Mistake / Mystic

This was written in my journal and I recently found it. It struck me, and so I’m posting it here, today, on May 8, 2021.

Mistake/Mystic, April 29, 2017 

When you grow up in a small town and then move away, and lots of time has passed, and you become a brand-new person, and you go back to that town, it can be a healing experience. Because of the space and distance, you return to it with fresh eyes. And what used to pain you, now seems like nothing. The aperture of understanding has opened wide and you hold your former home with a type of tenderness. 

But to have been in L.A. for decades, to call it your home, and to know it's where you came of age and are now aging, it can be hard to get perspective. 

Usually when I find myself deep in the valley I hop on the freeway to quickly get home. But not tonight. 

Tonight I'm in an ecstatic state. 

I am singing, driving around L.A. in my car as if it’s the first time. My heart has cracked open -- as it does these days again and again and again -- and I'm looking at the lights at the gas station and they're so beautiful. I am in love with the city that never meant any harm.

Tonight, I am bursting with love and understanding for it all.

These are the totally sober and awake states I would drop into throughout my life. They were ecstatic states of the divine heart. And even on my often dry, Buddhist path I remember meditating and yearning and seeking to know enlightenment, and I would touch upon these ecstatic states and then move back into something else – presence, expansion, stillness, peace, absorption, samadhi.

I experienced life through the heart when I was living my life. Not on the meditation cushion. 

Singing when I was a kid and a teen connected me to that ecstatic state. That was my church. I thought that I was singing to become a singer. I thought that being a good singer was what gave me the ecstasy. But I was singing to something unseen and unknown – an energy, an essence, a fullness that would surround me and fill me up when I would open my mouth and let out the sound.

But now I see that I was simply singing, like a bird sings. Singing just to sing, in celebration of being alive, in gratitude to the divine.  

For isn't it divine that we have this voice, this body, this heart and mind? 

In meditation the past week or so, memories and sensations have been floating up again of driving around L.A. through the years. The disappointment and sorrow of not living up to what I thought I would be in this city. The pain and despair and feeling helpless and hopeless. The confusion over which way to turn, and the calling back over and over and over again to my juicy, creative heart, yet coming up dry.

Being 24 and at home in whatever apartment I was in, smoking, drinking wine, listening to Sarah Maclachlan. Smiling at parties in the Hollywood hills. Those were definitely not ecstatic states. But I was trying. I was really trying. 

So tonight I drive the streets of the valley. My Honda and I traverse Ventura Boulevard, that sorrowful street that became littered with my broken heart a thousand times over. Tarzana, Sherman Oaks, Encino, Studio City. 

You see, when I first arrived in LA, I would drive up and down Ventura Boulevard working jobs that cracked my spirit, feeling depleted and lost, confused as to why my soul would bring me to this city to reach for the stars, only to feel squashed and stifled. Delivering flowers, delivering sandwiches, smiling for customers while my heart ached and my creativity seemingly lay on the shelf at home. 

I'd wonder to myself: What happened to that expanse I felt when I used to sing? When I would act and words would flow from my mouth that reached the rafters of the theatre and made the audience feel their hearts more deeply? 

Why could that not be found now? Where did it go? Why was that no longer here? It didn't make sense to leave L.A. But it was madness to keep staying. I didn’t know at the time, but the commodification of creative expression had shut me down. 

And I can feel myself at 27, lugging my blue cooler on wheels, filled with tuna sandwiches and egg salad on rye and in my daily despair it all used to appear so menacing. Every streetlight, every neon sign, every billboard was a reminder I didn't belong, an affirmation of my unworthiness, a sign of futility. 

Tonight I cross over Balboa, Hayvenhurst, Kenter. The lights of the boulevard look so beautiful and benign. It's hard to imagine that at one point they were beacons of my failure, reminders of all the wrong choices I had made. All the confusion. The floundering, the flailing about, the desperate need for answers and recognition and validation and love.

So many years ago I would drive this boulevard and deeply feel as if my life was a mistake, and that I was a mistake. But no, I was not a mistake. I was a mystic. I just didn’t know it yet. 

This is the city that once enslaved me, and tonight I drive its streets and I am free.