As many of you know, this year a young man named Mike Posner walked across america. Crossing what has, for a very long time, been known as turtle island.
Mike and i met a few years back around the dinner table of our dear friend Jamie Kantrowitz. She is a special kind of host, and course everyone who arrived not knowing one another, left feeling like family. I remember commenting to a friend later that night - he is really special.
At the time i didnt know anything about his music. I laughed many months later when someone showed me a video of him walking through a club lookin every bit the part of a pop star. And to be sure, that is part of his journey. But Mike has always been more than his craft, even when his poetry is at its most prescient.
Over the next year or so, we shared in some genuinely sacred moments together. Rafting the Salmon River was among them, where both of us were introduced to the Shoshone people, who claimed a history much older than anything I had previously understood. Along the river, they showed us pictographs - images engraved in rocks - they claimed were older than anything I had encountered, anywhere else in the world. I remember thinking that when I’ve gone to spend time in places like the mountains of northern China, or Palestine, or Kenya, that there was an assumption of an ancient history. It was widely accepted that people had lived on that land for a very, very, very long time, and that those ancient roots were inseparable from understanding the land today. But Idaho ? Even the name felt new. Yet there they were, ancient drawings staring back at me. It was the beginning of a great unlearning, and as the years went on, that journey would demand I reconsider every preconception I had ever held, about this land so many of us call home.
The water spoke to us that week, guiding us in feminine wisdom, and I left feeling deeply committed to a great healing. Within myself, and among the humans, the animals, the water and the land.
That same year, I had crossed the southwest on a motorcycle. My first real journeys on motorbikes were in central africa, and were later followed with my brother in the amazon. But riding on dirt in places where drivers are accustomed to paying attention to bikes, is a wholly different experience than riding in big cities where drivers are often on their phones, or across highways made of asphalt.
I had just begun to feel comfortable in the back alleys of venice, when my dear friend and former bunkmate Kai Brown called me one day and yelled - mate ! We’re crossing the country on motorbikes, and you better be on the road with us first thing in the morning. Of course i objected, having never even crossed the fullness of los angeles, but Kai is Kai and he yelled in his classic Aussie way, until finally i relented. The next day i left the house at 3am, for a journey that would forever change my life.
That day we drove 16 hours, and eventually landed in Zion just in time for sunset. My body was tired beyond comprehension, and my mind reeling with gratitude for having arrived, at least on this very first day, alive.
Along the way, we ran into one of Kai’s good friends, Trek Thunder Kelly, who showed up with a young man along with him. Alex.
Alex and i took to one another immediately. His has a smile that is warm like the sun, the quick laughter of a little boy, and eyes that hold the wisdom of generations within.
A couple days into the ride, we were crossing territory he considered sacred. As the sun began to set, we set off to hike to a more remote location to say goodbye to its glow. Just as we set off, it began to rain, and some girls nearby began to scream and run toward their cars. He looked at me and grinned with that particular twinkle in his eyes, saying simply;
Some of us feel the rain.
Others, just get wet.
That evening, just before the sun melted into the horizon, Alex began to sing a traditional song of the Diné people, or as I had always been told, the Navajo. As he sang, I could feel the ancientness of the song, as though it carried a vibration across space and time, arriving in that very moment as a sacred sound. This feeling was followed by one of great shame, in realizing that before that moment, I had never heard an indigenous prayer sung as ceremony, rather than as spectacle and performance.
As we sat on those rocks, I began to feel my soul coming back to this land. For many years, the entirety of my conscience had been focused on a region far from home, where the desperate calls for peace, had overpowered any other sound. The urgency of the time had demanded everything we had to give, but living in a perpetual emergency that was not tangibly visible to our immediate community, had taken its toll. That night, i began to feel myself within myself, fully here, on turtle island. This land I had always called home, and was slowly realizing I knew nearly nothing about. For perhaps the very first time, the scales began to fall from my eyes as I realized that this too, was ancient land, and that the genocides perpetuated by Europeans across the African and Asian continents, had taken their toll in blood and soil here, first.
Years have gone by since then, and each of us have lived our lives and pursued our paths. When Mike decided to walk, I knew i wanted to help in whatever way i could. In 2008, my dear friend @BobbyBailey had supported his brother Chris in walking across america as a form of personal restoration. I was there in New York, along with a crew of friends, when Chris completed his journey, and had seen the joy on his face in those final few miles. Mike had casually overheard the story, and knew he had to do it for himself.
And so it was, that I asked Mike if his journey in the opposite direction, was walking across land currently considered indigenous territory by colonial standards. When he said that he might be walking across the Navajo Nation, of course I called Alex.
Alex is Alex, and adventure lies at the center of his heart. He eagerly agreed to support, and soon thereafter we decided to join Mike on his walk across the sovereign territory of the Diné people. The challenge of course, was that Mike was on foot, and it was nearly impossible to predict how long it would take him to cross the rockies. Add on a rattle snake bite and all the delays that followed, it looked less and less likely the stars would align.
I got the call 48 hours before Mike arrived at the Four Corners. Called Alex, and then, on a whim, called my brother, dear friend, creative collaborator, and adventure companion for more than a decade - @DanielNJohnson. We did what was necessary to cancel life for a week or so, bought a ticket, and two days later I arrived in the Albuquerque airport to see them both outside, grinning like school boys. Alex’s pickup had only two seats, but thankfully riding in the bed of a truck is legal in New Mexico, so I hopped in back, wrapped myself in a blanket, and we set off. An hour or so into the drive it began to storm, and for the next few hours i huddled beneath a tarp, as we charged to the remote corner connecting Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.
The next morning we greeted Mike, to one of the biggest, most genuine grins i had ever seen. The road can be a weary place, and no other medium of transport moreso, than on foot. Seeing the way we lifted his spirit, and the way he lifted ours, I was sure in that moment that this journey was meant to be.
Mike had missed about 12 feet the day before, from where he stopped walking, to where the RV had moved in order to camp. Those 12 feet had plagued him, and his first request was that we all go back. Watching him walk that short distance, for no reason other than his own conscience, began to show me the integrity of the man i had come to walk alongside. Each day after would only confirm that conviction. This was a man who rose each morning before the sun, and walked with a fierce and steady dedication. Without fail, he finished each day with stretching, a meditation as the sun began to fall, and an early night of sleep. Only to begin again.
Over the next eight days, we would cross the entirety of the Navajo Nation. The first eight miles of each morning was spent in absolute silence as the day transitioned from darkness to dawn. As the day went on, we would be stopped by dozens of beautiful human beings, eager to share their story. Nearly everytime, Mike would ask the same closing question - if I prayed for you, what would i pray for ? Their stories were sometimes long, and sometimes short. They often contained tears and sometimes laughter as well. Every story was deeply and profoundly human, reminding us time and time again, of the shared nature of our struggles, our pain, our joy and our love. Walking away, we made sure to ask for Creator’s protection and blessings, and prayed their prayers would be heard by life itself.
I would be lying if I said the journey was not exceedingly challenging. Walkabouts and pilgrimages and vision quests are an ancient practice, and though this one was distinctly modern in many ways, it was also a return to something as natural for humanity as breathing - walking.
I remember going to a therapist once, who said that often trauma will become lodged in one hemisphere of the brain, and block our capacity to move from sphere to sphere. This breakdown in connection led to a whole host of pain and confusion. They recommended grabbing something soft in each hand, and squeezing one side after the other. Pitter patter, pitter patter.
Pitter patter, pitter patter.
Many ancient dances are the same. Left side step. Right side step. Left side step. Right side step. Or as the drum moves faster, left left, right right, left left, right right.
So much of modern life forces us to move in a straight line. Roads and highways, so devoid of life they have been called Rivers of Death by those who strive for harmony with the natural world, these lines and exacting angles force us into a very specific plane of thought. A dimension of the material world if you will, processing information that is physical, far more readily than that which is emotional, spiritual, vibrational, & energetic.
The beat of walking became so much more than simply one step after another. Among the mundaneness of left and right, we found the one thing so many of us are searching for. Connection. After many days, it became clear that while we were praying for those who stopped us, and while they often prayed for us, the pitter patter pitter patter of left and right was doing something else. As we connected the two hemispheres of our bodies, we also began to heal ourselves from within.
Over the years, Dan and I have had the great honor of making some very special pieces of content together, some of which have reached a great many people, and hopefully inspired them to fight for our collective future. But this is the first time we got to tell a story entirely in the medium of images in motion. If you know his photography or animation, you know he has always been a visual poet. But this was a new challenge for him, and I was immensely proud of the result. None of the pieces we’ve ever made have had a real budget, they've all simply been the art of passion. This one was no different. There is a rare joy in creating for no reason other than to create. And there are few folks whose creativity gives me such joy to support, and is more beautiful to behold.
The piece was released some time ago, but deadlines for pop stars and poets are a timeline all their own. After more than a decade of fighting a war through the internet, I have relished these last several years, where social media has been a place to mostly listen and learn, especially from those at the frontlines, who desperately need us to hear their call.
Along this journey, we got to spend a few precious days with an elder named Al. He is Alex’s step-father of sorts, but even those distinctions feel distinctly colonial in their need for separation and categorization. Al is family, and in every moment we were together, he treated us as such. Over the last few years I’ve had the great honor of sitting with elders from across turtle island, and learning of what this land was before Europeans claimed we owned everything. Before the Pope declared the theft of land legal, as long as it was taken from non-christians. Though reconciliation is profoundly challenging, and a work that will demand generational commitment, they have always shown me what any European who was willing to listen would come to learn; the peoples of this land have always been free. It is us who brought the chains.
Thank you to my brother The Tone Ranger, for always being so ready to set aside your own creative authorship, and add sound, ambiance, rhythm and vibration to these collective stories we love to tell. And thank you to brothers Al, Alex, Mike, Dan and especially Julian, who literally kept the wheels on the ship, as we set off on what became a sacred pilgrimage. It was a journey I will never forget. Love you all.
May we continue to work toward truth and reconciliation in this land, and for a historic reckoning, among those who arrived, with those who have always been here. Here’s to a future for our children, where we are honest about where we are, honest about whose land this is, and commit the fullness of our lives, to the liberation of life itself.
Peace yall
