“Words may show a man’s wit, but actions his meaning.” Benjamin Franklin
I wish words could be written in the air, but that’s not how it works. I have all these stories, chocked full of endless pronouncements about the nature of life and how to embrace it. Now, I take absolutely none of it back, so that is not coming up ahead.
I got a good one and it is about the nature of change. Out of the hundreds of stories I have shared, I can’t even count how many have dealt with the subject. It could have been relegated to breath, especially when sitting in zazen, the Zen word for being still in meditation. With each inhalation and exhalation, the world is not the same as it was before every breath exchange.
Now, before you think I am about to recant all that I have espoused over the years, forget about it. A shitty analogy would be training to be in battle and feeling you’ve got it, until the first, fucken bomb explodes and leaves your best friend in unrecognizable fractions of flesh. Being in battle is how you truly learn and that applies to all the Zen platitudes as well. Experience is the teacher and not the writing on the page.
I know you’re expecting some personal experience of mine, prompting this introduction to being who you say you are and you’d be right. I have been following the same routine for around eleven years and the curtain has dropped, walking me into a wall of my own creation. I am no longer employed, at doing what I have been doing for all these years.
Over the course of this time, I have gotten lazy. I remember so clearly the feelings I had when I packed up my stuff, shoved it all into my Dodge Colt and headed for Santa Fe, NM in ’87. I had no plan and thought I had a nest egg to cover me for a while, and we’re not talking about a lot of eggs either.
I had bought a small adobe home, absolutely in the middle nowhere, off a dirt road, which was off a dirt road. I had visited Santa Fe in Feb of ’87 and impulsively bought this little adobe womb, south of town. I freaked the realtor out, because she was accustomed to showing one house after the next and so on. It was the first place she showed me and I told her I had bought one home years ago and had no idea how you buy a house. It was pretty easy. I met the owners, who had just finished building their dream house right down the road. They were incredibly nice and said they would be around to help if there was anything I needed.
I went back to NYC, owning a home in the Cerrillos Flats, which is what that part of southern Santa Fe was called, a couple of miles from the State Penitentiary, which was notorious. I was like a hooked fish and it was only a matter of time until I gave in and came ashore. I quit a fairly successful career in the world of media and picked up and left on June 1, 1987. Before you hit me for overly romanticizing this time, there was a lot about it that was truly excruciating and not for this story.
For me, that whole world was one of artifice and posturing and I was terribly uncomfortable play acting a character that was not me. I had seen a couple of shrinks for around ten years in my thirties and started reading and exploring a little about Zen land. I just didn’t want to die living there anymore and that’s how simple it was.
I was tired of being frightened and it stopped feeling like my life, at least the life I was supposed to be living. I was looking at this person and it wasn’t me. I guess what I did was pretty insane, but I felt completely in control of the unknown, if that makes any sense to you. I was in my early forties and I didn’t want to die living the life I felt handcuffed to.
I am not sure when the idea of “no fear” entered my little world, but it sure as shit did. I left the predictability of my NYC life for one that didn’t even exist, waiting for me to build it out of the air. I had the time of my life there and lived one adventure after the next and when something ended, which they all did, I was totally open to the next one. I built an incredible life for myself and met some wonderful people along the way. What I never felt in NYC, I felt out there. I was home and being who I wanted to be, making no concessions, because there was never a need.
I am reminded of a time when I was suddenly fired from a job at an ad agency, Doyle, Dane, Bernbach. It was right around Thanksgiving in ’77. I was living in a home I couldn’t afford, with two young children and a marriage that was beginning to shred around its seams. I was terrified. I actually got involved with the Mafia and some records that “fell off a truck”, because I could make some quick money. While it was a fabulous adventure, all in hindsight, living through it was awful. I know fear.
In NYC, it always felt like I had to be somebody other than myself, which probably has a lot to do with not having the vaguest, fucken idea who I was. In the City, I was a lousy actor in a play I didn’t write. In Santa Fe, I became Larry, for better or worse. Oh, my God, it was such an adventure. Just for the record, I was still very capable of being an asshole and several relationships were proof of that. Perfection is for dreams and I started living my own imperfect idea of heaven.
I packed all my emotional and spiritual baggage when I came here in ’93. I still liked the idea of being me, no matter the circumstance and fear still couldn’t knock at my door. I have had my share of adventures on the island and I am not done. In Santa Fe, I always felt like I was hustling, not in the cheap, pool hall way, but always with my ear to the ground. I lost some of that over the years here, caused by an extended routine.
When you are pushed out of a plane, you need to smile when you pull the rip cord. So, as I share this with you, I am smiling. I guess what bothers me most about writing some of the stuff I do is that none of it has come my way without getting banged around, making the same mistakes over and over, until you actually start believing and embodying the words.
I really feel I am living my words more than ever before. I wrote a few stories ago about getting paid to write and what it meant to me. Today, my name is Larry and I am a writer and that is the world I have parachuted into. Months ago, I met and fell madly in love with a marvelously, unique lady, in the midst of all this. It makes the colors brighter and the feelings richer and now, when I put my ear to the ground, I also hear her heartbeat, along with all the possibilities.
Today, I now take full ownership of my words and I mean it.
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https://www.buzzsprout.com/admin/1292459/episodes/15712259-walking-the-words/edit