The Catchup

Right at the end of the year I got to spend a week in Tibet

It took me 6 years to graduate from college. I’d spent what should have been my sophomore year wandering around China where I’d gone to study Chinese but had instead, four months into the school year, dropped out and launched myself west fueled by an obsession with Joseph Campbell and the righteous demand that I not be denied my own Hero’s Journey. As a particularly idealistic and naive 19 year old that year would serve as the defining experience of my early 20’s. It was my first time truly on my own and the adventures I fell into (such as falling in love, accidentally ending up in Hong Kong, and traveling to Tibet) so exceeded whatever expectations I may have had about what the world had to offer that upon returning to the US to finish school I found the return to such familiar and mundane activities as school or work to be almost unbearable. I tried to drop out several times but but by 2011 eventually managed to cobble together a degree in liberal studies out of a collection of minors; philosophy psychology and native american studies.

Me in the hospital with appendicitis

That fall I finally made in back to China at the age of 24. This time my life long friend Tryg came along and together we made almost no plans at all. With a pair of one way tickets and no limitations except the meager amount of money I had in the bank we started in Beijing and went where ever we wanted or where ever we were directed by the people we met along the way. Once again I found life in China was more than I could have ever hoped for. We found ourselves consorting with famous artists and film makers, acting in movies, surviving life threatening illnesses, and eating the most amazing food in the world. For me the trip ended while trying to find mining jobs down under. Something shifted while we were staying in yet another dingy hostel in yet another unknown corner of the world, this time in Perth. It was time to head home, leaving Tryg who would go on to hitch hike up the western coast of Australia solo while I left unsure of what would come next.

I flew into Seattle and stayed with a friend from the internet who I’d met through a fly fishing forum. From there I went north to San Juan island where my dad was helping my grandfather move out of his house and while there sent out a flurry of job applications for various social work jobs. By the time I was back in Portland I already had a job offer for a therapeutic boarding school in Utah and within a week I was on the road headed east.

I wasn’t in Roosevelt for very long. I loved my job working as a mentor for troubled teenage boys in a residential setting. Teaching young boys how to deal with their difficulties was incredibly rewarding and at times quite exciting. Unfortunately Roosevelt Utah had absolutely nothing going for it. Not being Mormon meant there really wasn’t any way for me to meet people and four months in I had no friends, nothing to do and just couldn’t sustain living there any longer. Besides that I’d just built up so much momentum. In one year I’d traveled from Portland to Beijing to Shanghai to Chongqing, to Chengdu, to Yunnan, to Laos, to Thailand, to Hong Kong, to Australia to Seattle to San Juan Island to Portland to Utah. (I only had 4,000 dollars when I left by the way, and just managed the whole time) It honestly felt like I couldn’t stay put if I wanted to.

I got a job in Portland in a locked down therapeutic facility for severely at risk youth and moved into an apartment for the first time in my adult life. This job was significantly more difficult than my last one. On my first day shadowing the program I saw a three person brawl in which one girl was slammed against a wall while the other was trying to beat the crap out of her. Eventually I moved to a portion of the program that helped those students who had lived a large part of their childhoods in institutions transition into independent life. It was, however, a disaster of a program. It wasn’t clear to me what, if anything, was being done to support the clients in the therapeutically and the living conditions were absolutely deplorable. I complained and wrote a proposal to restructure the program into a more valuable one at which point I was moved to the graveyard shift and made to watch large groups of dangerous students alone without back up. I forced myself to stay, knowing that they were just trying to make me quit and not wanting to give them the satisfaction but at a certain point I found I wasn’t sleeping anymore. I would get at most 2 hours of sleep every day and found I wasn’t able to cognate or remember large chunks of my day. Problem solving became impossible and I started to feel like I was actually going insane. (a few years later the majority of that organisation was shut down by the sate of Oregon after an investigation by a local news paper. And the part of the program that dealt with young adults is now run by a friend of mine who has transformed it into a far more beneficial one)

Car life

When I left I was washed up. I felt apathetic and angry and had no interest in working so I moved into my car to be alone and to process. I lived mostly on the Oregon coast. I was desperately lonely during that time and really couldn’t tell you what I spent my time doing, just wandering I suppose. Mushroom hunting, reading, thinking and swinging from the elation of freedom to the desperation of alonness.

carrying fire hoses

That summer I fought wild fires in Oregon. It was the hardest physical work I have ever done or will likely ever do. Hiking miles a day while literally cutting our own trail through the forest and carrying sometimes hundreds of pounds of gear while wearing thick fire protective clothes in extreme heat IN A FIRE! It showed me what I was capable of in a way that I just didn’t realize before that, it showed me that strength was mental, not physical and that if you chose to do something, it would very likely be possible if you were dedicated.

after that I moved in with an old high school friend and started washing dishes. I still had no idea what I wanted to do in my life but I thought maybe if I just payed rent and hung out with friends I could be happy. I remember at some point having not been able to get out of the city for months because I’d been working so much and really missing the forest. Finally I had a few days off in a row and I went to the coast with my friend Lewis. I met Lewis when me and Tryg were staying in a hostel in the Yunnan province of China. We became friends almost instantaneously and together we have amassed several epic adventure stories over the years. We were both experienced car dwellers and so drove out to the woods together for the night. While there we talked into the night about all the things we loved about our time traveling and by the time we parted ways the next day we had made a plan that, come the fall, we’d head for Asia once again together, and this time we wouldn’t be coming back. Maybe India, maybe china, or Nepal, but we would find a place where we could make art, meditate, farm, and do all the things we’d ever dreamed of. It was a perfect plan, though it was not to be.

The next day while driving solo around Astoria I discovered there was a zen monastery outside of a small town called Clatskanie and head over. Almost as soon as I arrived I knew I was going to live there. Everything me and Lewis had talked about seemed to be preset. It was calm and tranquil and I could tell that it had something I was deeply craving. Looking back now I think even more than spiritual enlightenment what it had was structure. My life was beginning to feel unhinged and I found a place where I thought I might be able to really train in something meaningful that would help organize my mind and my life. I went home, moved out of my room, quit my job and was a resident a month later.

The monastery was a truly challenging place. Besides the fact that wake up was usually between 3:50 and 4:20 every morning with bed time usually around 10. And besides the fact that we sat for four hours of meditation every day minimum. And besides the fact that once a month we spent a full week in silence, sitting at least 8 hours each day and getting even less sleep; probably the hardest thing for me was that I just didn’t like people telling me what to do. The best part about my life up till this point was that I did whatever I wanted, and here I was willingly stepping into a place where I had other people telling me when and what to eat, how to walk, how to sit, who I could date (no one) and a whole host of other expectations that I was required to follow whether I agreed with them or not. It pushed all my buttons but there was something about that that I really loved, I could tell I was being challenged in a way that I simply wouldn’t be in the world I had known before this.

After I had been there for 6 months I was preparing to leave. Me and Lewis were headed down to Norther California to work for a season in order to fund our trip to Asia. The fates had drastically other plans for me however. In the middle what was meant to be my last silent retreat I was in a terrible accident in which I fell about 30 feet out of a Douglas fir tree in the middle of the night. I woke up in the hospital where I stayed for 5 days and multiple surgeries. Seven titanium plates were used to repair my skull, another was placed in my wrist and my mouth was wired shut. My knee was so messed up I could barely walk for the first month and I wouldn’t run for the next 2 years.

Within 2 months I had recovered enough to return to the monastery where I spent the next 6 months meditating on my own death and life. I would say that the first 6 months paled in comparison to this long and dark winter. I learned a lot, and it brought a level gratitude for that accident that I don’t expect people to readily understand.

I was in better spirits than you might guess

That summer I left the monastery to work at a ninja summer camp in portland (drawing on my 12 years of martial arts experience and 4 years as a camp counselor), then returned to the monastery with the intention to stay another year. Again, my plans were not to be.

It’s important to know at this point that, despite all these experiences I’d crammed into my life, even as they were undertaken each time with the express intention towards growth and maturity, and despite the fact that I really had learned a lot, the truth is I was not an especially mature or well put together person. I was desperately trying to tame energies inside me that I was frightened by. This was one of the main reasons I had gone to the monastery in the first place.

That winter, in the middle of the most intense and difficult period of training we did at the monastery, I had a major outburst of anger involving several other residents in which I damaged some property and scared a lot of people. I was asked to leave the monastery and even as the community tried to support me I made myself distinctly unsupportable. That year was unspeakably difficult. I felt abandoned (though in reality I was the only one who’d been doing the abandoning), I felt betrayed and angry, but also lost and alone and unlovable. There were thoughts that I wasn’t ever going to be ok no matter what I did, that I was trapped in this body with this mind and there was no point in doing anything to change it anymore.

I was once the head gardener at the monastery and also had a man bun

In that dark time I discovered Fly Awake, a tea shop in Portland. Unlike any other restaurant or coffee shop I had seen before, something about the way this shop was put together encouraged people to talk to each other and every conversation seemed enlightening and powerful. I began to learn about Chinese tea and found a whole community of lucid wonderful people who I could really connect with and felt supported by even as most of them didn’t know my story.

In that time I worked for a period of time as a mail man, then later went back to work at the Ninja Camp again.

At the end of that summer, having done some meaningful work, I was starting to relax a bit and was feeling just a touch of hope again.

A monk friend from the monastery reached out and invited me to go on a backpacking meditation retreat he was leading out in the Mt. Hood national forest. I quickly agreed as I had really been missing the clarity of mind that only came from several days of silent meditation.

Very quickly I regretted coming on the retreat. All my anger at the monastery started to resurface with every familiar chant, with every bell rung. It all represented this community that had turned their backs on me and I just wanted to see it all burned to the ground. At one point I walked far away from camp and began to scream into the forest. Screaming, yelling, toning, singing, praying, begging god to release me from this profound emotional pain, it was too much, I stayed there for hours.

When I returned to camp everyone was worried, they hadn’t known where I was and were considering going to look for me. I pulled the monk who was leading the retreat aside and told him I couldn’t continue, I would be hiking out alone in the morning and hitch hike back to Portland. My friend was very firm though and let me know in no uncertain terms that leaving was not acceptable, that this was my community and they were relying on me to support this retreat and I was expected to sit. I wanted to yell at him, to argue or even to just walk away but I was far to week in that moment, too much of an emotional mess. So instead I sat with the group and began to meditate.

As soon as my mind became still I felt a surge of energy pour through me and I began to sob. It felt like a pressure washer cleaning my heart, chest, arms legs and face from the inside out. it was almost unbearable but so clearly necessary that I only willed it to continue.

After 45 minutes the bell rang in the dark of the forest and I felt exhausted but clean. I went to bed and when I woke up I felt so happy and alive and clear, as if I had lost a hundred pounds in the night.

For months I waited to see if my anger would return, or if this was just a temporary state but it just didn’t. Some how I was free of this awful demon that I had carried with me as long as I could remember.

That year I worked at an outdoor education program where I would meet my current girlfriend. In that time I made amends with my teachers and the community at the monastery and my world seemed to fall into a beautiful and calm order.

The next year I followed my partner to Wisconsin (with out admitting I was going because of her) and started a job I had long wanted to try. I became a field guide for a wilderness therapy program that worked with troubled teenagers. I spent this whole year spending every other week backpacking with students who were facing some profound mental and emotional struggles. At the same time I was pushed in a way that I had never been before.

The Lady that likes me

I find it very difficult to describe my time there. I want to talk about the negative degree conditions, the emotional effort, hike days and the things young people do when they feel like they have no chance and the things that work to help them grow and heal. I want to describe all the skills I learned, the long shifts. I especially want to tell you about the incredible people who I worked with, sober powerful people who had through their experiences in the field developed a kind of presence and maturity that I have never experienced before or since in a group of coworkers. I want to talk about so many things that I know just couldn’t be understood as I would like them to be. In a lot of ways this job broke me down to my knees. I so believed in the work that I continued with it probably longer than I should have.

I was already utterly burned out by the time I was attacked by one of my students. I had been the subject of physical altercations with students before but this was an especially vicious one, and it didn’t help that it took place on the third day of a horrible unending blizzard that had worn me down already. I won’t go into the details of it here, only to say that as soon as me and my co-staff had subdued the student and he was able to stand on his own calmly, I walked away and collapsed into the snow. My body shook uncontrollably with adrenaline and it felt like acid was pumping in my veins. I did not return to camp. I let my boss know that I was done and he was entirely understanding.

This last event, the attack, but even more than that the whole year I spent at that job is something that I am still processing as I move forward to the next step which is the development of my own tea shop where I can offer a clear and present environment where people can be. I hope to capture some piece of the magic of that shop in Portland that was such an important and healing place for me.

This post has only been an overview of course. There are so many epic, amazing, and important stories in between the lines here it pains me to wash over them, particularly because I am so grateful for the life I have been lucky enough to live. However I hope that those of you who have wondered what I’ve been up to lately might have a sense now and those who didn’t know me well might appreciate what I’m trying to do next.

Ian