Stripped Down & Strung Out

Stripped Down...

It was August 2015 in the Texas Hill Country. The stifling heat radiating off the dry ground below in waves had given way to an unusually cool evening. I was sleeping in the back of my pick up truck.

The open air enveloped me, and I was relaxed after a long day of volunteering in the kitchen of a youth camp for refuge teens from war-stricken countries.

Washing dishes in a make-shift kitchen in the stifling sun proved so laborious, I held only one speck of energy reserved at the end of the day to do much but surrender to the exhaustion. 

I had just gotten off the phone, texting with Jack - a man I spent many lifetimes with and was deeply in love with. He loved me, he said in energy not words, but we would never be together. I took the scraps he gave me like a starving dog and thanked him after he scolded me. 

The night gave way to the brilliant stars that lit up the sky and a meteor shower of epic proportions filled the cosmic movie screen projected above as I drifted off to sleep. I lay unable to move in the back of the truck with nothing but a pillow, a sheet, covered with the coarse salt of dried sweat, and a copious amount of hope.

Not hope that Jack and I would be together one day. Not hope that I would stop having all these human problems that never seemed to end. ​It was the kind of hope that fills up your body crown to toe tips when you have nothing else to lose. Some call it freedom. It was a surrender of sorts, and more so, a path when none others were visible to the human eyes. 

I drifted off to sleep. In my dream, I was driving my white truck. Suddenly, thieves approached and began to strip the car as I drove. They ripped off the rearview mirrors, even the doors - anything and everything. I found I held no fear - at all. I just watched. 

When the vandals took the tires off the truck, I got out and walked, totally un-phased by the stripping of my vehicle and all that I owned. I just kept walking, nothing in my hands, only the clothes on my back. I walked steadily and peacefully. Numb but full of sensation. 

I came to a stream. Jack was there, and he kissed me. But I walked on.

I walked through a knee-deep stream as my clothes began to fall off. Piece by piece I became fully naked.

And I kept walking through the water. I stepped on rocks and my feet bled, the red pools forming in the water beneath them. Jack did not follow, and I did not care. I did not look back. I didn't need to. I knew he was not there.  

I passed a group of souls, beings, and I somehow knew were awake, and they said, "Stay here with us. We found Utopia."

I did not look up when I nodded in their direction. I walked on and on, through dark waters. My feet continued to bleed. All I could feel was bliss. Bliss in this moment was steadiness without a high or low. It was pure existence without interference. 

I reached a stopping point, still all darkness, and there was no one there. I felt a sensation sort of like love and a lot like acceptance fill my body. It was a peace not available to the human experience and therefore held no words.

I guess it's the kind of experience which only runs on a hope no one else can taste, a freedom which only comes from losing everything. One you cannot know until you are stripped down and strung out.

Strung Out.

After the dream, I would try to go back to human life. I continued to wash dish after dish at the youth camp. I smiled at everyone I came across and they smiled back. 

And then the hope that often felt like desperation, disease, and despair turned into something else - a guiding force that would not let me stop walking. When the car died, I kept moving. When the clothes came off, I walked naked. When my feet bled, I did not stop. When people showed up, I did nothing more than smile and walk on. 

These days - I have been sober for so long now - yet I am strung out.

High as a kite on the non-linearity. Spinning and twirling in infinity beyond the veils of maya. 

Instead of walking, I've taken up floating and flying.

My head spins, my heart beats fast and then not at all, and I spin and spin and spin.

And that weird desperate hope thing has turned into knowing.

The knowing feels like the motion of waves in the ocean.

​Am I seasick or I am experiencing a reality long forgotten?