To The Sweet Soul We Met at the First Eaux Claires

I carry your letter with me all over the place. I’ve brought it with me 3,000 miles to your hometown.

You told me that finding XXXXXXXX, XXXXX, and I at Eaux Claires was finding belonging for the first time. I know precisely what you mean. It was a cloud forming. I came to the festival with a caravan of friends from high school and left with a found family.

I hope you know belonging in these present days, now that those moments seem so long ago. Nonetheless, they will be cherished forever.

I’m sure we will talk about this all shortly, but I want to write it down anyway.

In your letter you called Eaux Claires your first big spiritual awakening. That’s so very beautiful and I hope the second one inspired another awakening and perhaps more afterwards.

Do you remember after the second Eaux Claires, when we went to Afton State Park and I broke down crying?

You had given me acid the night before and I saw a meteor shower above Whispering Pines. It was in the last hours of this trip that I real ized the fleeting nature of our lives, our friendships, our eyes. It became so vividly clear that we’re incapable of maintaining ourselves. We can barely hold ourselves together without letting some piece of ourselves go at every encounter. I felt this in a truly visceral way. I felt our little family breaking and that it, too, might be over soon.

One year later the rift had cracked and it all felt so broken to me. XXXXX and I didn’t even know you were coming to the festival. Later on I saw photos of you in the water at Afton State Park, this time next to a stranger. My heart swelled for you like that great, flooded river on whose shores I grew up on, but I drowned in sadness of how quickly we were washed away.

I haven’t really heard what it was like for you to be in the festival in the way you were. It was something my eyes never got to see, a crowd I was intentionally kept out of. A barrier formed in a place where barriers were meant to be obliterated. In the wonderful river of Eaux Claires, I found myself looking up at a levee with people I love standing overhead.

It’s a clumsy thing, this being human. So impossibly tasked with understanding each other and ourselves. I know you’ve dedicated yourself to the practice of attuning your awareness to life’s interconnected nature, but how we stumble and trip over the roots.

Good God I hope we reach the ocean in one piece.

Love,

your brother,

Roman

P.S. I know this isn’t the end. I know that we are now connected but oh how far apart we all are.

It was a real blessing to have your album with me during my travels. It was a companion to me on many drives through redwoods and long bus rides through places I didn’t recognize. In a way it brought me back to those beautiful green fields full of love and music.

Hearing the expression of your own journey with all the contemplative consideration that went into it’s construction reminded me that all this searching is truly not for nothing. We’re all just these lonesome souls who know what’s like to be brought together by something that calls to each of us. Just because we’re dispersed again doesn’t mean that we won’t have another convergence with the whole accumulation flowing amongst each other.