Lucky.

I was lucky enough to learn the beauty of authenticity the hardest way possible… When I first left home in my early 20’s.

I was running away from everything and everyone, heartbroken and terrified, poor and with only a few things I could fit in my trunk. No job. No outside support. Running away from a loving and safe home into the pure and feral wild, without a single plan of survival other than to head west.

Everyone told me I was foolish and unhinged but something deep in my soul kept their critiques to only a whisper. There was already a spark in me that was moving towards the dry brush where the wildfire would take place. The wildfire of purpose, passion and freedom. One that was sure to grant eternal life.

That very first night I left, I slept in a rest stop… In the back seat of a sedan. It didn’t recline and I couldn’t even stretch all the way out. I had always thought such a scenario would make me feel scared and dirty but it didn’t… It did the opposite. It made me feel free.

I drove endlessly. I stopped in every desolate and blank town I could find. I had nowhere to be and nowhere to go. I watched these new worlds of people living in vastly different lives that what I had ever seen or noticed. It might as well been a different planet with a different species.

A police officer pulling into the driveway of his simple, unassuming home. Grass that was desperately needing to be mowed. A broken down car in the garage.

A waitress smoking a cigarette and staring lifelessly at the broken cement below her feet. I don’t think there was a single thought going through her mind.

A rancher loading his dogs in the back of his truck, dirty forehead, dirty boots and dirty hands. A gentle lightness about his aura.

These were their lives. They knew nothing else.

I had no phone and no laptop so this was always my movie. Some people have big TV screens… I had the dirty windshield of my car. The movie I was watching was always changing, always new, always real. And best of all, if I didn’t want to just watch the movie, I could just put the window down and be in it. I could hear the noises myself. I could smell the smells all around. I could jump in the lake I saw through my windshield and immediately feel completely alive.

Completely present. No past. No future. Just there in that one perfect moment.

I learned, intuitively, during these years that we are simply not meant to still if we want to survive. We’re not meant to always be clean. Not meant to watch the movie on a plastic screen.

We are here to experience everything we can, in all of it’s entirety, in all of it’s color. We are simply petri-dishes that become our environment, mixed together by all the experiences we put into our life. The experiences that end up becoming the blood that courses through our very veins.

If you truly want to save yourself and be alive, burn down all of your comforts and walk back into the unknown.

That’s where the gods have always been waiting for you.

This life is all we have. The only way you can ever wake up from the dream is to sit still and die.