It's Always Darkest Before The Dawn

Painting by "Cuz'n" Bill Lorenz www.cuznbill.com

I fell asleep last night with the words "I live in my heart" repeating in my head. I had no idea what that meant, but I wrote it down so I wouldn't forget.

The first thing I read when I woke up were the words "Trust the changes you are experiencing as they are answers to your prayers about your career and finances."

As I drank my morning coffee, I pondered these two seemingly separate sentences, and I realized, they were actually connected.

If I live in my heart, then I am living in love. And if I'm living in love then I am following my passion. And following my passion means I'm following my bliss, which means in the long run, it will all be ok, no matter what is going on.

Things have felt pretty shitty lately. It feels like I"m struggling to make things happen instead of following my passion. I love my company. I never set out to just have a company to make stuff and be detached from it.

I created this company from love and passion and enthusiasm and ecstatic exuberance. And then it became something bigger than me. It was authentic. It was born from the heart and created in love and heat and passion, and the knowing I had to do this.

Maybe that's why it feels like a struggle now. It has become detached from me and I am in effort to make it be something again, instead of just allowing it to blossom like it once did.

Dr. Wayne Dyer passed away last week quite suddenly. He was a motivational speaker and my mentor. His books and lectures really helped me in some of my darkest days of running this company. I was fortunate enough to get some counseling from him, and he told me to live in my passion, follow my heart and it would all be ok. He was right. He lived from love. He touched many people. He lived spherically.

Part of what I'm running into with Gearhead is I've taken someone else's vision and tried to put it on. Instead of inhabiting it, I'm swimming in it, desperately looking for a floatie to save my drowning ass. Wayne Dyer told me to find my passion and live in it, but there was a time my passion was drowning me.

The Pizz, a tremendously talented artist who created a style many copied killed himself a few days ago. Why? Was his passion drowning him? Had he stopped living in love and instead was being consumed by it? We will never know, but I have felt that bleak, that drained, that destroyed by my passion.

Neil Young says it's better to burn out than fade away. That place of burn out is excruciating. When you are so tired you can't even open your eyes, when you breathe in and it feels like scorching flames in your lungs and your body is so heavy it feels like you're dragging a two-ton automobile behind you....

This weekend at Ventura, sales were disappointing and all the magic that I had felt when I first started going to car shows again was gone. Each car seemed like a shapeless lump of metal, each face a foreign blur. I know these clues now. I am no longer living in love, in my heart center but from duty and effort. Willing each person who walks by my booth to stop and buy something. That desperateness repels people. Its like having dog shit smeared all around my booth. Who wants to go near that?

Maybe that is the place The Pizz got to. Maybe his life smelled like crap and he was no longer living in his heart. Maybe he was so weary and discouraged because what once was his alone had now become second nature and mundane to the world. So many people copying his style and vision that his gifts and creations no longer stood out in this sea of wanna-bes.

Things have changed so much. What once was original and unique is now common place and boring. Every mall has a "punk" shop where you can just go in and and buy mass produced "punk" items and clothing by dropping a couple hundred bucks, and walk out looking like you've inhabited that segment of the underground for years because that's what you see celebrities wearing.

I remember how revolutionary it was to get your nose pierced or to get a tattoo, and now its part of our everyday landscape. Garage punk music now sets the pace for advertising everything from telephones to take out food. But when it first started, it was mind-blowing! As an artist and originator, you long for your work to be accepted and for it to make you a decent living wage so you can keep creating. But when it achieves that, then what? Where do you turn? I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that trust, and faith in love and passion to keep guiding us as trailblazers is essential. When the horizon is dark and cloudy those are the only lights we have to guide us through the darkness to the new day dawning.

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