It’s funny, changing my outsides, it makes me realize how similar we are on the inside. I am the same person I always was, but, as I change, the world changes around me, for me, in a way, to reconcile how I seem.

New mental doors are opening as fast as others are closing.

One of those new doors is how similar we all are, really. More than ever, I see our bodies as little meat suits we pilot from the inside, out from which our real selves look. It has given me empathy to so much, considerations of race, of sex, of beauty. This world has been so concerned with bodies for so long, that maybe we’ve lost sight of the capital-T Truth:

We all love and want to be loved, the end.

I am looking for a new way of helping people along.

Anyways, this sentiment made it into much of what we are recording up here in this little, conservative mountain town.

These aren’t done yet, but, hopefully, with help from these journals, you can see where these songs are coming from. There is so much to do, and while so much more has happened here so far (and so much more will, still), I think I am going to end my yammering here on a big brown porch with a woodpecker hammering at the pine in front of me. It smells like pine cones and sap, and there is a wild horse on the hillside.

I’d like to stay here for just a while longer in this moment, somewhere on the upswing of a much longer and wilder life than the one I’ve been living so far.