The Free Radical

This week’s topic was Intuition.

Originally, I had a lovely little story in mind about the intuitive message I received at the very first meeting with one of my best friends. However, when I sat down at the computer to write it, my intuition grabbed hold instead, and I ended up writing this:

FreeLovingWill

Faith:
Love is not a choice;
it is the end of choice.
Surrender.

Love can only Be,
and its Being is only loving,
so every choice is already made.

It may seem that freewill is nullified,
but if Love is our true nature,
Mightn’t it Be that our Will is loving too?

Every choice for an unloving journey
leads equally away from freedom
than from our inherently loving Will.

Unloving journeys lead to narrow,
tight,
desperate choices:
the whole world teeters upon the shaky fulcrum
of the ‘one right decision’
…over and over.

The ways of loving are infinite…
while unloving choices yield diminishing returns…
burning bridges…
making islands.

Now, I can only choose to surrender
to my own FreeLovingWill.

Now, who am I to argue with my intuition… especially about intuition? Honestly, I can only refer to the above ‘poem’ as proactive intuition, as opposed to the kind usually associated with passively waiting to receive intuition’s infrequent whispers. Perhaps intuition is an entire realm we can choose to inhabit, like an open field of wildflowers where our intuitive knowing is the constant supply of honey oozing into our minds.

And now get this. After I posted the above to the Mystical Masters Facebook Group, I was intuitively impulsed to add the video of Dexter’s Elixir Part 1. That’s one of those old songs of mine that’s been around for at least a couple of decades. When I wrote it, I was always sure that I’d gotten the lyrics ‘right,’ but I never really had a clue as to what they were about. I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but could it be that the odd relationship between these two creative works– separated by many years– is the full explanation of what they each mean… in providing context for each other? Nevertheless, one thing is clear: creativity is by no means a linear thing!

Video: Dexter’s Elixir Pt. 1

Now, that all seemed a bit ‘out there’ for such a straightforward topic like intuition– although it is what my intuition had to say– so I then went ahead and wrote the original story I had planned earlier.

What follows is an excerpted chapter from a book that hasn’t been written yet: R Nt U Missing Peace 2? The book is about my band and our consistently outrageous adventures; this chapter is about meeting the lead singer and my best friend at the time, Shane.

“Shenanigans!”

I had just completed the second phase of my life, although it would still be quite some time before I’d notice the periodic occurrences of thirteens, marking those phases.

My head was a-swirl, having lost faith in the value of everything I’d learned in my first twenty-six years. I had bought the indoctrination and now it looked fake. My education and the fulfillment of my highest potential seemed to be two mutually exclusive things… and that didn’t seem right!

Besides, I had graduated magnum cum laude from the Academy of Conceit with a special dispensation for spewing bullshit on command. I should have been rewarded…

I was cutting through the lobby on my way to the hot pools where I worked as a lifeguard. I would often go early before my shift to swim some laps in the cool pool. He was sitting in a chair, there in the hallway beside the lobby. He was wearing a t-shirt, worn jeans and cheap canvas sneakers, yet somehow I pegged him as a rich kid. He was probably booked into a room with his filthy rich parents; I saw his apparent poverty as some lame rebellion; I had him pegged alright; I was smart– like a judge… He barely looked up when I walked by…

And as I looked down the snout of my condescension, my intuition flared… Fuck no. You gotta be kidding me! The message I received was absurd. I had to call shenanigans on my own intuition.

“This is your new best friend.”

Had I been drinking a beverage at that precise moment I would have certainly booger-hosed it all over myself and the hallway. Thankfully I was able to stifle my snorts of derision, and eventually settled on a quiet chuckle once I got outside.

Hah! My best friend… shenanigans indeed! Oh intuition, you nut.

The pools are outside. I think it was April. After I’d finished my laps, I went straight over to where the entrance to the hot pool is, like I always do. And before I knew what was going on, my co-worker Deanna introduced me to the filthy little rich kid from the lobby.

“This is Shane Hagan…”

Shenanigans!

“…he just started work here… in the dish pit.”

So it began. Shane sang along with Eddie Vedder to Pearl Jam’s Ten, as I wrote strange poetry on his chalet room walls. Once I was done being perfectly self-absorbed in my own brilliance for those verses wrought, I was forced to take notice of the guy swaying in his chair and singing right into the face of that ghetto blaster, if indeed, ghetto blasters had faces. He had some attitude. But what’s more, that kid could sing! And he wasn’t afraid to… whereas I…

“Um, I write songs. I play guitar,” I said shyly.

He sang the shit out of my songs, giving them melody where I could just follow the rhythm. (Singing and playing at the same time are hard, you know.)

But as nice as it was that we could share musical adventures together, I think that our friendship was founded on something else. Our mutual superhero power was that we could see through each other’s bullshit.

Do you know how awesome it is to have someone who can find an infinite number of ways to say “Yeah, so you’re smart; so fucking what!”? When book-smarts meet street-smarts, nobody’s really impressed, either way.

I bought him his first guitar for his birthday. A few months later he had written half the songs on Missing Peace’s debut album; the other half were mine. We were yinning and yanging, making wholes in all sorts of cardboard cutout dreams.

For years we played an instrumental piece of mine that everyone knew as QC & the EF. One day I was finally asked “What does QC & the EF mean?”

Quietly Courageous and the Essential Friend… the answer to the question didn’t seem to really answer the question, so I further explained. “Quietly Courageous” is my friend from Germany, and the “Essential Friend” is Shane. That information was reiterated by other bandmates to Shane when we went through some adversarial times with each other– which we periodically did ‘cause when two guys can consistently see each other so naked, and only one of them is gay, some weird tension’s gonna arise. Haha…?

Some people unexpectedly show up in our lives and a whole series of events ensues, such that the mere possibility of imagining our lives without them cannot even begin to arise. They become Essential Friends.

Entanglement complete.
__________________________________________

The track I selected to accompany this piece is a live track from 1998 in Banff at the Rose and Crown. It provides the whole yin and the whole yang of it, starting off with an instrumental I wrote, and then segueing into an old Pearl Jam cover. Shane was often his enthusiastic best live.