Cowboys Sleep Soundly

There's a fine line between a love letter and a burn letter.

My cowboy hat sat on a rock, tending to the blaze of guilt I was letting run wild at my soul’s inaugural campfire…

I had learned to be on my own most of my life and learned to like it, or so I had thought.

I believed I was independent all those years, but I had been mostly co-dependant.

I depended on the approval and validation of others to uphold my image. 

Yet this image was also unsound, as it had only been echoed by the mirror of society and 1980s action heroes, rather than a reflection of introspection.

Ironically, all my life I hadn’t criticized myself deeply enough.

I had only looked at the surface level of my primal pond of feel-good reactions, rather than responding to the enlightenment of pain found in the deep caverns of our abyss.

I had just left The Life Healing Center, where I had gone to work on myself, and address the patterns that were no longer serving me.

I had committed myself to weeks of emotional labor, deconstructing the conditioning of previous behavior and harsh expectations I had placed on myself.

Now the magical bubble had popped me square into the jaws of a dark desert night of the soul.

I had been driving for over 6 hours on a lonely highway north of Santa Fe, into the Great Sand Dune Mountains of Southern Colorado.

The cold desert sundown was quickly approaching, and I was driving on a path of no return, with no motels booked, no cell signal, only a little gas and a map.

Luckily my eyes were keen enough, after years of New Jersey driving, to see the sign for the park.

I knew I had arrived when I saw the 10ft high dumpster laden with “You are in Bear Country” signs.

I quickly gathered wood, along with drawings and letters I had written at the Center’s art therapy class.

These letters and drawings depicted how others in my life had polluted my soul with their own unresolved guilt and were meant to be eventually burnt at a ceremony where those past emotions were finally released.

The fires of catharsis were ablaze, as I spent the night staring back at the new hat I was ready to wear in life.

After the final embers of dead soul scrolls faded into the endless starry sky, I was thunderstruck by a surge of silence rippling through my once vacuous heart.

Those embers were a sign that the light we can learn from rests in the void of our surrender.

The world felt like it was mine to claim for the first time in a very long time.

My wounds of abandonment, betrayal and shame had been dissolved by the golden elixir of Self-commitment.

When we commit to our Selves, we honor our ancestors, and their primordial fires that we left behind.

My only regret was that I had not started writing those burn letters sooner.

Are you ready to burn your beliefs in a desert where you are one with all the world, so that you can forge a fire of belief in your Self?

Take that ride.

Everybody’s waiting for you…

Don’t compromise. Seek 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵.

Thank you!