If we stop following our hearts, we are lost.
There is something sacred in the cosmic cycles unfolding around us. They are the constants to the many variables of our lives and the basis for our own biological and social cycles. I’ve always been a New Years guy, love New Years resolutions, and get charged at putting all the cards of life on the table to decide which to keep, which to discard and which un-held cards to work and wait for.
Looking back on this year, I feel a profound gratitude at everything that transpired. This year included extended time in East Africa, Central America, Canada, New York, Europe, Iceland, time with my family, and a tour across the American Southwest. So many profound people became part of my life and fit so seamlessly into friendships, that it is hard to imagine a past ever existed without them.
Normally on December, 31st I go through the year in a journal that no one else sees. This year I am throwing it up on the ‘ol blog, because, well, I trust you, World.
Clocking Into 2013
December, 31st, 2012, midnight, somewhere over the Atlantic. Between me and my destination of Nairobi are connections in England and Egypt. Seated next to me is an American teacher who has just retired. She’s headed for London, where she will begin a new life with her new British boyfriend. I crack us each open a single shooter of bourbon that my friend Charlie gave me that morning before he dropped me off at the MSP airport. The woman is giddy and I am glad for her. Happy New Years, we wish each other, strangers enjoying a moment of shared community above the world before returning to our separate paths.
Jan-March: Kenya>Uganda
I arrive in Nairobi, Kenya on the first day of 2013. My adopted Kenyan brother Calvin and his cousin Anita meet me at the airport. A forty minute cab ride takes us to an extended Kenyan family I never knew I had.
In a week my brother Tyler arrives. We head to Kisii, Kenya, the village where both of my Kenyan brothers are from. There are two boys, Samuel and Simon, who are roughly the same age my brothers were when they were adopted into my family. Both have lost their parents to AIDS.
My family worked together before our arrival to raise $1,500 to build a house for these two boys. My brothers and I make a promise to them and a promise to ourselves—as long as they work hard and stay in school, we will pay for their education.
After a month, my two brothers leave. As I often skip my return flights, I stay another two months to cover the internationally watched 2013 Kenyan election as a freelance journalist. It is around this time that communication with my romance in NYC fizzles to a halt. This is confusing and happens in another world from the immediacy of my present. I really liked her and maybe that was the problem, I liked her too much too soon. I know before returning to New York that I’ve lost her, never really knowing why she cut me out of her life. Perhaps it was the distance, maybe it was something about me—time moves by too fast to wonder for too long about another’s why.
March-June: New York
I arrive in New York with $50 to my name, staying on my friend Jen’s generous couch. I have no job and the freelance writing is bringing in very little. I am fueled by dreams and peanut butter sandwiches. The first two days, instead of writing for pay or looking for work, I take out my guitar and write a song called “Whiskey Sipping World.” It’s a song I feel needs to exist before I can resume my life in New York and the reality of this world.
The song written, I start writing and looking for work. I land a part-time job at a charity called High Bridge Voices in The Bronx, teaching and tutoring economically disadvantaged students. This job instills in me a love for teaching that I’m sure will make future appearances in my subsequent life.
I move in with my friend Andrew. Working hard late nights, I start bringing in enough money from writing to scrape by in New York and suddenly these far off dreams of being a writer who supports himself from his words seem closer.
At a show of mine at The Goodbye Blue Monday where I debut
“Whiskey Sipping World,” I meet Aaron Rush Hicks, a sword-swallowing, fire-breathing, Coney Island freak show performer. Later he moves in with Andrew and I. His ariel soaring, clown girlfriend Luna moves in a short while later. Now there are five of us in this strange family—a writer, a computer programmer, two clowns and a dog, Pepito. We are a strange family, but there is a lot of love to go around, especially in Pepito’s case. He now had a wolf pack.
June: Toronto
I meet my little brother Tyler at the train station in Toronto and we attend our second TBEX travel bloggers conference. But really, there is so much going on we have little time for the conference. We stay with Garry, a pal I met and traveled with in Nicaragua in 2008.
At the conference a romance blossoms between me and a travel writer I’d corresponded with since 2010. But as romances on the road roundup, a bus whisks me back to New York and it seems that is that.
I return to NYC and turn 28. I write in my journal that day:
I have less time than ever to f— up or waste. I need to be very honest with myself about where I want to be. Because if I am not, I will stand no chance of getting there. I know that one day I would like to have a house, a car, a family and yes, health insurance, etc. But for now, I want to sprint towards my dreams and avoid the slow death of wasting large tracts of time on things that don’t matter and romances that lead only to a goodbye.
Two days later my TBEX romance begins telling me of a cheap fare she’s found to Iceland in October—a bucket list destination we share. I tell her, that I’ll have to pass on it. I vacillate. I’d been quite taken with her in Toronto. But I don’t know where I’ll be in five months, so no, it’d be rash to book a ticket there for such a long period of time. Doing that would mean I’d be both unable to return to my job in the after school program or take another job—it’d mean that writing would have to be my one and only source of income, and I really need the supplement income of the teaching job for life to work.
I pass through Times Square on my way back from a fiction writers meetup in Manhattan. Instead of gazing at the immediacy of my surroundings that people travel all over the world to see, I text “Iceland Girl.” I write in my journal on the subway ride home that “right now the happenstance of star dust has me thinking about her more than anyone else.”
I have never lived a life of caution, have always gone for ‘it’ and figured it out along the way. Only a few hours remain to book the ticket at the ungodly cheap fare Iceland Girl has found. Fine. I tell her I’m in for Iceland. I can’t afford Iceland. Yet. I have five months to figure out my finances—to make this dream of being a writer who pays his rent and dinner tabs with his words come true. Failure is no longer an option, which in the coming months I realize is exactly what I need to succeed.
July: Minneapolis>Bismarck
Filled with an elation that often visits me on planes, I head to my hometown, to my parent’s July 4th party in Bismarck, North Dakota. In my journal I write:
So many years ago in third grade as I read Kipling and Stevenson by flashlight under my covers, I had no idea that this life of continuous adventure was not only attainable, but that one day my life would become a part of that dream. I’ve known despair and heartbreak and seen the worst faces of humanity and am no longer naive enough to believe that these unwelcome visitors will not come again. But for today, for this moment, they are nowhere to be seen as a single jet careens through the sky, above clouds that cover the world, headed to a place I will always call home.
July-September: Guatemala
I leave my hometown and return to another place I will also always call home, Antigua, Guatemala, where I lived between 2008-2012. This is my second homecoming since leaving and I am again amazed how intact my life here still is. A 4×4 driven by mi amigo Andrés and three friends I’m eager to give big bear hugs greet me. In tow is Beowulf, a German shepherd I last saw as a puppy eight months before.
Antigua is the land of misfit toys where every expat fits seamlessly into the context of each other. I spend my time working pro bono in development, writing on a mountain where my friends are building an ecolodge, having my third annual Mariachi Pub Crawl, and being around people I love in a place I adore. Guatemala reaffirms my decision to spent 2-3 months of every year of the foreseeable future here.
I also learned this year that Hula-Hoopers are awesome and when playing a show, if you have the option of someone hooping to your music, you take that deal (un abrazo super grande a Ada y Emjay (; )
October-Dec: NYC>Canada>Iceland>Paris>Amsterdam>Barcelona>NYC>MSP>Bismarck
Iceland was what I wanted it to be when I dreamed of it being more than I thought it possibly could be. It is beautiful. The people are quirky, lovely and friendly. Just as water finds its level, I find mine, and become part of an exciting group of writers, poets and musicians, forming a band called “Loki and The Fashion Bandits.” I collaborate with an illustrator on a children’s book called Puffin Muffins, and build a network of artistically endeavoring musical souls. One of these guys, “HEK,” a Kerouac-esque fellow who has spent a big chunk of his twenties rambling around Europe, will be joining me in New York this March, his first time to the US, to play music and meet some NYC poets.
Iceland is also heartbreaking. My heart breaks because I find myself breaking someone else’s. Just like at the beginning of the year when for reasons I still don’t know someone I cared about greatly decided to pass on me, I find myself opting out of a relationship with Iceland Girl. There is no loneliness so pronounced as being next to someone in a car who wants a part of you have decided is not hers to have. It’s a horrible feeling, for both parties, and beauty in Iceland is coupled with an unspoken horribleness.
On the ides of October, I write in my journal:
Skipping stones while walking along Iceland’s North Atlantic shore, not even the hint of a distant engine’s hum, just the mantra of the bay’s waves yawing against the shore. Clouds colored by the North’s unique angle to the sun hide the snow-capped, Western peaks while to the Eastern peaks are free and stoic. Kelp, stranded on the rock beach clings to its treasures—bird bones, drift twigs and shattered shells the color of autumn leaves.
Many moments brought me here today, but each of those germinated my conviction that this is my path. Be here for the present and use it, if you can, for the future.
*Iceland Girl* is somewhere along these shores too. She left before I did in the hopes of spotting a whale. But I suspect she also has some thinking to do. Last night as she made another unwelcome advance, I found myself calling her needy and my one consolation is that I think this hurt me as much or more as it hurt her. On paper she is who I am looking for. I should be running full speed after her, doing everything in my power to embrace her, hold on and put our lives on the same course. What exactly am I doing resisting her and, in the middle of our trip together, walking away from the chance at a romance that I’ve been hoping might work since we parted ways this June?
It’s moments like this, filled with unanswered questions that I beg for answers and wonder if I am destined to end up alone. We maybe could be happy together, but I worry her heart points inward while mine outward. I’m afraid she’d try to keep me for herself. I am expressing myself poorly, a writer’s greatest sin, but I’m guided by an inner feeling that I have to trust since it’s led me my whole life and it is telling me that I have to follow it. If we stop following our hearts, we are lost.
I wrote in Iceland. I thought. I recharged. I plotted out my future. After Iceland Girl left, I ditched my flight home and stayed. At times it didn’t feel fair that inside I felt as broken as going through a break-up when we had in fact never even dated. It felt like my emotions had betrayed me. But I hoped for both of us. I hoped neither of us stopped seeking. I hoped we would not become jaded to the possibility of love, would not cease chasing the possibilities even when it meant making rash reservations together to a country neither of us had been to, glaring with the possibility of a communal future with that someone we both dreamed existed.
After Iceland, I catch up with my friend Amy in Paris, then fellow Antigua-er Hannah in Amsterdam, and then go to Barcelona for a week and make new friends. I fly to NYC and have a homecoming show at The Goodbye Blue Monday, then surprise my family for Thanksgiving. It is the first Thanksgiving I attend in 6 years. Then my brother Tyler and I pile into his car, pick up musician Henry Hypnotic in Denver and head out for a mini book/music tour across the Southwest.
December: Bismarck-Denver-Gran Junction-Vegas-San Fransicso-Sequoia-Bismarck
Road tripping with my brother and friend in the artistic fight of good melodies feels like the only appropriate way to end this year. Guided by our music, every strum of guitar, mandolin and banjo is a way of singing the world into another year.
We make it home just before my brother and sister’s birthday, three days before Christmas, the day before my brother Joash’s wedding. Exciting things are afoot in my family. My brother Joash and his wife are expecting a baby on June 8th, and my older brother Aaron and his girlfriend have one due on June 6th. My birthday is June 7th, and I am hope that the former baby is a day early and the latter a day late. June 7th would become quite a bash. It’s likely this will happen, six people in my immediate family share three birthdays.
With so much happening, it’s a good time to be home and have time to spend with my large family (7 brothers/2 sisters). It’s why despite my aversion to winter, I’ll be sticking around through January. This will also give me some time to drag some projects I’m working on to or closer to completion.
Finally, thank you, dear reader, for being along with me this year. Thanks for everyone who’s given me heartening feedback about Travel, Write Sing. I’ve always felt the need to write down my experiences and record my thoughts—it’s why I’ve been journaling since I was six. Having you on the other end of the line turns this from an endeavor in reflective solitude to a shared conversation, and I love including you in the chatter.
Cheers to a another year!
-Luke
