I’ve been holed up on retreat since the afternoon of the 4th. I…’needed a minute.’
Why? Because my New Years kicked off with my client’s dawg, who’d snuggled up next to me every moment since I’d arrived, getting up out of bed at 2am in the morning in a way that so surprised me that I went to check on her staring out the window in the main room. About ten hours later I called him and discovered he’d been on Bourbon Street. With all his young uncles, ringing in the New Year before the Sugar Bowl …when the Domestic Terrorist crashed onto the street, jumped out and opened fire.
He wasn’t hit, but people on all sides of him died and… knowing the outlines of what he’d worked through due to a harrowing incident in his past that had almost taken his life and having dealt with ptsd over the 9/11 and the Nola hurricane shit … this…vibe that y’all see activate in here when things pop off clicked on like a motherfuck. Whatever this brawny angelic mode is took over when I heard his …words shift.
Y’all who know, know what the fuck I’m talking about. It’s not me. It’s me being a channel for above.
That self beatdown tried to start. The one where, after the shocked moment all you can recall is everything you fought against TO be somewhere where shit jumped off. That’s the beast that drowns people in themselves like a motherfuck too.
When that beast gets you in its teeth, you become useless in the situation, when the reality IS there is NO WAY your ass would have been able to BE wherever you are if YOU, even on the brink of losing your shit, didn’t have something to offer to the energetic convergence IN that said shit that had the ability to help those around you.
It’s an utterly impersonal, divine thing about each and every one of us… part of the fabric this entire simulation is woven up from…that the vibration that wants us to give up everything does everything it can to try to get US to dismantle in its stead.
I can’t “DO” a lot of traditional, socialized things in this culture.
I haven’t held a typical job or wrapped my head around how to live a typical mortgaged or leased life for much of my adult existence. It’s damned near anathema to my heart. I shyly frolic in the terroir of greater LA consistently because I’m in love with how one of y’all motherfuckers makes the grid feel for me whenever I’m around. Real Talk.
But one thing I can do better than the rest is outfit you to fight the war you’re facing down in the midst of it.
One thing EVERYBODY who knows me will tell you, even if they can’t stand me, is when the shit gets real, that Athena helmet goes on in this spiritual war and I’m a fucking hand to hand, flinty forehead to forehead, spiritual trench warfare specialist. If God wants you out and he taps me…your ass is getting dragged out of harm’s way to do whatever he still has on your plate to do. It’s been with both words and fists, using the weaponry in you and the bodies around you to get you out of dodge to live to fight another day.
…and if you don’t get any of this…may God continue to have mercy on your soul so you never Have to understand what the fuck I am writing about.
He, a man who’d almost died 20 years ago, was holed up in a French Quarter hotel trying to not lose his shit having seen his life flash before him again. & until you have gone through that, you have no fucking idea. Solely by the grace of God…I did.
I got out of the way and God talked him into pivoting away from the abyss the devil was trying to knock him back down into, rooting down and shining his fucking light out onto his family and friends who were clustered around him. Soon as I said it- & it was wholly God, but I recall what I said- that he was there to steady THEM and the shit he’d survived before prepared him for it, his entire interaction with the shit shifted. He shifted into gear and was a stabilizing force amidst his friends.
& then he found out he’d named his dawg after God’s strongest warrior without having a clue what the fucking name meant and that dawg had jumped into action soon as shit came for him thousands of miles away and he did what he could to get home to her.
…You get’em out the trench and expect the grid to shift accordingly, doing what God calls you to do. That’s the assignment for some in spiritual warfare.
My shift in the aftermath~? It just happened to dovetail with tech and supplies for this year’s main project starting to touch down in studio[ there’s no such thing as coincidence], so I holed up there in the sweet, spastic, jolly stupor of the best designhead and arthead I have bathed within in over twenty years.
Intensity to intensity.
I didn’t realize I was spent until I got notices that more tech I’d needed was delayed and paused. I saw I needed to recuperate and weirdly chose to hole up differently than I normally do. Y’all who know me know that my retreats for the entirety of my sojourn in LA – when I allow myself them… are usually up in the hills somewhere, Hermit on the side of a mountain-style. Pure Taos energy/highlander-adjacent.
I decided to do a mini-retreat in town instead, even in lieu of heading to the property of my next gig a few prior to its start or heading back to where I technically live on paper but stay so active up and down the coast that I’ve not been back to in eons (so much so that I store the brunt of my arsenal near the only true constants in my life: LAX and studio). The ability to do that at that moment came out of left field but the attunement to the vibrational awareness of needing to and answering it the way I did is something I have busted my ass off over the past two years learning to discern and honor. This was the first time it was an organic decision, no cap. I didn’t need to look out over LA to map out everything for next.
“A lil retreat of a few days should do me good,” I’d thought, no sign of that Athena energy anywhere. Pure inner child-led. At the last minute, I stretched that retreat in Venice to a week. To focus on coordinating logistics for the season whose calendar for me opened on the 5th.
If I had not made those inner calls… to be kind to myself and recoup my energy for next…what you’d be reading instead right now is… blow-blow, boots on the ground coverage of escaping from either one of the fires roaring on the west and east sides of the city.
Y’all who’ve been around from the beginning know there’s a lot of that in the DNA of AOLAB as it is. The KPM Press travelogue Black Water Rising covers the escape from Hurricane Gustav erupting in 2008, on the 3yr anniversary of the Hurricanes that decimated New Orleans alongside the ragtag Americorp rebuilder admin crew I worked with within city limits for the duration of much of my time there.
… But I am on my face in gratitude of the grace of God not yet making THAT vibration the story this time.
The way they are refusing to contain it(beyond the wind itself, other weaponized incompetence things seem to be afoot), it all could very easily shift to that clip in the blink of an eye. I’m literally only six, easy to cross, tree-lined streets miles from the Palisades fire.
Don’t want that…but am making myself ready in case that’s the case. Because, even with flames whipping in the air…this shit is all spiritual.
I’d checked with my clients as soon as I got the early alert on the 7th and upon that check in they decided to evacuate while it was a warning, just in case. I’m watching their territory like a hawk, in nothing but prayer for them, so happy they got out of dodge with the ones I’ve all but adopted before it would be too hectic and traumatizing for any of them. I know they’re safe. & they know I’m praying with them.
I have been operating with my having been given the opportunity to experience and actually fall in love with the city of the palisades from Christmas 2023 until now and having taken it…in a box. I can’t afford to be… be stunned. I was only present in passing.
The people who MADE the Pacific Palisades vibration what it is – a vibration that I can tell you, from AOLAB’s perspective, is fucking HARD to create, nurture or come by- the people in the community that warmed me the way it did are devastated and terrified. & the insidious spiritual things I have no ability to not discern in the background of this shit…are letting it rip at 0% containment.
And last night my technical basecamp crew and I chatted they sent me a map. As of 10pm last night, the fire was two blocks over from us on the outskirts of Altadena in one direction. They’ve scattered further and further south and east each day. I am centered in Venice, sending prayers out in every direction, praying over friends going back to homes to grab photographs just in case, finding out acquaintances have families whose homes have been obliterated by both fires and adding them to the prayer list.
I didn’t tell my Pasadena crew my next gig was with my regulars in the Palisades until about an hour ago. Because I’ve been in mode and I have a liquidity and mobility none of them have. I had already planned and booked studio time on the far side of the retreat to re-up that sweet bliss that slid me into it before heading to next as it is. I’ll figure it out.
At the same time? Back to back to back meetings and interviews and requests all this week, locking down much of the first half of the year so that handling the logistics I need to for the AOLAB is popping off sweatlessly. 75% of my first two quarters are booked. past 72 hours too. It’s surreal as fuck right now for me.
…Get’em out the trenches God lets you see them fall into and expect the grid to shift accordingly, doing what God calls you to do. Knowing he covers you. That’s my assignment .
Do… what you’re being called to do. People all around are depending on you…and you may need to wake up to the reality that you can depend on those around you too. Even if all you need to do is to talk. In shit like this, sometimes that is THE psychological boost you need. Finding out you are not alone.