4.0. That’s what my teammates on the football team called me, for my straight A’s.

Star student, the good kid. Hard worker on the football field. Christian. Valedictorian. Aerospace engineer. Mysticism. Critical philosophy. Creativity. Big Sur. High mountains. These are dramatic, idealistic things. I have an icarus complex, through and through. And I embrace it.

I have a long history with aspiring for greatness. Idealism is in my nature. I understand ambition and perfectionism intimately. I know the dark side of perfection as well as the light side. Having been someone who felt immense pressure to internalize everyone’s idealizations and synthesize them, to have a vision of the world, to be perfect, to know the perfect, to not only partake in the perfect, but to contact it and to become it. It’s still flowing through me.

However, this is after many, many cycles of learning through disappointment and failure the delusions of grandeur that perfectionism carries with it. At first, in high school, perfectionism brought me so much shame, I was barely sleeping, I was constantly in distress from the BS pushed upon us by the football coaches, I was striving, striving, striving. Samsara, idolatry, lust.

Jesus came in and saved me, lifted me from my sorrows, atoned for my lack of platonic ideality, represented the human face of the divine, connected me to the organic root of the world and of life itself. That grace was bright. And then came in rigid puritanism, forcing me toward moral striving. I had to go deeper, there was no way out in my mind. I would be damned to the prison of that labyrinth unless I boiled it to its n’th degree. So I delved and delved, through an eating disorder (starving myself until the sin was out and I had an answer to whatever prayer I had), through selling my precious things, guilt, almost becoming a street preacher many times, etc.

The sparks and kindling of God started to fire off like dancing bluegrass in the bayou. I was turning, turning, turning in the spiraling gyre. It was not what I thought it was. Light broke through, in the face of Jesus. It was the face of life preceding the law, existence preceding essence. My faith had become topsy-turvy, the whole deck of cards then inverted like a blissful spring meadow of bubbles, fresh linens in the wind, children laughing and meadowlarks babbling, an oak, and a shining mother. Terrence Malick entered my life around that time, affirming the new spirit. Evolutionary biology was back in my field of favorite interests/stories. I was brimming with cosmic creativity. I started diverting from the mainstream of evangelical Christianity as I followed the deep gospel into other perspectives of the world. I started prioritizing the other, trying to learn and empathize.

I found the isolation of college amongst a bunch of bullheaded, performance-driven, cocky aerospace engineers really hard. I longed for truth, for beauty, for the good, and I was interested in the knowledge of aerospace engineering. I could not find people to socialize with, inside or outside my major. The selfishness and isolation of Cal Poly SLO was weighing on me. So much texting, so little genuine slowing down. My grades slipped as I prioritized learning over performance. I started making bigger breaks from society and church culture. I wandered off into the terra incognita of spirituality. My religiously repressed sexual appetite was in pain, my biology was feeling worthless because I had not been attempting to reproduce. I am grateful I did not lose myself to a fling, but it was also very hard on my wellbeing to be so closed off as a person. I became very depressed. I was slipping myself into the existential groove of being the saint in the mob, the one who does not addictively use his phone, the one who bla bla bla. Enter existential thesis. Exit to Big Sur drama.

As someone who loves abstraction, the tango of perfectionism is my struggle to bear. After a while, I’ve observed that all of human ambition is actually quite a little thing. Many people tout a version of humility that is self-deprecating, but if human beings are actually quite small and unimportant in the cosmos, our dreams pose no threat to God/Nature. We are just a tiny little blossom in a giant cosmic field. Our individual identity is not that important. Yes, this crushes the delusions, but it also liberates the spirit. Rather than defeating us, it should enliven us. This hard cosmic Fact only defeats the one who is attached to the projection of their own ego. If the Universe is so big compared to us, and the entire world we inhabit is a little thing of ours, then our little world is a special thing, a trifle thing, no need to demean it to act humble. Our ego itself is small! No self-demeaning or self-aggrandizement is significant. So simply love oneself, one’s ideals, and try to love others as if the same self, a grand world of selves all striving for the Self.

This is the root of positive psychology and the New Age movement. It’s alive in the music of all the mystics and gypsies and vagabonds of the world. It’s alive in every human face, every footstep is a dance in the heavens and the earth, every raindrop is the biblical flood of cosmic orgasm. Nothing is everything, and everything is nothing. Joy, freedom, free space, boundless time—

I found that there is light in the darkness, there is freedom in the prison. It set me free, and I love it. The aspiration for greatness blossoms into organic clarity when it reaches the plumb depth of the essence of things, when it ruminates on the nature of life itself and contacts the very process itself.

I left San Luis Obispo and all its Manifest Destiny to the xenith of aspiration: Big Sur. Ideal of ideals, 15 million people come to capture ideal images of the ideal. “Big Sur is a state of mind,” they would say back in the day. I came here longing for the archetypal landscape, mirrored in the human soul and the environment. And my associations with those archetypes has gone from one of starry idealization, to a neighborly passion. I know the depths of those divine images, but I loathe the human effort to capture them. I see in the ten-thousand thousand tourists the unrealized perfectionism in me, longing to grasp, to attain, to bar. Nirvana inside of samsara striving to snap the cycle into equillibrium. Jesus in the heart wrestling for the knowledge of God. Robinson Jeffers hated the highway, but I think the highway is a peculiar addition of nature. A striving, measly thing. The backcountry lords over it, undisturbed from the heights, the sensationalism stays down by the coast, in that narrow ribbon above the water and below the unimagined heights and depths. They neither see the raw intersection of ocean on jutting rock, nor the bouquet of biotics. They see only the scene of the sea, the mountains, the sky, as a shape. While I do love the shapes, it is the first impression, and one cannot stay there if you wish to love it for what it is. I love the dramatic, archetypal, but I do not love it for the sensations, I am too fried from all the worship musics I’ve followed, the highs of religious euphoria I’ve sought in many forms, the idolatry of the senses, wandering through speciated representations from their resting state in the experience of the real. The vaulting sky, the jolting mountains, the rolling sea. I would utter all the details in copious quantity, if it weren’t for the bridle on my mouth. I will not pornographize my beloved substance, though I love to represent it. For in the unity of representation and objectivity, we find the extreme joy of existence, and most would not come to the bonfire banquet where the words stream and stream and stream like all the Earth was birthed from the stars and the stars and the stars.


June 16th, 2023
Gorda