Reflections from the Road

On Tricksters, Emergence, and Storytelling - Unpacking My Recent Book Tour + New Event Announcements!

I have just barely landed from my nearly month-long book tour and road trip across the western United States. 4 events. 7 states. 8 cities. Innumerable acts of kindness and generosity. I am steeping in gratitude as I write this.

If we crossed paths out there in the world and you are now reading this, 108 thank you’s for coming out.

Organizing this tour was like throwing wildflower seeds off a mountain and seeing what might take root come spring. Not everything sprouted, or had the right combination of ingredients to see the light of day. But some seeds did indeed blossom, aided by some blessedly helpful collaborators and magicians in their own right. Thank you, to all of you who helped conjure this wild into being.

Between hatching the idea and the first event in Denver, I had about a month to plan, and minimal support but for the few individuals kind enough to help me. A completely unreasonable amount of time and effort to organize such a thing.

And yet, somehow, it all worked out.

This book tour felt like an initiation.

First, it was an initiation into being in and of the moment. Each event was a portal into the unknown. Improvisation, emergence, and uncertainty were the guiding stars which I eventually had to befriend and embrace. It might not have felt like it for those attending, but for me, it certainly was.

All along I knew that I did not want to offer people a canned “book reading” or a one-directional interview, which would have been the easier thing to do. For the first two events, Denver and Santa Fe, I tried to adhere to this “traditional” style of what I thought a book event “should” be. Both times, the results left me feeling flat, strangely empty, and ultimately unfulfilled.

After barely avoiding what felt like a total disaster during the Santa Fe event, I realized that I needed to change everything.

No more interviews. No more “co-hosts.” No more book readings. I knew that in order to do this in a way that felt right, I would have to more deeply embrace the unknown.

It would have saved me a lot of time and anxiety to just simply know what each night was going to entail, like the band playing the same set over and over again. Instead, I found myself compelled to take a page from the book of the Grateful Dead, who I consider the patron saints of psychedelic improvisation. Each night had to be different, relatively unplanned, and left up to chance.

Interestingly, many of my teachers and elders in the mythopoetic tradition also embrace the same principle. Robert Bly was notorious for changing the entire outline and content of his retreats the day before, or sometimes the day of. I’ve seen Michael Meade openly admit to a room full of 100 men that he has essentially “no plan,” and is unsure of where the next 5 days might lead us. Two years ago, during Martin Shaw’s tour in Canada, he stepped into a similar portal when he walked on stage each night without a clue where he was going or what stories might jump out of his mouth.

This principle of emergence and trusting the moment is also a deeply animistic one, rooted in indigenous and ceremonial knowledge. A Navajo elder I’ve been sitting with for over two years walks into his hogan, and begins his teaching by telling stories, not knowing where they’re going to end up, or where the weekend will lead us. In the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition, the curanderos/curanderas will sing to what they see in the moment, and in their patients, as it emerges. Yes, they might draw upon familiar melodies–their icaros–but the content of what is sung is always specific to the moment and the unique moods of the medicine itself.

I’ve learned a lot from these teachers. There’s something irreplaceable and highly unique about trusting the moment, knowing that what emerges will never happen again. You might crash and burn. You might also take flight.

That’s part of the gamble. Trickster is with you the entire time, flipping a coin, laughing, rolling the dice with each word you say. That’s what makes it fun. That’s what makes it real.

This tour was also an initiation into a role that I never thought I’d find myself stepping into: storyteller.

As I opened into the new reality of each event becoming more emergent and unplanned, I began to trust not just in my own ability to hold the attention of the room, but in the stories themselves. Its an odd thing, to deeply trust in a story. It’s an immaterial thing, yet it can hold eons of ancestral memory and medicine within it. Like an wifi signal emanating from the mythic imagination, stories can be tapped into, and then become an overflowing source of energy, but with a mind of its own.

Yet somehow, even after studying with a variety of master storytellers for years, and after literally writing a book about mythology, I still did not see myself capable of the art form itself.

Mid-way through the tour, I realized that I needed to change everything. I had arrived in LA, and was gearing up for the biggest event yet. My old friend Tony Moss, an accomplished musician and a respected elder in the ayahuasca community, organized an intimate gathering at Shiloh, a boutique tea-house in downtown LA. The event sold out quickly. And I knew that this event, which would feature live music from Tony’s musical group, Bird Tribe, would be the crown jewel of the tour.

The afternoon before the event, I was sharing a cup of tea with Devendra Banhart on the floor at his simple, Japanese-inspired home in Echo Park.

A touring musician who has played to untold numbers of people on stage for the past twenty years, Devendra knows a thing or two about entering the unknown, and stepping into that heightened, mythic moment.

Musicians, actors, and storytellers all share the same bardic ancestors, and work with the same ancient powers of oracular performance, harnessing collective attention, tuning in deeply to the present moment. It's an old art form that pays homage to some old gods.

“As soon as I wake up, if I know I am playing later, the entire day I am conserving energy, being with myself,” Devendra said.

I shared that I was nervous about the upcoming event.

“Every time I play a show I get nervous. And before I go on, I do a full Vajrayana practice,” he explained. Reflecting back to our time working together in Jamaica, and when he invited me on stage to read a poem during his last show in Portland, Devendra shared, “But this is what you do. You go in front of people and talk and help them open up. People who are not used to talking in front of other people at all… Of course it's going to go well… You’re a storyteller!”

Mythologist Karl Kerenyi said,

“The journeyer is at home while underway, at home on the road itself, the road being understood not as a connection between two definite points on the earth’s surface, but as a particular world … He who moves about familiarly in this world-of-the-road has Hermes for his god.”

Mythologically speaking, the road is Trickster’s domain. The road is where infinite potentialities and futures coalesce and diverge into unexpected realities, branching out again towards even more unseen moments of delightful novelty and world-shattering surprise. The road is a liminal space unto itself.

When we set out upon the road, we enter the highway of possibility, the realm of risk, the portal of potential. It is a place of great blessing, creation, and transformation. Nothing about it guarantees safety or success. It’s not for the faint of heart.

I spent most of my twenties traveling. I learned to befriend uncertainty, and got real comfortable not knowing where I might rest my head come nightfall. I slept in some questionable places and made some questionable friends.

And damn if it didn't feel good to be back in that “world-of-the-road,” and to surrender to the will of Trickster, of Hermes and Coyote and Eshu. I won't be so foolish to say that we’re friends. Such a thing might invite the sort of attention that no sane person would ask for. But by now we’re at least well acquainted.

I have an equal amount of respect and weariness for these gods of the road. And thankfully, after all this time, they haven't yet led me astray.

---

Now for some announcements:

The gods of the road are apparently not done with me. I have some live events coming soon that I’m excited to announce!

April 17th - Boulder, CO @ Junkyard Social Club, w/ The Nowak Society, 7pm. Free.

April 30th - New York @ The Psychedelic Assembly. Free.

May 1st - Brooklyn (w/ the Brooklyn Psychedelic Society - details TBD)

(Possibly more East Coast dates - TBD)

May 11th - Duncan, BC - Collective Space, 1-4pm PT - $20-$30

May - Vancouver, BC (TBD)

June 26th - Boulder, CO @ Boulder Bookstore, Free

---

I’m a featured teacher for the upcoming online seminar, Soul Retrieval, organized by the good people at The Integration Circle, happening on April 27th. I’m honored to be speaking along side some truly amazing humans, many of whom I consider friends and teachers, including Joe Tafur, Kyle Buller, and Marc Aixala. Sign up here!

I was also recently featured on 2 delightful podcasts:

Deconstruction, with the wonderful Rachel Spyker:

One Thousand Names for God, with Rick Alexander:

Finally, for my paid subscribers, I am offering TWO Mythopoetic Integration Circle calls this month, since I was unable to last month because of the book tour. I’m shifting the day and time to try to accommodate more folks, especially people in the UK and Europe who have requested an earlier time.

Join me live:

Tuesday, April 15th, 11am PT

Tuesday, April 22nd, 11am PT

Hope to see you there.

And if not, see you down the road…