mid-life crisis – vagando

finding my spirit in death valley

I had relished a vision of life in my travels that has continued to thrive inside of me, years after all of the other things I contracted on those trips have gone. It may lay dormant for a time, but a fever begins if too many of the following preconditions are present at any given moment: mundane work routines, traffic jams, gradual wealth accumulation that has no clear purpose, planning more than one year in advance, mainstream news, two weeks of vacation a year and holidays that involve excessive materialism. For years I had used this vision to guide me. I lived a wild and carefree existence.

During these years I roamed far and wide, floating rivers, roaming in the mountains and sleeping outside under the stars. These were years of cheap beer, whisky out of plastic jugs, occasional dumpster diving, mushrooms as a regular part of my diet, naked parties, and free love despite the fact that many of us smelled terrible (me) as we (me) primarily bathed in the river. I would work half the year almost every day and then spend half of the year as free as a bird. Six months hitchhiking through Mexico and Central America. Five months riding my bike to Guatemala. I met a girl on that trip – Lauren – who I happily let throw a wrench in my spokes, which led to me staying in Guatemala seven more months. Then we moved to New York City for seven months. Then we moved to Mauritius for seven months. The time blurred by.

After living in Mauritius, my relationship with Lauren was frayed and I felt mentally exhausted. The past few years had reinforced my belief that the instability and lack of direction in my life was going to make it difficult for me to have many experiences or things that are considered a natural part of one’s life progression like a wife, sharp kitchen knives, a house, a garden, a dog, or kids. I thought I might want those things later on, so I figured it would be wise to plot a course in that direction as I had just turned 30. I decided that my years of rambling were coming to an end, that it was time for me to start a career and move on the next phase of my life.

I decided to move to the Western slope of Colorado to do a work-trade program at a solar trade school that permitted me to study renewable energy system design and construction. At the end of the work-trade program, I was offered a job based out of Salt Lake City, Utah managing renewable energy projects. This move was sadly also the end of my relationship with Lauren. I settled into my position in Utah making far more money than I had ever made beforehand and found myself as a cog in the humming American economy. I worked diligently, slaving away at the ‘ol sun mine. I slept on a mattress on the floor of a shared house, paid minimal rent, drove my beat-up old car and cooked nearly all of my own meals.

After a year and a half, I felt uncomfortable, like I didn’t fit in, like something was missing. I had no urge to do any of the things that I had imagined I might want to do with my new found wealth and stability like have a wife, kids, a dog or a house. I spent quite a few months depressed, earnestly struggling to understand or at least suppress my feelings. Where could I go from here? I couldn’t go back to traveling, in my mind those times had come to an end. In any case, I was reluctant to make any significant changes as I had invested so much into this life change and it had cost me my relationship with Lauren. I saw my previous existence as simply escapism and hedonism; I was framing my life in a series of binaries: stability or instability, rootedness or nomadism, growth or escapism, deep relationships or ephemeral relationships. I thought that stability inherently translated to personal growth. After a year and a half it was clear that there was something inside me though – let’s call it an idea – that was firmly lodged between the lobes of my brain that was telling me to leave, that was telling me that this life wasn’t right for me. Why am I constantly yearning to move? Why do other ideas or visions of life have no staying power or impact with me? Why don’t I have a nesting impulse or find sufficient joy in material goods to keep me working to buy them? Just like a parasite, ideas probably need a suitable host to flourish and some formidable ones had taken colonized me. I reached a breaking point and decided to take a trip with the hope that it would give me space and time to reflect.

I started my journey just after a blizzard had swept through the west and a cold, high pressure system had settled in. I left headed for the wilderness in Death Valley, California; this journey would be as much a physical journey as a mental journey. I drove for several days, camping at hotsprings amidst the white landscape with a few other strange individuals. The nights were long and cold. I would stay in the hotsprings until just before I intended to go to sleep, haul my naked body out of the pot, dry myself with a towel as quickly as possible, put on a pair of underwear and my boots before running across the crunchy snow to my sleeping bag with my core still warm.

My last night before arriving in Death Valley I sat in my tent late at night and examined a map of the area. I marked out a route to a desolate part of the national park where I could assuredly find solitude. Upon reaching this place I couldn’t sleep the first night. I got up and went outside my tent; I stood alone staring up at an infinite black ceiling scintillating with mystery, a sliver of a waxing moon lingering. I felt to the fullest degree separate, alienated. As I lay down in my tent, I found myself wandering through strange landscapes and unlived lives; I wondered how people lived before civilization and all of its distractions. Silence rang out around me apart from the sporadic chatter of two small rodents on either side of me. I felt swallowed by cold blackness. Sleeping outside by one’s lonesome can rive the façade of whatever convenient narrative we adopt to walk about this world. It can be hard to shut your eyes.

But the reward, of feeling at home, of facing this fear and letting yourself be swallowed by the blackness of night only to wake upon yet another dawn is vitally important – this has been the true human experience since the dawn of consciousness.

The following morning, I packed enough food and water for the entire day before setting out walking along a spine of rocks cradling an expansive plain peopled by Joshua Trees. Distances and scale seem naturally distorted in Death Valley, out of proportion. I didn’t see much wildlife, but I frequently stooped to examine the tracks of coyotes and bighorn sheep in the sand.

I quickly crested the head of a canyon that fed out to the Racetrack Playa shimmering in the distance. The Race Track is home to a strange phenomenon in which rocks with time and the elements migrate across the surface of a perfectly flat sandy expanse. Nearly all of these rocks have been taken by visitors. I continued descending until I found a nice sloping rock on a windswept outcropping where I could sit and revel at the expressive Seussian forms of the Joshua Trees wildly gesticulating. I pulled my knees up to my chest and tried to feel the place. The vast, inhospitable landscape was a mirror in which I glimpsed my small pitiful self: an ego trying to give expression to itself in a world devoid of meaning. I saw each of us valiantly struggling, indistinguishable from the other lifeforms that peopled the landscape. Each Joshua Tree, each shrub, each lichen, has a story to tell that has been defined by its aspect, the dominant wind direction, rainfall patterns, the shadows from other plants… So it goes for whatever is inside of each of us. Slowly we are twisted, gnarled, sometimes into beautiful forms, other times into grotesque haunting shapes, but in any case we will be desiccated and swept away.

I took a long gaze from my vantage on the peak at human existence and how adrift modern civilization had become. Looking out across the lanscape and reflection on my the previous night, it was easy to understand mankind’s impulse or the original impetus to address human needs. We are fragile creatures – ill-suited to many different environments. Human existence is defined by the existence of a self and a feeling of dislocation from all that surrounds us. Separateness is a complex matter as it is intuitively false, but rationally true. The other, whether the physical earth or human inhabitants, is a source of both anxiety, fear, excitement, and joy. We have constructed a society and erected edifices to try to ameliorate the external threats to our being posed by the natural environment, but this has only seemed to widen the gap for many people… to create a vast distance between us and our natural origins.

Human civilization long ago surpassed the point of having the resources and ability to meet all of humanities basic needs and now we have entered a surreal age untethered from need or purpose in much of the world. We now rise each day under the illusion of scarcity and we – the majority – let the system continue because it gives each of us a small allotment of commodity food pellets and a semblance of purpose. Instead of the anxiety that is natural to human existence, we have created a different form of anxiety as we run on society’s treadmill, constantly outrunning a fate of rejection from our artificial existence back into the harsh natural abyss from whence we crawled. This system has no clear goals or limits and any system without these two things is destined to destroy itself.

Notwithstanding this lack of purpose, onward we march, classifying, simplifying, substituting false definitions and narratives for nearly everything, including other humans. Inherent to this type of thinking is the ability to commit acts of violence, to take, to ignore the independent rights of other beings to one’s own benefit. A tree becomes board-feet. A human becomes a unit of labor. A section of the ocean or a strip mine is measured in yield. Cattle, pigs, chicks, the majority of life on earth is scientifically managed and industrially slaughtered, but arrives perfectly for the commodified American dream devoid of history, in neat bloodless packages. We thunder onward in a race full of pomp and circumstance, but that is only really definable as an unrelenting pressure to name, possess, and exploit all that exists in the most efficient manner possible.

I felt my mind going into a downward spiral without an end. My breathing was shallow and rapid, my brow furrowed and I wasn’t even paying attention to where I sat. I took a deep breath and recentered myself. Despite existing within this ugly system, I felt an undercurrent of mystery flowing through everything, something ethereal that cannot be subsumed by logic or rationality. There is rhythm in silence, patterns in darkness – a thread weaving everything together. Suddenly my thoughts and reality connected. I saw a turkey vulture riding the air rising off of another mountain, rolling and yawing in the invisible forces that buffeted it. I glimpsed an alternative to this logic, to this machine. It lies in finding a deeper meaning to existence that is rooted in something that I am certain resides in every living thing. The turkey vulture was giving expression to its essential birdness. A lizard scampered to a rock beside my head and tilted its head curiously as I made eye contact. An explosion of recognition and understanding passed through me, tears were suddenly streaming down my face. I closed my eyes. I thought about the light or the spirit that animates me, that has been with me since I entered this world; it is curious, radiant with joy and hope, constantly in search of love and a feeling of connection, but also fragile. I thought about my parents, their faces as I first remember them as a child appeared but then faded into their current aged faces. I let out a sob and felt the wind sweeping the tears off my jawbone as I realized that inside of each one of them resided this same spirit, this same light, this same ineffable energy. That they are fragile, that they don’t have all of the answers, that they seek love, that they have dreams, that they are just trying to do the best that they can, that they are vulnerable. I had never thought about myself, my parents or any of the billions of beings on this planet in quite this way before.

I slowed my breathing again. I saw my life passing from the perspective of my spirit as it endured defeat and rejection within this inhumane system, how it had been nearly completely suppressed to reduce my suffering. Why? The vociferous demands and pressures of society had forced me to attenuate its quiet voice; it had caused me great suffering to constantly run contrary to the direction of the systems that I lived within from seemingly the moment that I was born.

In the months preceeding this trip I had found myself at a critical fork in my life path. I had spent years trying to find my spirit and to listen to it, but I had stopped in recent years because that part of me seemed directionless, unproductive and reckless. I felt like I needed to change myself to avoid ending up unhappy later on in life, but this line of thinkingresulted in me finding myself depressed and frustrated almost immediately. Thus, there were two paths forward: listen to my spirit and let it guide me in life or to ignore it and risk irreparably losing my direction. The second option involves less exertion and affords a certain amount of stability and comfort for some people, but it had become apparent for me that this was not a tenable option. What I had been seeking all along was not escapism nor hedonism; I had merely been seeking a way to give voice to my spirit through action. A vulture that doesn’t fly, that doesn’t give expression to its birdness, is merely food for other vultures.

A profound realization like this, a deepening of your empathy and understanding, is difficult to come by. It is a rare gift that we have to cherish, but figuring out how to integrate a realization like this is even more difficult. I knew that I needed to make a drastic change in my life. The most immediate barrier that I could see to my growth was the job and lifestyle that I was leading – I carefully began plotting my departure and quit six months later. I began looking for volunteer opportunities with development organizations in Latin America where I could put my skills to work for the benefit of others. I was offered a position with an organization in Peru. Once again, I found myself storing the few things that I had that I couldn’t bring with me in other people’s basements and packed a backpack and duffle bag with the essentials before heading out into the unknown.

in search of it

We are born into a story, socialized and educated to believe in a certain narrative arc regarding the human life; this story is always framed as the path towards joy, prosperity, peace and love. Every society’s story is laden with latent values (and judgements of other values) that range from materialism to spiritual growth, sedentism to nomadism, monogamy to polyamory, acceptance of authority to critical thinking, patriarchy to matriarchy, democracy to hierarchy, rugged individualism to communitarianism, environmentalism to an exploitative ethic, selfishness to sharing, openness to reticence…isms ad nauseum. Without a frame of reference that enables us to deconstruct our milieu, we are fish that cannot see the water in which we swim. Travel has given me a frame of reference.

What is my story? I spent the first 18 years of my life in Lake Forest, Illinois, USA. Statistics and demographic information can only reveal so much, but I think in this case it can explain a lot. Lake Forest is the 34^th wealthiest city in the United States with an average household income of $268,922 in 2019, according to Bloomberg. The 2000 US census showed a population of 19,375 people with racial makeup that was 95.80% White, 1.35% African American, 0.06% Native American, 2.45% Asian, 0.13% Pacific Islander, 0.44% from other races, and 0.77% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.87% of the population. In summary, it is a wealthy and relatively homogenous place.

My mother grew up here and her family owned a successful manufacturing business in a nearby city that brought them wealth and recognition. They had six children that were raised in a large country house that is reputed to have been quite wild. When she was a kid, she occasionally rode her horse to school in a display of eccentric privilege. My grandfather took hunting trips around the world to kill all sorts of animals that are now considered threatened or endangered. My grandma is rumored to have had affairs, including one with a highschooler that led to the heartbroken young man publicly smashing her yellow Chevy Corvette with a shovel. Their house was raided by the police at one point to seize the marijuana grow operation that the kids were running on the property, but family connections had led the police chief to tip off my grandma before the calvary arrived. They went yatching with the likes of Ray Crock – the creator of McDonalds – and complained when “new money” like Mr T. moved into town. My mother seems to have come out of this strange upbringing with a slightly distorted view of life, but having learned quite a bit about what path she didn’t want to take.

My father grew up in the town next door – Lake Bluff – his parents were both god-fearing Protestants that had worked hard all of their lives. They were descendants of later waves of immigrants from Prussia and Greece and had arrived in Lake Bluff through hard work. They had two children that took very different paths. My aunt dropped out of school to focus her attention on drugs and art. My father seems to have come out of his childhood with a strong drive to transcend the shameful middleclass existence that his parents led amidst such opulence and to break away from the conservative, religious dogma that he was fed by his parents.

They met in high school and started a relationship that endured through college, although not without some time periods that are never discussed. They were married around age 25 and attempted to settle down in Lake Forest, despite having limited money. The early years are blurry but the memories that I have of my dad include: digging up plants from other people’s property to landscape our property; men coming in black suits to threaten us after it had been discovered that my dad had flipped our electric meter upside-down so that it would spin in reverse as we consumed electricity; the purchase and use of illegal fireworks (this includes actual dynamite he got from some connection in Kentucky); long hikes in the woods near our house with him; finding cocaine in his desk drawer; his purchase of a Porsche without consulting my mom; driving around in the Porsche whistling at women; firing a pistol into the wall to kill a rodent that lived therein and extravagant vacations put on his company credit card (one of which ended with him getting into a brawl at a bar and getting his forehead split open on the corner of a table). He was volatile and occasionally abusive around the house. I loved him and we had a strong bond, but I always had to gauge his mood to determine if it was safe to be around him.

I remember my mom being perfect, although cracks would occasionally appear in her façade. She seemed largely content with raising us keeps and keeping the household together. She devoted every second that she could to teaching us, clothing us, entertaining us and feeding us. I loved her deeply and she always served as a bulwark against my dad. Nonetheless I remember tears and fights between her and my father regarding money, drinking and relationships with other women.

The gamble of moving to Lake Forest, buying a house and trying to make it all work paid off materially. My father completed his MBA and became quite successful in financial consulting. We moved into a larger house and had nice cars that regularly changed. We continued taking luxurious trips around the country. My father was mired in this world, participated in it, but couldn’t quite fit into it no matter what he did and was therefore internally miserable. He emphasized critical thinking, equality and justice during occasional moment, but the primary values of the household revolved around work, wealth, and appearance. Hard work was not emphasized as much in some other families though as I was regularly told as a kid that I shouldn’t worry about anything as I was “an attractive, white male.” I remember my parents and siblings regularly sitting at the dinner table vivisecting their friends, coworkers and neighbors for social or sartorial faux paus. Or reveling in schadenfreude at the failed marriage or bankruptcy of another family in town. It was difficult for me to avoid internalizing this type of thinking and to keep it from consuming me internally. There wasn’t much love in the house during these years.

The story that my parents intended for me to internalize was that hard work, intelligence, bending the rules and keeping up appearances will bring you wealth and happiness. This wasn’t the way that I came to see it – I saw unhappiness, my father trapped in a system that he hated, my mom trapped in a marriage that lacked love and a society that seemed to revolve around kicking or pushing others down to bring yourself up. But I only knew this world and I definitely knew that I didn’t fit into it and was floundering. This caused intense anxiety and depression for me as I implicitly believed, and was explicitly told, that anyone else who lived differently was poor and miserable. I had no way to disprove this theory as I really didn’t know anyone that lived any other way.

I decided to attend college largely out of fear that otherwise I might end up as one of those poor and miserable people. During my first two years of college I never attempted to break any of this down. I continued dating a girl whose life and family revolved around wealth and appearances. I was studying engineering, doing well academically and did my best to maintain the appearance that I was ready to assume my rightful place in society as an attractive, white male. When it all fell apart, which I wrote about in the last post, I decided that I needed to put physical distance between myself and this milieu.

The first real travel that I did was moving from Chicago, Illinois to Salt Lake City, Utah. Any travel, even if it is around the city in which we live, gives us an opportunity to be exposed to different stories, to other ways of relating to existence, ourselves, others and the world around us. But it is ultimately up to us as individuals to be receptive and pay attention. In Utah, I had my first exposure to people that were leading different lives and thought differently, people that had chosen to focus their lives on certain activities – skiing, climbing, biking and playing music. This made me start thinking about my own life. It never had felt like my life beforehand for some reason – it had just felt like I needed to stay within the white lines that had been painted for me. How did I want to lead my life? What constitutes a good life? What did I even like doing? My years of nomadism began when I saw that I could just physically leave if I didn’t like a place, that I could live where I wanted and how I wanted.

After a year I left to Nepal and India, places that viscerally challenged my worldview and beliefs with sights, odors, sounds and a distinct rhythm of life. My inability to communicate with anyone made the entire experience even more disorienting. At night there were human beings strew across the concrete of the city sleeping. Sacred cows roamed the streets freely. Open defecation was commonplace. Leprosy was still an issue. People swarmed us and begged. The roads, train stations and markets were pure chaos – the press of humanity, of over a billion people practicing different religions and speaking different languages trying to carve out an existence. Amidst all of this, joy, peace and love flourished. I caught a glimpse on this trip of a different way of life, but I hadn’t even begun to understand it. I returned to school with a renewed dedication derived from dreams of travel.

I graduated college in May, 2008. I fought forest fires that summer to save money and then found myself teetering between entering the white-collar professional world, which was the path advocated by parents and peers alike, and pursuing my dream of traveling. The decision ended up being largely guided by the financial crisis that was unfolding at that moment – even if I had truly wanted to find an office job, almost no one was hiring at the time. I had one job interview before I became committed to my life of wandering. It changed my life.

The only way that I got myself to attend the interview with Chase Bank for a Personal Banker position was by playing the mental game that the vast majority of people in the United States are playing: I tried to convince myself that if I could just do something that I didn’t like for long enough to generate money, then I could be free to what I enjoyed. I began sweating as soon as I received the phone call because getting this job would require me to convince my interviewers that I wanted this job that I didn’t want. I immediately felt an urge to begin taking the anti-anxiety pills that I had relied on in previous years. I shaved my face and bought a suit at Men’s Warehouse.

I had read Walden that summer and was haunted by this quote – “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.”

I entered the conference room and was greeted by four pale faces sat behind a desk, some sort of panel of midlevel managers taken from the far-flung, forsaken branches of the bank in the Chicago suburbs. We covered the formalities; I kept a copy of my resume on my lap to make sure that my words corroborated the carefully tailored distortions written in lifeless Arial Narrow. I worried that I might lose control of my hands and watch them float away or that my face would tire from smiling incessantly, but neither came to pass. I was shaking though; my mind alternated between thinking that I should have drank either more or less coffee. My anxiety spiked as it became apparent that merely handing them my resume and answering a few mundane questions was insufficient to get me a piece of the sweet apple pie that is America. They wanted me to do some role playing, but I was already role playing. You can see how this might become confusing.

“Okay. Let’s pretend that I am a bank customer who simply wants to make a deposit. You will be my teller. Your goal is to convince me to refinance and move my mortgage to Chase Bank.” She actually pretended to be driving a car; her hands rotated an imaginary steering wheel, directing her car to the hypothetical air tube and speaker through which we would communicate. I wondered whether her feet were also operating imaginary pedals, but I couldn’t see them under the desk to check.

“Hello, I would like to make a deposit. Could I have a deposit slip?” She calmly leaned towards the non-existent speaker.

“Good afternoon! I will send that right out to you!” I can’t remember if I pretended to put it in the airtube or not, but my adrenaline was mounting amidst a sense of impending doom.

“While you are writing that out, DO YOU CURRENTLY HAVE A HOME MORTGAGE!” I asked in sheer terror, surprising myself as I nearly yelled the last part at the fictional speaker and the woman.

“Yes, but it is with another bank.” She curtly replied, seeming somehow unfazed by my loss of control.

“Have you ever thought about…..refinancing… your loan with Chase Bank? It could…..save money. RATES ARE LOW!” I consciously took breaths in between words in an attempt to hold it together, making it until the last bit before my tone and volume began rapidly fluctuating again. The adrenaline and disgust were rising rapidly and overcame me. I wondered if they could smell the sweat and fear. Maybe they even enjoyed it? I contained the overwhelming urge to run.

I felt like some sort of lab rat being grotesquely tortured, completely incapable of understanding the overarching purpose for having electrodes attached to my miniature nipples. I was shaking at this point, my fists balled, my pupils dilated, and my feet twitching in fight or flight response. They asked me some benign questions and things slowed down a little bit. The adrenaline slowly wore off and I sat in a post-ictal state as they talked more about the specifics of the Personal Banker position. I peered out at the glimmering SUVs backed up behind a red light. I observed a woman talking on her phone in one car, looking absolutely crazy as she gesticulated in the absence of context. I alternatingly glanced at the desk, at these people, at my shoes.

“Are you motivated by financial incentives?” A bald man officiously squaring a stack of papers over and over again asked me. The stack of papers had been square for several minutes at this point.

“No, I wouldn’t say so.” They paused for a moment, taken aback by the answer. Their reaction forced me to reevaluate my response and I bumbled as I backtracked a bit. “Well….I mean… it depends. I want to earn money.” I couldn’t lie. It all fell apart, but the honesty was a release. I knew the job was lost at this moment. I viewed my general indifference to pecuniary remuneration as a virtue, yet what I had just said was tantamount to confessing to a battery of priests that you don’t believe in god. These people worshiped money – there was no other reason they would work within that befouled temple.

I walked out of the sterile box into the afternoon sun with new knowledge about myself and the world. Chase Bank changed my life! I went home and bought a plane ticket to Mexico that left a few days later to go volunteer for a non-profit organization run by a family friend. The oragnization was in the Yucatan Peninsula and focused on assisting families that had been displaced by the creation of a protected archeological zone. The families had lived on their ancestral lands since time immemorial and only knew agricultural techniques that were appropriate to that area. The government had given them marginal land that required them to grow different crops and use different techniques of cultivation. The organization was trying to help them in this transition.

I flew into Cancun and felt an immediate disdain for the energy that heavy tourism had created. This feeling was compounded as the executive director of the organization took me to Burger King – in the middle of the culintary paradise that is Mexico – to eat. I spent a few days with him traveling around to communities, visiting projects that they had going and working in the fields. He left after a week and then I was the only person that spoke English in a small truckstop town in the middle of the Yucatan Peninsula. I spoke barely any Spanish, but enough to help out with activities in the fields and around the house. It also became clear that the organization had a strong religious affiliation and purpose, thus much of the time spent in attempted conversations with the family that I lived with revolved around them maligning all of the other members of the community that were not a part of their church and for them to proselytizing to me. They would regularly pressure me to pray with them or to say grace. They would put a bible on my pillow every morning. They would regularly tried to explain that I was unhappy because I hadn’t accepted god as my savoir, but I could generally escape these conversations by feigning a lack of understanding.

There were some ruins nearby that I desperately wanted to visit. The ruins had been part of the impetus for the creation of the archeological reserve. One day, the preacher from the church offered to take me there. The true purpose was for him to have me as a captive audience for his proselytizing for half of a day, but I was willing to make this sacrifice. I only remember two things from that day. 1. There was a litter of newborn puppies in the middle of our lane on the road. We were going quite fast, but there was ample room for the preacher to swerve and miss the puppies. I didn’t panic until it became clear that it was to late and I screamed at him. He coolly responded that he did it intentionally, that they were street dogs that no one was going to care for and that he was putting them out of their misery. 2. The ruins had been near the border with Guatemala.

I became curious about Guatemala. Everyone in Mexico told me it was dirty and dangerous. The religious hypocrisy drove me over the edge one day and I left town with no clear plan, but I knew that this wasn’t the place for me. The desire to go to Guatemala was stuck in my head and I met a few other travelers on the road that told me that I should go there. I bought a bus ticket south.

I arrived to Xela in Guatemala for Christmas and checked into a hostel called Casa Argentina. This hostel also served as the base for a non-profit trekking organization – Quetzaltrekkers – where I intended to volunteer.

On top of Volcan Santa Maria at sunrise.

It became quickly apparent that the stories I had been told about Guatemala were ignorant, gross oversimplifications. It is a predominantly indigenous country with 24 languages and cultures spread across a mountain ranges and jungles sandwiched between two oceans. A place where the magical realism of Latin American literature actually exists; seemingly anything can happen with inexplicably beautiful and horrifying events unfolding concurrently. Guatemalans accept and live within this reality; they are proud of it. For me the indigenous Mayan cultures that thrived in the highlands and the crazy gringos with whom I lived and worked showed me an entirely new range of possibilities for existence.

At this time, Quetzaltrekkers was an idealistic, anarchic, egalitarian commune of sorts. We guided treks for tourists in the mountains and volcanoes of the country recounting the history of the civil war and information about the ecology of the region. Any profits generated were used to support a school and orphanage for street kids and we lived off of the tips given by the clients. Status and authority did not exist within the organization – all decision making was done democratically, and everyone rotated through the different roles and responsibilities within the organization.

There were volunteers from Germany, Belgium, France, the UK, Australia and US – brilliant people exploring existence. It wasn’t acknowledged at the time, but in the depths of the financial crisis it seemed like the world was poised for changed, that we could create a different future out of the ruins of capitalism. Quetzaltrekkers felt like an oasis or a laboratory where we were free to explore alternatives. Everyone piled into a dilapidated, leaky house with half a dozen bedrooms that various people shared. Bodies were scattered everywhere, graffiti and murals covered the walls, and there was only one bathroom with an electric showerhead that indiscriminately delivered shocks. The food for the trips was made in-house – we baked our own bread, made our own made our own kombucha and brewed ginger beer. Our lives were further spiced up with a steady diet of substances as the kitchen fridge was a medicine cabinet that included LSD, MDMA, hash and countless edibles. We threw wild parties and lavish feasts to raise money for the organization that were famous. We talked, cooked, danced, drummed, sang and laughed our days away.

Between Xela and our time sleeping outside on trails it was a semi-feral existence. The sunrises and nights spent out under the stars on these trips filled me with awe. I felt a deep connection to the places where we wandered and stayed, something that we were always trying to deepen. One of the more vivid memories of this time is a trip that we made to Volcan Santiaguito – a live volcano that erupts erratically throughout the day. We did this not out of bravado or merely to take photos, it was to feel the volcano, to feel the earth, to feel the energy. We staying up all night captivated by the power of the earth as it shook, howled and spewed forth glowing molten rocks. Risking our lives, we made offerings of liquor to the earth and to the gods before running up to the rim of the volcano to look into it. I would have welcomed immolation in that moment as I had found what I had been looking for my whole life. It was there. I don’t mean physically in the crater of the volcano, rather inside of me, inside of us. This ineffable energy that vibrated in each one of us, an energy of joy, love and purpose. It isn’t something that you can buy or possess, it exists in many places but isn’t on any maps. It is ephemeral and has to be created in each moment. My time in Guatemala changed my life and those of everyone that was a part of this madness. I am still friends with many of these people, some of whom I haven’t seen in a decade. This experience still feeds all of us, its spirit alive in each and every one of us. I am still wandering the earth looking for it.

A year after I had returned from Guatemala, I was wearing a shirt from the Queztzaltrekkers that said Xela on it. I looked in the mirror and realized that Xela is my name backwards.

drugs, travel and meditation

I want to start by first explaining the weather in Lima, Peru, where I currently live, as it is a really good metaphor for my mind. Lima really only has two seasons – winter and summer. The only thing that really separates them is the sun, during half the year it is out and the other half it is absent, the city shrouded by a dull leaden blanket of clouds. During these months of grey, the days seem to blur together; it becomes difficult to demarcate the passage of time as everything seems to sit in stasis due to some undefinable malaise that permeates the air. It is difficult to get up in the morning as colors are dull, flavors are off, and the air carries a bone chilling cold.

The pending arrival of summer is first noted by warmer air and a stronger sun despite the blanket of clouds. During the middle of the day, the sun will occasionally break through the grey for few hours at a time. Just before the it appears on these days, the clouds will often descend as a fog thick fog upon the city, but the sun eventually becomes so strong and relentless that the clouds have no choice but to flee, the homogenous mass breaks apart and forms individual clouds that stream like phantasms up from the ocean as they desperately seek refuge from the sun between the buildings of the coast. With the appearance of the sun the buildings and homes of the city are resplendent as their colorfully painted facades shine, trees fill out with green, flowers bloom and fill the air with scents that transfix, flocks of parrots chatter as they careen between buildings and the world regains some sense or meaning.

I have struggled with depression for years, although it is more like Lima’s winter than the more tempestuous forms of depression that exist. Over the years I have found a few recourses that have become a vital part of my life as they help lift the clouds from my mind so that I can see the sun again; they erode the feeling of separation that I feel and help to remind me that I am an inseparable part of a universe that evades comprehension. I would like to talk about why and how I discovered them.

I was taking summer classes fourteen years ago and I was sitting in my room one day, looking out my window and watching cars rush past. The glass looked surreal, like it had oil smeared on it. I had been reading a few moments before, but I got distracted by a the glass and a lecture that I had heard in physics about forms of matter and the professor had said that glass could actually be considered a liquid and a solid, as its structure was very slowly flowing at all times. My thoughts shifted to the books that I had been reading recently – On the Road by Jack Kerouac, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. These books were like a mirror that lead me to examine myself. I saw myself running on a treadmill towards an always distant self-realization, happiness or success. They contained values that had been absent in my earlier development as a person, values of self-exploration, of adventure, of love and happiness existing absent material wealth or professional success. They planted the seed in my mind that maybe I didn’t have a genetic chemical imbalance, that maybe I wasn’t wrong in feeling empty and depressed leading my life as it was. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest led me to question the mainstream psychology and psychiatry system, in which I found myself a patient, as simply providing chemical versions of the horrific treatments that patients were subjected to in the middle of the 20^th century. My chemical lobotomy consisted of Paxil, Wellbutrin, and Trazadone at the same time. One to numb me, one to put me to sleep, one to get me up.

How did I end up receiving my diagnosis and chemical lobotomy? I had started taking these drugs because, when I was thirteen, I began struggling in school and causing problems with teachers and administrators. I couldn’t stand the monotony, the conformity, the rote learning, the authority. It wasn’t just school though. In the town where I grew up, everything was ostensibly perfect, yet there was something sick about it. There is a line in a Walt Whitman poem that goes like this, “Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones.” Everyone there seemed to be busily moving about and twitching like flies or small birds – never still or content. Their titles and outward appearances were in order, but I knew that they sniffed their socks, talked to their dogs, peed in their pools, drank themselves to sleep, and hoarded things that they didn’t need. There were suicides talked about in hushed tones, cheating swept under Oriental rugs, and swindling was just business. Money and material things always seemed to take precedence over love, or ethics, or community. Everyone seemed to create themselves as an individual through work and consumption. It all seemed to stem from the pernicious illusion of personal inadequacy or inferiority, not out of a desire for a better world. I felt so much pressure, to be, to act, to dress, to conform to all of it. No matter what, I didn’t fit in. Eventually, I saw it as this war against me, but fighting back only seemed to make the problem worse. My grades had taken a nosedive. I was withdrawn and refused to do my schoolwork. I couldn’t sleep, except for in class it seemed. I remember feeling incredibly self-conscious and nervous. The situation was framed as being dire, my path was irreparably veering off course. I got ground down gradually and my parents decided that I needed help, so we sought out a solution that our health insurance would cover to avoid the inevitable dismal future to which even a brief stumble would lead. I welcomed the pills in the end as I had a strong desire to just fit in, to be a normal kid.

I began seeing a psychologist and a psychiatrist. They seemed to just be an extension of the very thing that I despised, that was driving me mad. They seemed disinterested and not overly concerned with truly trying to understand me; I could see right through their clever questioning and feigned compassion. It didn’t take long before I was diagnosed as having anxiety and depression problems, something that I could have told them the moment that I walked in the door. These issues were the result of “a brain chemistry imbalance.” That meant that my mind was a problem and that I needed to, indefinitely, ingests pills from pharmaceutical companies in order to function properly within the confines of society. That was the start of years trying to fix myself with increasing doses and varied cocktails. I went on and off the drugs several times in the ensuing years; they made me numb, they had side-effects, I stopped, I found myself in a dark place again, I began taking them again.

After my second year in college I got an internship with a major healthcare corporation. I hoped to put to use the computer savvy I had learned in the past few years of studying engineering. I spent that summer in a cubicle, working eight to five, staring at a computer, rarely speaking to anyone, and observing my counterparts that had been doing the same thing for decades. We had Hawaiian Shirt Fridays. Cubes games were rehashed in the break room. I was regularly asked a question that inspired horror in me: What do you want to do with your life? I couldn’t answer with what was really in my heart: anything other than this, including, but not limited to: shooting birds at the airport to keep them from being sucked into jet engines, picking trash out of compost with a spike on the end of a wooden pole to render it aesthetically pleasing to homeowners ( something which I later did), become a streetwise junkie that prognosticates for pedestrians, or exist on the margins of society performing poorly paid work so that I could keep my mind free to later do the monetarily worthless things to which I gave meaning. I drove an hour each way and went mad in the river of glass, concrete and steel. I knew in the back of my mind that there had to be more to life than this, but this was the life seemed to be my destiny, what I had been groomed for and this internship was a trial that I had to endure.

I went to see the beady eyed, creepy psychiatrist that I had seen years before – I always felt like he was psychically molesting me – and I practically begged him for medication to make reality not so real. He, nor I for that matter, appeared to have any understanding of what it means to be human as we continually added drugs to my cocktail and upped doses in an attempt to short-circuit my mind. I just felt numb and a deep sense of loss for the part of me that was being smothered, but I didn’t know what that part truly was. Numb to the world, I really stopped caring at work, the infinite monkeys typing clicking away on type writers, well I figured that I could just let them do the work. Instead of working, I often occupied a toilet stall playing chess on a handheld organizer and reading books.

The complex mix of feelings at the time created a sense of reckless abandonment within me. I started lashing out against the hyperrational mechanism that I saw as opposed to myself. It was futile, but cathartic in some way. I hadn’t figured out yet how to channel any of this into a creative force of any kind. My mind became unhinged, but it took a while before I found my nadir. I was back at school and the chemicals showed their true inefficacy. The problem, whatever it was, began manifesting itself in other ways. It was like squeezing a balloon – one of those long ones that are used to make circus animals – the air just moves elsewhere. I cut the cable to all of the apartments in my complex the morning of Superbowl Sunday. Not just one wire, I sadistically disabled the boxes beyond repair. I got into fight at bars and parties, I took a shit inside the new phonebook sitting outside my rude neighbor’s door, I pushed all of the buttons in elevators when exiting, regardless of whether there were other people inside. I ripped the head off of a robotic Santa and ran off with it into the night. I robbed manger scenes during Christmas break, first only the Baby Jesuses, but then indiscriminately. (One funny thing that we found out during this period was that the owners of the manger scenes keep clandestine stockpiles of baby Jesus for just this purpose. We figured it out because some days they would have the infant replaced before any stores were open the next day.) I don’t think anyone could have said that I was ‘progressing.’

Returning to me sitting in my room staring at the window and out the window at the same time – in this moment of reflection I realized that I was just going through the motions, advancing towards a place that I didn’t even want arrive at, against every instinct that I had. I seemed to be repressing, or not even exploring, my own desires and trying to develop my own view of reality. Instead I was substituting the values and meaning of others and therefore was inevitably disappointed with the outcome. I felt exhausted physically, tired of constantly feeling the need to simulate what was expected of me. I felt like I didn’t even exist, like I was a fragmented image constructed out of magazine clippings. This wasn’t living – this was just another form of suicide. In the poem Howl there is a line that goes “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” That was why I had needed the pills, but they were also a form of suicide.

My mind was raw and I was capable of anything in that moment. I feel like I truly asked myself for the first time in that moment: What should I do? What do I want to do? I saw that the world was vast – there were so many different lives I could lead and places that I could explore. I didn’t have to take this path, but I didn’t know what path to take and I had previously felt too afraid to go adventuring. As I sat staring out the window, the phone rang. It was my friend Karina. She asked if I wanted to go into the mountains with her and take mushrooms the following weekend. I agreed and decided in that moment to stop taking all of the pills. The was going to veer off course and find another path.

Photo taken while tripping on mushrooms in the Wasatch Mountains, Utah.

As the mushrooms took effect in the mountains the clouds lifted, and the world was no longer grey. I laid down in a creek and reveled at the moss under a waterfall, I marveled at the lines on my hands, I breathed deeply to smell the summer wildflowers in bloom. As darkness descended, we built a fire and the dancing of the flames was one of the most beautiful things I had seen in my life. As I looked up, I was forced to take a deep, slow breath to steady my mind as the profound reality of the Milky Way – our galaxy – overwhelmed me completely. I lay down on the ground that night and I wondered whether this was just a temporary feeling, something fleeting, whether I would return to the way that I had been before. This was the start of a different life and I have never been the same since I saw the complex beauty that coexists with all of the ugliness, death, and pain that characterizes life. After this experience, I dropped all of my classes in university, went traveling in Asia and started meditating. Drugs, travel and meditation have become integral parts of my life that have changed me for the better and help me to continue growing. I will share experiences that I have had with each one in further blog posts.