Hello,
Welcome to Walk Around. This is Hudson Gardner. It's been a little while.
I've been out and about, traveling, hiking, running, doing things that I love, spending time with wonderful people, seeing beautiful things, having really beautiful conversations—learning about myself, learning about others, and by that, learning about this world we all co-create and exist in together
I'm back in Port Townsend, where I live, and sitting in the pasture near a stand of trees on the edge of the field.
It was my birthday a couple of days ago, actually, a week ago, and I have been coming back into some kind of personal awareness and depth inside of my own body and mind recently, thinking about things I've left behind for too long, things I've been incapable of doing, reflecting on life in general.
I feel like I often write some kind of reflection around my birthday, and I guess this is it for this year, but it feels very different.
It feels a lot less melodramatic or sad than a lot of the years have felt in the past, and maybe that's because I've come to a fundamental honesty.
I've been honest with myself, and that's allowed me to actually move forward from something that I was stuck on for a long time.
I had a conversation with a friend in Salt Lake when we were walking up a canyon together near where he lives, and we talked about a process of deep honesty: what it means to be really deeply honest with yourself and with others, and how hard that actually is.
For example, whenever I have had a thought about something I really want to do, no matter how much I want to do it, how much I'm interested in it, how long I've been interested in it, there's always this counter-current in my mind that pushes back against that thing.
It says something like, well, that's not practical
If it doesn't lead to something, why even do it? It's going to be too expensive
It's not going to be what you hoped it to be
There's all these self-sabotaging tendencies
This is for bigger things…
I guess about two months ago, I decided that I wanted to go study Japanese acupuncture in Japan and also go to Sapmi, which is the home of the Sami people in northern Norway, Finland, and Sweden.
Those are obviously two very different directions and locations.
I also want to spend time in Scotland.
It's kind of like, how do all these things... My rational mind is like, you have to choose one of those
Those are three different countries
That's too much
But if I think, well, I have 30 years to do this, 40 years to do this, why not? I could spend 10 years in each country
That's cool
What it means to be deeply honest about intentions and direction for me is to look at the resistances and think, why am I already sabotaging myself from doing something that I've wanted to do for 10 years already? I've wanted to go to these places for a really long time.
I had, maybe, not fewer… but I had different reasons for it, just kind of a general intuition
As I've gotten older, the desire hasn't gone away, and the reasons have just started to pile up. It just makes sense that I'll go there eventually.
I need to stop overthinking it and just start planning, figure out how I'm going to do it
Don't worry about what's going to happen. Just go and do it. See what it brings. For me, this is how life has always worked out.
I feel like I take smaller risks normally than spending, I don't know, $2,000 to $5,000 to go on a trip. That seems like a huge risk to me.
But every time I've followed a feeling I've felt for a long time, it's led me to something that was indisputably important. So I need to do that.
I think it's important to be honest with ourselves and other senses about what we're hoping to do in life and why we're not doing it yet
There's going to be a lot of little distractions that come from a lack of belief in your own path or what you really feel like you want to do next, whatever that might be
Then you can just get absorbed by the distractions and give up and forget about it
“Oh, yeah, that thing, yeah, I didn't really want to do it anyway, I guess…”
Anyway, I wrote a poem a while back, and I want to share it today
It's about things like this, or just life in general
It's called, Imagine
Imagine
Each year of your life: a wooden urn
With a good tightness on the lid
Each lid left off until
The final day of the year
Each urn the kind of wood
That reflects the kind of year
And inside: 365 small glass beads
Bigger than sand, but smaller than stones
Perfectly smooth
Perfectly cool
They have a certain weight
Each myriad colors, darker and lighter
As the days have been
A handful of such
Is indescribable in words, the colors
Shift even now as you look at them
One year deep yellow
Another mostly mauve, and one bright blue year
Another burns orange
Way back a series
Of black ones
That on closer inspection, or just for today
Look dark blue-green
One with a golden thread that shimmers
Like a vein under cold water, shifts and changes
As you turn the days around
Rolling and roiling them through your hands
Please tell me...
What colors would yours be?
“Don’t just do something, stand there”
— Terrence McKenna
I'm sitting next to a big ant pile.
It’s one of my favorite places to hang out, next to these big thatching ants. It's just a calming place to be, to see them working, or just being.
A friend of mine, Blaine, when I talked to him recently, said this quote from Terrence McKenna, which is the reverse of, “don't just stand there, do something.”
Don't just do something, stand there.
It's a good one.
Thank you for listening, and welcome to late summer.
Fall is quickly approaching.
30 - Imagine