It wasn't long after this that I started doing lots of yoga, sleeping by streams, and growing dreadlocks.
This has continued, more or less, for the past fifteen years. In so many ways nothing has changed - spring follows winter, and the icy runoff floods the canyon only to trickle into late summer. I used to sleep outside here in the winter, but after a drunk Irishman nicknamed Leperchaun froze to death a few hundred feet away from me I started seriously migrating during the cold months. That was almost three years ago now. These days I only spend the summers here in the high country.
I think sometimes I have nothing to show for my life. No possessions to speak of, other than the necessary warm weather gear. I still sleep outside, although I have a van with a bed in it I can use if I need. A few friends, some acquaintances, but truly, like the walkway to the library tells me, I am a bird that leaves no trace of my wings through the air.
And yet indeed, it is true that I am glad for this flight. I have seen so many changes already, and so many more are coming!
I have some of my own yoga students now. My dreadlocks have long lost all semblance of being organized, and I am sure I offend the bourgeoisie with my primitive sense of style, but some of my senior students have arranged for me to teach in a decent facility, which is a far cry from trying to hustle a job as a yoga teacher. Over time my ganja habit has matured into a meditation habit, without making me square. I chant sanskrit to soothe my nerves when I drive or hitchhike. Yoga has ruined my ego.
My body continues to amaze me. I almost never date, but the last woman I was with told me, " you have a fifteen pack - how is that even possible?" It makes me self-conscious. My body - the sensory experience available to me, the temple in which the "I" dwells - is exquisite, a masterpiece. I am humbled by its extraordinary level of perception, and in awe of its potential. My body, and my ego's relationship with my body, is simply getting better and better.
My values have changed. Wealth originally meant "well being", and prosperity originally meant "living in hope." So I live outdoors, without a "home", lost in nature, drowning in true wealth and prosperity. Through it all, nature has been the healer. In the summer months, I spend most of my waking life by the Little Ganges, allowing the colors themselves to inform me of the nature of beauty and truth. The sound and the movement of the water replace the clutter of the human condition with the pristine purity of nature's harmony. I grow wealthy watching water flow across smooth stones, without ever becoming possessive.
This world, this existence, this lifetime is finite and I have always yearned for the infinite, and somehow I set out to experience the infinite and there I went and so I did and so it was and now here I am. Not that I'm enlightened or anything, but I've found the Kingdom of Heaven, and its within me, just like all the World Religions have taught in all the Holy Books since the beginning of the invention of time. There is a peace that the world cannot give and can never ever take away, and that peace is accessed through meditation. Be still and know that I Am God. I don't need much from the world, really. I've already got it all, because it's all inside me. God wants me to start a church and herald the dawn of a new era by building an altar upon which rests a statue of Jesus in the lotus position, meditating.
Naturally, I am as caught up in the fascinating circus that is modern Boulder as the next post-truth hippie, but my dreadlocks and my ascetic lifestyle give me something of a prepper's perspective. When I start feeling a bit like John the Baptist, eating locusts and wrapped in goat wool, urging people to make way for the Kingdom of Heaven, that's when it's time to get stoned.
to be continued
Can I get a kickstart?
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