The heart is like a compass. Listen to it and you will know which path to take.
This is a story about forks in the path, the heart compass and the meandering, purposeful journey that has been my calling. Many of you know of me because of where this journey brought me. But getting to this place in my life is a story worth sharing.
If you read the Seeds of Change blog you will have read my story of moving to Santa Fe in 2020 and going to work on creative undertakings here. But this is not the first time I have lived and worked in Santa Fe.
The first time was in 1991 and I was 22. It was different then. A pallet-tent was my home. I paid $150 a month rent which bought space for my Kmart tent in the backyard of a faux adobe house owned by a workmate, ⅓ of the refrigerator, the cabinet space above the stove and bathroom rights. It was summer, which for good reason is called Monsoon season in Santa Fe.
Night after night the rain thrummed on the roof of my cheap tent, sounding like the feet of ten thousand gigantic cockroaches tap dancing on a wet drum head. I would wiggle my feet in my sleeping bag, pretending to read a book under the beam of my flashlight but utterly unable to focus. The wildness outside made the warmth inside feel precious and uncertain. My worldly possessions were tucked into the corners of the tent, which was set up on old pallets. This all rested on the raw earth of the backyard of a new track house. To the north my shaky palace was protected by the mud-splattered, pink-beige plastered wall of the house and to the south by a splintery pinewood privacy fence. The wind and rain came from the west.
The four inches of lift provided by the pallets held me above the raw earth and were the only thing that kept the quickly deepening muddy water from pouring in. The pallets had been my idea, found abandoned in the dirt of a nearby construction project and dragged to the yard, scritching across the surface of the bright new concrete sidewalks of the subdivision. But even the dullest of human landscapes cannot protect us from the wildness of nature. I remember laying there, not reading my book under the full onslaught of the storm thinking to myself that my pallet design was an early sign of genius and this brought me some peace.
Everyday I would ride my bike to work and eat a cheap burrito for lunch at Baja Tacos. My day job was converting clay pots into lamps or painting them with smelly lacquer and gluing them together to make chintzy fountains that people actually bought. And though it all may sound a bit raw, and perhaps distanced from genius, I was in love with life. I was one semester away from finishing my university studies and facing the bewildering question of what I would do with my life.
Then, as my tenure as a lacquer fountain builder came to an end that summer I was offered a job so unique that there was only one such position available on earth. The offer came to me suddenly as I stood on the edge of a gravel parking lot while the man put a $50 bill in my shirt pocket. The offer gave me thrilled goosebumps and scared the shit out of me in the same instant. I was suddenly standing at a fork in the path of life. The choice I would make in that moment would have monumental consequences in my life.
There are moments, experiences and choices taken at potent crossroads that can line up, one after another, in the most wondrous of ways, creating the worthy journey, drawing an ornate line that writes the meandering story of our own unique existence. Through our choices, instincts and quiet listening, through our confusion, inspiration or the gift of synchronicity, we are drawing an elegant, crooked line that is the composition of our life.
That moment on the edge of the parking lot was of tremendous significance in my life and we’ll come back to that moment of gravel and gravitas. But to arrive at that moment with the fifty dollar bill man, my cheap tent, lamps made of pots, the summer rains of New Mexico and a job offer most rare, it is necessary to go back in time eight years to the moment I met one of the great loves of my life.
I was a 14 year old boy still marked with the freckles of childhood, a cowlick popping up in the middle of my shiny blond hair, and big front teeth. It was springtime, late afternoon and I was surrounded by the sounds of diesel busses, a babble of voices speaking a foreign tongue and unknown scents.
Up until this moment, the world as I knew it consisted entirely of the land between the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains where the sagebrush valleys of Nevada began and the breaking waves of the Pacific Ocean along the north edge of California. Vast enough, but rather small on the global scale of things. The only worldly traveling I’d ever done was in my imagination. And as far as that was concerned, I’d traveled the world over.
But on this particular afternoon, I had a Neil Armstrong moment. As I stepped southward across a faded and crackled white line on the asphalt with pieces of gum stuck to it and brought my Converse High Top-clad foot down on the other side, I took one very small step for mankind, but one giant leap for Eric. With that single step I had arrived in a nation unknown, chock full of sites so odd that my eyes became like saucers and my heart raced. I knew in an instant that I had found a place that spoke to the quiet, insistent, yearnings in my heart.
The sign over head, a bit askew and tinged with rust read, “Bienvenidos a Tijuana”. Welcome to Tijuana.
And this is where our story begins.
See you next week ;)
someplace south of the crackled white line.