What comes after a freedom quest; after a pilgrimage to thyself, soul-smithing and reinterpreting the lines you’ve drawn like a map on your palm?

Do the work.

My mantra the last time I was coming off the road, three years and many moons ago. The western United States saw me through the Badlands and the Redwoods, a burning red-gold sun over Wyoming, moonshine in the Rocky Mountains and then the southern thrall of misfits and night keepers in New Orleans shrouded in mysticism and bourbon. The white lines on the road like lines of chalk on my blackboard connecting disparate ideas into a mosaic or an equation or an algorithm of mitosis within me. Taking what I needed and giving my whole open mind to each and every day. Learn the roots, learn the language, learn the rhythms and beats of the human symphony.

Do the work.

I dug into those other classrooms of brick and mortar and came out on the other side with another lesson. There are three things, says Plato, that drive all of us. The obvious being money, and then lust (or simple pleasures), and knowledge. I’ve always been poor and in the event that I remain as such I choose not to prioritize capital in its entire benevolent rule. Balance, between pleasure and knowledge, is my latest mosaic. My time then on the road was the essence of sensory and spiritual fulfillment. The past two years have been in the pursuit of wisdom and truths, crafting arguments and raising the questions that wanted answers. And now, as I find myself back in my familiar safe haven, the second pier on the marsh, my marsh, letting the breeze filter through my lungs leaving the taste of salt residue on the tip of my tongue, I feel as if I were at the beginning of something. I’ve not felt this way in so long, though the immediate road behind me seems near its end.

I’ve been sitting on this pier for seventeen years; the sun paints iridescent hues on soft ripples broken by the spindly long legs of tall, silly white birds alighting on the surface or alligators’ tails cutting the current back and forth.

I told my friend Nick, one of the last of the original South Carolina beach family “kids” (now 25), that the park had changed.

“Yeah, they’ve got WiFi now,” he said.

Our home away from home has become a tourist destination and an old peoples’ requiem. But this particular spot on the pier perhaps 100 yards down the Kerrigan hiking trail near the camp store sees little traffic as that would require actual exploration on the part of the campers. Getting old is a bitch, or so I keep hearing, and this is the end of an era. In its natural poetic justice the 17-year-cicadas are out, come to send us off as they ushered us into the magic that are the 2,000 acre Huntington lands with old Atalaya and her ghost stories and cages for tigers and beach walks and armies of raccoons raiding coolers and tree frogs’ synchronous melodies in the evening dusks.

I jump up on the wooden seat of the pier and look at Grayson’s name etched into the Southeast support pole in childish block letters with a dull pocket knife; I take out that dull knife and cut the lines deeper, clean oaky color revealed underneath greening letters. We’ve lost dear friends along the way and gained friendship and family in kind. Everything is changing, and my lessons are trust, dare, seek, adventure, forgive, protect and balance.

Breathing this air connects us all to the past, particles of our histories and memories traveling on through time like infinite frequencies – you need only tune in. This place is love, this place is faith, this place is family. The stars here on the beach at night are somehow more fantastic than any I’ve seen in other skies. I think I understand why celebrities and people worth remembering are called stars, because isn’t that what everyone really wants in the end? To be a shining light and beacon to people 1000’s of miles and 1000’s of years away after their own fire has burnt out and its will extinguished in a galaxy far? How will we be remembered and by whom? For me, I hope my light will be the words on this page read by somebody else who made meanings of this place, and we will have shared a smile, and we will have shared the stars.

I’ve done the work; willful and tethered, and now with balance – pull anchor and walk back into the ether.