The Story of My Compass Rose

This is My Compass Rose. For now anyway. A work in progress I’m still figuring out.

The initial concept dates back to 2016, which is the year I legally changed my last name. That is a longer story for another time. I needed a new beginning. A kind that could only come by severing the reminder of other years. So when I signed my name on my proudest achievements, my artwork, it’s not immediately tainted by father’s estrangement. The consequences of being his son ripple on and so on. I needed a new kind of newborn. A legacy I was proud of. A sign that was in harmony with the inner transformation, healing, and peace I worked so hard to embrace and resolve. The generational curse is over. I am a son of the North.

Who is this that gives peace? Who is this that then steals it? I contract Lyme disease just a few months after. This throws me into a new war in my body for the next, going on five years. Everything I fought for through my twenties was stolen. Along with everything I loved, and everything I was capable of. I had to quit my job. I couldn’t draw, write, or walk down the block. I couldn’t hike with Levi, or have the energy to shower. Brain fog, joint pain, weakness and fatigue destroyed my ability to live. I was thrown into the deepest dark. Eaten alive by little monsters. I believe the worst is over, because I can’t imagine it getting worse. 

There’s a love story in there too. Another longer story for another time. She was the first sense of home I felt apart from feeling it in the mountains. She was a catalyst of cosmic change. She pulled me through the worst of my sickness, and gave me the strongest reason to live. And then died in a car accident.

Who is this that gives love? Who is this that then steals it?  

I’m not offering an answer. That search you must go on alone. As I have been.

I used to hold onto the perception that a newborn is born into life here. I see through different eyes now. I believe we’re born into death here, and we’ve forgotten who we are. A different kind of hell.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, I think something deep and native in us knows this. We’re looking for peace, for love, and for harmony but instead, so many of us are caught in loneliness, addictions, and disconnection. Our modern life experience is in constant resistance against our true human design. The pain of what we’re born into ripples on, and we collect trauma like sea shells.

I don’t think humans live in a natural state of conflict. I think we’re broken because we fit perfectly elsewhere, and not here. We’re designed to live, that’s why death hurts so damn much. We’re not meant to die. I don’t know about you, but I am homesick for a home I can’t return to.

This was the intention behind My Compass Rose. More of an emotional chart that signifies the obscure directions I feel while my magnetic North is off. Farsickness and homesickness. Sojourning against this long resistance. Happily adventuring while emotionally nomadic, and hating it. Fleeting beauty. Feeling love and grieving. Peace and pain simultaneously. It’s not a matter of cardinal direction, but a never linear navigation. A circular guidance around a mountain. A never arriving. A feeling of the essence of somewhere else and I can’t return there.