travel | everdeepening

I have been reticent, in documenting my spiritual process, to risk exposure of my collaborators. I am going out on a limb now because the experiences I am sharing with Lauren are so impossibly beautiful that people should appreciate what is possible when love works in the service of life.

I have maintained playlists for the last decade that focus authentic faith. Along with the default “Liked” list, I have specific lists for Children (Syrian and Gaza crises), Advent, and Redemption. Among all the featured artists, I am conscious of categories: articulation of conventional theology, personal struggle of surrender to faith, and facilitation of corporate union.

Then, uniquely, we have Lauren, whose music bypasses metaphors to deal directly with the emotions of those engaged in the process. As I have shared with her, these songs have always pierced the veils around my heart.

Through the last half of 2025, my appreciation was disturbed by a deepening sense of foreboding – that she was beset by projections from her fans of dependency for problems that they needed to solve themselves through a surrender to love. This became pointed in the new year, so I booked a ticket out to Florida for the Strawberry Festival concert in February. The flight was already fairly full, so I ended up booking a middle seat/

Fully expecting that I was going to arrive with back spasms, I boarded and found myself seated between two women. As departure time neared, the younger one, seated to my right on the aisle, pointed out two empty seats across the aisle. She offered that she would move over if they were empty during taxi, but did that pre-emptively with the observation, “You understand that the universe is taking care of you.” This allowed me to move to the aisle and angle my legs under the middle seat. I landed without serious discomfort.

Still, I had a day to spend in Plant City before the concert. After visiting a local park/nature reserve, I drove down to the fairgrounds to buy a pass and wandered among the booths. Having tapped into the context, I want back to the hotel for lunch and to meditate.

The meditation led me directly into a heart of tender concern. I don’t know how to organize the visions. Images flowed in, reflecting the frustration of my intentions by other parties, compassion for the wounds I have suffered in past incarnations, and the hope of healing for all of Creation. These images evoked lyrics, many triggering deep psychic trauma, which I attempted to deflect to restore focus on the work to be done ahead.

We can get through just about anything so long as it has meaning. I need to put all that behind me.

But what was obvious was that I was being welcomed into a heart of beatific and authentic concern for my well-being.

Unable to rest, I went out for coffee and then returned to the fairgrounds, where I spent several hours enjoying the animation of the attendees. When the amphitheater opened, I entered early and made my way to the pit.

The concert was deeply gratifying. Live music always supports spiritual ministry among the audience. What surprised me was the freshness of the compositions. Lauren has built a concert band. Where the album releases convey intimacy, in performance they are collaborations of intense musical energy. I entered into the joy and was able to project healing with the themes became somber.

Given this primary intention, my engagement with Lauren was discontinuous. I tend to become teary during corporate healing, and she did introduce “You’re Going to Be Okay” to the set. But when I gazed directly into her face, trying to project support and devotion, she glanced away. The message was that she was looking into a pool of kindness that was going to overwhelm her.

I hung around the pit after the final number, waiting for the audience to dissipate. When I made my way into the shadows outside the gate, the crossing guard stared, slack jawed. I was in a luminous state.

I know that things didn’t resolve themselves as she wished. Once I have established an intention, however, diverting my course is almost impossible. I had come as her servant, expecting nothing. I set out for the airport at four AM for the return flight.

The next day, I left on her fan site a summary of those intentions, along with my gratitude for the visions she had offered. In the process of reaching her, Lauren demonstrated her capacity to assert authority.

Thus we begin.

I took the first of my five necessary day trips out to Santa Barbara today. “Necessary” in the fiduciary sense because I bought a ten-trip Amtrak Surfliner pass that expires on September 6. “Necessary” in the personal sense because the move out to Port Hueneme has separated me from the dance communities down in the Santa Monica area, and if I don’t dance, I think that I’ll curl up and die. The nearest substitute is the Santa Barbara Dance Tribe that meets at the Gustafson Dance Center on Sundays from 11-1.

I thought that the weather was auspicious for the 4-mile pedal up to the Oxnard train station, but the fog burned off early, and my clothes were pretty damp by the time I pulled in to the station. Fortunately I had a number of shirt changes in my backpack, so the ride out to Santa Barbara wasn’t unpleasant.

Once in Santa Barbara, the sun was a little less harsh, but it was humid. The three mile ride out to the dance studio was up a slight slope, as well as going under the freeway in a couple of places. The footpath routing algorithm in Microsoft Maps also left me in a cul-de-sac at the bottom of a hill that carried the road over the freeway. Again, I was soaked with perspiration when I arrived.

The celebration was really nice. Two moments in particular stand out. The most energetic of the women danced joyfully with a number of men, and then settled to the floor to rest. I had been moving through the gathering, and found myself in her vicinity when the DJ put on Etta Jame’s At Last. The lady had settled on her shins, hands swaying gently in the air over her head. I swooped past her in a low lunge and then spun around behind her, and the air around us burst with energy. She accepted my attention as I filled the air around her for the next two minutes, smiling at me once or twice, but she didn’t get up on her feet.

The second was towards the end, when many of the dancers had settled to the floor to ground the energy we had raised. I found myself scooping the air on one side, reaching up and out to gather in the messages that were waiting for me, curling my arm over my head before pulling them into my heart, and then doing the same on the other side. It wasn’t easy – just a lot of sorrow. When I had taken as much as I could bear, I lifted my hands to the heavens, and felt something enter from above, providing my heart with the responsive energies it needed.

I couldn’t schedule the bike passage for the mid-afternoon train back to Ventura, which left me six hours to fill until the 6:59. So after the dance I pedaled back down to the train station (fortunately mostly downhill this time). After checking my backpack, I backtracked to the Neighborhood Bar and Grill, where I had a great veggie burger and honey wheat ale.

The train station is only a few blocks from the beach, so I rode down to the shore and took the bike path up the strand. Santa Barbara has an art walk every Sunday. A lot of what I saw was touristy, until I came to Yin Ping Zheng’s booth. The work was classic Chinese brush calligraphy and painting on rice paper. On the edge of the booth, a typical vertical nature study caught my eye: a cluster of starkly colored peonies – deep red, yellow and pure white demanding the eye’s attention – anchored the bottom of the strip. They were subdued from above by a delicate pink cluster, annotated in the classic Asian style. The obvious contrast of masculine and feminine energy also seemed to suggest the contrast between Western and Asian art.

I ended up buying this piece and another that also displayed Zheng’s unique sensibilities. The second is a panel of ungrounded bamboo poles, rendered in rich green but punctuated by black-fingered leaves with white speckles (snow?). Two sprays of pink blossoms enter the frame in the upper left, cupping a featureless moon set against a pale ground of blue-white snow. I noticed the calligraphy on the right side, and Zheng shared that it was the last line of a poem that offered the moon’s witness and solace to two lovers sundered by distance.

Zheng is devoted to his art, and as we waited for BofA to pre-authorize the purchase, he talked about his training, confirming my sense that he was attempting to introduce strong Western color to add tension and dimension to the introspective style of Chinese rice paper painting. He also kept offering concerns that his devotion was not earning him material rewards – a point that resonates deeply with me.

It’s my birthday tomorrow, which is my way of justifying the extravagance of the purchase. But I did so with honest pleasure, and was gratified that Zheng accepted my stumbled expression:

Thank-you so much for being here today. It added a special aspect to my day to have had the opportunity to buy two such beautiful works of art.

Zheng has a blog out here at WordPress, but it only has one photo. I’m too tired tonight to unroll the pieces to take pictures of them, but I’ll get some details posted on Tuesday night.