Other Voices

First published on January 21, 2014

Oh, my soul, you come and you go.

           You began this journey so very, very long ago, wandering away so many times in search of me, spotting me in the distance and running to pull me to safety, only to have me run away, to run faster into the forest toward a hidden cliff’s edge. 

Was I there when you set off, when you took the form of Heath and gave yourself over to time and space, when you wrote out your list of goals and adventures, horrors and pains? Of exhilarations and bliss, sorrow and loss? Of quiet and unparalleled happiness? Were you prepared for the inhalations of All? To feel the breath of Govinda enter your lungs, stop, turn around, and leave .  . . enter your lungs, stop, turn around, and leave . . . enter your lungs, stop . . . 

I feel you calling out to me, across the alive, ever-shifting, ever-singing years between C. Heath Johnson III, the young teenager who questioned EVERYTHING and EVERYBODY without really wanting answers, who agitated the elders of his time because he was restless and bored and dissatisfied with himself, and C. Heath Johnson, the slightly wizened, much older seeker who searches for the same reasons, and because he’s at the head of the line now, the next one to get on The Big Ride. He wants to be sure the machinery isn’t going to go haywire and leave him dangling in the air, or collapse in a tangled heap of metal and wood and flames and lava and agony. That it’s going to elevate him to the clouds and show him the world below as it really is, as he always suspected it might be and the way his dreams painted it.

In the early days, when I was a teenager in flux with all the symptoms of wanderlust and an unsettled spirit, I was obsessed with blackness and mystery: the dark and ancient corners of Oedipus Rex and the so-called heroes and monsters of Greek legends; the Roman armies and the gladiators; the medieval torture chambers and torchlit castles in dark, foreboding forests; the depths of space and the depths of depravity. I wanted to know everything about the origins and histories of humankind— the good and beautiful as well as the shrouded and sinister. I wanted to be a part of ancient talismans and Mayan rituals, to explore underground tunnels and endless caverns, to walk the canyons of Europa and Mars, to trace the footsteps of witches in the woods and fly with angels to the mountaintops.

This darkness worried my parents. They couldn’t understand why their otherwise healthy and mentally astute son would blacken his mind with the dank, frightening images of Baudelaire and Poe and Blake; why he would brood in the corner of his purple bedroom with black lights and Jimi Hendrix posters listening to Jim Morrison and the Doors ranging through an eerie musical underworld of snakes and acid and death. Why he would clamp on a pair of headphones and listen to Meddle, a weird, atonal epic by Pink Floyd that seemed to fathom the dark waters of fear. Or the ominous thunderstorms of Black Sabbath. But what they didn’t understand was that their son was on a spiritual journey, and as with any long journey there will come stretches of night.

The sunrise, for me, came in 1971. It was in the summer of that year that I met and truly fell in love with Vicki, my very first serious girlfriend (and who remained my steady love throughout the remainder of my high school career) and I, along with the rest of the free world, was introduced to John Denver and his unabashed, almost overwhelming optimism. “Sunshine on My Shoulders” indeed! “Annie’s Song”: Come, let me love you. All I wanted to do was sing that song as my own to the girl of my dreams. Who, as the subsequent, unfolding years revealed, might have been any one of a series of young women who whimsically captured and released my all-too-naive and willing heart.

Then, as the sun rose higher in the sky, the way became clearer, the path wider and easier to follow, the company ever more enjoyable and encouraging. The story of those intervening years is much too long to retell here, but once I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and discovered that I had a fellow traveler in Richard Bach who, like me, was on a personal quest to find the heart of the universe and his own attachment to it, I knew I was in for a very, very long journey indeed, but one well worth taking. More than anyone else, it was John and Richard who led me through the 1970s and paid my way, allowing me the freedom to study the scenery and to instruct my heart in the ways of joy and sorrow and the inevitable battles to come.

And come they did. After high school, Vicki became a memory. She was followed by other loves, other heartaches, though none so captured my imagination as Cassandra, a young woman who changed my life the day she died in 1986. I had to learn how to live again. For the longest time I sat by the side of the trail, sure I would never have the will or the strength to get back up on my feet, to ever take another step. I lay down by the trail and wished the journey would end then and there. But Other Voices called from further down the trail, assuring me she and I would meet up again once my own travels were complete, but that in the meantime better times and even deeper Love was on the way. It would be a very long time— a very long time indeed — but they promised me it would be worth the wait. So, with the sound of crickets in the grass and soft breezes in the trees, I pulled myself to standing and took a step. Then another. And another, and . . .

There were adventures and disappointments as I traveled on: late night talks with my old man in front of the fire; nights exchanging philosophies and religious ponderings with my closest friends; deaths, expected and unexpected, and more relationships. Through it all, I kept traveling because when you’re a seeker on a journey you know intuitively that the answers you’re looking for will not come find you. You must search. You must move and hope that around each new bend, with each new rain, will come the garden.

Oh, yes, there were churches along the way, as well. Let’s not forget the churches. Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Church of Christ, Bible churches, nondenominational churches, feel-good churches, feel-bad churches, uplifting churches and spirit-destroying churches, churches with predictions and history lessons, churches with myths and lies, even churches with musicals (remember “Jesus Christ Superstar”?) at Christmas and Easter. Even Mormon churches.

But none so placated my aching soul as a walk in the woods, or a beachfront sunrise, as cloud vaporizing and a night spent contemplating the universe under a desert night spray of stars. Or the finding of a woman to see me through the balance of my life and give my spirit practice in the art of day-to-day loving. Or the miracles of our two sons. The day and the sunshine made me believe in living again, that life was still good. Extremely good. In spite of all the personal pain, and the pain of the whole wide world caused by war and neglect and meanness, I came to believe that the problem with the world was that people- individual people everywhere -were missing the point. The suffering and pain and hatred and greed and every other hostile symptom of a soul in turmoil was coming from inside them. If they would simply turn inward and begin to peel away the layers of self-hatred, they would find the source of LOVE; they would discover that LOVE isn’t something you fall into or out of— it just is —and they would uncover the peace they so desperately craved. They would understand that whatever god they serve is not pleased with their behavior. They would know at last that there is a mansion on the hill, and there are many paths around the hill that lead to the top. No one path is the right path, though some may be easier than others, or more scenic, or longer . . . but they will all lead a wandering, hiking soul to the top. They would understand that everybody else is a fellow traveler and that to make it to the top in the best possible condition, and in the least amount of time, they must abide by the one rule of the wilderness that assures spiritual survival: 

    Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

At long last, then, I have reconnected with my old friend Richard Bach and am learning why he and I and other seekers like us sometimes find ourselves Running From Safety. I have reconnected with John, too, and find myself yet again Looking For Space in the happiest, most overwhelmingly contented ways. And I have made some new friends, friends who are showing me an entirely new path.

Mostly, though, I am reconnecting with Heath. The Heath you would have liked back in the 1970s because, although he had very long hair and tended to stand in the shadows watching everybody else instead of running out onto the dance floor, who recited Jim Morrison’s poetry, and wrote hopelessly romantic letters and stories to young women he knew he had no realistic chance of ever marrying, he was looking for the same things everybody else was looking for. He was a good kid, a good young man. 

I’m not sure whether he is pleased with me today or not, but if not, I think it is because I ignored those Other Voices and made him wait for me here so long, because I took far too many years to arrive.

Now that I am here, though, I have a feeling that even though I declared recently I was “Done” writing books, Heath and I are going to write one last book together, the one we were meant to write, the one we’ve been planning all our life.