From THE MAGIC ELSEWHERE. by Samuel Need

…American emptiness, Buddhist brain, liberal arts education, sacred temple of Earth on the rose petal floor in a shop of machines that stand twinkling as false form above an earnestness again and finally. Yearning for the horizon of middle class middle school playgrounds as you drive by in your Volvo. Something sweet emerges on the insides of your cheek – hazy brown soil of an afternoon distance. You are two. Ten. Heartbroken. Older. Fifteen. In each case there is a stone in your chest that is suddenly not only existent but heavy. Scraps of chapped lips offered to another and then taken back in a flourish. Gesture of growth, wanton and delivered to the seeds in your palm like a careless 3pm dance. Getting blood on your knees in church, in the woods, in the football game, in the embrace of your first love. Where did the people run to when they decided to run? Was any of it worth anything? I read somewhere that you ought to crash a big motorcycle into your own gravestone. Out of anger about the whole business of it. Some poet said that. Tear off your business slacks. Cut the collar off your shirt with garden shears. Throw the razor blade in the clear mountain spring and watch it sail away into the valley below. Follow the hamster as it winks at you and rushes into the blackberry thicket. Lush, tickling hair on my ear as a snake speaks truth for an instant between sweet grass at the bottom of an oak tree. Find another season and do something with it. Another winter, another deep exhaling as the year grinds to a halt.
The great Oppenheimer hell bombs of the twentieth century do not make the fur on our arms bristle like it made our parents body-hair bristle. I saw a picture of my dad sticking his arms through a chain gate at a test site in New Hampshire in the late 1970s and all I could think was boy, not me. We have different fears, my friends and I of the 21st. Fears of food, of resource and responsibility. I cannot tell whether they are new or recycled. The cynical historian says don’t kid yourself junior, you’re all the same and you dream the same and lust the same and fear the same as the BC babes in Babylon, and you’re a fool to think otherwise. But I wonder still and in spite of it. Hopefully as I hustle along something will make itself out of the both of us…
ELSEWHERE
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Durham, NC


I sit cross-legged in the living room of my parents’ house and watch my father as he blesses me. Kneeling, he wears a short-sleeved flannel shirt and old work jeans. I am wearing almost the exact same thing. In fashion, as in most things, I have followed his footsteps as if they were a religious creed.
“Heya,” he cries, slapping his palms onto the floor.
We are in downtown Durham, in the split-level house my step mom has owned for several decades. It’s been “home” for me since my parents split at the turn of the new millennium, although homes and definitions have been shifting a lot these days. The neighborhood is in a strange location. Old quaint sort of Victorian houses a mere block away from the most legitimately life threatening streets in the whole city. Chock full of middle class White families who vote Democrat and get robbed every few months. Getting used to the frog croaks of car alarms as you drift off to sleep.
It’s a North Carolina August and the unbelievably wet summer heat is aching through the walls. Sick secret pockets of moisture collecting in porous caverns of paint. Wooden walls, slowly rotting in the American South. Kudzu vines frame the large bay windows on one side of the main landing. We sit in the middle of an immaculately cleaned wooden floor. Buddhist shrine in the far corner. Couple of elderly cats strewn around in a heap. Old time cast iron stove next to them, chugging along like the room’s giant black stomach. A laughing Dalai Lama in photographs leaning against a window. Rimpeshe. Dancing dust; square window shiny as a dinner plate, big as the whole void itself.
In a few hours, I will catch a plane up to New Jersey, where I meet my best friend Adam. Then, finally packed, we will drive across the country, in long loping horizontal strides, out to the Northwest Coast for a season of organic farming. Montana is the first destination, then Washington in September. Portland and Oregon in October. These were the places in general that drove the whole trip for me. I’d met many people who had sang its praises, assured me that my floppy haired presence would be met with likewise ambition. Tickling my ears with promises. But there was something more. I had always heard of Portland as a second tier city, a sort of humble pie place where people still act bashful about things. That intrigued me too. In November, we’ll bop down into Northern California, maybe tackling a grape harvest in the Napa Valley. And then in December, even further south, rolling down onto the parched skin of the great Southwestern desert. The empty esophagus of the Colorado River. So-Cal. The harsh spaces that no man should live but far too many do.
The system works like this: we provide a day of manual labor on these farms, and in return, the families feed us three squares and give us some sort of roof to lie our heads under. We’re planning on hitting seven farms, two in each state and one for good luck.
We hadn’t talked about return plans after the Fall. I didn’t tell Adam this, but I wanted to get stuck out there in the still mystery fogged West. I wanted to find a commune where I could simply sustain, where I could just be and be and be and not ever be bad and not ever pass off my burden onto some poor brick maker in Bangladesh. None of the curves and jumpy lines of progress and family that so regularly munch on the freedom of a human soul. I wanted something else out there. A different variety of life. I wanted to find work that would fill the shrines in my spine that keep ideals alive when my brain is reading The Economist and packing it all away for a neoliberal winter. I wanted to find truly good work that was so spiritually correct that not a soul could gainsay my engagement with it. I wanted to find something so intrinsically good that I myself would never doubt it, and then I wanted to give my whole being away to it.

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It is the summer after I graduated from college, and the fears of an adult world cloud my head in subtle strides. Two months ago, my anxiety was a ripple. It is now a torrent of things. It’s hard to count the exact instant when you shoulder a new responsibility, but they now number greatly. Bills, rent, groceries, college loans holy Christ college loans, insurance, insurance for the insurance of insurance. All these little daddy long legs crawling into the room, each with their own price tags.
So you start breaking down the future. Aught I go to graduate school, to ensure that all this work would pay off in some vestige of career? Should I give up on that and go teach at a high school or community college, because I know in my heart that academia is ivory laced with privilege. Should I give even that up and move to a monastery? Bashing the self like a driveway slate of December ice. Should I go to China, to start a new life on new terms? Or should I do even more service, signing myself up for the Peace Corps. Giving away my body and soul out of hatred for the disparity and unevenness in the world that shall probably never be resolved. Or a therapist for suburban husbands. I know I could help with their emotional side. How about writing? Writing kids books like Rohld Dahl. Colonizing dreams.
These are not innocent dreadles that I sing above my head. These thoughts have talons that rip into my experience of the present, dragging my attention forward, away from the view of sudden light on the backpack of a girl in the red Ford Bronco, away from my own experience of the cold stone underneath my butt as I type these words. For a moment, she looked like she had a nest of baby dragons on her shoulder blade.
We all react to graduation differently. Some of my acquaintances have already turned corporate shark, and will be buying expensive presents by Christmas. Some are in old Volvos headed towards graduate school. Others have moved on to the next city, the next thing. Hollywood. The Stage. Trying to just scrape by for a few years. And then finally there are others, the sentimental ones, who are moving more slowly, with good intentions but lethargic, as if in a daze, oppressed by a heaviness that they cannot place, and because of this, I call them my friends.

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“Heya,” calls my father.
He is a medicine man, you know. In a way, I’d always been aware of it. Over the course of 22 years together, he had spoken to the rocks, the stars, the wind, the ancient. He’d spent time hitch hiking in the 70s. Teaches South and South East Asian religion at Duke. Practiced Mahayana Buddhism in Western Massachusetts during his twenties. Worked as a dockhand in Boston. Lost a girlfriend to the band members of They Might Be Giants. When I was nine, he would yelp out ecstatically on the road to the grocery store, crying to the spirits of the stone, imploring them to rise up and fracture the complaisant concrete that our car glided over. When I was just born he kissed my head and dropped sage out the passenger side window. While I was crawling on the quilt, he was sitting next to me on the floor for hours in the basic lotus position, meditating. I’ve seen the pictures.
At times I’d notice it and think to myself, “Something different is happening here. Other people’s dads don’t do this. Other people’s dads don’t believe in ghosts.” I guess I was confused and doubted him sometimes when I was young. But today somehow, today, his song, his blessing, was more pungent. I mean, it was right on point, and I knew now more than ever, that I had a shaman as a papa. Even though his skin was as white as mine, and even though he had awful old Massachusetts Puritan in his blood. It’s just a matter of fact: he was with the medicine, and had always been that way.
“Hey ya!” he cries, ushering in the beings, waking the angel ears. He turns to the east and lit a candle. “Great East,” he intoned. “Spirit of land, of fire, of ground, the beginner of things. Hello. H-e-l-l-o.” He spelled it out, just like that. A poet’s cadence. There was a lyricism to his voice that silenced a room. I had seen it in action during his poetry readings, and I imagined his melody was one of the reasons he was a successful lecturer at Duke. Then he shut his eyes hard, and lines of perspiration crossed his forehead, as if with some shadow or secondary figure he was literally grabbing the spirit by the arm and pulling it from out of the ether and onto the living room floor.
He turned to the south and touched a clear glass of water. “Now I turn to the South, to the spirit of childhood. The spirit of children playing on playgrounds at recess. The spirit of imagination, of a kid looking at a spoon and seeing a light saber and not a cooking utensil. Spirit of the figurative goof off simile, like when you look at a tree and imagine it as the frilly fingers of a great underground hand. Heya! I give this water to you. Welcome.”
He placed a shell of some sort on the mat in front of the glass. “For all the times you need to shell the water,” he said. Still not sure what that meant, but as always, someday I’m sure I will.
He turned to the West, where I was headed. “Hey ya, thunder beings,” he said. I recognized these, the spirits of the wind and storm and sky, because I had recently read the memoir and vision of a Lakota Sioux man, Black Elk. This man called upon the great thunder beings more than anyone else during his ominous visions, said they were the number one deities out west, and now my father the shaman was calling on them too, pulling on the dangly skin of their earlobes to aide me as I set off on this bohemian fantasy. As a method of attracting their attention, he lit a stick of incense, obvious commerce with the wind. While the smoke made its progress towards our ceiling and storms that no doubt lay slumbering, I hoped that these beings, more than any of the others, heard my call. I would be in their territory soon.
Finally, my father turned to the North, tracing with his finger the ancient path on the edge of the dipper that points to the North Star, a path countless winded eyes had traced before in the fierce and murky black at the center of the woods. The sky map at the end of the world and in the stomach of a fresh kill. “Hey ya!” he said. “You are the oldest ones. You ancient ones, I’m looking at you.” “These fellows are so old we must seem fast to them,” he said to me. He smiled up and laughed. “Here we are, being fast again.”
We are fast, aren’t we? That’s what we do. We speed from one thing to the next, (from nursing to walking to eating to dreaming to school to internship to job to sweet bed to sweet child to bad habit to despair to rebuilding to despair again to alone to together to everywhere to peace), What flecks of infinitesimal fragments must we seem against the ancestry of a boulder? What tiny motes are our dreams in earnest?
And this trip is going to be fast. Make no mistake. Four months out on farms in western America, then a career and longer years in one place, then a death and the longest years there. These ancient ones had seen a hundred, hundred travelers set off, all the people who had ever lusted after something just beyond that hill. With sticks and stone, then bronze and iron, but all of whom carried in their heart some momentum. Many of these countless travelers were braver than I – great men, warriors, chieftains, geniuses, artists, shamans, healers, almost all with a skill set greater than an analytical essay and a bounce pass. And yet I am on my way all the same. I am moving. Carrying the legacy of motion that is passed down through the subtle crooks of a narrative bundle. And perhaps this sort of imprecise dreaming and wandering is that which distinguishes the people of this Earth from other things.
My father lit a small bundle of sage and waved it in front of my face. (My stepmom would later claim this smell was pot). I am always surprised at how slow some things burn. In my mind, the flame instantly immolates its subject and leaps to my hand. The bundle of sage, however, is a patient burner. There is plenty of time for my father’s thickly haired hands to wave it over my head in loose circles.
He blessed the following: my mind, my eyes that would see trees never seen before, that would see landscapes never scaped before, to erect into the boundaries of possibility new forms, new trees, new valleys. The world will expand with every step forward. It is almost like the process of breathing outward, the way a belly moves out; the way the West fills out beyond the Mississippi. Even the most careless drunken step is still an act of faith, an extension of realm. And with that expansion, a new drive. I hoped so dearly to be saved out in the farming hills of Oregon. To have an indelible part of my heart hooked into a stream, a state highway, a skirt. To have something guide my life, because I shrank from the task of guiding it myself. The unknown movements of my heart in response to the known movements of my feet. That’s the equation, isn’t it? No, never that. That’s the story. It is all story perhaps.
The sage moved to my lips, so that I would find these words. It moved to my body, to slender arms that I worried about. I was a string bean, an indie concert boy in a flannel shirt. Svelte, but hopefully not too svelte to lift a crate of logs. I was ambivalent about how I would perform out on these real, REAL farms. Would there be lifting? Of course, but how much? I could already see it. A barrel-chested man ordering me to bring up a wagon, only to watch in slack mouthed humor as I stumbled up a gently sloping hill. Would the ax be too heavy? I had done push ups all summer, but I hadn’t run enough.
We shall see. At the very least my body would be reconciled again with the crushing gravity of its ground. Would immerse itself for a time in some of the genuine gears of this world. That alone would be worth the price of admission.


“Oh I can’t forget this one,” my father said, last of all. “Go in peace son, and meet the great American Angels of the east, the south, the west, and the north. May you be refreshed 1,000 times over!”
I was refreshed just this once.
And I was ready.