From Ditches to Mansions
These last two months of California have me thinking a lot about status, wealth, fitting in, and our quality of life. Rarely are we slingshotted so hard from one extreme to the other!
I remember our 125 mile stretch back in Montana. We were either sleeping on the edge of a mountain, in the ditch, or under the road. We were dragging ourselves unshowered for a week beneath the 95 degree sun, and packing 140lbs of water across this tremendous desert stretch.
And how did our suffering end up getting resolved? We arrived in White Sulphur Springs to be hosted out of the illustrious Ringling Brothers Mansion!
But here in CA? It’s been one extreme immediately contrasted by the next! Flip flop flip flop. Up down up down. We dropped in from weeks of wilderness social isolation, picked up 20 million views a month in the Valley and all kinds of news coverage, went back into the wilderness a bit overwhelmed, and came back out to some of most beautiful cities in the state, including the biggest!
And we feel incredibly grateful, more than anything, to be able to see both sides of life, from dirt to gold sandboxes and those who play within them; it has laid bare the subjective realities we inhabit, and the paradigms common to these different ways of life.
We are each a lonely awareness yearning to be whole. Most of us are struggling against endlessly filling every hole that once gave us pleasure.
We build our illusion of wholeness by climbing the ladder, wondering if it might await us up there.
We build our illusion of wholeness through the accumulation of money and proof. As one of our followers humorously commented, if there’s no pic it didn’t happen. And so we form our “house of wholeness cards.”
The money card, our stored power. Status, others validation of our existence. Identity, a made up story we defend about who we “really” are when WE don’t even know. Belonging itself, as we often seek it, is just insulation against existential aloneness. Each promises completion. Each slyly whispers, “just a little more.”
Yet, here we’ve slept in ditches and in mansions. We’ve gone from avoidable hobos to unseen wanderers to algorithmically amplified, socially inundated, local micro-celebrities and back again. We’ve carried 140 pounds of water across desert heat at times and at others we’ve been carried by hospitality so generous it could almost embarrass us.
And wouldn’t you know it, the sense of being whole has never correlated cleanly with any of it.
Not mansions. Not views. Not the wilderness. Not even the people that come running and crying, because you changed their life.
Wholeness doesn’t appear at the top of the ladder because the ladder itself is horizontal. It only moves you across environments, neither vertically, nor inward.
The gift of being slingshotted between extremes is that you see the mechanism. You see how the game is played on both sides and why. You see that dirt and gold sandboxes are built from the same human hunger.
Nobody is JUST trying to become rich or known or impressive; we are trying to feel complete. But the subtle, inconvenient reality is, completeness will never be found through these attachments, striving, or clinging. It is only found when desire yields to the magnificence of the present.
Our house of cards only ever obfuscates the wholeness beneath it.
