted the shutters and the doors outside the seven-hundred-square-foot yellow house a vibrant orange. With no family to help me move, my girlfriends stepped in. When Teresa came over to unpack my belongings and decorate, she dubbed it the Sunny Shack. It was the perfect name. Little did I know the Sunny Shack would serve as my home base as I traveled all over the world for the next two years, my new reality exceeding any human expectation I’d ever had for my life.
When I hit the two-year mark of owning the house—to avoid taxes you must occupy a home for two years before selling it—I called Jimmy and said I might be ready to sell it. No problem, he said. Within one week, he sold that old shack in June 2015 for a mighty profit, funding my adventures for yet another year. It was totally above and beyond anything my human self could have planned for—the same person who could not rent an apartment because they were addicted to drugs in 1999, the same one hysterically crying in the car.

Had I operated solely as my human self—ordering off the menu handed to me—I would have gotten another job to simply pay rent and make ends meet as I worked a full-time desk job and looked for the next husband all my friends kept saying was on the way any day now. Instead, I listened to my soul voice. To the human, it looked like a big risk; to the soul, it was the creative solution I had asked for. I funded my adventures without compromising my true soul’s desire to allow instead of work. Sure, people thought I was nuts, including my human self, but fuck them and their advice. When you’re in the flow, the last thing you need is to listen to human, fear-based advice from your mind or the minds of people around you. Today, when my human screams that we need a plan for a storm that may or may not come, my soul flashes the image of the Sunny Shack. Its canary-yellow walls and sunset-orange shutters remind me once again that the grandest creations come from the soul and the fountain of creativity that flows from within.

***

Somewhere in between leaving my marriage and moving into the Sunny Shack in June 2013, I was out with my former college roommate. We had just arrived at an Austin music venue called the White Horse and were standing outside, beers in hand, when I heard someone yell, “Lauren-fucking-Hutton!” I couldn’t tell where it came from. Then he emerged from the crowd. It was Chris, one of the long-haired boys with guitars who had been in my junior high crew. I was over the moon to see him. About sixteen years had passed since I’d last seen him.

“Chris! No fucking way!” We hugged, caught up, and reminisced. I’d probably smoked my first joint with him and his best friend, Kevin, but I’d lost touch when I started hanging out with the cool kids. Seeing Chris instantly opened some sort of door for me, and all the memories came flooding back in—not only of our days attending concerts and smoking cigarettes in the bushes of suburbia, but all my esoteric studies. His presence alone was enough to take me back to that place of eleven-to-fifteen-year-old Lauren, who was so in touch with her soul voice. I desperately wanted to reclaim her. I also wondered where along the path to success I’d lost my love of music and the effects it had on me at both the soul and human levels. It was time to bring both the music and the magic back in.

I ended up seeing Chris many times throughout the summer of 2013 before he moved from Austin to Baltimore. In a strange twist in my newly single life in the Sunny Shack, I made a friend who was also single. Lisa had recently met and begun dating a guy named John, who lived in Houston but came to his Lake Travis home on the weekends. I went out to the lake house with them one weekend only to find Chris and his best friend, Jerry, hanging out too. It was all too designed to be a coincidence. The strange crew we formed spent the summer playing in the lake like teenagers with bigger budgets. We would swim, blast the radio on the boat, and dance away the day in our bathing suits, cocktails in hand, watching the sun set every Friday and Saturday night. I felt like a teenager again, totally free from responsibility and the unwritten rules placed on adults.

***

Around the same time, I began seeing another friend from my teenage years who now played bass in several Austin bands. We connected on Facebook. He’d also moved from suburban Houston to Austin after high school graduation. He often came over to the Sunny Shack after a gig. We would listen to old records, like Jimi, and make love until the wee hours of the morning.

For the first time in my life, I was actually interested in sex. Now that it was so free and informal, the experience felt more expansive than restrictive. There was no energetic feeding or expectations from one day to the next. It was the informality of friendship I loved so much with the added bonus of a sensual experience. During the week I had another lover—a Harley-riding man in his forties who wore a leather vest. While definitely not a GQ model, he was hands down one of the best lovers I’ve experienced. We rode his Harley around on hot summer nights and made love afterward.

It was a summer of love, wine, dancing, sunsets on the lake, motorcycle rides, and rock and roll, and I was having a great time. I felt younger than I had in years. The weight of a career, marriage, and being my father’s caregiver melted off me. When I looked in the mirror, I appeared younger and more beautiful than ever. I was falling in love with the freedom of this new life, and most importantly, I was falling in love with myself for the first time.

As the end of summer grew near, I felt the pull from my soul to return to the path I had veered from in my adolescence. With the final release of the human responsibilities I had so fiercely hung onto for so long, the path didn’t feel so far away this time. I understood on some level that all this fun was about allowing my human expression of SELF to be fully human, to have the maximum experience of what it had to offer. There was no family, husband, or job standing in the way—no rules that I was trying to live by.

The summer ended on cue. There were no more weekends of debauchery at the lake on the weekends as John packed up and headed to Houston to be with his children. Lisa and I wrapped up the summer nicely with a weekend at the Austin City Limits music festival. That Saturday after the last band played, we got on our bikes to ride home to our north-central Austin homes. A quick rain shower made the roads slick. Flying down West Fifth Street, my front bike wheel slid, and I came crashing down, hitting my bare head on the concrete so hard I could feel it bounce.

I lay in my front bedroom of the Sunny Shack for three days after the music festival, unable to move much—my entire body aching from the accident. As I mentioned before, so often accidents are an opportunity for more of our souls to seep back into our physical bodies. Bump and fill. I had not thought much about the incident at the time. A somewhat drunk girl in a bike accident after a music festival was not abnormal. However, my behavior after the incident tells another story.
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The Texas version of fall was approaching. In the winds of the changing season, I felt the internal pull to shift directions. Suddenly, I had no interest in bass playing, Harley-riding lovers, or weekends of debauchery. Intuitively, I turned inward, and by October and November it would manifest in such a way, there was no way to deny who I was or what I was here to experience.