There’s More to Life Than This
Back in 2010, when I was still living in London, my soul began to stage a revolution with the quiet repetition of there’s more to life than this. The existence that I had been sleepily fumbling through had become completely devoid of meaning: a husk-like existence that, for myriad reasons, demanded an awakening from.
The tremors of discontent from my soul-body had begun a couple of years earlier, in 2008, when a shocking event knocked my family and I sideways. My father was convicted of a crime that he did not commit, and sentenced to seven years in prison. He served almost four years of that sentence before his release in 2011. Evidence clearly exonerating him and proving his innocence was disallowed during the trial. The prosecution let us know that he was being made an example of - ostensibly due to his race, allowing for the manipulation of harmful implicit biases. False testimonies against my father, in exchange for plea bargains so that the witness - himself guilty - would be let off the hook was peddled as truth.
Off the record, the prosecution, acting on behalf of the government, made it clear that while the actual criminals, my father’s ex-employers, were guilty, they knew that my father was not. It was a high-profile case however, deflecting attention from that particular government agency’s high-profile bungling of another case. It would look good for them to have this win.
My father’s only “crime” was of not being aware of the criminal activity that his employers were engaged in. On the day of the verdict, the judge with his absurdly ringleted white wig and even more absurd pretensions at playing God, confirmed this before he pronounced the guilty verdict, sentencing my father to seven years in prison.
Violent white criminals have come away with less.
As that judge’s gavel came crashing down, my body was vividly numb. Fractals of frozen grief, rage and shame began to form and radiate out from my cellular nuclei, repeating themselves and cohering around a force-fed meaning that I swallowed with the terrible bang of that gavel. That unnatural meaning would reveal itself later on, in the wilderness of the desert, when I was far away from this meaningless world.
My father - a man whom I don’t recall ever missing a day’s work or knowingly telling a lie, whose value system was firmly based on following all the rules, working hard and providing for his family, whom I used to become maddeningly frustrated with because of his naivete and misplaced trust in the prevailing systems and institutions of government and justice - was guilty of something.
He was guilty of being a brown man, an immigrant, who had the audacity of entertaining dreams of a comfortable life for him and his family, and who had worked hard to achieve these. He was guilty of having unwavering faith in inherently racist and colonial systems, of adhering to a work ethic rooted in the abuse and exploitation of Earth and human.
He was guilty of expecting fairness and justice from these rotten systems.
Meanwhile, my soul, through my body, began an infernal racket. Autoimmune symptoms exploded into my world: painful, itching, weeping sores of psoriasis appeared on my feet and legs, and chronic body pain that left me unable to walk properly or move around without making me cry out. Eventually, with the help of Ayurvedic herbs and medicine ceremonies with Shamans, these subsided - for the time being. Long enough for me to escape.
They would eventually return in the desert, when it was time for me to begin the journey of re-membering my indigenous wisdom and decolonizing my soul and my body once and for all; when I would start the process of restoring my story.
But the pain, radiating out from the frozen, traumatized fractal-fissures of shame and rage had left cracks through which my soul started to whisper things to me.
And this time, instead of repressing and fearing it for fear of not “fitting in,” I listened.
I listened because what happened to my father had revealed the meaninglessness of the life and culture that I had enslaved myself to - that demanded my enslavement. The desire to safely fit into this machine of patriarchal colonizer culture is what I had been silencing my soul for. And now that machine, behind all its smoke and mirrors, revealed itself to me in all its wretched tyranny.
Finally, my soul had my undivided attention.
There’s more to life than this, she would whisper over and over again. And every nerve and tissue in my body would answer with a resounding yes. The more I listened to her, the clearer her guidance became.
She urged me on and away from a life revealed as meaningless. This is when I saw Oli again, eleven years after first meeting him. She spoke to me through his eyes and mouth, through his truthful, unflinching reflection of my experience and his willingness to be my accomplice in escaping - because he too had been waiting to escape his whole life, like her.
Soon enough, we married in a quiet Welsh village, just the two of us and the most magnificent summer’s day.
I listened to my soul and allowed her to guide me without question. And eventually, after my father’s release in 2011, she guided me to this desert, where she would begin the alchemy of decolonizing herself, re-membering my own indigenous fractal pattern of meaning which was connected to my ancestors, to the Earth and to the Anima Mundi - the World Soul.
She guided me, and continues to, through myth and story.
Back when she started whispering me awake with there’s more to life than this, she led me to the potent medicine of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
That short, deep and transformative tale became an abiding bright light with which to see my way through the smoke and mirrors, the gaslighting and naysaying.
And this is the story that we’re going to journey with this summer in Root + Rise.
The new cycle begins on Summer Solstice, 21 June - the day the sun is in stillness at its apex.
Registration closes at midnight PST on 30 June.
If you’re feeling the tug of there’s more to life than this, answer the call to open-eyed adventure.