~ Tich Nhat Hahn said, “Life only exists in the present” a very simple but profound thought that is often passed over by all of us on a daily basis.  I have spoken much about living in the moment in some of my previous posts but how do we do that and still learn from our past and prepare ourselves for the future.  This often becomes the frantic thought in our head that is the engine that drives us to panic, fear, and un-centeredness.  The first thing I have found that I must do in my own life is to let go of the outcome.  We must not behave in a way that is dictated by the outcome we are looking for.  We should behave in a certain way because it is what makes sense to our heart, our mind, our body, our life.  We often find ourselves doing things to please others, to secure our future, to move us forward, to make us more money…etc We try changing and manipulating our present to try and affect some future outcome.  If we are to be open and honest centered people we must live the present fully.  We must understand that all are connected past and future in the present moment.

Speeding through life as we do, busyness and activity has become the greatest barrier to truly living in our time.  My father said in his book Messy Spirituality, “It’s not sinning too much that’s killing our souls, it’s our schedule that is annihilating us.  Most of us don’t come home at night staggering drunk.  Instead, we come home staggering tired, worn out, exhausted, and drained because we live too fast.” We move so quickly that our focus is constantly on how we can move faster to keep up.  How can we notice the things are important when we live in a culture that says more and faster are what are important.  It has become increasingly difficult to listen or our own voice or see the important moments of our lives with clarity. 

I wish we could be told what moments to pay attention to in our lives.  What are the moments that will haunt our hearts years later, the moments that we will constantly come back to trying to learn more from the bits of memory that are left scattered on the floor.  We don’t get this knowledge.  We don’t get an emergency broadcast system to interrupt our lives, “This is not a test.  The following moment will forever change your life.  Please pay attention.”  Instead we often rush past the important moments of our lives like a couple lost in the city.  “Was that the street?”  “I don’t know….keep going were late!”  If we start to pay attention and be present to our lives as it is happening not as some plan to be maintained we will see these moments clearly when they come.  We will feel our hearts rise to our throats as we let life wash over us.

I remember as a child being on vacation with my Dad.  We were staying in Hawaii in a lavish hotel on the beach filled with Jet Ski’s, bars, pools, water trampolines, luaus, dance classes and more.  In the midst of all of this activity was the absolute beauty of the sand, the setting sun, the warm wind, and the sea.  Many people never really took it in.  As a teenager I would sit and watch couples and families racing to dinner reservations, to helicopter tours, and shows but always waiting, always patient, was the setting sun.  The awe inspiring colors splashed across the palette of a blue sky went often unnoticed. 

My Dad was a complicated man.  He hated busyness and would cross the country often speaking about it and yet he spent most of his life on planes, in meetings, and on tight schedules away from home and family.  It was if while on vacation my Dad wanted to make up for all the time he had not spent being still, being quiet, just being.  Everyday we would race to the beach my Dad in front yelling “Hurry up!  We are going to miss it” frustrated that getting five kids to move was like organizing a small mentally challenged army.  Jumping over lounge chairs and discarded beach towels we would storm the beach frantically looking for a spot to call our own.  We would move towards the water until we were alone, quiet – still.  The talking of the world would stop, the shoulders would drop and the silence would take over.  There was a certain reverence that would overcome us all.  As a small child my parents took me to the Sistine chapel in Italy .  I remember becoming very quiet and speaking in a whisper but not knowing why.  I had that same feeling of being in the presence of something more, something bigger than myself, something holy as I watched the sunset.   

When we pull ourselves away from the television or the rush of speed along the highways of our lives we and find the quiet, we find ourselves becoming whole, complete, calm.  We don’t watch enough sunsets.  We no longer stop to watch the leaves fall over each other in a dance of color and air.  I have spent hours watching my son Wilder stumble through the yard in November dropping his toy sword to pick up a leaf hold it up to the sun and then tromping off to stare into the darkness of a puddle.  When did we stop doing that?  When did we stop being in awe of the world around us and more interested in world in front of us? It is one of the great ironies of life.  Life is so wonderful so full of so many things that it makes you want to start organizing and planning so you can supposedly “get more out of it” but the moment you do you start to miss it.   

Days after my father died my brother and I found his video camera and began looking at the video to see what were some of the last moments my Dad had felt inclined to video tape.  We rewound the tape about 20 minutes back and watched.  The last moments my father taped where of a bird on a balcony, the wind pushing against a palm tree, and twenty-six sunsets.  During one of the sunsets you hear my father calling to his wife, “hurry…..you’re going to miss it.” Maybe that voice is in all of us but it is not the one we think it is.  It is not saying “hurry your missing out on life.  Hurry your behind and you need to catch up.”  It is calling us to be still.  It is calling us to stop, to be present and settle into our lives.  It is calling us to the shore to clear our head and listen to our heart.  Slow down…..slow down….your going to miss it.

picture by my pal Shawna McHenry

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Red light.

I was rushing home. I have about three different routes I use to get to work and back. Each of the routes I take are not really main roads or highways so I never have to really deal with traffic. Most of the time it is a easy 40 minute drive. Right before I turned right onto Montecito I hit a red light. The car in front of me blocked me from getting in the right turn lane so I had to wait. I taped my fingers on the stearing wheel, “come on” I thought. The light changed and I turned right. I got 200 feet and hit another red light. “Awww come on..” I was glaring at the driver who had triggered the light waiting to pull out. For some reason it was his fault I had decided. Green. I drove another half mile. Red Light. “sonofabitch!” What was worse was I hit it right when it turned red so it was going to be a long wait. Now I was angry. Tapping the stearing wheel….moving my gear shift from 1st to 2nd…and back…”come on, come one”. Green. I floor it and get in front of the two giant trucks driving 25 miles an hour in a 40 mph zone. I glare as I go by and mumble “fucking morons”. I am angry at everyone. Now I am home free. Red light. “what the….” Two teenagers each carrying a 20 ounce rockstar energy drink had pushed the crosswalk button. I hate them. They did this on purpose I think. Everyone and everything is working against me. Green light. I drive maybe 100 feet, the guy in front of me stops to turn right into an apartment complex. I am stuck. I look in front of me and I see the light up ahead and it is green but not for long. I can’t get around this guy. WHY WON”T HE TURN!!!!! His blinker keeps blinking. He is looking into the apartment complex and looking at a piece of paper. blink. blink. blink. blink. “COME ON!” I scream. Cars are Zooming by me as I wait for him to turn. The two giant trucks pass me….it won’t stay green forever…finally I am able to zip out and hit the gas for about 22 feet before slamming on the brakes at Brush Creek Road….yes…you guessed it……Red light. I have turned off the radio at this point. If I listen to talk radio at this point I might drive my car into a phone poll just to relax. I look next to me now at the red light. It is the guy who wouldn’t turn with his blinker still on, staring at a paper and trying to see the street sign, his windows are down and he has Take on Me by Ah-Ha playing just a little too loud. The guy is swaying back and forth a bit as Ah-Ha sings “Take me oooooonnnn…..I’ll….be…gooooone Inah” and then they sing something only dolphins and mariah carey can understand. He turns and nods at me as if to say, “sweet song eh?” I picture myself lifting his car over my head and crushing it to make an example of him for the rest of the cars. Green light. I am off and running. I floor it again. Up ahead two lanes turn into one. (William Shatner Voice) “Must…pass…..all cars….be…fore….lane merge.” Zooming in and out I pass the two trucks again. YES, Victory! Light up ahead but it stays green. The world loves me again. I keep zipping along until: Red Light. My head drops. Defeat.

I turn to look out the window and I see an old man staring at a Tree. That’s all, just staring at a tree. Lots of people walk this sidewalk after work for exercise. I watch him and he doesn’t move. He is so still it freaks me out a bit. I even look above the tree to see if he is looking at something else like a helicopter or alien spacecraft. Nope. Just the tree. I feel my jaw loosen. I think “someday I will be the old man.” The man looks down, picks up some dirt, rubs it in his hand and then continues his walk. I wonder what all this stress and hurry and worry will get me? The world has its own pace. Your life has it’s own pace. RED LIGHTS have their own pace. I know this and yet I get so frustrated when I cannot control things. I get caught up in getting angry about why my life isn’t as it should be instead of accpeting how it is. “Life as it Should Be” is a dangerous line of thinking.  As Author Richard Rohr says, “Always remember that the best ally of God is what is.  Not what should be, what could be, or what needs to be, but what is.” ”Sometimes you float with things, doors open, the sun shines…etc. Sometimes life is nothing but red lights and it angers us all at some point or another. I think because somewhere along the line we were taught to believe we have control of our own destiny, that if we followed Tony Robbins we could release our inner power dragon and bend the world to our will. The fact is we do and we don’t. We can chose certain directions in our lives, certain paths, but that doesn’t mean the path will not suddenly disappear, be covered with snakes or lead to a cliff. I have got to a point in my life were I do realize that life has a pulse, an inhale and exhale, times of nothing but green lights and times of nothing but reds. I was frustrated driving because right now in my life I am getting nothing but reds and the world just emphasized the point with my little drive home. I need to remember that life is too short to be so angry at things I cannot control. I need to remember that there have been times when every light turned in my direction. I need to remember that every moment…and I mean every moment….. has something to teach me. I need to remember that this too shall pass.

At the stop light there are two lanes. I turn to the right. The two giant trucks are now next to me again.
“ahh…sonofa…”

Green light.

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It’s hard when you have been hit hard by someone or something. It is hard to keep it together, to smile, to get up….to breathe. Unfortunately so many of us have had this happen and we all deal with it differently. Not letting people know you don’t have it all together and that you are failing or hurting or a mess seems like a big thing in our society.

I am a big people watcher and was around a couple as they broke up, got back together, broke up..etc. For some people it can be so important to not show “weakness”: to not admit when they are hurting –  to never break down. If you are watching and paying attention it can be heart breaking. I wrote this song about all of those emotions. At one point while writing this song I imagined a person beat up, looking like they just lost a fist fight but smiling a forced smile, teeth missing, bloodied lip and face and saying….”What do you mean? I am TOTALLY FINE! In fact I have never been better!” Sometimes the greatest strength is admitting when your weak.

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The past month or two I have sat with various people, friends, and aquintances over a glass of wine or meal.  As the night moved on we would talk and stories would begin to reveal themselves.  This past month it seems I listened to many, many heartbreaking stories.  The things people do to each other: wives to husband and vice versa, fathers to sons, mothers to daughters, strangers to innocents.  There are horrible things in this world.  Things have been done to people that I cannot wrap my mind around, cruel and painful things that I don’t know how people survive.  What do we do with the damage that has been done to us?  What do we do with the scars that lie just under the surface of our skin, distorting our thought and emotions, distorting our ability to trust, to believe, to love.  Some of us have allowed the abuse to continue by defining ourselves as only a victim and nothing more.  We have allowed ourselves to only see the world through the lens of a victim.  How can we truly live if we see the world only as abusers and victims?  Horrible, horrible things happen in this world.  I cannot pretend that they will go away.  I cannot tell you they are a rare occurrence.  What I can tell you is that if we chose to let it consume us we are destined to live a life only half fulfilled because a part of us will always be left behind at the point of our betrayal.  We do have a choice.  We all do.  You chose to be the person you have become or become the person you know you are.  It seems like an easy choice but look around you and you will find a population who has settled.  A population that has decided to choose to be what they have become instead of still reaching for the person they started out trying to be.  A population hanging on to moments in their lives that have become weights hanging from their skin.   Many of the people I spoke to were allowing that horrible moment in their lives to continue because they allowed it to define them.  Unfortunately we cannot wash away the past but we can cut the strings that pull us back.  We can make the scars we carry only small marks on our body and life, instead of living as if our body and life are only small marks on a scar.   I know it is difficult to let go.  I struggle with it every day but in every moment there is death and rebirth.  Maybe you and I can chose this moment to be reborn and wash ourselves clean.

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sorry everyone….but I have been trying for hours to get things back up and running but it turns out someone hacked my site and deleated most of my posts and screwed everything up.  crap.  I will see what I can get back and if I can get the site up and running again. 

 Unfortunately all your kind words and beautiful comments are gone.  Also, gone are all of you that linked to various posts.   Quite a few posts will be lost forever and those of you who subscirbed to my site may need to resubscribe if you haven’t received an update recently.   I am working on getting music and the song Be Still back on site but will have to wait until tomorrow. 

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~ You are going to meet resistance once you start trying to live a free life. ~  I keep telling myself this.

Last night I couldn’t sleep so I quietly got up and paced the halls of my home.  As I did I had this thought: resistance should be the first affirmation that you are on the right path. Think of all of the great movements throughout our country’s history that started out with great unrest and resistance, the woman’s movement and civil rights movement to name a couple. At one point the majority fought against such changes. The majority said it would lead this country straight to civil war and destruction. The resistance was great but freedom moved forward. In our own lives the resistance may come from our family, friends, co-workers, religious leaders…etc. but if you have done the work and found what is true for you in your life, what is true to your heart you will move forward with strength. You are going to get many questions such as, “what do you mean you are quitting your job? It is a solid safe job, are you crazy?” “You’re going to move where?” “But you have to go to college. You can’t just travel around because when you come back you will be behind.” “do you know how hard it is to succeed with what you are trying to do?” “What’s your fall back?” “You can’t join a band and become a musician.”You will be quietly and systematically attacked so that you will break down and move along with the others. You will feel resistance in your own heart, in your own chest. The questions of the un-free will plague you. Don’t listen. There is a great story from World War II. As the allies closed in on the Germans many prisons and concentration camps were abandoned. The prisoners would wake up with all of the guards gone. No guns, no tanks, no angry cold faces lurking over them. They realized they were free but they could not move. Days would pass before one would have the courage to open the gate and walk out. This is what it will be for you when you start the path of a free life. You will be unsure. You will be scared of what hides around the corner. You will keep searching for the guards that are now no where to be found. This is normal. Take a deep breath, shuffle your feet into the sunlight and begin your journey. The gate is open.

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Life is complex.  We hear this often flooding our consciousness.  We are told in this complex world we are often told we need more and more things to help us manage our lives; life counselors, personal assistants, SUV’s, instant access…etc but the truth is life is simple.  Very few things in life matter when you distill all the clutter in your head, the day-to-day thoughts that consume all of your time more often than not are dribble.  Our minds light up like a child who sees a shinny object with each new thought.   We toss it back and forth, turn it around, and throw it up and down and then finally set it down for the next sparkling piece of trash that we find blowing down the sidewalk of our head.
      What are the things that we simply cannot live without?  Take a moment and sit down and write down what you need in life, not what you want, what you need.  When you look at the things that you actually need you realize there are very few of them.  It often seems everything we clutter our life with is pap.  So why all this distraction?  Why all this noise?  Why do we crave all of this glitter and yet need the very opposite…substance…quality…. silence.  We love the action.  The fast paced flicker of life but that is all a lie, an illusion of living an important life.  In reality it keeps us from our life. 
What do you need?  When I write down the things I need it is simple: love, my family, shelter, friends, passion, and a job I enjoy.  That’s it.  When I wrote it down I couldn’t believe it was such a short list: What about a Mercedes, one million in the bank, a boat, great abs, house in Malibu…etc.  We have bought into the notion that bigger is better, more is better than less, and a full calendar is equal to or greater than a full life.  Can we even distinguish between a need and a want anymore?  What I see now is crowds of people thinking their wants are needs.  Have we forgotten what we want is not always what we need. 
      Look at your life.  Look at the things surrounding you.  Right now, look around you.  Are they really what you thought they were?  Do they add to your life or subtract?  These are such simple questions but the answers do not come easily.  Having a stereo in my house adds to my life.  Every morning my two year old son likes to dance and run to music.  My wife and I dance with him and the benefit is immediate and enormous.  We play music while cooking or when friends are over and it adds to the evening, it adds to our life.  We had cable TV but I used it to zone out to.  I would stay up until 1:00 a.m. flicking through the channels, watching nothing.  We got rid of cable TV (why is it that TV has to be capitalized?  We don’t capitalize toaster when used in a sentence.)  We still watch movies because curling up with my wife to watch a movie adds to our life.  We enjoy it.  I am not saying throw away everything and get a tent.  What I am saying is be thoughtful about what surrounds you. 
      I think we have been taught to buy on impulse, accept what is given to us, and participate in a game that we didn’t know we were in.  All of these things are being handed to us like a pamphlet on a busy street and we are all shoving them in our pocket without ever realizing what the say, what they mean, and without ever looking the person in the eyes…..  We are moving so fast from the moment we take our first breathe that we have no time for stopping and being thoughtful about our life.  How sad, if this is a once in a lifetime ride.  No redo.  No coming back for seconds.  No do-overs.  Let’s take stock in the things that make our lives fuller.  Listen.  Listen.  It is simple.  What are the things you need? 

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The lights shinned bright on my face as we hit the first note of our set.  On the bigger stages it is hard to see because the lights are coming right at you.  Often you don’t know how many people are out there until you hear them applaud or worse you hear the lone cough after ending a song.  I knew he was out there.  My father had come to see me play.  I kept thinking in my head that he was out there….watching…judging…wondering where he went wrong.  The band lurched forward into rock song after rock song trying to get the energy of the room up.  I was pushing all of my energy out to the audience hoping I could get them to get stirred up in a rock-n-roll frenzy so I could show my Dad the path I had chosen was the right one.  To walk up to him as the crowd screamed for more with a big “I was right!” grin on my face.  The lights dimmed, and the show was over.  We had done well; the crowd had a good time, danced, drank, and got their money’s worth. 
     The next day I hung out with my Dad and asked him what he thought.  I thought I would finally get the “wow.  You really rocked that crowd!  You guys were great!”  My Dad was quiet and finally said, “you know I probably shouldn’t say this because it is going to sound square but why are you playing all of these songs about sex and partying?  You’re a better writer than that Trent.  Don’t worry about playing the songs people want to hear.  Play them the songs they need to hear.”  I was quiet.  I was trying to think of the right thing to say back to him that would show him how wrong he was, but I couldn’t think of anything, because he was right and worse yet, I knew it.  I had written song after song that I would quietly leave on the pages of my journal because I knew people wouldn’t dance to them.  I had song after song in my head that I refused to devote time to because I felt nobody wanted to hear them.  They wouldn’t make the crowd want to yell and scream for the band.  I had chosen a hard path by choosing to follow my passion and become a musician but somewhere I had forgotten why I had started out in music.  I started to compromise.  When I began I had all of these ideas and things I wanted to say and I was slowly becoming no better than a Cruise ship entertainer.  I wanted people to like me. 
     A true artist does not worry about the audience.  If the audience comes along that’s great but either way the true artist will continue creating what he or she feels in their heart.  That night I began to write without boundaries, without an audience or my need for acceptance dictating the direction.  I wrote a song called Inside Out, a song about living out loud.  A gospel song of sorts pushing me to live, breathe, and think differently.  I wrote the song because it was there in my head, in my breath, in my veins waiting, asking to be let out.  It became and still is one of the best songs I have ever written.  It was a turning point for me as a writer, performer and human being.  I no longer cared if anyone liked my songs or not or could dance to them or not.  That was not the point.  The point was the song needed to be sung. 
The same goes for our own lives.  We have so many choices we can make, so many decisions that lead us to ruin or triumph.  How many of us choose to play it safe or choose a life of acceptance?  How many of us are simply entertainers in our lives instead of artists?  The hard lesson I have learned is that living a spiritual life means writing and singing the songs that need to be heard.  It means following our own voice, not the path dictated to us by our parents, society, or religious leaders.  They are there to help us find our voice, not to tell us what it is.  We already have a voice, we already have a song; we just need the courage to seek it, call it out, and follow it.
     The problem that I see is we have all become entertainers.  We have various acts that we perform for one another and like most performers, as we get older we perfect our performance.  We become adept at making small talk with our friends.  We hone our jokes and stories of our childhood, college life, and career.  Pretty soon your friends are saying, “ohhhh tell him the bean-bag story…you have got to hear this, this is soooo funny” and what happens?  You tell the story and have them rolling in the aisles, of course. It’s a great act.  But when did you stop being an artist in the midst of your life and start being an entertainer?  Entertainers amuse.  They help people have a diversion from their life.  Look at the television how many of us sit in front of it day after day so we can “zone out.”  We now have people who treat their lives as television shows.  They are the stars of their particular show and work hard at making sure it is entertaining, making sure people want to continue to tune in.  The focus is on slick marketing rather than substance.  Walk through any American mall and you will see people who walk and act like commercials.  Slick hair, slick clothes, subtle product placement and the aroma of packaged rebellion all scream “please tune into my show!”
     True spirituality is an art.  It’s creative and expressive.  It is not meant to be pinned down and analyzed in a text book.  It needs to be splashed with bits of paint and spoken words in a torrent of love and passion.   It needs to be worked on, torn apart, and then put back together again.  Jesus upset everyone with what he was saying, as did Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others, but it didn’t matter because they were saying the things that needed to be said.  They were unconcerned with what people wanted to hear. They were not trying to entertain anyone.  They were telling the truth.  They were writing and singing the song for the sake of the song not for what the perceived audience wanted.    Step out on to the stage.  Let the lights hit you in the face.  Yes, someone is out there watching you but they are not judging or disappointed in you.  They just want to hear you sing.  They came to hear an artist.  Leave the Entertainer in the dressing room.  Maybe your life will be out of step and out of key, but it is not your job to figure out what the world wants to hear.  It is your job to give the world what it needs to hear.

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