The Phenomenon of Realization and Growth: Old Me meet New Me

Fancy Meeting You Here~

It has been 1 month nearly to the day since I began reaping the benefits of being outside the states, away from home and the familiar routines, in a completely different state of mind than perhaps I have ever known. This transformation of emotional self-understanding is not an easy one to undergo, nor is it fast or convenient. Hardest of all in this evolution of self is the ever present reminder of past mistakes. These are the things that grind deep within the gears of one's soul. What I'm talking about are the insensitive mistakes I have made that I regret. The ones I wish I could take back only for an instant, to maybe see how it would have changed where I am now, specifically in terms of relationships and the paths which they travel. Also in terms of life choices, ambitions and philosophies.

These are all very deep and personal things that we all must confront at times in our lives, potentially when we are the most alone. These are confronted at the times when we are allowed to realize exactly how small we truly are on this earth, how insignificant. These for me are welcome moments of self retrospection and self introspection with the fullest intentions of positive growth and improvement as a thoughtful outcome. It has been a long time since I have really questioned why I do what I do, how I do what I do, and whom I choose to surround myself with. This is a very valuable time to recognize what I am proud of and the laurels on which I have rested for far too long. Learning to learn again, leaning towards love again and giving way to growth once more. This is what I'm here for.

When was the last time you realized you aren't who you thought you were and felt incredibly small? When was the last time you made an effort to improve yourself beyond improving your bank account? When was the last time you spent time trying to answer not just a difficult personal question, but one you asked of yourself? They are the kind of questions that usually only a significant other might ask of you in order to prove a point. It's what happens when you allow yourself to be your own best friend, your own worst enemy and subsequently, your own significant other. It sounds depressing I know, but understand that these kinds of things need to occur in a person's life in order to accumulate knowledge and self determination. It must happen if one desires understanding and clarity, personal evolution and improvement.

To answer the questions I posed in the preceding paragraph, the last time I remember a marked experience of personal growth was after a couple of seasons of Drum Corps. There's nothing like hard work in every sense of the term to frustrate you into change. For me that series of experiences not only shaped my perceptions of hard work and dedication, passion and performance, but also gave me a new appreciation of isolation. By this I mean, on tour you live on a bus and on gym floors with 130 of your closest friends for months. It is the hardest times that you find yourself missing the routines and regularities of home. This is isolation. When you can be surrounded but so many people, but still feel lost and alone- isolated.

Hardships experienced in nearly any way can provide insight into what it is that you as a person take for granted.

Don't be mistaken, tour is pretty much all routine, and it is all dictated for you on a dry erase board on the side of your rolling cafeteria..(Mmmmm.... cheese bagels and tato bar... ahhhh.) It is the basic stuff you take for granted though- sleeping, showering and defecating in complete privacy. Having more than 10 minutes to digest before running a few miles. Basic stuff like that is completely glossed over by so many other things in "regular" or "real" life that the average person living in supreme comfort truly takes for granted. If you don't believe me, try to remember the last thing you complained to someone or within yourself about and then post it on a scale of 1-10, least to most, how petty that complaint really is. If you still don't believe me, watch an episode of nearly any American "Reality Television" show... if you want one in particular MTV's "My Super Sweet 16". If you haven't seen it, really, do yourself a favor and have large quantities of alcohol chilling in the fridge for the aftermath. Oh, and prepare to be sooooo jealous! (That friends, is sarcasm.)

The time before the great experience to which I owe the subculture of Drum Corps. is one which can be described as a defining one. Not in the sense that it made a title for me, or entitles me to anything or that I can call myself special for any reason. I suppose these experiences can only define me as a fortunate soul. It is how I am defined as fortunate that shapes the experience for me.

In the summer of 2001 I was fortunate enough to go to school all summer. This wasn't any old schoolin'. This was 6 weeks of isolation in the central Oregon desert, with a group of people I had never met until the day I embarked upon the journey to field school. Our mission involved studying the cultural remains of people who lived in harmony with the natural environment, at least much more so than the majority of us can even come close to claiming, for many thousands of years. We were to excavate known sites in a respectful and scientific way. If we happened upon ancient human remains (which we did) we were to stop, notify the Confederated Tribes of the Klamath (which we did), wait for their elders, their prayers and their blessings and then continue with our dig (which we did).

It wasn't digging up 11 or 12,000 years of geologic and cultural history. It wasn't seeing or touching the artifacts or smelling the dirt in which they had been encapsulated, sealed off for thousands of years from the living and breathing spaces beyond the lonely layers of volcanic ash and tuff. It was the isolation of being in such a harsh and unforgiving environment. A place so vast that at night from the cliffs on the edge of our camp, we could see for more than 100 miles. It makes you feel so small when there are no lights to be seen. None that aren't huge balls of gas, millions of miles away.

On the 4th of July there was an electrical storm over the desert. It was hot that day, 112 degrees in the shade, and we had worked hard with the prospect of beer and a fireworks show in Christmas Valley, about 50 miles away. Well after dinner... there had been too many beers to make it to the fireworks show. I decided to hike up my cliff. To the soundtrack of nighthawks diving and swooping at insects in the warm night air, I watched the fireworks show in Christmas Valley. Well above the dizzying heights of the fireworks I witnessed something I doubt I'll ever see again. This was what made me realize how insignificant one human is. It was lightning streaking the sky, just like you might see in a National Geographic magazine. It wasn't just the lightning that was spectacular though. It was the glow of the stars over the vast desert that hadn't yet been blanketed by the distant thunderheads, and it was the fireworks bursting, dwarfed and humbled beneath the nauseating reality of lightning.

How Truly Small Indeed.

So, as I was saying...

It wasn't that we were enveloped in the vastness and isolation of the desert, or the breadth and mystery of human prehistory. No, it wasn't just living in a tent for six weeks or systematically wandering around the desert for miles just looking at the ground for signs of prehistoric (or historic) occupation. It was the combination. It was the elixir created by hard work, rough conditions, deep curiosity and respect for the historic people and the land placed before me. It was the time spent alone beneath the wise boughs of massive ponderosa pines (aptly or coincidentally named for ponderousness) or on the cliff above the desert, wooing the nighthawks and bats or whomever was listening, with the guttural organic vibrations of my didgeridoo. It was traveling by foot through arid hills crowned with ancient juniper trees and blooming sage brush, managed by coyotes and jack rabbits and rattle snakes and lizards. It was knapping obsidian projectile points in the same way, with the same materials as those who roamed that very rugged land no less than 10,000 years before me. It's timelessness nearly unfathomable and it's memory always humbling, I came home a different person. I am fortunate to have experienced the truth and purity of being that accompanies natural isolation and moves a human toward a more natural and instinctual state of mind. I am fortunate to have learned an even deeper respect than I once had for the earth that sustains and nurtures our human race, whether or not the majority of us choose to recognize or praise her for it. I am fortunate to have gained a deeper understanding of a place that, because of it's isolation and harshness, most people of comfort tend to ignore and avoid. I am fortunate to have learned a new kind of love.

When we speak of regrets we are usually speaking of things we have done or said intentionally and thoughtfully at a time of action or response, which we later wish we could reapply ourselves to in order to have better handled the given situation. I suppose then that in the end when our actions or words come around to kick us in the teeth and fully embed our own stinky foot in our own dirty mouth, we realize how we may have been fully in the wrong while at the time feeling completely and unapologetically correct in what it was that we said or did.

Here's an example... and it really may apply to my regret or my justice in the future more than now. So I apologize to you and myself in advance. It is about heaven and hell. And so be it. I'm really not sure about either, and therefore can only go upon what I do know. That is itself another slippery slope, knowledge. What do we REALLY know? I don't know for sure that there is or is not a heaven or hell. But the fact that sooooo many people on this earth act solely by an idea of what is to become of them in the preconceived event that they are "judged" after they have lived, at the "pearly gates", that they miss out on all the great opportunities in life that they could have experienced had "THE MAN" not kept them down under the enculturated ideas of religion- is purely fear based and disrespectful to the human experience of which it is a conscience governing part. That is to say- heaven and hell are constructs of the human mind through the intrinsic and unconscious nature of humanity to fear what is unexplainable. This also implies that those of you who do believe in heaven and hell, for better or worse, therefore indeed believe in reincarnation- afterlife- the thing you experience after you die and your soul leaves your earthly body and this particular plane of existence. However, to flip the coin, these constructs are also valuable and integral parts of that same human experience and are owed respect and gratitude.

This is neither here nor there, because if that time of judgment occurs and my homie St. Peter asks "What the hell were you thinking? Didn't you know you might regret that decision, don't you know about hell?", I can honestly say, "Uncle Pete, I am a pure soul. I used the information given, was aware of wolves in sheep's clothing of all forms presented to me including all the ones in religion. The last thing I would want to do is REGRET anything I did. With the understanding that sins are forgiven, wouldn't it be logical for a mortal to attempt to make Heaven on Earth, with the best of intentions, knowing that we really DON'T know. Why would I live and act with good intentions my whole mortal life knowing that some of those intentions, regardless of my personal beliefs would likely land me in front of a little red guy with horns surrounded by fire and brimstone, three headed dogs and The Backstreet Boys? Because God loves me? That should be a sin in itself! Holding back on life, streaming consciousness and spontaneous but thoughtful action under the passive/aggressive shadows of fear that have been provided by the purely human constructs of religion? For all I knew, God had planned for me to be this way and to act how I act and to question what I question. If IT wanted me not to be like this, IT would have fashioned me as a sea slug or a banana or some mangy little kid's pet rock. Hey, thats a nice set of wings ya got there! I am a buh-nana!"

I can't help but believe that we are here for no other reason than to love and learn, with compassion and understanding... and to think for ourselves. It is when we become complacent in, and stop questioning those things that we begin to lose our grasp on humanity and our truly conscious freedom as living, breathing and independently thinking creatures.

I'm not trying to disrespect religion or belief systems... so don't go bitchin' at me because I'm giving you a different and potentially "blasphemous" perspective. I am however trying to think outside the box a little bit. That is my whole point. Why should we just believe what we have been taught, what's been thrown and spat at us
since we were small children. In the words of a curbside and comedy club prophet of our times, Chris Rock, "THAT AIN'T RIGHT!!!!". To just bend over and take it because, "That's just the way it is , son", would be a terrible injustice to the whole idea of freedom and individuality. If God loves us all and moves us all, then IT knows whether or not IT wants us to be good people by virtue of IT's constant dissatisfied tinkering with the peace and comfort in our lives. I could potentially go on and on... but I'd rather not and I'm sure you'd rather I not, and I'd rather you not rather I not... Unless you rather?

So you see...

This is part of my journey of re-realization. If you've spent time with kids you then know the beauty of innocence, the intrigue of wonder and the power of fear. This is typically how Westerners (Americans specifically) are raised. (Forgive my blanket statement). As children we are nurtured through innocent wonder and into fear and thus experience loss of innocence and inquisitiveness by the installation of that same fear. Example: "Stop it or your eyes are going to stay that way!" , "Keep doin' that and you'll go blind!", or anything associated with " because Santa Claus is comin' to town". This again- fibers woven into the fabric of complacency, conformity and homogeneity, and essentially manifests the near loss of one's truly curious self identity as it relates to the world around. This is quite a bit more evident in the Japanese culture, only without as much fear instilled into young children. That is just a personal observation of the freedoms allowed to Japanese youngsters at nearly all times in comparison to the disciplined guilt that is ingrained into the youth of the Judeo-Christian, Protestant work ethic... these same free souls on both sides are later morphed into robots by schooling and extra curricular machines. Few will escape the mold.

I suppose I have ventured away from my original point a bit, but it all applies to the broader spectrum of thinking. That one person can be so intensely and blindly programmed within their lives by the very things that are culturally and socially designed to protect them from the destructive forces of the pervading world and themselves, by their parents and their peers, their cultural values and the educational system into which they have been led with the best of intentions- is not often questioned or recognized as the force by which homogeneous culture is bred through the individual.

I must ask then; How does one escape the psychological, emotional and intellectual boundaries both positively and negatively implanted by the social nurturing devices of mother culture? How can one person grow beyond the parameters of understanding one's own mind, if there is no process embedded within to endure growth beyond the normalcy, complacency and stagnant nature of the potential majority of beings within native culture? Based on observation and deep thoughts (by Jack Handey) on this subject, I must propose that it seems to be at the most random, the most incomprehensible, the most difficult of times in a person's life that change is fostered. It is the moments which lack clarity and drown energy that in turn create energy and force clarity. It is the balance between old and new, what is seemingly "for sure" and what forces us to question what is "for sure". This is the space between routine comfort, typical situations, got-the-world-by-the-balls-ism and personal growth.maybe if i write... it will save me.

We are all a part of this greater thing, a greater consciousness. With this in mind, think of the possibilities that we as humans are completely oblivious of and complacent to. What are we missing? Think of the capacity of the human mind as an untapped resource, like tha oayl up in that thur Alaskey. We are only using small parts of our brains and even smaller parts of our energetic connectivity. Is it not fantastic what we can do without really thinking about it? I mean really! Look at what we do and have done, what we have created and destroyed... what we do to each other and what we will or won't do for one another. This is all performed in a very robotic, very practiced and routine way. We function as if what we do as an occupation defines who we are, and how we fit into the greater scheme of things. In some ways that may be true, but how is waking up and going to work, coming home and absorbing your daily dose of distraction, going to bed, waking up and doing it again the next day beneficial to the overall consciousness and spiritual evolution of greater humanity? Don't you care what happens to humans in the future? Sure you do! Why do we rut ourselves into such dehumanizing and robotic lifestyles without caring about or questioning it? It is unnatural. We are subservient participants, blindly engulfed in a sad phenomenon- the devolution of the human spirit.

There is so much capacity for love and compassion within the human spirit. There is such power within all of us as individuals. There is so much untapped energy that if we as a species were to heighten our awareness of it, be willing to hone it and nurture it and collectively aim it toward peace and unity, toward education and opportunity, toward food and shelter for ALL and finally toward love- we can reverse the effects of devolution and begin again on our righteous path to higher human consciousness and REAL HUMANITY. We all have to want it though. We all have to recognize that the path we are currently choosing on this planet is misleading and destined for failure. We have to reeducate ourselves in what it is to be powerful without money and guns, to be compassionate and generous without the promise of a tax write off, to be loving and concerned for the well being one another without allowing religion or nationality or property or resources or entitlement to continue to divide us.






Until we are able to humble ourselves beyond our egos, recognize our social limitations as humans, embrace all people and our untapped collective capacities for positive energy, compassion and love- We will not know peace and we will not know truth.


To bring this thing back around, back down to Earth...

How do we begin to act upon something that is so much larger than ourselves? How can I make a difference in this short period of time I'm allowed on this planet and on this plane? How does all this stuff apply to what I have written and asked? Further, how does it all relate to these ideas of old and new self?

A very wise man named Ghandi said many profound things in his short time on Earth, and one of the sentiments he offered that resonates with me on the simplest level- "Be the change you want to see in the world." And so it starts with me. It starts with you.

In the last several years I have stopped dreaming both literally and figuratively, stopped aspiring to go beyond my comfortable capacity as Christopher Hudock: Grandson, Son, Brother, Brotha, Nephew, Cousin, Barista, Teacher, Artist, Musician, Athlete. Surely there is always more to a person than that which they would ramble off on a resume or dating website in hopes that they are given a new purpose or person, a new reason to occupy their time. That I will not argue. For me though, these acts of dreaming and redefinition have taken the lame sidecar to the small stuff that resides within the darkness of my own being, driving it's big cool Hot Wheels. MY BIG COOL HOT WHEELS! It is the stuff that hasn't seen the sunshine since I last locked it away in my internal dungeon with all of its subconscious, selfconscious friends. Insecurity, Guilt, Egotism, Anger, Passivity, Self Doubt, Pride, Guile, Apathy and Ambivalence all live in that dungeon. All things considered it is quite a nice dungeon. Push button all wheel drive, rad set of cup holders, great stereo system and central heating... but it is still a dungeon that can be cold and dark and unforgiving. Sometimes it seems that hiding in the corner of that dungeon trying not to draw attention to themselves, trying not to become somebody's Bitch or get shanked with the sharpened end of a toothbrush or beaten with the business end of a turkey drumstick- are love and truth. They hide in there, free to go- but waiting for the others to lay down their shanks and drumsticks, and move aside.

In the light of knowledge and self determination, truth and love can grow up strong and outwardly even stronger.


This is where it is at. Learning how to ask questions of myself again, and giving myself some answers. Through these questions and responses within myself, and with the help of a wonderfully objective friend, we have observed some very small things about me and my interactions with the world around that I would like to work on. I would like to learn to be more objective, take things at face value and not put my own spin on them. I would like to be more compassionate toward others, put myself in their shoes if for nothing else but to understand the perspective of another. For both of these things to happen I need to be more humble and less self absorbed. With all this talk of self realization though, it is more that I should be more internally observant and conscious than outwardly sharing self flattery. I must keep in the mindset of learning. I would like to learn to be more precise with words. I would like to say what I mean and mean what I say. I would like to learn to say more with less. (Not a very good start yet, I know.) I would like to learn more about subtlety, tact, transparency and directness when dealing with myself and others. I would like to love more fully and more freely, as there was a time when I questioned the existence of love- I'm over that. I want it to be less about me as an individual and more about the greater realm of human interconnection and consciousness.


I may have said too much, and I may have said nothing at all. I hope it makes some sense and I hope it may get you to think about some things you haven't thought about before, or at least in a long time. Maybe, you'll begin a renaissance of your own. Maybe together we can unite for the cause of knowledge, love, truth and compassion. You know, join hands and start a love train... love train. It has to start somewhere, it has to start sometime. What better place than here, what better time than now? (Thanks Rage Against the Machine, for that one)

Thanks for reading.

Nothin' but love.