Pictures from top to bottom: Adrian doing an ice sculpture for Atlanta's Imperial Opa
Brice and Adrian at Hijacking Music Festival
Adrian's wall at Living Walls in Eyedrum Gallery
“Soulmate, a term used to designate someone with whom one has a feeling of deep and natural affinity, love, intimacy, sexuality, and/or compatibility”
- Wikipedia
Or, as believed by many paranormal people, a soul who has traveled with you through many lives…
“It’s not knowing your friends have your back, it’s knowing you have theirs.”
- Green Street Hooligans
“Oh and Brice” Kelli said as she, too, got up from the fire. “There’s a man coming.”
“A man, like a boyfriend?” I asked.
“I… umm… don’t really know what the nature of your relationship will be. I don’t think that’s actually been decided yet, but this man will be very important to you and your journey. You’ll meet him soon. Maybe April? (Remember this all happened in February of 2010). But… you wont get close until August.”
“Ok,” I responded.
“But Brice… this person is really important to you. Take him seriously. Let him in. Your heart is a bit closed at the moment. Open it to him.”
In “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho, a young shepherd boy in Spain goes on a journey to find his personal treasure - a journey that in return becomes his personal legend. In a dream, the boy is told that his treasure lies in Egypt, at the foothills of the pyramids. So being young and courageous, this boy crosses the Mediterranean Sea, works for a crystal store in Morocco, crosses the Sahara, finds the woman of his dreams, gets robbed a few times, meets an alchemist, and finally gets to Egypt where he learns that his treasure was in his home country of Spain all along. Once he arrives back in Spain and finds his treasure, he looks to God in bewilderment. He questions God for God had sent him all over just to bring him right back to where he started. God in response says that God knows, then asks the boy, “But weren’t the pyramids beautiful…?”
In my 27 years on this earth, my journey has taken me all over the world. I went to school in England, traveled to Ireland, Scotland, Spain, France, the Pyrenees Mountains, swam in the Mediterranean, spent time in Zimbabwe, South Africa, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Australia, and finally ended up living in Los Angles before I decided to move to New York. It never once occurred to me that my personal treasure, like that of the young shepherd boy, was in my own backyard the whole time, and my move to New York would never happen. Sometimes I wonder what might have been if I had moved to New York or stayed in Los Angeles, and my heart fills with gratitude to the universe for putting me here, for putting me back home, in Atlanta, for giving me the people that have become so precious to me, my own little treasures. And sometimes I, like the boy, wonder why God sent me all over the world when all I needed was where I started in the first place, and I smile because, like the shepherd boy, I hear God say, “I know, but wasn’t it fun?” By leaving, I got to see things most 40 year olds haven’t seen, and by coming back, a changed woman, I can appreciate what or rather “who” was in my own home state all along.
Adrian is someone I wrote about in previous blog (Please see “War and Creation”). He is one of the many people I met during the month of April, through Dodekapus, but even though there was a weird and magnetic energy around him, our friendship didn’t pick up until August. We were always friendly toward each other, but it wasn’t until Living Walls that our relationship took a deeper turn, and the “Oh Shit! YOU’RE the man Kelli spoke of” hit my being like a ton of bricks. Honestly, Adrian was the last person I expected to be “him.” Adrian, was in fact, the last person I thought I would end up trusting completely and opening my heart up to in an almost, dare I say it, natural way.
Through my time in Dodekapus, many of my fellow collective members and friends asked me for readings, readings that I gladly did especially since these were the people who supported and loved me unconditionally. Most of my friends were always stunned by the accuracy of my readings, even though I told them over and over again that I wasn’t special; I could just see and hear things they could not. All of them seemed completely comfortable with what I am, well, all accept Adrian. Adrian always approached me in a guarded way, a way that is pretty uncommon amongst the Dodekapus family. It would frustrate me at times. No. It would piss me off more than anything. He was way more open with our other members. Why not me? Why was he so afraid of me? Why did he view me with such distrust? Why did he guard himself so closely around me? “Everyone likes me,” I would think to myself in a selfish way. Why doesn’t he? What did I do wrong? I assured him many times that I don’t read people unless I am asked to do so. I assured him that I believe in free will and personal space, and would never allow myself into someone else’s privacy unless he or she asked me to do so. He would just smile at me and walk away. Then, I thought maybe he thinks I’m crazy. Maybe he thinks I’m a fraud. I can’t fault him for that because what I am sometimes is too crazy for even me to handle, but no! He knew I had done readings for others. He knew I was the real deal from our mutual friend’s own mouths! My aggravation and frustration would spin in circles around my head until I found myself having to drink every time I was around him. Never once did I think we would ever be “close,” but I was completely wrong.
As the month of August approached, and the Living Walls Conference* grew closer, I, being Monica’s assistant, started working my ass off. It was nice. First of all, I was helping a good friend. Secondly, I was heavily involved in something I believed in, and thirdly, I could distract myself with work to get my mind off of this one person I saw all the time who apparently didn’t see me as a friend.
My first glimmer into our future friendship came at Dodekapus’ Carnival. As a collective, we had put together a carnival themed fundraiser for Living Walls. We worked long hours setting up at The Big House**, and when the night approached, my spirit tent was set up and ready to go. I got myself ready to do readings for the night, and as the night progressed, readings were ALL I did. You see, when I do readings it takes a fair amount of energy for me to channel for the person I’m reading for, and as time went by that evening, I had a line out the tent. I got to a point where I couldn’t think anymore, and was actually scared to drive home due to my lack of energy. Despite the line before me, I had to stop. I was completely drained. As I stumbled out of the tent, Adrian was the first person I saw. “Great!” I thought sarcastically as he walked up to me.
“You ok?” asked Adrian.
“Yeah, just a little drained. It takes so much for me to read. I can’t do anymore.”
“Yeah, you look exhausted. May I get you a beer or something?”
“No!” I shouted back, “That will make it worse.”
“You need to go home.”
I looked around at the massive amount of people at our carnival. “I can’t,” I said back with the pulling tug of responsibility to be there till the end. “We’ve got so much going on, and I’ve got so much stuff here. I can’t leave.”
“Brice,” Adrian said. “Go home. I’ll get your stuff for you. I promise. I’ll take care of it for you.”
I stood in silence for a second in utter shock that Adrian, of all people, was offering me a true act of unselfish friendship.
“Thank you,” I said to him and I quickly left the carnival before someone else asked me for a reading that I didn’t have the energy to do. The whole car ride home I was bewildered and replayed in my head the conversation with Adrian. Where did that come from? Why, all of a sudden was he willing to do something for me? Of course, I didn’t mind it. I liked it.
As the week of Living Walls rolled in, my days became longer and longer. In Georgia’s dreaded August heat, my mind, body, and soul lived at Eyedrum Gallery***. My days were spent sweating my ass off, helping Monica and the artists involved with anything I could possibly help with. The week moved along with everyone in Living Walls and myself living off of three hours of sleep a night, max. Adrian, there every night after work, would come straight to me and ask if I was ok, and one night in particular, with sweat stains all over me, make-up running down my face, my hair a hot mess, and stressed out of my mind (to the point of tears), I found myself running to him as he pulled up into the Eyedrum Gallery. As I raced to his car, I felt peace as he approached me. I vented to him about the latest Living Wall’s drama and fought the tears as they came close to pouring out all over my face.
“I hate seeing you this way,” Adrian said looking me dead in the eyes.
The world stopped for a moment. All the noise and the craziness around me went quiet. I looked back into his dark, engulfing eyes and sheepishly said, “What way?”
“This way! Stressed out!”
“Well, Monica is my friend, and, Adrian, I would do the same for you,” was my only, truly honest response.
“I know you would,” he said.
At that point, Adrian became a true friend. Always in communication with me, helping me whenever he could, I helping him whenever I could. He volunteered, willingly, to go to the airport with me at all hours of the night to pick up artists and guest speakers, and in one of my most favorite Living Walls memories, I got up at the crack of dawn with him to help him wheat paste**** his own wall in Eyedrum Gallery for the conference (after all, Adrian is an extremely talented artist).
Our friendship didn’t stop at Living Walls. We started hanging out more socially. Laughing together more and soon that guarded wall Adrian had around me vanished as if it had never even been there in the first place, but the magnetism around him still lingered. There was still something very different about Adrian. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. Energy I had never experienced with anyone, and yet, he was someone I had only known for a few months.
Around the Living Walls Conference, another weird thing started happening to me. I started having very precise past life visions. Having these visions isn’t weird, but seeing the person I recognized in these visions was. A while back, after learning that Indigos have lived many, many lives on earth, and after first accepting for myself that reincarnation is a possible reality, I asked my spirit guide, Louie, to show me what I needed to see. At first, this notion scared me. Did I really want to know what or who I was in the past? What if I did something awful? Heaven forbid, what if I was someone like Hitler or Jack the Ripper? That would devastate me. But no, everything I had seen in the past was neither scary nor too bad. Pretty normal. There is a difference between my past life visions and my future visions. In my future visions, sometimes I don’t really understand what’s being told to me. I mean, think about the guy who wrote Revelations. It’s taken scholars a long ass time to try to remotely understand what John was writing about because John, himself, could not understand his own visions, and even then, sometimes those scholars got it wrong. But in past life visions, what one does (something I’ve recently learned) is astro travel*****. By giving permission to your spirit guide, you’re taken back to a time of your existence. You feel everything. You feel the body you’re in (one different from the one you inhabit in this life). You feel the weather. You feel your clothes. You feel your emotions, and in that moment, you have no recollection of the person you are in 2010. Up until August, I’ve never recognized anyone from the past that is currently in my present life after being brought back to this life. Perhaps that’s because it wasn’t important for me to know who others were in past existence, but in August, I started to recognize Adrian.
At first, it pissed me off. I would get mad at my spirit guide (that happens a lot), and that anger would turn to pleading.
“Please, Louie, please take Adrian out of this. This is just confusing me,” I would say begging Louie for this small favor.
But the vision remained the same, and got even more in depth as my time spent in these visions grew longer and longer, and soon I gave in.
“Ok. I get it. I’ve known the guy for a long time. That’s fine, but he’ll never know about this. This I’m taking to the grave,” I said, surrendering over my pride, and myself once more, to the spirit world. I couldn’t tell Adrian. Yeah, we had gotten close, but in our time together, we had never spoken of my abilities or of spirituality. I wasn’t about to roll up one day, and say to my now “finally” friend that we had actually known each other for a very long time. Even I know, that sounds completely crazy, and at the end of the day, if I’m anything, I’m most definitely prideful.
Little did I know, that was only the beginning, for a few weeks after Living Walls, my beautiful friend, and roommate (who reads cards as well), Jessy, did a reading for me, and in that reading the cards told me that Adrian and I had a journey, and the paranormal would play a major roll. In my frustration, I kept asking for clarification. I was mad. No!! In no way was I going to talk about this with him. I know what I am is weird to most. I know it scares people. I know it’s taboo, and I most certainly wasn’t going to go down that road with a friend it took so long to make. I asked the cards what the nature of my relationship was with Adrian. Who was he to me in this life, if we had known each other for so long? And all it told me was to wait and see… something my impatient self was not happy about. Keep in mind: no one at this point knew anything about my visions with Adrian. I pushed it all into the back of my head, and decided to do what I do best in any uncomfortable situation, paranormal or not, ignore it until it goes away…something that’s never worked, but I keep hoping that one day it will.
A few days after this reading, I spent the evening sitting on the floor of Adrian’s kitchen, fixing bicycles with him. If the truth be told, he was the one doing the fixing on both our bikes, as my only contribution was ordering the pizza we had for dinner (Actually, I think he called it in… I just picked it up). We sat there laughing, talking, watching YouTube videos on how to switch pedals (he took mine with the clips and I took his sans clips), talking about Dodekapus going nonprofit, and then it happened. HE asked me about paranormal experiences. I was speechless. Flabbergasted. I could feel all the color running out of my face. He went on to tell me about his own personal experiences with the paranormal - questions he had about knowing what was normal and what wasn’t. Once again, to my dismay, but really no surprise to me at all, the cards had been right.
That night, my response was slower than usual. That night, once again, I was shown that as much control that I THINK I have over my own life, there is a bigger force at work. At the end of the night, I told Adrian that I would work with him. I would help him in his journey. In the “Witch of Portobello (By Paulo Coelho),” a book Adrian lent me to read a while back, it says that “the only difference between a teacher and a student is one is less afraid than the other.” Seeing that, begrudgingly, I had to accept what I am a long time ago meant I was less afraid. And therefore, I would help Adrian conquer his own abilities, but I still wouldn’t dare tell him about our past lives…
…until the day of the East Atlanta Strut******, when after a few too many PBRs, it came out…
I didn’t tell him the details of our past lives together, and actually, I still haven’t told him exactly who we were or what happened. Let’s just say, I’m waiting for the “right moment” on that one. But I did, in my state of liquid courage, tell him that we had known each other for a long time, over 100 years. All I’ve told him is that in the lives I am aware of, we have always had close relationships, and never once did we betray each other, and if anything, I owe him. He was always my protector, and in this life, after knowing what I know, I will gladly be his. He didn’t seem surprised at all, and I eventually told him about my card reading with Kelli, and the forecast of his arrival in my present life, and as the days turned into months, I eventually put the crystal Kelli put into the palm of my hand back in February, into the palm of his.
Every time I give Adrian a little more information, I start out by saying, “I hope this doesn’t freak you out,” and he has assured me many times over that as far as the paranormal goes, nothing would freak him out.
One night, in meditation, I asked Louie why it took Adrian and me roughly 27 years to meet each other when we so clearly spent so many years together in the past. Time. That was his response. I needed time and he needed time to grow; to grow from our old lives into our new ones because our journey isn’t over. What is our journey exactly? Psshh, I haven’t the faintest idea. What will tomorrow bring for us? F*ck if I know. But, what I do know is back in April there was a man, a man who wasn’t that close to me, a man that was distant and guarded, a man that today, teaches me more about myself than I could dare to learn alone, and a man that, in August, I grew to love. A man that has a very special place in my heart, and not because he’s a man, but a being that I’ve been blessed to travel with in our journey through this thing called life. There isn’t a lot I wouldn’t do for Adrian. I would give him my right arm if I had to, and that’s saying a lot since I’m a writer, who’s right-handed, and therefore, I kind of need it to create. I will always support him in whatever adventure he takes in life, and if he succeeds, I will be there to celebrate with a 12 pack in hand, and if he fails I will be there with a shoulder to cry on, and again, with a 12 pack in hand. Like I said, I have no idea what kind of journey we have together, but it’s a little less scary knowing that someone else is right there with me. Someone just as stubborn as I, someone who cares about the same things I care about, and someone who by just being there has enriched my life in more ways than he knows.
On the morning of September 8, 2010, I received an email from Adrian. He had sent it at 6:30 AM. In the email he said, “I discovered this quote recently… thought you might like it. ‘Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make it the whole trip that way.’ –E.L. Doctorow, writer (b. 1931).” Adrian was right. I think about that quote daily when I sit down to write, but I don’t think it just applies to writers. I think it applies to life in general, and with people like Adrian, it’s not so bad only seeing as far as the headlights because the darkness that lies beyond the light is an exciting adventure just waiting to happen.
In the song, “Galileo” by the Indigo Girls, it says, “How long till my soul gets it right? Did any human being ever reach that kind of light?” And who knows? Maybe this go round, Adrian and I will get it right.
“Galileo”
By The Indigo Girls
Galileo’s head was on the block
The crime was looking up the truth
And as the bombshells of my daily fears explode
I try to trace them to my youth
And then you had to bring up reincarnation
Over a couple of beers the other night
And now I’m serving time for mistakes
Made my others in another lifetime
How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach that kind of light
I call on the resting soul of Galileo
King of night vision, king of insight
And then I think about my fear of motion
Which I never could explain
Some other fool across the ocean
Must have crashed his little airplane
How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach that kind of light
I call on the resting soul of Galileo
King of night vision, King of insight
I’m not making a joke, you know me
I take everything so seriously
If we wait for the time till our souls get it right
Then at least I know there’ll be no nuclear annihilation
In my lifetime, I’m still not right
I offer thanks to those before me
That’s all I’ve got to say
‘Cause maybe you squandered big bucks in your lifetime
Now I have to pay
But then again it feels like some sort of inspiration
To let the next life off the hook
But she’ll say,” Look what I had to overcome from my last life
I think I’ll write a book.”
How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach the highest light
Except for Galileo God rest his soul
(Except for the resting soul of Galileo)
King of night vision, king of insight
How long
(Till my soul gets it right)
(Till we reach the highest light)
How long
(Till my soul gets it right)
(Till we reach the highest light)
How long
*Living Walls Conference - an event in Atlanta that happened in August of 2010, where street artists from all over the world were given walls throughout the city to put up murals. There was also a gallery show at Eyedrum and a lecture series on street art at Georgia Tech. Most of the work is still up around the city, including an 11-story wall in downtown Atlanta, done by the French artist, Remed. For more information on Living Walls or to see the walls, please go to: http://livingwallsconference.com
**The Big House - a house in Atlanta on Ponce De Leon that houses artists of different mediums, and is often used as an artist workspace.
***Eyedrum Gallery - a gallery and event space in Atlanta that also serves as a nonprofit organization. Many artists exhibit here regularly. For more information on Eyedrum, please go to: http://www.eyedrum.org
****Wheat Paste - an adhesive most commonly made from water and vegetable starch. It is used often by street artists who post paper art on city walls, and is also commonly used for paper mache.
*****Astro Travel - otherwise known as disembodiment or astro projection. It is commonly known to many as an “out of body experience,” where the soul literally leaves its physical body to travel through time or space in a metaphysical way. This is a very common ability even among those who aren’t paranormal. Many people claim to have memories of seeing themselves leave their sleeping bodies in the middle of the night.
******East Atlanta Strut - an annual event that happens in the East Atlanta Village. Historically, the strut started as a music festival, but now has evolved into a neighbor festival with tents, music, parades, and a yearly celebration of the East Atlanta culture.
For more information on Dodekapus please visit our website at www.dodekapus.org
