I'd rather post this to the integration sub forum but...

This is another of my long winded exercises in textual abuse. Some of y'all may have heard part of this story before...

Looking around for publishing resources...

I hope you enjoy and would appreciate feedback! Love you all! (Don't let that stop you from being brutal.) here goes:

The men and women who escaped slavery and risked their lives on the Underground Railroad did so not only to secure freedom for themselves but to ensure that their descendants could one day enjoy it. They put their well being on the line that only in the most extreme circumstances is reflected by our struggle to achieve a change in policy to protect our cognitive liberty; but yet I still draw a comparison to help illustrate the climate under which we endure. The drug war is an extension of the racial subjugation of slavery, so maybe the comparison is not so off after all. For those of us who commit thought crimes we risk everything. We risk our freedom, our livelihoods, our families because we have re-discovered an ancient route to perfect well being hidden by a government afraid of losing control,which through racist and draconian fear based legislation threatens to strip the freedom of anyone who dares to use a plant to engage in deep meaningful conversation with their own inner being. For many who have discovered an effective means in them to defeat debilitating conditions like myself, having found a route out of long term addiction and severe depression, the use of these medicines is not a matter of simply getting high. We have found a way to survive this world and are going to use it.

Beyond the mystical experiences many who ingest psychedelics discover, researchers have long known of, tested and proven the amazing efficacy of these chemicals to treat many pervasive and stubborn modern conditions like PTSD, depression, anxiety and addiction. However the Nixon administrations hysterical reaction to the fact that America was losing a war alongside a cultural revolution in which LSD played a major part doomed ongoing research into ways to put them to practical use. Finally the doors to research on the subject have reopened with several institutions regularly performing well funded research into the therapeutic value of psychedelics as well as discovering how they work. Little is known about the mechanism that creates their profound effects but more is being discovered every day on how the molecules interact with brain chemistry and signal transmission. While that research is being done in laboratories, and we wait for the results to effect change in legal policy and for FDA regulation, for many a route to freedom from their illness is out of reach.

Some like myself have no choice in the matter. Waiting for years while the lab coats and the legislators catch up is not an option, as if it ever was; for some developing an auto didactic practice using psychedelics is equivalent to survival. I come from a place of true self inflicted isolation, inextricably intertwined with severe chronic depression, suicidal ideation, PTSD and addiction that only got worse as I engaged in the only forms of treatment available to me. Accessing 'treatment' first through heroin dependance, the only options available to me were a plethora of 12-step-based treatment programs through county and social service agencies or a pharmacological approach of being prescribed antidepressants-SSRIs, often during a hospitalization for emotional crisis. I found the 12 steps to be intolerably narrow-minded with absolutely no basis in human reality, construed long before we as a species had any real comprehension of how the brain works. Therefore it was entirely ineffective for me. In fact, the repeated failure and my inability to "get it" led to on more than one occasion a serious relapse to drug use out of hopelessness. Every time I was prescribed an SSRI, after taking it for several weeks, I would notice that I would be overtaken by extreme anger and rage that had no circumstantial cause, and when I found out that that was a not very common side effect and that many people had committed murder as well as suicide while being on those things, I threw them away. The inability to find anything that worked as well as being accessible to me as an indigent- status my condition had firmly mired me in- left me with such hopelessness that suicide or to just simply continue to use until I expired seemed to be the only future available to me for a very very long time. At that point in time, had one asked me where I expected to be in a year, I would have confidently answered that I'd either be dead or in prison, now several years after embarking on this path one would get a very different, positive response. Using psychedelics for me in a conscious practice-practical tripping, I call it- has freed me.

The ancient plant medicines have practical applications for me through properties inherent within them, and the ability of them to catalyze experiences of connection to something greater, outside of and yet integral to self being an important one. Allowing one to "stand outside of ourselves", conferring an ability to dispassionately observe oneself unimpaired by emotional or egoistic blinders, grants access to pass through that doorway in which we no longer stand the divine impulse, and through that hole punched through the ego we peer directly into the eternal mysterious source from which we all have originated. The great mystery becomes profoundly understood if even briefly and that is powerful medicine.

I found myself after a deep personal experience that was just as or more real than anything I had ever experienced and after for the first time in a long time comfortable in my own skin – finally home. After one application of 5meo DMT, the effects of which lasted for all of 20 minutes, I was more profoundly healed than through years of "treatment", which I had engaged in to achieve results which I expected to be nowhere near as significant as that which I had just been gifted with. I was renewed, granted a new sense of awareness and purpose. This was several years ago, and the effects still reverberate, and rather than diminishing as the ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond, rather the beneficial effects continue to increase effecting all areas of my life and allowing me to be of better service to others and to my community. When that 20 minutes was over, I had a new purpose in life, which was to make this work by developing a practice of self-care using the experience and the substances as a tool, to spread awareness of this method in its effectiveness, and to become active in changing the policies which keep it out of our hands.

There has been a systematic removal of the experiential awareness of the divine. The term entheogen, meaning 'to manifest the divine within', was coined to address this quality of psychedelic drugs to provide deeply meaningful personal experience to their users and also to separate this style of use from the other culturally loaded greens in use. I argue that the root cause of many of our deepest neuroses; our depressions and addictions, the effects of which range from minor emotional disturbances which nonetheless impair our ability to be at our most functional and effective all the way to debilitating conditions such as where I had found myself to be the result of this disconnect. The modern neuroses which have the effect of paralyzing our happiness and retarding our effectiveness as members of society, are manifestations of a congregate cultural condition of disconnection from what I term here"source". Through a long and systematic removal of the experiential awareness of something far greater than not only ourselves but which from all things emanate it has become accepted that there are only a few – the priest class – who can mediate for us a connection with this and can only do so upon the terms of their specified dogma or religion. These religions have since their inception been responsible for all of the egregious disasters that have befallen humanity since civilization began. The rise and fall of nations and cultures, genocide, wars, brutality, bloody conflicts of man against man all over the definition of the word-God. Therefore, not only have we been cut off from the source by design, but the actions of these established systems have repulsed so many who have any sort of conscience whatsoever and are capable of independent thinking that even the concept of what they connect to has been shut out in revulsion. Religion murdered God.

Only as a way to beg out of conflicts arising from that aversion to anything connected with religious thought, do I delve now into some of my concepts, therefore defining some of the terminology used in this essay. I am trying my best to eschew words like 'spirituality' and 'God' because they are so loaded with cultural connotations in favor of other terms in order to keep the reader engaged here, but I feel that one should have some idea of the meaning of them to be able to fully grok this entire essay. I will try my best not to mire this in terminology that will turn off empiricists, even though I'm under good advisement not to mix the woo with the science.

After I took 5 meo DMT the first time, I experienced what I've seen fairly well described in accounts of near death experiences. Being unfamiliar with the drug but knowing what the psychedelic experience was like, because of the difference in physical effects from classic psychedelics I actually thought that I had poisoned myself and was dying. I had a brief moment of panic, but lying facedown on the floor and having perceived my heart as having stopped and feeling my consciousness slip away into a place beyond time and beyond space I knew that there is nothing I could fight and just let go. Let me point out here that what I did was incredibly reckless and stupid, but I related a little bit of the place where I was when I did this. I actually thought that I had n,n DMT, another powerful tryptamine psychedelic with fast onset and short duration effects but very dis-similar to the one I just ingested, which came to me in the form of a water soluble salt and I injected intravenously a very large dose. I was alone, and any number of things could've happened, resulting in a very real death. Please, don't do this at home kids.

Proceeding to lie there on the floor, I felt as if all that "I" was, my consciousness, not my physical being, begin to build up as pressure inside my skull which was then released through its top and I began to perceive as if I was going through a tunnel of light. As I flowed through this long corridor all that I knew to be me, all the experience, all the memories, thoughts and concepts that made "me" begin to fall away, no longer suited or relevant to where I was going, as if I was shedding off layers of old, dirty, ill fitting clothing. I neared the end of the tunnel and passed through an aperture and was greeted not by some white guy with the beard or a fairy king riding on a cloud but by pure pregnant emptiness. A void full to the point of bursting with nothing and everything; all that ever was is or will be existing simultaneously only as potential before even manifestation into "thought". Samadhi, Eloah v'Daat, many terms have been given for it through the ages by many tried to communicate this experience – the mind of God- the source. It is ineffable, but it is at the core of what it is to be human. A tiny drop of water having just dropped into the ocean of existence and on the verge of dissolving into it, at the edge of the singularity in ecstatic bliss, I was called to "Remember!"

What was there to remember? By even being able to relate the story to you you may discount it's veracity, for who was it that observed this and who was it who can bring back this memory to you? I cannot answer that question, but suddenly I remembered. To breathe, to pull air into a body lying facedown on the floor of a small room somewhere on a small globe of rock and water spinning perfectly hung in the vastness of material space. "Ah!" And with that memory I was pulled back through the same tunnel of light in reverse and squeezed back into a hairy sack of skin. With a deep gasp I rose and utterly amazed and bewildered at what had just happened that I exclaimed loudly "I am home, after 42 years I am finally home!" I put on some music, and began to dance a sort of jig, still feeling a little high. At that point I began to feel nauseous and felt that I was going to vomit. The feeling came on very quickly and I was still not very confident of my footing and didn't want to descend the flight of stairs to the bathroom so decided to just throw up on the floor. I got on my hands and knees and began to retch and felt something coalescing within the very center of my being, concentrated at the center of my body and extending all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes. I begin to feel it take form and enter into my gut and I began to vomit this out. Expecting stomach contents to eject from my mouth I was mortified at witnessing a thick, pitch black boa constrictor slowly emerge from it, curling itself downward and beginning to turn back around to face me. I could see that it was dissolving into spirals and fractal like forms of black smoke which dissolved into the air. I was terrified. This was all of the evil that had ever entered into me through circumstances or my reaction to them, traumas or even passed down epigenetically. All the bad stuff was coming out of me, and I perceived this "ultimate evil" as being unleashed upon the world, powerful with a destructive capability to wreak havoc upon the unsuspecting world unless I retain it. Perhaps that was the last lie of an evil threatened by the end of its own existence, but in a panic I clenched my jaw shut and I felt some of this substantial being remain within me. This to me illustrates the value of an experienced person to be there with one during experience this powerful. I am not one for witchery, but nonetheless a giant black psychic boa is what I was perceiving and had someone been with me who had seen something similar happen before they could've assured me that it was OK and helped me through encouragement to purge myself of that which I was instinctually trying to get rid of. Even though, despite the fact that I feel that the work that night was not "finished", as I said, I felt renewed in a way which I didn't think possible.

I was not instantly "fixed" though, this entire experience was only the catalyst for a long period of work to get myself to a place where I could say I feel like I have fulfillment and happiness in life regardless of whatever is going on around me. It was actually so shattering and filled me with such a sense of urgency to make major life changes, that the lifestyle I had been leading and the ways in which I was supporting myself no longer tenable or tolerable that I ended up homeless. That began a long, several year journey of self discovery and finding the value and worth myself beyond the contents of my pockets but which is also lead to a place where I can see comfort and stability and a long-term vision of moving into the future with deliberation. I don't suggest to anyone that such a thing would help them, in the long term it did teach me many valuable lessons, but I feel this also illustrates the need for guidance on this path. There are as many ways to walk it as there are people who do, and the work must be done alone, but there are communities of people doing it that can help.

I looked around me and reached out into some of those communities online to people doing similar things, knowing that they were here but having no idea how to find the people in my local community. Within the online communities, and one in particular, I found a virtual home full of people burning with love, encouragement and excitement but also tempered by intelligence, ration and reason and from there I was able to begin to make sense of what had just occurred to me. I have found community in many ways to be a linchpin to success in this practice. Surrounding oneself with like-minded yet rational people allows one to avail themselves of those other people's tempering reason. Discussing one's progress with others who are understanding and intelligent allows one to build from a consensus model a workable reality.

Integration is, well, integral to the process. Again, I want to impress upon the reader that the experience or the substances themselves are but a small piece of the entire equation, a good tool but one of many in your toolbox. One does not lay a hammer down next to some nails in a field, walk away and return the next day and expect to find a home built. One must dedicate work, identify their needs and find the tools they can use to achieve them. In this case that can mean many things – for me like I said community has been very valuable. Through this community and through the one of locals I was eventually able to find and make connections face-to-face with, I've learned many adjuncts to add.

Along the lines of substances, I have found long term "bolstering" of my mental/emotional state through the regular use of cannabis and occasional trips for personal insight with LSD and psilocybin mushrooms and exploring more esoteric realms with the help of n,n DMT to be effective for me personally. The psychedelic journeys for me only occur on the order of maybe once or twice a year, for others they may be more or less frequent. I have also found great benefit in "micro dosing" mushrooms. Taking small amounts which are under the threshold to achieve real physical effects "tunes up" my brain and puts me in a state where I feel energetic and creative. More effective at putting thoughts into words and action, my first round inspired me to go back to school after having dropped out of high school at 16, and even though living on the street at the time, managed to complete my first year with a 3.8 grade average. This is not something that I do daily by any means. Only when I feel the need to, when I'm feeling sluggish and burned out I will begin a regimen for maybe several weeks to a month and I'll ingest sub-threshold doses somewhere between twice and four times a week. This is what I have found to be personally effective, your mileage may vary.

There is no roadmap to this, but once one starts on the path they can only move forward. It is taking a long time to begin to integrate the first experience which I described here but as I learn more and more new things out of that experience a long time ago, or as I allow new information to pass through the hole punched in my ego, I feel that I grow and become more effective and compassionate for myself and others as a human being. Placing into my reality a new perception of something greater than myself but of which I am an integral part, gives me something that can't be taken away and which takes precedence over my suffering.

I write this essay and I talk to people about this subject not to glorify my personal experience but to give hope to somebody who may come from a situation similar to mine. A living death, mired in darkness and despair and suffering, only relieved by periodic injections of whatever external form that relief comes from – drugs, sex, food, television, hate... Falling prey to our own egos and driven only by insatiable desires, filled with a bottomless empty hole with a thirst that can never be quenched; this is not hyperbole, this is what kills. I felt after my experience that I remembered something. Not the body I was reminded of while I circled the event horizon of the void, but rather the void itself. I felt like somewhere, somehow a decision was made to leave that void, to become manifest with consciousness able to perceive of something so complex for the express purpose of simply feeling it. That nothing has ever "happened" to me, that I am here by the purpose and design of something not external and foreign to me, but rather myself- to just be. As Jimi Hendrix said in the song 'Manic Depression' in reference to the state which I am trying to escape but which ironically invokes the way to be within peace – "existing-nothing but existing".

I wish you peace on your journey, and I wish you success. I wish you the courage to begin it and the perseverance to continue. Your hard work will be met with beautiful success in whatever that looks like, you will create something beautiful. Go, be good to you and in turn be good to the world. Move in peace, you will encounter understanding and compassion for yourself and only once you have empathy for yourself can you love others. There's so much more to touch upon, from issues related to cognitive liberty, harm reduction, common paradigms and treatment modalities that need to accept this route and on and on and in future essays I intend to explore more. This one only deals with the "spiritual" underpinnings of this practice, but there are much more difficult parts of the journey, and I'd like to think that some of what I've learned can be a value, aiding you in yours.

There is no need to be hopeless.

Great Essay! Good to know your out there in the world. Need more like you!!

Masha'Allah!!!



furthermoar unwanted ramblings...

A truly beautiful essay, Null24. Thanks so much for taking the time to write it, write it so well and publish it here

Worthy of mass distribution. A few spots that lacked total clarity, due to auto-correct mangling your otherwise beautiful work.

Thank you for your very kind words and input. I am looking for resources to disseminate this to a wider audience. This is one of a few pieces of writing that I feel good about. I've been developing my skills as a writer and storyteller for sometime and I'm about ready to embark on a journey with it.

Eventually, my goal is to expand these and other concepts into a book.

So did you ever get that black evil boa constrictor all the way out or did it regrow?

Heck I don't know- I do know that after that event over three years ago, that the changes I've undergone have put me in a much better place. While I can't now, nor would I ever, say I'm done or that there's nothing left to work on I do feel that I've made many improvements to life that see me looking forward to instead of dreading the future.

I read a post by another member this morning where they claimed to no longer experience things like anger and other negative emotions, and I doubt I'll ever be that complacent- things irritate and frustrate me , I do stupid and reactive things but something resonates from that nondual experience to inform me and remind me that we are one, and that hurting others is only a reflection of my own suffering. Is rather alleviate suffering than cause it.

So no, I have not purged like that again, nor would I expect a continuation of the same vision were I to. I'm still a jerk sometimes, but now I'm an empathic jerk.

This morning we got a bit angry too. One our neighbors, a fat collared dove that sleeps about four feet from our head, on a branch near our bedroom window. It likes this place since many many years, we think, it is because we keep the window a bit open, so warm air comes out from there...it is not afraid of the hundreds of crows, rooks, magpies and jackdaws that frequent our place during daytime.

Anyway, this is what happened: we saw the dove having a full blown seizure. It lasted moar then five minutes.

The other day, we came through a park close to our home. An old woman was standing there on the pathway and looking up a house front. So we stopped the bicycle and looked up too.
The woman asked we, what this was.
We said: it is a brand-new mobile signal antenna (we don't know how these things are called).

It sounds dream-like because it was dream-like.....

The woman said: the antenna wasn't there the day before yesterday. They also cut down all the trees and even the lower brush close (not really) to the antenna with Borg efficiency....

We don't know, but we connect the doves' seizure to the new 4G antenna and that made us angry. And we have had a history of unexplained seizures our-self. Even a feather from that dove is moar precious then all combined samsunnng and appple gadgets of the whole corporate world. It is by far superior in all aspects. Yet when the kids from the opposite block see a birds feather, for them it is just dirt.

And bird is dirt for them too, unless it is angry bird on their poison-phone. These Arab kids should prolly burn some harmal today, for the way we looked at them today when they left their houses for school - always staring at their poison-phone, like being under an evil spell or something....perhaps there wouldn't be war in Syria if it wasn't for these poison-phones...and facebooks, twitters, al-jazeeras newsfeeds......blablablarants...

anyway, that's how we got angry today....lol

Very understandable. I wonder about all the EMR floating through our heads too.

That said, I would not be surprised if your friend was poisoned by something put out to eradicate "pests". Many rat poisons are neurotoxic and work on the CNS of small creatures. Indisrimity putting poisons out where other creatures can reach them is angering to me...

How was it being homeless?

The answer to that will hopefully be my first published book.

For me, the first night outside was the loneliest I had ever felt. January 1st, with the clothes on my back and a blanket, and a phone in my pocket with which I could call anyone, anywhere with- if there was anyone, anywhere. I didn't think id ever feel warm again as I felt the concrete below me seemed to actively drain it from me.

I struggled hard to retain the new lease on life-with a literalness applied to that pat phrase-but I was on my own and the only communities I knew were either heroin addicts which I had bought/sold/used from/to/with, or people who were part of the 12step or "recovery" scene, and neither one of those social resources did anything but provide me ample opportunity to continue to screw up, and surely didn't offer me a way out. That's why I often gush about how much I love this place and the kind, intelligent, compassionate and empathic humans that make up the Nexus. I love this place for a reason. Y'all saved my wretched ass and helped me to be the much happier, fulfilled person I am now.

I was outside for three years. The first year, I entered community college, at 42, the first time I'd been in a school since I dropped out of high school at the earliest opportunity, getting a GED to satisfy my parents as soon as I turned 16. Admittedly, the decision to go back to school was catalyzed by the access to student loan and grant money , which I saw as a way to get off the street, but upon doing the math in reality, there was no way I could with any real permanence and instead I rented weekly rooms. I did very well in school though for six terms, up until my last two, when I entered a misguided and toxic relationship and I allowed myself to let her needs take precedent over my well-being. That was my antidote for loneliness at the time, I gagged on it before I did too much damage with the poison, but nonetheless we both walked away hurt, but I for one, walked away a little wiser.

Next, I attempted full time work. Back to production screen printing, something I'd done off and on my whole adult life, more so in later years like this, as a stop-gap. That, I was not so successful with. The gig started at 6 AM every day, meaning that I had to wake up at 4:30 every morning so that I could make it to my methadone clinic, take my dose, and get me and my bike to the shop six. Needless to say I was constantly wait because even if I showed up at the clinic me half hour before they opened up at 5 AM, there is still a line of 75 people, arguing with each other, rocking back-and-forth peering through The cracks in the shades to see if there was any movement inside. One morning I actually took a pole and went along the entire line to see how many people have jobs or anywhere to go and out of 73 people, three of us had jobs or anywhere to go. The rest were just people who get up at 4 o'clock in the morning to go get their methadone in their pajamas and then go back home, eat till's, watch cartoons and go back to sleep. I lost the job after a few months, but I was actually thankful for it, there is absolutely no way in hell I could ever get a foot forward working for $10 an hour.

I would have to put three or four paychecks together in their entirety to even rent a room in a house in this city. Usually upon getting a paycheck, I would go rent a motel room for three or four days, maybe five and spend the rest of the money on pot and food then I would work another nine or 10 days flat broke. Needless to say my performance wasn't the best. I never slept well, I could never even get to where I slept then before 11 o'clock at night because I had to wait for everyone to vacate the building whose fire escape I occupied. I would be lucky if I could catch three or four hours on a given night before I had to get back up and go to work. I felt like a stooge. The business owner knew I was almost too, but all that did was make and scrutinize me more.

I finally got off the street through the kindness of a stranger. I slept for about a year outside the entrance to a UPS store, with a 24 hour entrance where people could go in and check their mail. There was a guy who would pull up every evening at about seven and check his mail. Out of shame I would usually dive into my sleeping bag when people were there so that they couldn't see my face and I wouldn't have to see them engage them in anyway. One day he came to check his mail, it was warm out and I was sitting on top of the sleeping bag reading. He asked me if I needed a place to stay, told me that he had an opening in his business and that he needed somebody to keep an eye on a lot that he keeps cars in which has a 32 foot RV on it but I could move into. We exchanged emails, met the next day and I've been living in that RV since last September. It's not much, but I love it and having that small space has given me what I need to pursue the things I need to move into the future – working here, co-organizing events in helping putting together meetings for people locally to get together and create a psychedelic community as well as pursue my own creative endeavors.

Like I said, I'm writing a book. But you asked. By the way, the working title of that book is "the American ascetic blues" keep yer eyes peeled.

Sounds good so far, did you have sex on the streets? How dangerous was it? Also how's life in the RV? Do you ever get cynical?

I'm pretty much an open book. I like to share my story because it would have helped me to hear something similar in my blackest nights. I hope you haven't taken that as a point of ridicule.Are you just trying to be funny? I'm going to guess that you are sincere and not just trying to prod someone into a flame-out, which wont happen.

But if you really want to know- I didn't hang out with that toxic girl merely to abuse myself- there was a function-albeit unhealthy- that she served, and which I served for her. We most often spent time together on motel but there were a couple warm nights....In a park, in the woods-normal stuff, not humping on the sidewalk next to pile of feces.

Yes, it's dangerous as hell, I slept with my hand on a knife or a stick, I tied my shoes together through my backpack which was my pillow. I always kept to myself, never walked around carrying my stuff (one backpack and a sleeping bag- travellin light is the only way to fly) to advertise homelessness, did not associate with the neighborhood street drinkers and users (although I WAS one), and tried not to present my self in such a way as to gain attention from LEO. I was robbed a couple times in my sleep, three times I had all my clothes and sleeping bag stolen- by other homeless people with no humanity left- but my biggest fear while sleeping was police. Ive heard horror stories, people beaten robbed and then arrested, there's even one story going around about one guy being doused with kerosene and lit on fire in his sleep by someone in uniform. I saw the guy's burned up hoodie, but don't know how much veracity is in that tale. Nonetheless, the cops are the real brutal one out there and even scarier in their impunity. Luckily though all they ever did was hassle me.

And I love the RV. I have solar power, live off grid basically, the thing is parked in the middle of about 4 acres and it's nice and quiet where it is. There's bike trails and all kinds of urban nature- in fact yesterday I saw two deer, a rabbit, some hawks and heard an owl. It's a 32 footer, I even have an extra bed for guests and everything works but I dont drive it. Sometime I get tired of crapping in the $#!?-pit, especially on cold mornings, and want some amenities I don't have, and it's not where I want to be in a year, but right now it's my house and me and my housemate- a cat- love it. It's a platfrom, a launchpad for a creative life and I'm grateful everyday for it. Even with all the "misfortune"(;'nothing has everhappenedto me')in my short sad life, I feel extremely fortunate to have what I have, and not just in compare with where I was. There's people who would kill to be in my position- as much responsibility as I want, as much challenge as I desire, and the freedom to move, breathe, and decide where I want to go.


As for the cynical part- I don't get that either. Of course I do. If it wasn't for cynicism and sarcasm, I'd have absolutely no sense of humor or comedic ability to rely on. Really tho, the entire experience took from me a large part of what I thought I knew, what I thought I had. My home was taken and I'm a cancer, very much am I a lover of "home"-as concept or as reality. Eventually, like the crab carries his home on his back, I learned to be at home in my own skin, a feat of which I'm actually quite proud and nowadays while I'm often very unsatisfied with things-the contents of my wallet, the phone call so-and-so wont give me- and I'm often sad, or upset, or angry or yes, cynical, I don't let it take me over. As opposed to satisfaction, I learned how to be fulfilled with the air in my lungs if that's all I have. I learned a lot about myself, my motivations and hindrances and a lot about this society and culture I live in, and have been able to get rid of a lot that didnt serve me well and foster things that do. I learned just how much I'm an outlier of the mainstream but yet I figured out in the process how to prevent myself from being marginalized. I've found out what it is I am, where I can be of service to others and how to be the best at that I can be.

Being homeless was the most horrible, scariest, lonliest time of my existence- I'd absolutely NEVER volunteer to do it again. But if I could trade those years back in and get them back without enduring it, I would not. It was the most valuable thing I've ever gone through, an advanced education in self-awareness, compassion, empathy and humanity. It could have gone either way, I could wrap myself up in cynicism and hatred, and react to the world like a wounded animal. I could lash out at a world I perceived to have have victimized me, but somehow, I learned how to care. I learned to love me, and because of that, I can love all of you. By being kicked out of society, I learned how to join community.

"The fox has it's hole, the bird has it's nest, but the son of man, he has no place to lay his head and rest."

Ha! Maybe you should wear robes now, so that folks can see/hear who is coming at a distance....we loikes black btw.....