Overland Odyssey – Travelling North America by Road
Part 4: Colorado to Vermont
I step off the bus at Denver into grey slush, white mounds of grubby snow lining the streets and a piercing northerly wind rushing through every exposed crease and crevice in my clothing. I eat my breakfast in the bus station and help a friendly Venezuelan brother with poor quality directions and some biscuits (also poor quality). I catch a bus into centre town which requires a changeover on a street corner brimming with activity, a ragged vulgar huddled crowd exchanging various invisible hand-to-hand substances around a little fire in a metal pan under the bus stop cover and many of them laughing, arguing, angrily posturing, raving total nonsense or just talking to themselves – or their invisible companions – calmly and collectedly.
The scenes are of a gritty, grey unforgiving city in the last stretch of a grisly winter, windblown and huddled in a corner rocking back and forth beside a weak and flickering flame. I am glad that I did not spend the winter out here. And I, I am soon rocking onwards on the bus floating through another strange yet strangely familiar place, the same silver-sleek buildings and fancy steak restaurants and security guards talking on their phoneses. I head to the big marble stone central union station to charge my phone at a large set of open wooden benches in the great marble temple station hall, rows of pews lined with a rapidly rotating horde of commuters, tourists and crazies, myriad streetfolk mumbling and drooling and one exceptional case of a fat white-bearded man shouting FUCK YOU CASSANDRA! into empty space as he waddles out the building redfaced escorted by two security guards, another woman frantically flashing her hands at the sky in a manic energy that I have to look away from lest I am pulled a little too far into her anxious racing vortex. These people fascinate me, break my heart, and simply appear as yet more curious perfect manifestations of spirit dancing form and body and person. All is well, all is pain, all is love-meeting-suffering. Stay with it.
From Denver I get an easy bus ride over to Boulder just one hour away and slip into a cafe for a matcha latte (my favourite indulgence, and dharmic too because you know that Japanese monks drink it before meditating) and write, and read a novel (Starhawk) and behold the softly wintered world through a misted window, nose against glass in awe and nostalgic sorrow.
It’s cold, but hell is it beautiful.
All this time I spend I public places, I watch people a lot and have begun to practice and experience seeing them as family, seeing everyone as family. It is very simple but powerfully heart-opening. I begin by simply imagining how I would feel seeing this person if they were my mother, or brother or uncle, or old beloved friend, and then see what opens in my sense of them and very reliably comes this unconditional warmth and goodwill and appreciation, no matter who it is or how scruffy or odd or serious or glum, whoever it is, I find that I can and do love them without contrivance and I find the place in me that simply wishes them well and is grateful for their presence in the world, grateful to participate in this/our/the ineffable shared Presence, and especially I think this practice helps me to be with people in their suffering just as we are with our family members through all manner of struggles, without judgement and with love, without needing them to be different from how they are, exactly and precisely just how they are, and without fear of what they think or feel about me, because yes we all project and assume things about one another but through this practice I can find and rest and rejoice in the place where everyone loves everyone because everyone is family, cosmic family, divine family, divine dance playing out the play of the universe to perfection, playing our character roles to a tee, suffering and all: a great gathering of divine souls adrift on the crumpled lyric sheet of wild and wayward angels, dreamers who conjured a broken cosmos and stepped on stage to fix it up, ad-lib slapdash and grateful, slipped right into costume and into drag: into the intensity and intimate immensity of embodiment as an act of love: an act of unfathomable devotion to ever-unfolding beauty… to discovery and dynamic deliverance ongoing forever, and without limit…
Boulder, Colorado
Through this unusual endeavour of writing and posting outlandish philosophies and experimental poetical inquiries online here on Medium for the past five years, I have had the pleasure and privilege of making connections with various sterling folk from around the world, one of them being the great Tucker Walsh, community weaver and visionary and film-maker and writer, who invited me to Boulder thus to givme a glorious excuse to make my way to Colorado, the central heartland of the USA in my imagination, and was kind enough to arrange a place for me to sleep with a friend for a few nights. This led me to the house of Sarah in Longmont (named simply Sarah Longmont in my phone), a neighbouring town nicknamed Longtucky by the fancy schmancy Boulderites, and Sarah a woman of great integrity and creativity and ceremonial devotion – of Irish blood! – who I feel absolutely blessed to meet and be hosted by, my bedroom assigned within her garden-shed temple space, a space of song and medicine and ceremony, a pilgrim’s shelter which reactivates the power-thread of ceremony in my life-journey and we enjoy long hours of conversation about language, mountains over mountains, about ceremonialism and perception and evolution and healing and music, conversations which nourish me deeply and dearly, and strengthen me with a energy of meaning to this very path, no other… this exact weird terrestrial path of sacred kinship and the ever-burning question of how to honour the reciprocal sacrificial sacramental nature of our eternally individuating existences?
The next day I meet Tucker in Boulder after perusing several delicious dark wood bookshops and flicking through sumptuous photo artbooks and dipping in to random dharma books for flashing poetic excerpts. We sit down to talk and it’s like meeting an old friend, combined with the joy of getting to know someone new and hear the foundations of their story and to grow my imaginal conception of this amazing human being, one I feel particular resonance with as a community weaver and self-proclaimed generalist and creator of online lists with the intention of sharing vital life-giving information with the collective.
At the end of the day I go to sit at the Shambhala mediation centre in town, silent and patient and grand, and as I leave bow to the buddha thangkas and the photos of great lineage holders on the walls and the image of Sixteenth Karmapa arrests me completely, brings tears to my eyes and I cannot help but fully prostrate before the image, three times, Tibetan style. We (mad Buddhists) do this before images of awakened beings not to “raise the Buddha up, but to put ourselves down”.
Only by putting ourselves beneath all beings, can we serve them. So did Buddha. So can we. What ego cannot see: this is total freedom.
A day at Longmont library helps me to contextualise and clarify my place on the map, on the unfolding path of soul development (following Bill Plotkin’s map): I’m still in the phase of the Wanderer in the Cocoon, still close to the mysteries of nature and darkness and the psyche, yet the longing to be of deep service and to be fulfilled has been growing, coupled with a unexpected longing to return to the glistening green grasses of England and to my village, my beloved friends and family, bearing gifts and songs and stories and communing with the magic and history and medicine of those amazing amazing lands. This is new and different and welcome. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens, as I soon – upon arriving in Vermont – enter two months of intensive training at the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth under the tutelage of a highly realised guide. I’m scared, ready to get my ass kicked, and also not ready to get my ass kicked. I am however almost ready to travel all the way up to Vermont, far North East. But it’s a long way: first comes the journey.
On Craigslist I find a ride going from Boulder to Chicago in a couple days time. This allows me a welcome window to sleep and recharge in Longmont before hitting the road once again.
I meet Chris (driver) on Friday morning at Boulder bus station, ready to go. He’s an old timer, a good man, a good deep honest American who has lived all over, who has lived several lives in one and as we drive he gets to talking and telling stories, amazing webs of interlinked stories that help me understand life in the US better than any museum or tv show, because he’s worked as a chemist and a bus driver and an athlete, has been homeless living in his car, has been in fights as a drinker and battled through the deep soul journey of AA, has lived with Native Americans, has cycled from Chicago to Colorado in the sun and wind, survived marine corps basic training, and as the stories keep coming I feel that I am meeting a Ulysses of the Joycean manner, a true working class hero, and it’s my privilege to just receive and receive and to simply ask the questions that might take the stories to a yet deeper level, the epic nature of the arc of this life emerging and deepening and as we go. Every life is interesting if you simply look closely, and he since needs to talk to stay awake I decide to welcome to the challenge and to stay with him through this outpouring of memory and relationship and difficulty and beauty, and it really does keep going for the whole sixteen hours that we drive, on through the flat dry grasses of the central plains for hours and hours, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, on and on and on without feature or hill or landmark, rolling through the night popping into gas stations to piss and rolling on eating free fancy snack bars he gets from Colorado state on food stamps and Chris getting wired on Pepsi to keep driving and I just coming back to open awareness again and again and again like a little flower opening every spring forever and holding my new friend in a warm wide space of goodwill, and when finally we crawl into the Chicago suburbs it’s 4AM and by now I am in some way-expanded state, the familiar twinkling inner brightness that comes with long periods of no sleep, a strange ecstasy in which the beauty of life is inescapable is everywhere is bleeding through the walls of familiar boxed-up sensible reality as if the ego circuits are just too exhausted to keep going and start giving way to the ocean of awareness ever-revealing itself in and as now and the vastness of now, the pure unalloyed aesthetic of now and hereabouts Chris my brother drops me at an outer town station so I can catch the first 6AM ride into central, and as I watch the city rising from the dawn into a vast urban skyscape accompanied to ambient soundtrack (Stars of the Lid, who else) I am fastened to the glass in awe – the poignancy, the pain, the poetry of it all!
Chicago!
The Windy City!
In Chicago, I wrote poems. Drink hot chocolate, listen to blues in Buddy Guy’s, wander the grey streets in disconsolate yearning and golden high smiling appreciation, and write more poems.
One evening I find a pink scooter abandoned (god-given) on the windy streets and so I take up the invitation, mount my steed and fly, soaring gleeful like a mad happy kid through the streets for hours, up all through the north of the city and across to the sprawling lake along a winding canal sidewalk, weaving under bridges and up staircases and down alleyways and all the merry way along honking main roads to my hostel where I pass out deeply satisfied.
I come to rest – still in motion – in a profound sense that everything is okay.
Despite the grey slush madness of the chaotic streets outside. Perhaps even because of it.
The Cleveland Baggage Chase.
I begin to gear up for the final quarter stretch to the east coast and my pre-agreed arrival at the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth for two months of rigorous meditation training. Bring it on.
Perusing the highway maps for Chicago for hitchhiking routes, I succumb to the low-stress option of Greyhound bus upon finding a Chicago-Vermont connection for a little over $100. Not a bad deal for a 22 hour journey. I try and try to find a nice direct route but all I am offered is a four-bus tandem: Chicago to Baltimore, Baltimore to New York, New York to Vermont. So be it!
I book and board, my last long leg across the continent.
Two hours into the journey we stop in Cleveland, Ohio and are all asked to leave the bus for twenty minutes (for no apparent reason). I wilfully oblige, exiting and standing politely in the bus station concourse awaiting further instruction. We are then told it will be a one hour stop. Then two hours. I shuffle around and find a spot to eat my sandwich. I get to thinking and scheming, as one does in the weird liminal places of the world. Two hours aye? More than enough time to amble into Cleveland, imbibe the ambience, and make my way back for the onward journey. And so I do, hopping along into a funny little grey town of eighties-style skyscrapers and the same robo-food chains. I sit and write impressions on my phone in a food market, wander around the park listening to podcasts, search for a cafe (that doesn’t exist except on the map), sneak a secret groovy dance in a opulent empty old-style mall where delicious bright colourful jazz is swirling from invisible speakers (the bliss! the freedom! the love of life!), and eventually end up in the public library, a lovely big stone cube of safety and warmth and cerebral nourishment. I browse the shelves and peruse the magazines and nestled therein I spot a sleek as shiny copy of Tricycle, the Buddhist magazine (five points if you can tell me why it is thus called). Having read many fine Tricycle articles online but never on paper, I happily pick it off the shelf and set it down on a wooden desk, eager to reach the piece featuring Rebecca Solnit because she clearly groks and emanates the whole utopian futurist visionary energy – but how to check and balance this with radical presencing and non-attachment, penchant of Buddhists through the ages? I am ready to find out. I sit down, pick up the magazine, glance at the time. 1:30pm. Exactly the time… when my bus departs.
What?!
How did this happen?!
Oh, no no no!
In other words:
Fuck.
My bags are on that bus! And the humour of it smacks me in the chops before I can say “greyhound bus”, and before I can lodge a formal complaint to the galactic committee I am RUNNING, flat out, spreeeentingg through the Cleveland streets direct for the bus station, only a ten minute walk away so I’m in with a chance, a good fighting chance of catching a bus that may very well leave just a few minutes late, just a few merciful minutes that may allow me to reunite with my wheel-ed chariot and continue on my way, running huffing puffing drawing deep centred guffs of life energy air energy wind energy and it feels positively amazing to fly through the lower realms of the sky, the sky the kissing the pavement and wrapping around the lampposts and diving down through my gullet to suffuse countless alveolal sacs with life-force, sky filtered and compacted in enzymatic furnaces to fuse oxygen blocks with sugar blocks and spit out ATP that is instantly assigned rapid express delivery to leg muscles, back tendons, and fetal pads pounding the hard cold ground of the sleeping winter earth, and within mere seconds I am within sight of the bus station and it happens: I see a bus pull out and away down the street – but was it mine? I decide split-second that it is still worth running on the chance that my bus has not departed and so I keep on at max intensity all the way into the station and up to stand number four where my bus… is no longer visible.
Gone!
My bags are on that bus – bound for Baltimore. And I’m stranded – in Cleveland Ohio. That’s what you get for being a dreamer and a wanderer. For not accounting for the entire hour you spent in the bus station, eating and deciding whether to leave the bus station, resulting in a one – not two – hour window with which to explore the town. A heedless miscalculation for which I can either critique myself or love myself. I choose the latter, embracing the opportunity to dance the dance of life and to reject the groundless idea that things would be somehow better if I was on that bus, together with my bags, reading and sleeping and not contemplating the ridiculous divine perfection of it all – which includes, unequivocally, the unplanned and unplannable occurrence of being stuck in the liminal grey disrepair of the Cleveland bus station!
As the Arabic world proverbs “Tie your camel before you pray”, I cannot hide from the wonderfully foolish humour of failing to keep track of time as a result of becoming entranced by seductive and exciting Buddhist literature. Ideas have disconnected me from reality – and in doing so, can create entirely new realities! Far out!
Closer in, I need to catch another bus. And I need to rendezvous with my luggage that is now speeding onwards to Baltimore. (“Need” is a strong word, admittedly, but I have learnt to thoroughly enjoy and embrace side-quests).
And so, the chase is on! My bags are bound for Baltimore but the bus will then continue on to Washington DC. Can I get to Baltimore in time to intercept them? Can the driver unload my bags as they pass through? The lady at the greyhound desk says he can. But then, there aren’t any more buses going to Baltimore today, not until tomorrow evening. Then I’ll be way slowed down and will have to sit in purgatory (the Cleveland bus station) for a whole standstill day. No, I need to get moving! I decide to get the bus to DC and ask the driver to unload them there, at the end of the line. This has the painful consequence of losing any chance of catching up with my bus schedule, forgoing my old ticket and requiring that I buy a new one. An expensive mistake. As I have concluded multiple times on this trip: gremlins are expensive. Left unchecked they will cost you money, relationships, health, happiness – even your life. So be vigilant! And yet, be forgiving and loving. Mistakes are the engine of learning – so keep going! And so I do, racing through the endless highway constellations of lights, lamps, and voids through the night until, bleary and half-conscious in the morning, we arrive in DC, all big shiny silver and glass buildings standing sterile and heavy in the blasting icy wing, and there the bus attendant, Mark Edwards, a shining soul of a man with long blonde hair, the kind of man who does an ordinary job in an extraordinary manner, precisely by smiling, being kind, natural and easeful, taking care and patience in the essential work of helping the buses park, unloading and offloading passengers and baggage with a beautiful gentle kindness, a natural bodhisattva, and he assures me that when he’s done with this current influx of coaches, we can go and check the lost property for my things. And we do. And there they are!
My guitar! My backpack full of notebooks and summer shirts from mexico and two sleeping bags (summer and winter) and a little bag of shrine objects and essential oils and assorted semi-valuable claptrap that I could conceivably drop but now feel responsible for and so will continue to steward for the time being. I’m joyous at this unexpected reunion and at the beaming enthusiasm of Mark who, despite the cold blustery drudgery of his position, seems to genuinely be having a good time delighting in serving the good people of America on their many journeys across this strange and vast land. I wander round the early morning rush of DC central station all coffee and croissants and suits and cellphones, serious calls and laptop workbreaks at tiny tables all crammed in tight and I slot right in there to drink a hot chocolate and just be amongst it, part of it, inseparable from all of it and everyone flowing and going and glowing, mystery incarnate and shattered and complexified a millionfold, jovial laughing man from New Jersey next to me excited to visit his brother in North Carolina (or was it Georgia), and I myself ready to embark once more for the next stop, New York City which I had planned to save visiting for the very end of my time in the US but have now been assigned to pass through in a swift 2hr bus changeover, and so off again on the timeless cloudy American road, rain and wind and as we pull into NYC I’ve got “Wish You Were Here” (whole album) on my headphones cohering the vast industrial scene of smoke and chimes and dark greys into a sonic cinematic masterpiece, “Welcome to the Machine” reverberating from the city walls and the spiralling guitar lines of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” echoing through every raindrop on the misted bus window and across the heavy morning landscape as the bus curls and turns through underpasses and huge great bridges to start coming down into the city proper, buildings rising and rising higher and higher until I cannot see their tops due to the low smoggy clouds, great baggy eyelids of the sleepless, dirty cotton wads of the night before closing deals and drinking cocktails, hovering and covering the city’s canopy-dwelling elite from the slushy dirty chaos of the streets below. It is those streets I walk in an awed ecstasy for two hours in the pouring rain, never before bombarded with so many high-power pixels from so many higher-power advertisement screens in all directions in all colours on every conceivable place that one could attach them to a building, the whole cityscape an electrified matrix of humming buzzing neon energy, anxious, whirring, plugged-in, pulling resources in from the far ends of the earth just to keep that while going, to keep those people high, caffeinated, tranquillised, and hitting their goddamn targets.
When America Blesses God, this ship will turn around. But until that day it will remain a parasitic childish monster on the body of the blue-green organic Goddess we call Gaia, jewel of space, mother of life, teacher of souls.
The bus to Albany is not unworthy of poetic report, but I choose to leave the space unwritten and undefined. So too the four hour night journey from Albany up to Burlington Vermont where I wander in the cold for a half hour before curling up under a hedge beside a big white modern church overlooking the lake, safe and happy and gleeful. Arrived! Intact! Alive!
Two public buses get me, finally, to the little town of Morrisville where I await pickup, dancing and jumping in the cold to stay warm and laughing, laughing and singing and chanting mantras at the goodness of it all, waiting an extra hour then two and really working up a great bouncing energy fuelled by two blueberry cakethings and a conversation with a wonderful old boy surfer also a dharma junkie, bouncing in the timeless cold and before I know it Bhadda arrives and announces “let’s go” and I hop in the car and a portal opens and the next chapter – MAPLE – silently and seamlessly begins…
“A life fully lived is a continuous free fall into the unknown”
