Epilogue: The Next Search

I’m home now. Back in a place where the big things are more or less stable and the attention is on the details. Living with my parents, I am cradled in comfort and security. There was no initial rejection; it was a completely natural reversion. I had created a world in my mind – one of peace, abundance, and comfort – as something to look forward to upon my return. And now I am living as if I am in that world. I bought a sandwich for $8.39 without flinching. I gently manoeuvred the car back to the right side of the road when my Dad pointed out that I was driving on the left without assessing the could-haves. I left my wallet out in public places fully expecting it to be there on my return. So far I haven’t been disappointed.

But I am expecting, as the weeks go by, for this fog to lift. I will start to feel strong emotions again, rather than a gentle baseline buzz. I will note aspects of my life here that feel emptier, despite all of the abundance, because I have lived in a place that in many ways was more nurturing.

My last week in Cape Town gave me a good sense of closure. The CD release for Khoi Khonnexion’s Kalahari Waits was very well-attended. Many people said very nice things, including the group, who has seen this as a defining moment in their ten-year history. We sold dozens of copies, and since then more have been sold to South Africans and people all over the United States and in Europe. Several press pieces have come out about it, all of which have been positive. Soon, for U.S. customers, the CD will be available on independent music site CD Baby. If you are interested in a copy, however, the best way is to speak to me about it.

After the release I had a farewell party and jam session at Tagore’s in Observatory, where I had played the out-of-tune piano several times a week for loose change over the summer. On Tuesday, Glen, Jethro and another friend took me to the airport. There we ran into the outgoing national Minister of Arts and Culture. He already knew Glen and Jethro, and we had a few minutes to kill before our planes took off. He wanted to buy a copy of the CD, but we didn’t have one with us. Then he showed us a new songbook he had helped put together for schools. He proudly pointed out which songs he had written, and performed them for us right there in the check-in line. A touching note to leave on.

As a musician, I often think about the process of assimilating experience and moving forward. Somehow, by some psycho-physio natural selection, my fingers go from fumbling a melody one hour to nailing it the next. From weak chord voicings one year to more harmonically rich ones the next. I think it’s a big part of what keeps me going – my ability to see that I am, slowly but surely, moving through some sort of terrain.

It is the moments when I doubt this progress when I feel the most fear and uncertainty about myself as an artist. Preachers use the same rhetoric and logic today to attack homosexuality as their predecessors used to defend slavery not long ago. Hundreds of civilizations in history have collapsed due to overpopulation and environmental degradation, but the same mistakes are being repeated. Does that mean it is possible for me to lose all the lessons I have learned while in Cape Town?

I am working under the hopeful assumption that my experiences have become part of my tapestry – lessons learned on an unconscious level will stay with me as long as they stay true. But I think it would help to condense into a list some of the lessons I can extract now in immediate retrospection:

1. My biggest barrier to understanding people is my own notions about them.

2. I can’t not be an artist. When I came to Cape Town, I had decided that I could succeed more as an academic. I soon learned that this was irrelevant. My core impulse is to create, and if I ignore that, I will not be happy.

3. For everything that I’m good at, there are a million people who are better. So stop dwelling on it.

4. There are as many ways to listen to music as there are styles of music. I can shamelessly practice as many as I want.

5. People in developing nations are caught in a complex love-hate relationship with America. Meanwhile, Americans don’t know they exist.

6. Poverty doesn’t have to be about feeling sorry for yourself.

7. Money can destroy relationships.

8. Relationships can destroy money.

9. Artists are the guardians and destroyers of myths.

10. Comfort is placatory.

11. A lot of people are struggling with what modernity requires them to believe. Many First Nation people struggle with the antagonism between the wisdom of their traditions and what modernity requires them to believe.

I think these lessons I am learning are part of being a global citizen. There is a growing body of people who are educated, financially stable, and mobile. These people live in a global village, and so have added power and added responsibility. I grew up in the place where I am now, the small town of Huntington, West Virginia, where many residents have lived for generations and generations. I knew that the opportunities I was looking for didn’t exist here, but at times growing up it was hard to imagine not being tied to this place. Now I am joining the ranks of other global citizens, and learning what that means. At the same time, by taking myself farther from my familiar context, I am learning what it means to be a West Virginian.

At Michigan I first learned to be proud to be a West Virginian, because I saw West Virginia’s uniqueness and I had to dispel others’ ignorance about it. In Cape Town, most people didn’t know it was a separate state from Virginia, but they also didn’t know the stereotypes that aren’t worth knowing. So it was tabula rasa for me, and I had to make a first impression. Natural beauty, strong culture, isolation, and economic woes were usually my talking points. And I would usually end up talking about dependence on coal and explaining mountaintop removal, which was always met with incredulity. When I was flying in to Charleston, I sat next to a businessman from California who was coming here for vacation. It felt good to be a local again.

Like the Zen cycle of awakening, I am now back at the exact spot where I started, but with my eyes a little more open. There is so much to explore about this place and my relationship with it. Now that I no longer find myself in Africa, it’s time to find myself where I am.

Thanks to all of you for reading over the past year. I have appreciated your feedback and support. I welcome you now to help me re-narrate this year by sharing your own reactions to my experiences and the lessons I have learned. With our complementing and conflicting perceptions, we can start to get a glimpse of something true…