Before I started racing bicycles at the age of 16, I got to go on a bicycle tour with a group of kids for a couple of weeks. I must have been 15 at the time. The trip was the first time I got to spend any real time away from home. It was liberating and fun, giving me the chance to ride with other kids and showing me that I was a really strong climber. That tour led me into the world of bicycle racing, but when I stopped racing, touring was right there, ready to fill the void.
By the time I stopped racing, I had escaped my homelife and family and I’d reconnected with an experience that I called Peace then, and that I now call Life with a capital ‘L’. Bicycle racing had taken me far and wide, allowing me to feel relatively comfortable with stepping into the larger world. My connection to Peace, to a mystical experience of God, had become my guiding light. Bicycle touring became the low-cost, high-quality way for me to use my extraordinarily high level of fitness to explore the natural world so I could continue to deepen my connection to and find my place within it.
On one hand, my debilitated core was doing what it does with many of us—it was driving me to step into life in ways that was continually leading me to reinforce and worsen my state of debilitation. The more debilitated we become, the more distanced from ourselves and life we become, and the more we hunger to find something to be a part of. Unfortunately, our debilitation drives us to do this in ways that are unhealthy, and so we end up nurturing distance and conflict, instead of connection and flow, within these pursuits. How I engaged with academics and bicycle racing were classic examples of this.
On the other hand, I had an ace up my sleeve that I was unaware of at the time. This was my deep hunger to reclaim a connection with Peace/Life. When I was a boy, I found what we would call a mystical experience with some plant communities, and it allowed me to survive the abuse I suffered through. (Getting started posts) I never stopped hungering to return to that experience, even after I completely suppressed it along with the rest of my childhood. It was that drive that ultimately directed me away from being continually stuck in on-the-ground pursuits that would dig me deeper and deeper into my negative emotional hole.
I got a job working in an Indian restaurant my junior year of college, and I was able to save much of what I earned so I could hit the road on my bicycle when summer came. I rode from Colorado to Alberta, immersing myself in the natural world as I went. I wasn’t eating quality food on my shoestring budget on the tour, and so by the time I got to northern Montana, I was dragging physically. I met a couple that was bicycle touring through Montana for their honeymoon, and the woman knew some things about edible plants. She introduced me to some of them, suggesting I start eating them to help round out my diet.
Just as finding Peace in a monastery in the Colorado Rockies felt somehow normal to me (01 My struggle begins), connecting to the plants and starting to engage consequentially with them also felt like returning to a familiar place. It would take years for me to realize I had established consequential relationships with plants in my past. For now, what I was being introduced to simply felt like coming home, and so I pursued it.
I worked at a Mexican restaurant throughout my senior year of college, and then set off north again, finally free of academic pursuits. I road to the southern edge of Alaska, took a ferry south to Seattle, and then road down the Pacific coast before wintering over in Portland, Oregon. By then, I was putting a lot of my attention towards plants. As I opened to each new part of the West, I’d get new opportunities to meet and engage with new plants. This led me to expand my knowledge base from edible into medicinal plants. I would geek out with excitement with every new discovery that I would make.
I left Portland in the spring, spending the summer crisscrossing the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges before crossing Death Valley and entering Arizona. By the time I finished my third major tour, I felt that it was time to stop wandering. I settled in Santa Fe, NM and got a job in a restaurant so I could continue to save up some money. That next summer, a man named Michael Moore, who had written some herb books I had studied, was giving an intensive on medicinal plants in the nearby mountains. After attending it, I decided to take his more in depth 6-month program in Bisbee, AZ. I moved down to Bisbee, did the program, and then stayed on in the desert afterwards.
It was in the desert that I finally broke through to my suppressed past. It took me years to figure out how and why this happened. I had suppressed my whole childhood because I couldn’t handle the awfulness that it carried. But, as I reconnected to Life and actively pursued a deeper connection with It, I slowly started coming out of my deadened state. By the time I finished my plant schooling and was living in the desert, I had come back to a connection to Life that was powerful enough to organically give me the energy needed to start to shoulder the burden of carrying the awfulness of my past. This led me to reach out and find help emotionally for the first time in my life, and that help put me on a core healing process that would shape the rest of my life.
We’ve done something strange in this culture. We’ve completely divorced ourselves from any functionally intimate relationship with the earth, and we’ve decided that this has been a positive thing. Doing so has certainly made our lives much easier functionally, but it has come at a cost that, through my eyes, has been catastrophic. The reason why has to do with energy. When we live lives intimately connected to the earth, we are organically fed by the Life that’s infused within it. This gives us a type of energetic supplement that allows us to operate at our full energetic capacity. Without it, we operate at about 85% of this capacity, which means our hearts still beat, but we experience life in a deadened manner. Because we’ve normalized this depleted experience, it’s all we know, and so we take it for granted that this is how life (with a lower case ‘l’) should feel.
Many who need help emotionally end up progressively degrading until we hit rock bottom before we’re ready to seek help. Because I was so deadened from the abuse I went through as a boy, I needed to come back to Life just to reach this place. However this works for you, you always need to start by understanding how your issues and problems have been established so you can then use this knowledge to find and implement solutions.