Author: Benjamin

(Regarding what I announced yesterday.)

It took two-and-a-half years of plodding, methodical keep-showing-up for the necessary flash of insight to arrive.

After almost two-and-a-half years, I finally figured out how to make Free Refills work the way I want it to. It came to me in one big download Friday night. It’s gonna take a lot of planning and organizing and almost certainly some custom coding, but I finally can see it, what it should look like, how it should work.

Sometime right around now–yesterday, today, early next week–a court here in Colorado is going to affirm my lived reality and declare that in the state’s view, I am no longer married.

I have written this week some explorations of what the notion of home means to me now, now that the old meaning doesn’t apply.

On the meditation cushion yesterday morning, the image of a tortoise arose in my mind as symbolic of something I should now aspire to. If home is not a specific place in my world, and won’t be for the foreseeable future, then to truly embrace my current life and the potential within it, I must learn to carry (in an energetic sense) my home with me wherever I go.

This is the view from the deck of the condo I’ve been renting this summer in Summit County, CO. I loved being here–here meaning both Summit County and the condo itself. Here was a haven when I needed
a haven. I looked out on this view and I felt magic.

But the condo was only ever going to be “mine” in the short-term, and so while I could play with the idea of it being home, and could try on the idea that someday I’d have a home like this–a comfortable, inspiring space in a place of beauty and magic–it was never truly going to be home.

My time here grows short, but that’s okay. I had a haven when I needed a haven. And now new adventures impend.

While we were in New York, my mom took me to see the building she and my dad lived in when I was born. They moved away from New York when I was one, so I have no recollection of this place at all. But this building was my first home.

(In case you were wondering, their apartment was on the 11th floor in the back.)

I had a great time in NYC, but truth be told, I was there for maybe 15 minutes before I started looking forward to being home. Too many people, too many cars, not enough mountains. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s not the place for me.

It’s good to be home.

But … home.

A story: a few weeks ago, I was driving back from NM. I stopped in Alamosa, CO, for a little break and I texted a friend. “Are you home yet?” she asked. Hmmm. A few weeks before, I had finished moving out of the house that had been my home for the prior ten years. I had just driven out of NM, where my family is. I was on my way back to Summit County, where my heart soars. A few days later, I’d be back in the Front Range, where I have a room that’s the closest thing you could call “mine.”

“Home is kind of a complicated concept in my life right now,” I texted back.

And that is fine. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to live this experience right now. My whole life is in a space of transition and growth. I get to explore that space without being too tied down to anything.

But one of the things my time in NYC this weekend told me is that the concept of home matters a lot in my life right now. Where and what home truly is is something I’m supposed to explore.

Tonight, after a whirlwind long weekend in New York City, I will fly back to Colorado. What will I carry back with me? A trip this short can only offer validation rather than transformation, right? So what have I seen in the mirror New York holds up in front of me?

I’ll tell you when I figure it out. In the meantime, I can promise this: it will be good to be home.

I woke this morning, far too early by society’s clock and earlier still by the one that ticks within me, near or in New York City. I flew in on the red-eye. I’m pretty sure I’ve never before taken a red-eye on anything shorter than a trans-oceanic flight and I don’t intend to make a habit of it. Odds are good that I slept horribly, my legs folded uncomfortably into the tight confines of coach seating, my neck stiff from never quite relaxing, as though that little ten-degree tilt the seat allows offers any relief.

There are many aspects to this trip that are new to me. I’m here with my mom and my sister–I can’t remember the last time we traveled together. We’re here for a long weekend, and we’re here as tourists. We will do New York things the way actual New Yorkers mostly do not: we will go to a couple of museums, have meals at destination restaurants. Perhaps we will walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on our way to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.

Also: these days, I wear no rings on my fingers.

I’m writing this beforehand, of course. My expectations for this trip exist only in broad contours. I expect to enjoy myself. I expect it to feel different from the last time I was here–back then, I still wore rings on my fingers.

Things are different now. How will New York choose to reflect that back to me?

As creators, we are not alone in this. We seek the help of others, others who choose to hear us when we speak. We want them, need them, and, yes, ask them to say to others, “This person, listen to what he is saying. It will touch you.”

The creation of an audience, then, is collaborative, a growing relationship built on trust.

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(Yes, I used “he” to pronoun the gender-neutral “[t]his person” from earlier in that sentence. I acknowledge that while I’m speaking partly in the abstract, I am also pointing at myself, and I identify as male. If you’d like that sentence to point at you as well, feel free to substitute whatever pronoun fits you best.)

(And then yes, in that first parenthetical I used “pronoun” as a verb. Sometimes I do things like that.)

We have to make our own magic. That does not mean we are alone in this. Far from it. Indeed, the very thing that guides us into the arts in the first place, whether as creators or as audience, is that art helps shatter the persistent illusion of the physical world, that we are discrete entities, separate from what surrounds us.

And it is an illusion. With a little bit of practice, it’s possible to apprehend this truth directly and consistently. It becomes undeniable.

But even if you are not ready for that kind of practice–and it will shake up your world, I promise you–we can get a glimpse of that truth, every time we look at a painting, read a novel, listen to music; we feel within us that deep stirring and know that we have shared &hellip something across space and time.