Gabriel Morris Kundalini and the Art of Being

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come to Texas and visit her sometime. It was shortly afterwards that I
started thinking seriously about leaving Eugene for good.
Later that day, Julia s sister finally called the local social services clin-
ic, to come pick her up and take her to a psychiatric facility. She was
acting increasingly hostile towards the men in the house and wouldn t
talk clearly even to her own sister, who was extremely apologetic to us
all but didn t know how to help her. I was gone when they came over
to get her and relieved when I returned to find the drama finally over.
There was something about this particular weekend that attracted
all manner of random, unsettling circumstances. In addition to the
incident with Julia, and Amy s rushing through with her own frantic
situation, one of our ex-housemates, who had moved up to Portland a
month earlier, came by the next day to get his couch and dining room
table, which we all were using. Suddenly we had nowhere to sit in
the living room and no table to eat on. And just a few days after Amy
left, I got a $150 traffic ticket for running a red light while working
one evening. My brake pads had been screeching lately from undue
wear. When I came speeding towards the intersection, I d decided
Kundalini and the Art of Being & 59
to go for it rather than slam on my squeaky brakes, even though the
light was turning from yellow to red. A friendly female cop was at
the front of on-coming traffic to catch me in the act, though not quite
friendly enough to let me off, even though I explained that I would
be getting my brakes fixed soon. When I came home from work that
night, exhausted and frustrated, wondering how I was going to af-
ford to pay for that ticket, I discovered that our house had been bro-
ken into. My housemate Hillary had gotten home just before me and
was sitting in one of the dining room chairs eating a late snack with
her plate in her lap. I walked in and noticed that my stereo was miss-
ing, as well as most of my CDs.
Uh, do you know if someone borrowed my stereo and CDs, Hill-
ary? I asked, hoping to hell that I hadn t just been robbed, once
again. My previous record as a victim of theft was almost sadly, pa-
thetically comical. My backpack had been stolen while I was in Eu-
rope, sleeping on a bridge in Paris. My car had been vandalized at a
trailhead while I was camping with a friend just a few months before
moving to Eugene; and my next car had been stolen six months later
while I was visiting my aunt and uncle in Portland, only to be found
a few weeks later pretty banged up. And as I mentioned before, my
mountain bike had been stolen shortly after I moved to Eugene.
Unfortunately, as Hillary and I started to look around the house,
we realized that it had indeed happened again. We never locked the
back door for the simple reason that it didn t lock. Apparently some-
one had been aware of this, or else had gotten lucky trying random
doors, and had come into the house sometime during the day while
the four of us were out of the house. Almost everything I owned of
value had been taken. In addition to my stereo and CD collection, the
thief had ripped off my backpack, hiking boots, and Nikon camera.
Over the next few weeks, it hit me that I was definitely going to be
leaving Eugene soon. I had no certain idea of where to go from there,
but I couldn t easily deny the message of everything manifesting in
my life lately: it was time to make a major shift of some kind.
60 & Gabriel Morris
The final and decisive reason I saw that it was time to leave was
that the lease for our house was going to run out at the end of Sep-
tember, and my housemates had decided to look for another place
together. Due to the $150 I owed for the traffic ticket, plus the fact
that I hadn t put down a rental deposit when I d initially moved into
the house, I wasn t sure if I could afford to go in on another place
with my housemates. And I didn t feel much like trying to find a
cheaper room in another household with another group of new peo-
ple to get to know.
What I most wanted at that point was just to sell everything I
owned, including the pickup, pay off all my bills, hit the road, and
hike far out into the desert somewhere, alone, with no distractions,
no expectations, nothing to do but simply be for a while and hope-
fully figure out, to some extent, what was really going on with all
these events swirling around me. I decided to work through the end
of September, to save up some money to keep me going for a while,
then sell my truck and hit the road. Although it had been a while
since I d done any hitchhiking, I looked forward to it. I d been driving
around town for my two delivery jobs for the past year and welcomed
the thought of just being a passenger going along for the ride.
After a four-day backpacking trip in the Oregon Cascades with my
brother, at the end of that summer, he left Eugene himself to head
back down to Santa Cruz for another year of school. He took along
with him a few of my few boxes of unnecessary belongings to store
in my mom s garage while I was gone to wherever it was that I was
going next. The appropriateness of leaving began to feel more and
more certain, despite the profound unknown that lay ahead of me.
After the four of us moved out of our house at the end of September,
I stayed for two weeks on the floor of my old housemates new house,
working and wrapping up final business as well as formulating a plan
for where I would go once I left Eugene. My plan involved a number of
mini-adventures within the larger adventure of making my way pro- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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