Right now I am in Hawaii. I will be here for the next two weeks, after which I'm flying back to Colorado for Christmas and a couple days after. Then I'm hopping in a car with some of my dearest friends in the world and letting the highway and our subtle whims direct where we steer for the following week. Ultimately, however, we're going to Vermont, where I believe I'll be living, writing, and falling in love throughout the next 2 months until I fly to Ireland to study and fall in love in probably a different sense.
I have tried working jobs I don't believe in (many of which were chronicled on this blog), but all along, I felt they were means to an end, something insincere that was filling in gaps in my life when I should have spent the time writing, or else being alive in a sense more present than I usually found myself.
The Tao Te Ching says that the active, engaging part of being alive must necessarily revolve around the work that you do. Gibran says the same thing in his little book The Prophet - it is to fall in love with your work, love it whole heartedly, put your full self into in every moment and thereby be fully present all the time. Life-Love-Work all seem to be in essence the same thing, so long as one lives it sincerely, holding nothing back.
Since I graduated college, I've spent a lot of time running around, trying different lifestyles, I've crossed more time zones and met more people than I can begin to count, but throughout it all, there was one message that seemed to be completely consistent: wherever you are, it is a question of how you are engaged with it, the work you are doing, how deeply you are in love with the fact of being there, in every capacity.
I went to so many places to try so many alternatives, busboy, yurt fixer, fish gutter, festival hippy, communist/raw foody/back to the lander, farmer, apprentice, journalist, reader and finally writer. The question plaguing me all along was "What do I actually believe in? Which of these options makes me feel alive and present, fully engaged, fully in love?" All along I noticed a glass between my engagement with a thing and the thing itself, in all except in writing the novel I'm currently working on, called Continental Divide, as well as with the most sincere letters I've written and received, phone conversations I've had, and some Thanksgiving talks, face to face with my family. When I felt something true, something fully real was on the line in my engagement, suprise suprise, everything lit up and I became wholly there.
It is therefore, after trial and error, after trying the alternatives and gauging how I felt about them, that I have decided to settle down in a way, to commit in a way I had always been too hesitent to do earlier: I'm going first to Vermont and then to Ireland to focus on what my heart has told me is most important to me, to cut with the bullshit feet-wetting I've been doing most places and finally run headfirst into a little piece of life and not (like Lot's wife or Orpheus) look back.
I'm returning to the community that has made me feel hands down the most alive, the most inspired, that I have ever found. It is a lesson I have traveled over 10,000 miles to learn, but I feel a new confidence in it that far surpasses all the superficial speculations I made while playing the tourist in so many other places. I'm returning to a community that brings out all that is best in me in the hopes that that will put me in a position to return that energy, all that I have to give, back to the community as well as into my writing and thereby bring all to life as a whole. Together to wake.
While in Vermont, I will focus my mornings on writing Continental Divide and my afternoons on being alive and present among the people that have inspired the most love in me. More and more do I realize that environment really is everything: which side of our personalities dominates, whether we dwell in our hopes or our fears, all seems to be a direct by-product of the atmosphere we find ourselves suspended in.
That is why I'm going there and that is why I regret to announce that I've decided to stop posting my chapters online. I need to support myself, somehow. I have chosen to do so by means of the literary way. Whether that means writing fiction or journalism, I'm not entirely sure yet, but I know the time has come in my life to stop fucking around and start truly working at what I want out of life: to stop floating from place to place, getting my feet wet but mostly worrying about money. Time after time I have epiphanies that say the same thing, again and again, it's about working hard, it's about love, it's about actions and living, not preaching or speaking. So much of my focus has been on the hypocrisies of society because I recognize myself as a hypocrite, someone who can talk about life in such extravagent beautiful terms, but then once I find myself in the thick of it, generally choose to sit on a rock and think about it. Always the glass between. So I'm ready to work now, really work at living the life I believe in, instead of just talking about it.
But, like everyone, I need money to do that. And like most artists, I'm yet to think of a way to support myself by means of my art. I spent 9 months writing the book I've been publishing here and it's been many more months in the process of editing it. This is my art and therefore, the thing I must look to for support.
Of course, ideologically, I believe the work should be free for anyone to read (I believe all art should be free for everyone, just like all education, especially higher education, should be free) but I also need a way to feed myself and pay off my student loans (which have been hanging over me like the weight of the world on Atlas' shoulders - there's nothing more spiritually castrating, I think than being in someone's or some THING's debt). This same issue, interestingly enough, was why Joyce was a socialist: he didn't believe in charging people for his writing, but he also believed that, as a writer, he should be able to eat every day and not have to work a separate job to make that happen.
So here's my solution. I think I am going to finish editing, then self-publish this book, get it in a final, cohesive form that a reader can hold in his or her hands, and not groan at the prospect of reading it on a glowing (hard on the eyes) black screen with white words (a format I've held onto, mainly, in all honesty, to make the physical page more affecting, haunting, stick with you after you've finished reading for the day). Once done, I will start selling the book with the same dream as every other young artist: that the work will ultimately speak for itself and sell enough copies to enable me to eat and groove, and write an even better book. In the meantime, however, I want to stay true to my word that this book is free to anyone who wants to read it. Anyone who e-mails me and asks for it, will be sent the remaining chapters, with sincere love and affection behind them. (e-mail me at studentpilgrim@gmail.com )Hopefully, by the time I've finished publishing it, I will be in a position to humbly ask readers to support me by purchasing the book online, and encouraging friends and family to do the same.
Truly this is just the same old story of a young artist trying to get a start in the world, but maybe there is something fascinating about the process in a general sense, maybe it's the story of life not only for self-proclaims "artists" but also for non-artists alike. Maybe Gibran is right that no matter what we do in life, we are all artists, for any sort of action or job can always be performed as an art or as an obligation. Maybe asking for early support to empower a young self to ultimately, down the road, support an older, more capable self, is how everybody makes their way in the world, whether it's done consciously or just naturally, by the by.
While some might find it irritating that I wont post any more chapters here, I promise with all my heart that anyone who e-mails me directly will be able to get the chapters anyway. In the meantime, I will work on getting my shit together with publication so my decision to not release the work to the entire world at once will actually have a purpose. This I promise.
I send you all all my love, and thank you all so much for reading my words and thus supporting the life I've been leading and the decisions I've been making.
travis
studentpilgrim@gmail.com
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