 This morning I have come to the conclusion that we are all actually wizards. There has been folklore, myth, tales, etc. for centuries, but our scientific and analytical experience of the world has told us that such things are not possible are simply something we tell our children. I think people have forgotten and/or ignored two important details of our existence: energy and imagination. Now, when it comes to imagination most people tend to become disheartened rather easily for one reason or another (fear), but I have found it is usually quite easy to re awaken a person’s imagination. Energy, on the other hand, is something people either relate to a physics class or a protein bar, which are both correct, but they fail to notice that energy is actually everything. As in: the Whole Universe. Because everything is energy, the energy you choose, or not, to put out in the world collides with everything else’s energy and that’s how life happens. BAM.
Considering these qualities of life has me realizing the power of thought and attitude and all of those other wonderful things. A good friend is always telling me to live in the joy, be joyfull and the world will give you joy in return. So, i’ve been practicing this in situations where I typically would be nervous or instantly assume it will not work out in my favor I instead try smiling and I speak out loud, “This will work,” and, “This is going to happen for me and be wonderful.” I am shocked at the success rate of this strategy. Yesterday, I was watching a storm roll in and the weather report kept telling me it was supposed to rain all day today, but I’m supposed to go on a hike. So, I looked at the sky with a smile on my face and said, “This weather will pass and tomorrow is going to be a beautiful day for hiking.” What a beautiful and sunny morning it is. I am a witch, a wizard, a sorceress, because I can control the weather with my mind. I also can make people call me when I want to and if you try to light me on fire I will stand in the flames laughing with joy until the wood is all ash and I still standing tall and free. I exist in a world full of creativity, which is where imagination and energy are applied together. When I see my brothers focus their energy on their respective art forms I am continuously amazed at how awesome and powerful they are. Their skills look like magic tricks with the ease with which they perform. How do they do that?! At the same time I get the same response when my father watches me work on a painting, so I can see both sides. I just will the painting to be so, and a few hours later it’s there. We all have the power to shape our worlds in this universe. I recommend starting with joy: it’s a wizard’s best friend.
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 My dad and I just watched our last two cows get butchered. For ten years my family tried half-heartedly to run a ranch. The experience was really more about my brothers and I growing up in an environment full of responsibilities such as raising cattle for beef, horses, goats, chickens for eggs and meat, ducks, of course a plethora of dogs and cats, building shit, taking shit down, gardening, etc. It was a great way to grow up even if the only result is that we know how to DO things such as solve problems on our own. Being the creative types that we are, however, lent itself to a situation where my brothers and I became busy with rehearsals, practices, shows, and our ever-lovely minimum wage jobs on top of our school work or we moved out to go to art school. Basically the ranch life slowly deteriorated. After ten years, it is time to move on from the ranch, time for a lifestyle change.
So, as I watched the sunrise through the trees on Monday morning while the last two cows dropped, it dawned on me that the life I have most consciously known, the life that pushed me into adulthood, is no longer my life. This dawn is new. Thinking on what little projection I can see for life in the next ten years has me emotional and excited. It will be a decade full of art, music, theater, new adventures, laughter, and love. A year from now I will have graduated with a four-year degree and start my life that doesn’t include a summer and winter vacation (or will it?). What a wonderful moment in time. My brother will have graduated from his program, another will be graduating high school, who knows what the other two will be up to but they’re strongly directing themselves towards music. We are, all of the people in my inner circle, moving forward towards a more rich and creative life: I’m in love with this change. When we first moved onto property it felt like Disneyland compared to the gated communities we had lived in prior. With all of the space, the trees, the possibilities we ran around those 26 acres like there was nothing else in the world. I remember the first cattle we bought in an auction and naming them Juicy and Fillet to avoid getting too attached, but once Tom, the Butcher, came around there was nothing but excitement for some fresh, grass-fed beef. We were such good ranchers that when our first calf was born we didn’t even know Juicy was pregnant. There’s nothing quite like seeing an animal born, raised on the pasture unperturbed for its whole life, watching it receive a painless death and cleaned up only to fill your freezer and feed your family of eight for several months. We gave up on the detachment approach after that. Mostly the ranch was a space for us to explore and create. We constructed paintball courses and would have huge tournaments on the weekends, we built a half-pipe that was six feet tall and twenty feet long that we’d ride almost every day, we had relay races in the front pasture with all of the cousins while the parents and grandparents would laugh and shoot at us with airsoft guns, and we would ride dirtbikes and quads all over the hill. It was a place of expression, or as my dad calls it, “the Rockstar Factory.” We threw huge dance parties and costume parties, dug out a 150 foot slip’n’slide, and put together mini concerts on the porch; I mean the activities were endless. Unfortunately, living on property like that requires a lot of maintenance and all we wanted to do was create art and make music. I’ve lived in a lot of places in my relatively short life and I’ll likely live in many more, but the ten years I spent on that piece of property was worth all of the blood, sweat, and tears we put into that place. Now, the time for that life has passed and it’s time for another lifestyle change. Time to downsize and re-prioritize our lives to accommodate the change that happened in this last year, but it is difficult to let it all go. My parents’ divorce, my grandpa’s suicide, my dog’s death, my mom getting a little crazy, my brother and I finishing up our artistic education, my youngest brothers-whose diapers I changed-getting their driver’s licenses and cars and jobs, people not doing anything but floating around exhausting their resources, and everyone is packing up and moving. I mean it has just been one thing after another and it has been exhausting. Accepting that life changes can often be one of life’s biggest challenges, but this time I could not be more excited, or more anxious, for what is to come. These next ten years are going to be even more awesome than the last. |
