The anniversary of the death of my friend Eric David Funderburg is February 25th and I always re-post this around that time to honor him and to remind myself not of his death but his life.   I am still trying to live up to the gifts he gave me during his short time in this world.

I remember my Dad and I loading up the Bronco for my first year of college.  As we were driving up the onramp on I-5, I had this horrible pit in my stomach.  After months and months of being excited about leaving home and being on my own I realized in that moment that I was totally and completely lost.  I had no idea who I was and what I wanted.  I was going to college because that was what the voices around me told me I should do.  I didn’t have any better ideas so why not?  I had picked the college I was going to because my best friend said, “dude, we have got to go to college together. So I went.  I moved with the pull of the world instead of finding my own voice in it.  It is so easy to slide into the stream of our culture because to turn against it or follow the fork in the river brings sudden and immediate disapproval.  At the time, I knew nothing else, so I allowed myself to be moved by the forces around me.  I grew my hair long, grew a beard for while, bought a whole new wardrobe at the second hand store, looked for things to be angry about, and took up drinking.  These were all shallow ways of trying to find the answer to a question that I had never thought to ask: who am I and what do I want?  Instead of asking the question and listening for an answer I wore the uniform of the college student.  I paid close attention to the voices blasting at me from the megaphone of the world in Dolby digital surround sound.  In high school you behave this way and in college you can now behave this way.  Organized-sterilized rebellion is ok.  Listen to music that is marketed to show people you are unique instead of being unique.  Basically sow your pre-approved wild oats before you get down to business and by business they mean:  Career, spouse, home, kids, stuff, income and becoming a consumer.

Throughout my first year of college I took the classes you were supposed to take and learned the things that I was supposed to learn. However, in my dorm room was my best friend Eric, and he lived differently.  When I was 17 Eric and I were walking to guitar class at Yreka High School when he said, I don’t think I am going to live past 21. I was 17 and his best friend and didn’t know what to say accept, you’re crazy.  You will probably live longer then me. But he reiterated that he wouldn’t live past his 21st birthday.  I didn’t like talking about death, and I certainly did not like someone I loved saying they would be dead in a few years.  So over the next few years I tried to make sure we didn’t talk about it.  Looking back now I realize that Eric had been given a wonderful gift.  He knew that life was short.  He understood that he was not invincible and that death was not something that only happened to grandparents.  But did he live his life depressed or in some insane Seize the Day- Disneyland-extreme?  No.  He listened intently to his own voice, his own calling and was never persuaded or pulled in by what the world wanted for him.  He spoke of God often but the God he believed in was a reckless loving God who pushed him to love big and brash and leave the comfort of the well traveled road.

Eric was the first person I knew who lived deeply.  He moved through the world free and unaware of the restraints that were trying to be put on him or the rules he was breaking.  He was this big 6 foot athletic guy but he wore his heart bravely on his sleeve.  When my divorced parents had a horrible fight I drove to his house an emotional mess.  I sat on the floor of his room and began to tell the story frustrated, angry and heart sick.  The words began to tumble off of my lips like ice from a glass but as I spoke he came over, sat next to me, and said nothing.  He reached out and held my hand and wept. The world stood still.  He didn’t worry about how it looked, he didn’t worry about slipping into the sadness of that moment, and I felt my shoulders drop and my own tears being given permission to fall.  Eric simply felt the pain of his friend and because the spirituality he felt came from within and not from a mind full of religious rules and doctrine he did not think, instead, he let the language that only the heart knows speak for him.

Eric was alive in every sense of the word.  He took scuba diving classes, Karate classes, roller blade hockey lessons, and bought photography equipment because he had a child like interest in those things and wanted to know everything he could about them.  He was a spokesman for DARE and SADD.  He signed up to be a Big Brother at a local church when we got to college.  All the while I watched him bounce from class to class thrilled with the things he was learning but it wasn’t enough.  What he really wanted to do was fly.  I had known Eric since we were kids and flying was always on his mind.  So half way through the year Eric began investigating how he could become a helicopter pilot.  Once he found out he did not have enough money to do it he looked into the military.  Midway through my first year of college he joined the Army to become a pilot.  He focused on his tests and passed with flying colors.  He learned everything there was to learn and the thing was he was happy and truly free.  He did not worry that his parents and I thought he was crazy.  He wanted to fly so that was what he was going to do; all the talk of having a college degree as a fall back seemed absurd to him.  “Why spend my time here when I know what I want to do,” he would say with a big grin on his face.
At the time, I wished I had his courage but instead I was in the process of sweeping my voice and my dreams of playing music under the carpet of impracticality.  Eric never paid much attention to the voices of his parents, me and society trying to reel him back in.  He was in touch with a voice that was connected to the river -connected to the spirit.  It is my belief that as Jesus and other great spiritual teachers have said the kingdom of God is within you.  It is my experience that the spiritual life exists not in books or sermons but in ourselves.  Eric understood this and like a vigilant gardener he cared and nurtured this voice until listening to it was like breathing.

Eric left college to attend flight school and became the youngest flight officer in the Army at the time.  I transferred to Sonoma State University to pursue a degree in mediocrity with a minor in life-safety.  Eric and I stayed close writing letters and visiting when he was not on some backwater Army base in the south.  During my third year of college he came to see me in October and then three months later in January he gave me a call from Honduras.  He seemed tired but I could tell it was important that we spoke so we talked on the phone until there was nothing left to say.  The line began to crackle and pop so we said our good-byes promising to talk soon.
During a clear day in February I remember being happy to be alone as my scooter raced up the expressway toping out at 35 mph.  I was heading back to my apartment to sit and read or maybe play some video games. I didn’t feel like being around people so I decided to head home before my next class.  It was doubtful on such a nice day that I would make it to my 4:00 class.  I zipped into the parking lot, turned off the engine, and pushed my scooter up into my 10 x 10 “backyard.”  I could hear the phone ringing from inside as I in one fluid motion dropped my backpack on the floor and threw my keys on the counter.  I could hear the TV in the other room and see the feet of my roommate’s girlfriend. Strewn on the ground were the carcasses of Cheeto bags left to rot in the beige light of our thinly insulated walls. “Crap” I thought.  She had been there for weeks, showed no sign of leaving, and was now between me and video game glory.

I picked up the phone to find my father on the other line. This was a surprise because my father was notorious for avoiding long “check in” conversations on the phone.  “Hey DAD” I blurted out as I immediately launched into a discussion about a class I was taking involving religion.  My Dad was well known in the Christian world as a speaker, company owner, minister, and writer.  Christianity was his favorite topic so it was guaranteed to keep him on the phone.  You had to move fast with my Dad; if you didn’t keep him focused you could hear on the other side of the line his attention melting away; magazines being flipped through, lawn mowers being started, speeches being edited.

My Dad cut me off, “Trent, hold on.  I have some bad news.  There has been an accident.  I don’t know how to say this…..but..It looks like Eric has been killed. My legs shook.  Thousands of thoughts, memories, and images of Eric crashed against my eyes as I felt my stomach turn and my mind disconnect from my body.  “Wha…..what….?” was all that the air left in me would allow me to say.  I lost my voice.  I felt the cold chalk of the wall against my back as I slid down.  I couldn’t understand what was happening.  My mind was running from station to station in my head trying to put out fires, trying to get my legs working again but my body rebelled and hit the ground.  I could feel the beat of my heart in my throat as I squeezed out another, “wh….what?”  My Dad explained to me that Eric was the co-pilot on a mission and they had lost their tail rudder and spiraled into a lake in El Salvador.  I started crying.  I wanted my father to fix it.  I wanted him to make a few calls and get everything sorted out.  I wanted him to speak to God and point out that this was not part of the plan.  Eric had lived a spiritual- moral life.  There must be some sort of mistake.

My Dad explained that he needed to speak with Eric’s parents Joe and Jan and would call me back.  The phone went silent but I stayed on the ground staring at the phone as if it were a puzzle; trying to find some new meaning or some new piece that would put everything back into place again.  Eventually I walked up the stairs to my room and sat on my bed.  I slowly looked around as my head spun and spun and spun and before I realized what was happening, I was destroying everything.  It all seemed like bullshit.  Everything in my life made me sick: my posters, my pictures, my clothes, my furniture…….everything.  I dumped out my drawers, tipped over my dresser, tore my clothes from their hangers and finally crumbled to the floor weeping, “Please don’t take my friend away.”
Hours later still in my room, I felt as if I was awakening from years of slumber after some fairytale curse. I rummaged through the wreckage, found a bag, stuffed some cloths in it and walked out realizing I would never pass through the doors of my apartment the same as I had hours before.  The air felt heavy, the sun seemed unforgiving as it glared down at me.  I looked up to the sky as if looking up from the bottom of a pool.  I could see the surface above me, but I now knew the surface was like childhood; I could never go back.

When you have a soul-shaking event happen you can do one of two things.  You can learn from it and use it as a chance to inspect your life or you can use it as an excuse for all of your problems and continue distracting yourself from living a free and spirit filled life.  After locking myself away in an apartment for a year after Eric’s death I started to look at things differently.  I had changed, and the seed of that change began to rumble in the pit of my stomach.  I began to pay attention to my own internal signals, and I realized I was living a safe life, following the guide posts left by the world, and rarely ever being quiet or standing still.  I noticed something else.  There was a voice in me that I had failed to listen to.  It didn’t come from my head; it came from a deeper place, a calmer place.
When I was young and would look upon Mt. Shasta from the deck of my family home, I had the same sense of that voice.  The mountain was peaceful, solid, powerful but quiet.  Mt. Shasta always made me feel centered when I felt lost or dizzy with the pace of my life.  This was the same voice that I found in the depths of my soul.  It is hard to mold consonants and vowels to fit a proper description of this voice because it speaks an unheard language but I believe it is the voice of God – the voice of the Spirit.  It comes to us as nothing more than a tug on the heart or as the breath of a child on your neck and much different from the booming radio signal of the intellect.  In the days after Eric’s death I began to turn the radio static down and listen to this voice in my chest and suddenly I found everything I was pursuing was false and lacking meaning.  I wasn’t lost in the woods of my life; I was lost on the Los Angeles freeway of my life speeding through a maze of interchanges.
I began to write again.  I began to notice my breath and the wind and my feet on the ground.  It had been many years of spoonful after spoonful of sand to cover my voice; it would take time to bring it out again.  I began playing guitar in my room with the door locked so no one could hear my fingers stumble across the frets or the scratch of my voice as it tried to find a melody.  I cleared my shelves of text books and began reading literature and poetry.  I could sense something being nursed back to health inside of me; it wasn’t God, he had always been there, but my capacity to listen to God, to hear God, to sing with God that was what was being refreshed.  My soul had been desperate for water and sustenance but for years had only found sand.

The songs I wrote were not great, in fact in all honesty, they were filled with cliches and bits of broken thoughts, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was I was using my voice again, and it was mine.  My voice was my life, and I was listening to what God was whispering to me as he helped me along. I could feel myself being filled up instead of drained out as I went through my day.  Living a spirit filled life takes a lot of listening.  Finding your voice takes time and silence.  It means paying attention.  It means living your life in a way that speaks for you instead of finding the right words, the right philosophy, or religion.  St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the gospel to the whole world, and if necessary, use words.”  There is too much talk these days and not enough people letting their hearts and their lives sing for them.
Wherever you are in your life right now, it is not too late to find your voice.  It is not too late to find an empty room to start to listen to the voice that has been within you from your very first breath.  Once you begin to find and listen to the voice the adventure can begin and your life will never be the same.  I am 36 years old as I am writing this and I have been playing music ever since that day in February.  I have been wildly unsuccessful as an artist and singer but what a ride it has been.  I have laughed more, loved bigger, and learned more on this journey than if I would have continued living the life of a surface dweller.  I have failed, taken giant steps backwards, and lost my way often but after finding my voice, after finding the spiritual path it was never long before I was charging back into the woods of a life filled with wonder.

I remember one night during my first year of college Eric said he had never smoked a cigar, so he and I went down to the local mini-mart, bought some cheap cigars, and smoked and talked all night about the meaning of life, love, pain, calling, and the days before us.  At one point he put on his favorite record, jumped up on the bed and danced in his underwear with a cigar hanging form his mouth.  He then said to me, “In this life Trent, sometimes you can’t walk; sometimes you have to dance.”  In 3 years I would get the phone call that Eric David Funderburg was killed in a helicopter accident in El Salvador.  He died one month past his 21st birthday.  The words he said to me that night have been carved into the walls of my heart, and I carry him and them with me everyday.  I never knew their significance until the day I got the phone call telling me he was gone.  They were the first words I thought of when my Dad told me he was gone because in that moment I realized I was walking through my life, but I desperately wanted to learn how to dance.

Finding your voice is hard work.  There is a world out there pulling you to the safe structured streets away from the forest with cautionary tales and fear, but your voice is your ticket to the dance.  We live in a world full of people walking through their lives on very safe sidewalks of concrete and stone being told what to sing, how to sing, and when to sing.  I know the sound can be deafening, but the voice you are looking for is not on these sidewalks.  There is a river that runs through all of us, that connects you to me.  If you follow this river it will lead you to your voice, your calling, your path in this world.  It will lead you to greater hardship and greater joy than you can possibly imagine but you will also find the very heart of being alive.  Do not forget you were created to experience beauty, truth, wonder, and goodness.  You have one go around in this life: stop walking. Listen closely to the gentle song of your own voice and soon you will find yourself dancing with eyes and arms open.

Posted by Trent on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 12:00 am.