Last week I spent two days walking around Lake Atitlan’s shore from the village where I live to San Pedro, nearly halfway the 50 mi.² circumference of the lake. Part of me resisted setting out, feeling ever-occupied by the many corridors of my artistic, community, and philanthropic life.

But there was a wistful whisper within that said, just go—go. I’ve come to know this voice, it’s the heart’s whisper and it insisted I not postpone. There was something quintessential in store for me, some shimmering discovery awaited me, I felt.

I knew the nuances of this inner prod by now—it was the same heart spark that insisted I get off the M train while hunting for a sublet in New York in 2012. After days of dead ends, I got off at the Myrtle Ave stop. I walked into a bike shop. I asked the lady behind the counter if she knew of any sublets and she said, “That’s so crazy, I just cleaned out my exes’ office today to rent, but I haven’t put it online yet. How the hell did you know about it?”

That synchronistic disembarking led to my future New York life of friendships I can’t fathom not carrying today. But back then I still called such synchronicity luck.

3 years later the same guiding light led me up an escalator in a mall in Cebu, Philippines into the bookstore where I found in a flash this thing we call God. It was the poke that prodded me to my first silent meditation retreat in Thailand, where the person who entered was not the same as the one who exited. But these are all stories for other times, perhaps waiting for books yet to be written.

In the story at hand, I followed the inner plea and set out with a backpack of too many books (classic Luke) and teaware, instead of more practical things like food and a change of clothes.

“What was it, waiting for me?” I wondered at the insisting and elated intuition, while also letting it fade into the background as the adventure at hand jumped for joy on centerstage.

While Covid has helped conquer much of my insatiable nomadic nature, helping me settle into routines that are essential for the cultivation of artistic craft, I was long overdue a break from these routines. I felt an unbounded freedom dancing within when I set out, singing mantras and songs, skipping as I stepped, joy incarnate, a wistful sense of wonder and gratitude that my self-contained Lake Atitlan-side life also carried the waters that quench the traveler’s thirst.

Along the way, I stopped to pour tea with friends I knew and friends I just met — a strange foreigner at home with his peculiarities, inviting locals to sit down and drink tea and share company.

And the I Found If (Or did it find me?)

And as I walked through the town of San Juan, what was searching for me found me — a book — so often in my life the sacred and miraculous comes bound up in books.

I passed a rummage sale with its piles of clothes and shoes and the pile of books, and of course I couldn’t resist that.

“Don’t even look at them,” said the voice of practicality I never obey. It was a dangerous gambit, already I was caring more weight then was wise given a spinal injury I am still only recently recovering from after years of problematic pain. But my love of books bypassed my concern for my body.

And there it was, the book that I sensed had beckoned the whole two day treck—At the Center of All Beauty, by Fenton Johnson—A book that just came out in 2020. How a just-published English hard cover it made its way to a rummage sale in the Mayan village of San Juan is a mystery I doubt I’ll ever solve.

But from the first chapter, I knew I was reading a book that was placed in my hands to change my life—a stock phrase, sure, the only constant is change, right Buddha?—but it felt like the book had come down from the heavens in answer to questions I was currently asking myself, a book to both affirm and galvanize my choice to lead an artist’s solitary life.

It’s a book of just that, the lives of solitaries, distinguished by Johnson from hermits. One can be solitary AND social. I’m very social, but I’m also quite solitary. I do well on my own, my own company is enriching and pleasant to keep.

At the Center of All Beauty details lives of those inscrutable characters from history who defied convention in pursuit of service to their art, and by extension service to the beauty of human life.

Johnson writes, “To be an artist is not, finally, about product; it is about process, a way of being, and every solitary is of necessity an artist—an artist of her or his life, with little or no help from conventional rites and forms and mythologies, making it up as we go.”

The timing of its arrival in my life is uncanny — at a time of recent separation from last year‘s romance, at a time when at 35 years old I’m questioning the conditioned assumption that I’ll one day marry produce progeny, at a time when I’m beginning to understand that I can’t possibly give myself fully to family and the inner world of art. I’m not closed to either course, but I’m finding myself fully content to accept either eventuality. I’ve had but two relationships pass the one year mark, and none pass two—I’m a solitary by nature, in a lifelong relationship to my art.

And while at the time of this writing I’m only a third way through it (already through it in two days!), I am again affirmed in the fact of forces that are ever at play beneath surface of what is seen in the manifest world. This world, this life, this uncharted wonder beneath it all, ever beckoning us back to the beauty both beyond and within us all.

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