Saturn Returns, NYC 2009

What does it mean to return? What is this planetary myth of change and challenge, and how can it inform my next steps into the world, born again from the limits of my own vision. When I told Kent "give me two weeks and I'll be there" I didn't know that I wasn't coming back, that this journey would take me out of the self I knew and bring me to question it, the goals, motives, and desires until now, when I return to New York, which feels more like my native city than Los Angeles, the place of my birth. We can never return to the same place twice. There is no such thing as place. There is only relationship, and what the city was before I left was my relationship to it, to those spinning streets and vaulted buildings.
The story must be told. There are two worlds, and this city holds one firmly in it's grasp, the focus of human creativity, expression, endeavors. The full externalization. And where is the listening? When I speak of this story here, on these streets, where some have not slept under the stars in years, I don't know how to translate it. How do I speak of something that is not about doing, but about listening? How do I rest into the stillness I have found in the deserts and mountains, the open skies and leaf green canopies, beyond the swath and swirl of New York City? How do we find our rest, our connection with the natural rhythms and patterns amid the rectilinear psychology of I-beams and plate glass.
How does the story hold itself in its delicacy within the velocity of this world? Is it still meaningful witnessed by this speed? Does it still speak?

Radical Joy for Hard Times

Trebbe's vision has grown since we saw each other at her endless mountains vision quest. Now her vision of sitting on the earth's wounded places has grown to become a non-profit called Radical Joy for Hard Times, and I am on the band of directors. Usually it is called a "Board of Directors", but I? don't want to be a board, I want to rock out, I want to make music, I want to Jazz, so we are a band.
Other familiar faces from the Death Valley Experiment are Christi Strickland and Farion Pearce. I am beginning to see each person's superpowers light up the group. I am beginning to believe that in coming together groups of people can create beautiful things that are more resilient than what the mind of one person can create. We are talking about a cultural collective here-- a movement towards empowering people to take the first step towards environmental equitability and reconciliation with our natural world, our natural selves.
We go to Cazenovia Lake and sit. We sit apart, we look, we listen, we feel. We come together. We tell our stories. The method is very simple, but this does not diminish it's power. We all feel more clear, energized, loved. We, at the very least, have connected ourselves to our earth, have sung it's acknowledgments, have honored the life in this place. It is a simple act. Christi sums it up: Stop. Look. Listen. Feel. Love. Give.

What more do we need?