Hello folks. I'm on the open road, discovering a sense of possibility and questing for a personal direction or a sense of purpose beyond the general save-the-world thing. Really I believe this means I'm looking for a place to belong to, a grounded central space to put down roots, to move and have my being. It's fitting that the tarot card I'm working on at the moment (as part of a new and exciting art project!) is the Ace of Pentacles, which embodies exactly such potential, the energy of the seed and keeping things safely in hand for another season of growth. For now each day is full and the uncertainty is a welcome expectation of change. I thank several artists for my new outlook: Ben Karis-Nix for his excellent album We Are Giants Now, a beautiful artistic rendering of the state of flow that I've been trying to cultivate. I play it when spinning poi and lately while driving. And Big Sam's Funky Nation, the New Orleans funk band that I heard live. Big Sam plays the trombone, wears sunglasses in a dimly lit bar, and dances fit to beat all in his very shiny shoes. He even smiled at me. I doubt I will ever buy a funk album because I don't see how it could duplicate the extraordinary experience that occurred in that bar. The guitar twanged away, the brass reverberated and suddenly the whole audience was swimming, as if in a fishbowl, moving through water, not air, and Big Sam performed spectacularly. He told everybody to shake it, pointing with his trombone, and they did. I swam through the best hour of my life completely sober yet in a deep experiential state of wonder, and I drove home with complete confidence, yet the familiar storefronts I passed looked new to me, like I was driving through someone else's hometown. This has stuck with me in my travels, but it began in the place that for so long I called home. Not the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive, someone told me, that's what you are searching for, what we are all searching for. An interesting idea, like a trail of incense smoke dissipating over a crowded street. Nostrils flared, I'm ready to follow it to its source.