..As I die unto myself..

Something in the air today has reminded me what I felt the week of my birthday--that my New Year has already begun.As as I jogged today I took in all the scenery around me,and I found myself thinking about how far I’ve come since I moved up here almost 3years ago. That journey’s purpose was to find out what I was made of all on my own and to find some hope once again. That journey has completed itself and I’m onto a new one. As such, I’ve I realized I feel myself, in this season of fall, saying goodbye to what’s around me..I’ll be moving on from this place and into a nomadic lifestyle again…

To burn myself down then be born again…

The fires of purification are not about “cleaning” oneself in a puritanical fashion, but letting go of comforts and artifice, including one’s pain, turning the voices in one’s head around into friend from foe. To burn in the fire and see what parts of self are left afterwards, then to begin again, realizing that all choices I make are declarations of who I AM and who I want to be.

Some of my wishes when I moved to NoCal: to find out what I’m made of all on my own, to fight down my demons in the proverbial desert and cast them off forever, to go to jungle in south America and study with shaman, to reach enlightenment or some sort of breakthrough out of the vicious cycle of the phoenix, to have positive people come into my life to whom I could give back, to be released of the darkness that has haunted me since I was a child so I can examine it without suffering its disabling grip.. .and I received all my wishes in one form or another.

Since I was a child, I wanted so much to have a little place called home, with a warm lamp to read by, yet it’s never come to me. My life once again seems determined to remind me that my home is within myself.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot yet be reborn. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” -Antonio Gramsci, "The Prison Notebooks.”
I remember finding this quote in a photo book at photographer Richard Hobbs' apartment. I was working on Crisis’ “8 Convulsions” album artwork at the time and was looking for something..something that said it all. When I opened Richard’s book, the first page showed a black ann white photo of a cemetery, with Antonio’s quote underneath it. The words hit me so hard, I immediately screamed “That’s it!” and copied down the quote. (And then later read his book).

Now that the oldness within me has died, and the huge amount of morbid symptoms have disappeared in the light of my rebirth, I am excited at the endless choices I am now making to create my life from this point onward...