Visions of a Wanderer

Our beloved Baba Ram Dass always says, “you have to become somebody to become nobody. I have misinterpreted these words from the moment I first heard them four years ago until 3 nights ago when I was up late with Jas and we were reading our Chiron (the wounded healer and its house placement) when the truth slapped me in the face. 

To journey from somebody to nobody is the journey. 

Jas and I are always saying you can’t do something for another until you can do it for yourself. I always thought the journey of becoming somebody was negative, that the process of the somebody journey was creating a character or a projection that blocked out who you really were but the becoming somebody is going on a journey of seeing who you are. It is seeing what you desire, what  you dream of, and what you want? When you answer those questions it is building roadmap to do those those things for yourself. 

I have always envied people who love things so much they really don’t care what others think at all. They are the true “don’t give a fuck group”. I have spent so many days trying to persuade others to like things that I like only to end up loving the thing a little less because my love of it is rooted in what others think of it.  

I AM going back to the beginning to love what I love for me. This is the type of living I live for so that I cannot be swayed any which way. 

I am satisfied with the juice that has been squeezed. 

The first time I walked into Whole Foods Downtown Detroit on Mack Ave., I saw in the checkout line, the title of the headlining story in the Dec issue of the Atlantic read, “ The Miseducation of the American Boy- Toxic Masculinity and the Brokenness of Boyhood”. I reflected on it for 3-4 seconds before I remembered Elisha-Rain was with me and that he was getting 10-15 feet away from me with his small person shopping cart. 

I didn’t think anything about the magazine cover until a couple weeks ago when I happened to stumble into the GQ October cover with Pharrell as the headliner and connected the theme to the Atlantic issue as well. After I read both cover articles, Spirit brought me to watch Marriage Story on Netflix to round out the whole meditation of me myself as a Man in 2020. 

Even with all the self love, self awareness and practice going on in my everyday life, I couldn't be prepared for the mirror that Adam Driver’s character in the film would provide to me. 

There is still so much that I bottle up. There is still so much that I do not say or speak up about. There is still so much anger that I take out on others. There is still so much jealousy that runs through me. There is stillI so about about Masculinity that I have yet to understand and love. 

I am divine Masculine. I am sacred feminine. Divine Masculine is not something that I have even begun to understand but the simple places I am giving myself permission to go into in 2020 are to desire just for desire's sake. I am giving myself permission to be specific about what I want in my life outside of what I think others want to see from me. 

Consciousness is shifting and we are letting go of old. I don’t want to cling anymore. 

Ok here is the deal, I am entering into a time in my life that I really care less and less about things that are outside my purpose. What I mean by this is at 30 years old now it is time to step into the I AM self and start connecting everywhere and everything.

The I AM is the God that I am. I know what the I AM is more now because I know what it is not. It is not my highest self because I have various forms and degrees of highest selves. I AM is love, I AM is oneness. There is no separate or other in I AM just one. 

I am so honored to be back writing and sharing because it really is the thing I enjoy the most.

I am bringing back the visions of a wanderer blog for regular love and sharing but under a different name grounded. & good. 

Along with the blog I will be doing regular video content on YouTube and insta because the video medium is a powerful tool that amplifies written words.  

Days ago I was changing the bubby’s diaper on our bed before sleep time while Jas and Mama were also hanging out and I happened to feel Elisha-Rain’s thigh muscles and remark, “wow bubby your legs are so strong.” To which Jas immediately responded, “Wow I wish someone loved me as much as you loved the bubs.” 

At this comment, my immediate reaction was one of tightening... as my ego made Jas’s words turn from “someone” to “ME” and the mind went down tangent after tangent... your not a good partner.. how could you love your kids more than your wife?... and on and on and on. 

 As the night wore on and the kids slept. I looked within for the real answer as to why Jas’s comments caught me off guard. 

In that moment Jas expressed what all of us are dying to have--- love that is without strings or attachment.  But the truth is that we cant receive that type of love until we feel that WE are WORTHY of it. 

To receive love that is without strings, we must believe we are worthy of it. The journey will always point you back to that place within and answer the question of how do I really feel about myself?

Light and love 

A.D. Verville 

Recently I have had a lot of people say I am this or that or make assumptions that lead them to believe something extremely negative about me. As this happens it has only affirmed that my path is my own and is true. 

I cannot comment on anyone's life or path but mine own. As things unfold and I dive deeper into my subconscious, the intensity of all connectedness and how the internal dances with the external is magic. 

I am not a white nationalist. I do not support systems of oppression. I am not silent. I am not a leftist liberal. I have not been brainwashed. I am not on drugs. I am not a bully or a bad friend. I am not a terrible son, nephew, or grandchild. 

I have been called to a specific path that only I can fill. 

Chance is saying the Day is on it's way, it can't wait no more.

i'm just gonna keep rappin' & y'all just keep clappin' & keep actin' like Flint got clean water & y'all don't got teen daughters & black friends & gay cousins y'all just don't say nothin' know that the day comin' knees bowed, tongues confessin' the last ones gettin' first dibs on blessings

Every time my awareness goes on autopilot and my white existence is  left to be the default mode, I start to think, “Is this series of blog Posts necessary?” Then I think, the fact that I can even internally ask that question, shows how privileged I truly am. People are dying and racist systems remain in tact and I am asking questions.

Awareness is intuition that comes from within, it looks at everyone and everything, it observes if their experience in the same circumstances as me and asks, Are they the same? White existence is the privilege to walk into any situation and not be asked, “What are you doing here?”, “You know that is a $150 perfume?”, and it is not having to justify your rightful placement in the world. 

I did not 100% (to the core of my being) believe the spoon fed post racial history I had been told, was a crack of shit, until about 6 months before Elisha-Rain was born. I refused to believe that the institutions put in place to safeguard “all of us”, could possibly be trampling over People of color for the betterment of a micro percentage of the population. Then the Liturgists Episode 34 - Black and White: Racism in America came up on my updated Podcasts lists and in an 1 hour and 38 min of listening-- all of my walls, boxes and stereotypes of how I viewed systematic oppression in America were shattered. 

Jas and I grabbed some Mexican food with my Parents that night and when I asked my Dad, “How was Papa able to get out of the Projects of Detroit and buy a home in the suburbs?” He responded quickly and un-alarmed, “the GI Bill.” 

My families opportunity for upward mobility at such a quick rate all made sense. 

Due to the complete RACIST restructuring of Post War initiatives (GI Bill, associating income taxes to public schools,redlining, disenfranchisement, etc.) and the fact that my family was WHITE, we were given opportunities that my brown brethren were never given. Now all people can agree, no matter the intelligence level,  life is about opportunity and what you do with it.The thing is you can’t take an opportunity you were never given. 

So day 6 is about finding out some family history, so exercise 1 is to ask and get answers to the following questions. 

1. Did your grandfather or great grandfather serve in any branch of military? 

2. After serving did they take advantage of the GI Bill that established veterans hospitals, vocational rehabilitation, granted home mortgages, provisioned stipends covering tuition and living expenses for those in University or Trade schools? 

Exercise number 2 is to listen to the Podcast I mentioned above 

Episode 34 - Black and White: Racism in America  

After you have completed these exercises stay tuned for Day 7 as shit gets more and more real. 

I was super afraid to be called a racist for many reasons. First and foremost, I never wanted to be associated with any activity that benefited myself at the expense of another. But now I know that I was most afraid for ego reasons.

Growing up I had seen countless images of white overseers beating slaves, to white lynch mobs murdering innocent brown brother’s mothers and children, to police hoses and dogs brutalizing people in Jim Crow, to the KKK marching openly in our Nation’s capital, to the modern day 2017 white nationalist beating a defenseless brown man in the Charlottesville counter protests. These were the images that my mind connected to Racism—and I couldn’t be farther from that.

So if and when I was told that an action I was committing was ignorant, privileged, prejudiced or borderline racist (side note if someone is saying that to you, then what you’re doing is just racist) I would go into defense mode--engage my internal scorecard of them vs. me and respond, “my best friends are black, my family and I tutor in the inner city, I have been on multiple mission trips throughout the world and my girlfriend is black.”

But what are these statements other than justifications to not have to look at my own privilege and change? Were they things I find value in and helped me to continue to grow?

You see I was unaware and very impressionable by the things around me. I created these boxes of things ‘I am’ and things ‘I am not’. When another person would tell me that I was acting ignorantly and that attribute fell under things ‘I am not’, I would react with waves of conflict, anger and then blame them. By blaming them I would never have to change.

The reason in Day 4 I wrote about my own personal inventory of shittiness was so that I might be able to get to a point of zero or emptiness, so that what I identify myself with moving forward may be different from that which I have been.

I was so afraid to be called racist because I didn’t know myself. There was a deep sense of panic inside that can now only be attributed to my lack of self-worth and consciousness. When we don’t know our own stories or why we act the way we do, we must re-trace our steps and find the missing answers. This is why we have to know ourselves before we can hope to change anything. Stay tuned for Day 6.

Words: A.D. Verville 

Please take the 5 min to watch this Decoded video.. Franchesca Ramsey  is doing some amazing things with her art.  

You can’t truly hear another until you know yourself-- was the breakthrough I needed after having repeatedly beaten my head against the veiled wall of systematic oppression and the fact that I was racially ignorant. I always attempted to fix my ignorance through reading and listening to others experiences instead of just looking at myself first and the things that have happened in my own life.  It wasn’t until I looked at my own fuck ups and loved them that I was able to move into a new space.

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit—a byproduct of the redlining and strategic measures to keep people of color at arm’s length. Needless to say the 89.1% of white people that surrounded my daily existence left me comfortable, ignorant and unaware.

When I stole a sizable amount of money from a fellow classmate in 7th grade and the person blamed for it was the only brown male in the 30 students in our class, I stayed silent subconsciously hoping that he would remain my scapegoat so that I wouldn’t have to own up to my wrong doing.

When I was on a Road trip for a soccer tournament in the south with my childhood friends Kyle and Oliver, we stopped at a rest stop in the late hours of the night to use the restroom. As we walked into the gas station and saw that there was only one unisex bathroom and it was occupied, we decided to be the thirteen year old assholes that we were and repeatedly pound on the door. Pretending not to hear the loud grunts, “I’m in here God Damnit”, we lined up single file and acted as if we had been quietly waiting our turns, but as the door unlocked and an angry older white gentleman emerged from the bathroom, our snickers and wily grins quickly turned to fear as he began to berate us and tell us we weren’t worth a damn. The eery thing is he only looked at Kyle and Oliver --looking back and forth, back and forth with this energy that presumed them to be nothing. My only thought during this episode was one of gratitude for not being yelled at.

During my senior year when I began my first interracial relationship and a white girl that I had previously been seeing texted me, “Really Alex??? A black girl…..” My only thought was, “At least she is jealous”, completely bypassing the racist comment.

After college I moved to downtown Baltimore and about six months after having lived there, my brown girlfriend at the time, along with another white friend of ours got into a discussion about the current state of the city and the groups of citizens that inhabited its different Burroughs. When we started talking about the epidemic of homeless people that littered the city, my white friend said, “It is isn’t that I don’t like black people, it’s just that I hate laziness.” Again I said nothing and justified it with the argument that he is entitled to his opinion.

I share only a few of my thousands of moments of ignorance in the truth that every time I share one I am closer to uncovering the true way that I was created to look at the world. When I suppress or shame myself-- the anger and frustration only grow and get to the point of being unmanageable. So on Day 4, take a moment and journal the moments in which you acted differently than what you know as your true self and be amazed at the freedom you feel from the self-love.

I think I should clarify what these series of blog posts are before I go any further with it.

For those of you that know me and for those of you who don’t, I am married to a brown goddess who is woke as fuck and am the proudest Papa to the happiest of souls I will ever know. 

Since we met, Jas along with her true soul sister Aden have challenged me in love to look at my white experience and dissect it to its maximum capacity-- not because I should be ‘woke’ or ‘intelligent’ but so that I could understand this human experience better and how a great majority of us have far fewer opportunities, are not as healthy and do not have the freedom to believe they can be anything they want to be. 

Through three years of DENIAL, EGO, PRIDE, SHAME and finally ACCEPTANCE I have come to a point that I will never know what the experience of a person of color is but that I am responsible to share involvement with my silent white community so that we might move to make the voice of unity and the concept of All for ONE a reality. 

I leave you with the brilliant James Baldwin to ponder until tomorrow......

I have been puzzling over Solange’s letter to her younger self for almost two weeks. After I sent it to my closest friend, she responded, “…this may be the most complete thing I have ever read.”

In the piece she touches the bases of loving oneself, being present and following your path, she says, “you will sow each of these chapters in the land that you become. you will see bits and pieces of them scattered into the skin you grow into. you don’t have to figure everything out now. time will reveal itself. i promise you.”

TIME WILL REVEAL ITSELF. This is a promise I have a hard time living out. I have so many desires and so many dreams. So many things to work through. I worry a lot about the time frame in which things develop. I work really hard and then I think, “The results are not happening fast enough”. I become anxious to the point that it effects my emotion towards others and causes disruptions in the bliss that I consent to every day.

My elderly neighbor Joann has been coming over to see Elisha-Rain about every other day and we always marvel together at the joy and presenetness he exudes. He isn’t attached to results of his actions or what others think about him, he lives in the actual present. This is why my guru says, unless you become like him you will never reach enlightenment. To be present is to be aware and conscious of all that surrounds me and why I am acting as I do. It is to act as all is an offering to you— an acute consciousness coming from a place of love and compassion.

I am making a covenant with You to live and trust as, “the soul has ears that the mind does not understand.”(Rumi). I was never and never will be—I simply am and belong to You. Moment to Moment an offering for time revealing itself.

A couple of nights ago I put my head on the pillow to have a lie down. And with Elisha-Rain down for the night and Jas on her way to the shower I EXPECTED to have a peaceful 30 min. But a creaky door and a prince of a light sleeper had much different ideas. The next day while out and about I overheard the person in front of me in the checkout line say on their phone, “I know we all have our issues but I think he is just socially awkward and may be the reason it’s time to go with someone else.”

My thoughts during both of these instances is judgmental, entitled and extremely inconvenienced. I look at Jas with a look that says, “What the fuck” and think the obesity and sloppiness of the person in front of me justifies me thinking, “what an asshole”. But why am I so angry? I am so angry because I see myself everywhere. The anger I feel has everything to do with my own emotional immaturity and self-righteousness. It is a conditioning of years and years thinking that to gain life means it must be taken.

The human experience becomes more up surd each day that I am present in it. The more I learn – the more I figure out I know almost nothing. Knowing that to hate my life in this world leads to enlightenment is a mind-fuck but I do believe as Ocean sings on Solo, “It’s hell on earth and the city’s on fire, in hell, in hell, there’s heaven.”

Amidst my doubts, fear, and anger the answers must start and end with me because they are me. To find the heaven in hell I have to engross myself in the struggle and most importantly take responsibility.

“Don’t replace a pleasure until you reach a higher pleasure”, said Gandhi. I used to think of pleasure only as society defined it. But then I looked up the definition and found pleasure attached to sexual gratification and selfish pursuits is only associated with the verb definition. The noun definition includes a feeling of happy satisfaction or joy.

I looked at this quote 100 more times before I understand the essence of it. Until someone is aware of what they are during and or their experiences, they will do nothing to change them. We are moved only by what has been internalized, so each of us chases joy to the capacity of what we know brings it. Even when an activity is detrimental to us we will chase it with no care for the ramifications because it feels right. Stopping one pursuit, refraining from and or suppressing certain behavior is a dangerous gamble because it only brings temporary relief. The only way to change a pursuit is to engage with its root.

 For me finding higher pleasure takes time and normally means looking within and   answering the question, why is this bringing me pleasure? It is very easy to scoff at others poor behavior and justify actions through them, but is has to be remembered we are all driven by what we have found to bring US our highest pleasure. Finding the answer to the why gives us a chance for a new lens to develop. The new lens is patient, kind and loving. It gives the space for an old pleasure to be replaced with true bliss that feels better after the 100th time then it did after the first.

I should’ve wrote this a couple of weeks ago, perhaps even a month but sometimes it is better to write in retrospect for your own sanity...

On the heels of the spring equinox as a giant shift in the Universe’s energy takes place, we are left to disengage from the yearly cycle of suffering and reflect. 

Suffering means many things to people but the suffering I am talking about is the one that scrutinizes our lives so we may take appropriate responsibility, ask for forgiveness then move on. I am talking about the strength and determination to not give up and turn stone into bread. It is seeing, knowing and feeling this mysterious journey and accepting it has to be filled with pain and uncertainty. It’s walking towards our inner and outer conflicts with an honesty that doesn’t point fingers at others but only focuses on the inner transformation taking place.Suffering is looking at our lives and knowing that we will mess up, betray and desert but the suffering is how we respond to those things. 

I have endured the most intense months of faith in my life and have doubted, complained, and acted anxious almost to the point of “fuck it” but I made it. I see that the swinging pendulum of affliction is the only way to recenter. It is in the face of affliction that the truths of the cosmos are found.

This may sound like nonsense to some but for those who are finding their wind, we now enter the garden of epiphany with so much appreciation and gratitude for all the worst things in life. So find your wind, bathe in it, soak it up and enjoy because the receiving of bliss depends on it.