Hello World.

Dark stone reporting.

Beaming to y’all from San Francisco…again.

Fighting bad guys. Protecting the streets. Giving alms to the poor.

Blessed drives. Coastal moments. 3 vans. 13 friends. Traveling cross country. Playing music. Singing songs. Dancing in the ocean mist. Diving into the cold baptism of the pacific northwest. Waving at seals. Blowing kisses to starfish. Sprinting through the dunes. Screaming to those frozen behemoths of stone.

BLESS THESE HANDS, WE ARE FORGIVEN.

BLESS THE SCARS, MAY WE SHINE LIKE STARS.

We pulled in on a summer camp. We walked with the old guru. Back bent and broken by the aggression of those sworn to protect the people but paid to protect the financiers and the money lenders of the empire. His staff gnarled as hi humor.

Dark Stone: How are you kind sir?

Pig King: I’m…semi-spectacular.

Dark Stone: Ha.

Pig King: You’ve come to ask me…something, yes?

Dark Stone: You’ve suffered so much for peace. Beatings. Assault from cops. How do you stay so positive? How can we be men of peace in times of war?

Pig King: Where does the Lone Ranger take his trash?

Dark Stone: Huh?

Pig King: To the dump, To the dump, To the dump-dump-dump.

Bewildering.

Some lessons are beyond words.

Rewind. Wake up in the fullness of dawn, walk barefoot through the woods, stepping through the brambles and the moss. find god in all her undefined divinity speaking sweetly through the drops of the morning mist.

Fast forward. 150 kids. Singing. Dancing. Sharing their talents and truths. Shining that pure and ever lasting light of youth. The beginners mind. Hope for mankind.

Onward.

I met a sorcerer. A Sagittarius.

He gave me readings of Tarot and guess-ture. Some intuitive. Some not.

That was just a day ago. But it seems like a lifetime.

Life moves so fast on the road. There are tombs and volumes I want and could say. But who has a mind to remember all the things we’ve done? Who has a pen to partake in such beauty?

Not I. Not yet.

Being in warm company and surrounded in earnest with the communion of my 100 companions, and feeling only the emotions and tender cleverness that comes from the presence of angels, and having learned the lessons of  bear, and fox, and lava rock, I had taken quite the recess from the competitive ways of self protection and deception I once knew so well.

Judgements. Weighing them on my friends and enemies.

Judgement. Like a mountain. Teenage. Messy closet. A quick room clean of the spirit and ego. Piling all the resent into an ever filling closet. Then…one day, the closet door busts open, and it’s all laid out there.

One thing I’ve realized. It’s better to just say something. If you’re angry. Let it out. If you’re hurt. Let the pain be known. Holding in emotions is like the hardening of a stone. Release is the purifying fire that yields diamonds.

I’ve been carrying a stomach full of coal.

But it’s great. With this poetic retelling of my process. I’m seeing every transgression on me as a transgression I’ve inflicted on someone else. It’s pretty cool actually. It’s reminding me of old friends and old times. There’s a lot of guilt, sure. But there’s a lot of nostalgia too. For all the silly and careless ways I’ve been, it never really was that bad. It’s just…learning. Seeing now through new eyes how i’ve taken advantage of people without meaning too. How I’ve made other people work on my behalf and been unappreciative of their efforts. There’s so many ways I’ve been, and I’m feeling them right now. It’s perfect. To remember. To forgive. Not only others, but myself as well.

I guess that’s the great illusion. That “I got it” space of self reflection and development. Life laughs just to remind you that you don’t. And that not having “it” is totally ok.

It’s the point actually.

There is a way on the road that is at once so distant and simultaneously familiar. For now, I’m home. Home in the bay. Home for now. I’ll sleep on a floor. Or in the van. Or under the light polluted sky.

But for now I’m drunk on the streets of San Francisco.

Another restless soul. Finding my rest in the chill and the fog.

Hanging from an alleyway staircase. Chasing giants into churches of blue. Finding that soothing peace in one congregations definition of what is god. Turning the other cheek. Forgiving those who betray. Loving endlessly and turning the tables on the money lenders. Fasting. Walking miles through endless desert. Confronting fortune and saying “so long” to the devil.

Though the church be crooked, the walk be straight.

Jesus Christ. Bless the homie.