The Sea Has Spoken

My iTunes surprised me again this morning.

Several years ago, on his album, Life'll Kill Ya, Warren Zevon (whose life did kill him) put out an interesting little song about the crusades that has always been one of my favorites. It's primary point is that you take a journey - any journey - for the purpose of getting to know yourself better.

The last three weeks in Petaluma have been that kind of an experience for me. It isn't at all clear to me why I felt the need to spend all this time here, except for the fact that I found a comfortable motel run by people who seem to understand my predicament, at least a little bit.

What has been frustrating, exasperating and saddening to me is the extent to which friends (or people I at least thought of as friends) either don't get it, are, in some sense, tired of getting it, or just flat don't care to get it. Over the last few days I have experienced rude, unpleasant and hurtful behavior from people I trusted, respected and liked. I know that it's always a bad idea to take things personally, but it's difficult not to take such experiences personally and to react in kind. I regret the reactions. I do not regret the awareness that I have gained from the experience.

The entire process of the last three months (going back to the very beginning of this weblog) has been one of prying up and throwing away nearly twenty years of carefully (and not so carefully) constructed veneer. I did not lose much in the storm; I had already gotten rid of most of what I had. The small bit that was left I returned to when I returned to California. The last month in California has helped me detach from most of that.

This morning I find myself standing on a new precipice, starinng off into a completely uncertain future. There is a great freedom in this, but there is a psychic payment to be made when you make the choice to break out of a ragged rut that you have padded into a pleasant pathway by complacently traversing it day after day and year after year. The cost of freedom is paid with uncertainty, fear, and confusion, all things that I have experienced over this weird journey of the last three months. It is also the only way to seek out and to begin to find one's authentic self.

Last night I watched Benny & Joon for the first time in years. One of my favorite movies with one of my favorite songs. At the beginning of the film, Joon's "housekeeper" Mrs. Schmiel, explains her leaving by relaying an old Irish saying that, "When a ship runs aground... the sea has spoken." I think that the last 90 days of my life have been a process of listening, over and over again, to what the sea has been trying to tell me.

Now I'm headed home... I'm not there yet, and I likely won't be for a while (even after I physically arrive), because one thing I've learned out of all this is that... I always take the long way home. I think it's the only way to go.