“It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.
—Theodore Roosevelt
It’s an old adage that hard, physical labor greatly improves the character of a man. I also believe the same is true of education, and when you combine the two, very powerful things usually happen. When you use your own labor to earn a living, whether you build something, or perhaps tear something down, work on a boat, assemble cars, mill lumber, drive a tractor, load a truck, deliver a baby, put out fires, keep the peace—all of that bending, stooping, lifting, and using the muscles in your limbs really does something to the body, which in turn does something to your mind. That’s why men who have never worked an honest day in their life are usually lacking a certain kind of character that I would call grit. They’re a bit soft on the inside, and they are quick to attack those who actually work for a living. These spineless types often find their way into politics, where they have a unique propensity to excel. The rest of us know how to work.
This doesn’t mean that once you move from physical labor to some other kind of work, like a desk job for example, that you have lost your grit. Not at all, because once you have done the real work, the down in the dirt work, then you’ll always remember it in the cellular memory of your body.
When I was growing up in rural Washington State, my first jobs were what you would typically expect from a youth—mowing lawns, weeding gardens, chopping firewood, and from time, doing fence work for a local rancher, which entailed digging and setting fence posts, stringing barbed wire, and tightening it all together. These jobs paid only a few dollars an hour, but it taught me enough that I always had my own money as a kid, throughout high school and college, and generally for most of my life.
When I was in high school, I worked as a busboy at a local hotel, serving demanding and often rude customers, hauling away mountains of dirty dishes, setting tables, and working enormously long shifts that were mostly on school nights, and often on the weekends as well. I can’t say that I loved the job, but I didn’t hate it either, and some of it was rather exciting (because hotels have a scandal every now and then). What it did give me was a deep sense of people’s character—every waiter will tell you this, and I also got a healthy dose of the classic work ethic.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s I was working for a small construction company that remodeled houses, which often required excavating and pouring concrete foundations, which is exceptionally hard and dirty work. I was the foreman of a small crew of Mexican laborers and we all worked very well together. I respected those hard working guys and I learned my first Spanish from them, but the job didn’t pay much, and as a result, I was occasionally late on my rent and I had very little to live on. However, it did allow my bands to rehearse and perform at night and on the weekends.
I did this kind of work until my first successful band, the Screaming Trees, started to earn enough money to where I could be a full-time musician. This is a different kind of physical labor, because I earned more calluses and blisters as a drummer than I ever did pouring concrete. Unfortunately, by around 2000, I came to the realization that I needed to take a break from music completely, at least from the standpoint of being a rock musician. I had been doing Zen for a few years at that point and I was really quite over the drama of rock & roll—it had become a bloated and ridiculous musical form, losing all the lean swagger it had in the early 1990s. I was prepared to start from scratch in a new profession even if I was 33 years old, which was still young, but a bit older than most people starting an entirely new career. Thus, I decided to rent my house in Seattle, give up my apartment in Los Angeles, and I made the move to New Mexico to reinvent myself.
Why New Mexico? Well, I had made some great friends there over the years who were martial artists, mystics, and fine artists, and they influenced me to take on a more spiritual path, which I was very inclined to do. I left Los Angeles in the early morning, driving my U-Haul east across the Mojave Desert, through the Navajo nation in Arizona, and I arrived the same evening at my small rental house in Taos, nestled in the foothills of the Sangre De Christo Mountains of northern New Mexico.
Taos is a legendary Wild West town where several historic people and events took place. It’s famous for its numerous outlaws and shoot-em-ups in the 1800s, and the ghosts of slain gunfighters seem to lurk in the shadows of its historic plaza. This is where the writer D.H. Lawrence settled, Georgia O’Keefe made her exquisite paintings, and Carl Jung once visited the Native American Pueblos there. The film “Easy Rider” was filmed nearby, as was a 1970s TV show called “McCloud,” starring Dennis Weaver. Mr. Weaver actually lived in Taos, and in the TV show his character was a Taoseño Deputy Marshall who is reassigned to New York City in the classic “cowboy goes to the big city” plot line. In my case, I was a former rock musician who was now living in a town much smaller than the one I grew up in, with a diminishing income to match.
It is the landscape of Taos that holds you, and that’s why so many artists, writers, and musicians are drawn there in the first place—it certainly ain’t for the economy, that’s for damn sure. You move to New Mexico for the beauty of the landscape and the people, but you can’t rely on its regional economy, which is fairly non-existent. Somehow and rather miraculously however, Taos had reinvented itself as a high- end ski resort—but then I was never a skier.
However, I did have a great love for Kung Fu and thus I began my studies of a mysterious form known as Hsing Yi, one of the “3 Sisters” of the internal styles. I studied for years with the great martial artist and Taoist, Elliot Haas, who himself had studied with the great Yamada Sensei in Japan in the 1970s, Yamada being one of the original students of Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido and considered to be the greatest martial artist of the 20th century.
I ended up spending 8 of the hardest years of my life in New Mexico, yet they were also some of the most beautiful and spiritually transcendent years of my life. It was, as the poet Robert Bly would say, “the katabasis of my life,” my personal “ash work,” my descent into the most difficult and humbling times of my life. I went there as a rock musician trying to reinvent myself in a lonely town full of ghosts, desperate people, and a road system with the worst potholes in the continental US. I left, 8 years later, with a master’s degree and some of the finest musical and visual art I didn’t even think I was capable of.
It started with my social life, which was far more interesting than anything I had ever experienced before, and I met some incredibly interesting people who were also “hiding out in Taos.” I met the chief flight surgeon of the Apollo moon missions, a CIA operative, an FBI agent turned shaman, and some actual Native American shamans. There were always more artists around than regular folks, and more than a few shady characters who I’m sure were not using their real identities. Again, it was the legendary landscape of New Mexico and the people who captured my heart and held me captive for those 8 years, which felt like an entire lifetime.
When I first arrived, I had a chunk of money saved up to buffer me against that first year of setting up life in a new state. By the second year I had started taking classes at the University Of New Mexico Taos campus, racking up credits to complete my long overdue bachelor’s degree, which I had abandoned 15 years earlier. I was also trying to build a recording studio in an old adobe house that I had purchased, all while trying to record my first solo album. All of it came to a rather disastrous end right on the eve of the Great Recession, because those kinds of economic tsunamis always hit the small towns first. I had finally run out of money, lost the house, and my attempt at building a recording studio in a small, remote town was just about the worst financial mistake I’d ever made in my life.
However, and simultaneous to all of this, I did finish my bachelor’s degree about 3 months after I lost my house, and the only good thing that happened that entire year was being accepted into the university’s esteemed PhD program for anthropology. My tuition was reasonable, but still unaffordable on top of my living expenses. I realized that I needed to find a job, because even with a newly minted bachelor’s degree, there was a recession looming and there just weren’t many jobs in New Mexico that wanted to hire a former rock musician with an anthropology degree. I knew I had to knuckle down and work, just as I had in those early Seattle years.
“What happened to all your royalties?” a prospective employer asked me. “Yes, I still have some minimal royalties coming in from my old bands,” I explained, “but being on a major label a long time ago doesn’t mean any real money today.” I was a rare example of someone who actually did earn royalties, but it certainly wasn’t enough to live on and pay for graduate school. I would have had to live in a tool shed to survive on that kind of income stream. What I needed was a job that paid real money, on a regular basis, and preferably in cash.
One of those jobs came in the form of a jazz trio that played every Friday night at a European-style restaurant that was built in the elegantly rustic rooms of an old Spanish hacienda. I became the new drummer in the Mary Bruscini Trio, which paid exactly $100 every Friday night (not counting tips). We also got free dinner and a pretty fun way to spend a Friday night in a town where not much else was going on. I always wore a suit, we played the jazz I loved as a youth, and most of the artists and town folk would come to listen, including the occasional movie star who happened to be in town for a holiday. Most of you reading this know how hard it is to make $100 doing anything, and that extra $100 a week made all the difference in my life.
I had moved into an artist loft in Santa Fe, which was halfway between Taos and Albuquerque, and that allowed me to drive an hour south to Albuquerque twice a week to attend my graduate seminars. Then on Fridays, I would drive an hour north to Taos to make my Friday night jazz gig at the hacienda. I still needed a second job, though.
That job came from my comparative religion professor at UNM, Barnard Voorhees, who had been a pararescueman in the Special Forces and had recently started his own tiling business. Well, it wasn’t really a business because he didn’t have a business license (no one in that town did). Barney had managed to get some large tiling contracts, which required a second man to help with the layout, setting, and grouting. In New Mexico (and I surmise this is the case in most desert towns), people do not use carpet in their homes because of all the sand that blows inside. Instead, they put tile in almost every room, and always in the kitchens and bathrooms. Tiling a New Mexico house is like tiling a small grocery store—it takes days and sometimes weeks.
Most of these tile jobs came from Eric Larson, a retired Army Ranger captain who had served extensively in Vietnam and was now a real estate agent and developer. Or as he fondly referred to it—“dirt pimping.” Eric became a kind of mentor to me, as did Elliot and Barney, because their example of intense focus really resonated with me, a young Zenist who was just learning how to apply that skill to my own life.
After my first day of lifting and setting what seemed like a literal ton of tile, much of it spent on my hands and knees, I could barely walk the following day. I had done hard work, but that was years ago, and tile work was definitely the hardest physical job I had ever experienced. Over the months and years my body grew like a bodybuilder and I developed huge Popeye arms. There was also something incredibly rewarding about designing a beautiful layout, spreading the adhesive, setting each piece of tile, and then a few days later, spreading the grout, which would frame the final beauty of an entire house decorated in handmade tile.
Thus began my 5 years as a student by day, and a tile setter/jazz musician by night. During the academic breaks, I would stay at Barney’s house in Taos and we’d work on tile jobs nonstop until we finished the contract. After doing that kind of hard labor, there was something rather magical about attending my graduate seminars, where I would listen to brilliant professors talk about the great thinkers and writers of the 20th century. When I wasn’t in class, setting tile, or playing jazz, I was usually writing lengthy research papers about various musical cultures around the world. I would occasionally take breaks to swim in the university pool, swimming being one of my favorite things, and I joined a regular meditation group at the Albuquerque Zen Center, where I also took my first Zen painting classes, an art form that totally blew my mind open.
The most amazing thing that happened, however, is that despite my furiously busy schedule and very little free time, I somehow managed to write and record 3 albums worth of music, which would become my first 3 solo albums: “The Painted Desert” (2004), “Earthspeaker” (2006), “Zenga” (2009). In addition to recording those albums in Taos and Santa Fe, I also produced an album in the Peruvian Amazon for the Shipibo Shamans, an indigenous tribe that I worked with for my master’s degree. Somehow, and despite my best efforts to leave music behind, it found me again, and forced me to evolve into a very different kind of musician—a musician who could embrace every kind of music.
New Mexico—the land of enchantment (or entrapment, as the locals fondly refer to it) taught me how to use both my body and my mind, how to write stories, how to make my own albums, and most importantly how to think critically and objectively, which is what higher education is all about.
Although I didn’t complete my PhD, I headed back to Seattle on the same day that I finished my last official class. I had already moved all of my musical instruments back to Seattle during the Thanksgiving break, but I kept enough clothes in a duffle bag to finish out the semester in Albuquerque, where I was living in a small motel run by a family of Romanian jazz enthusiasts—a story in itself, but not for here.
I departed New Mexico in December of 2008, driving my Ford F-150 straight into the sunrise, making it back to Seattle the following night. A few weeks later Barack Obama was sworn in as the new president of the United States, and my master’s diploma arrived shortly after that. After 5 years of physical labor and intense studying for my BA and MA degrees, I just wanted to be a full-time musician again, but this time it would be different—and it was.
When I look back at my odyssey in New Mexico, there was one day in particular I’ll never forget, and it was perhaps the single most important day that encapsulated my entire experience in that remote desert sanctuary. It was about a year before I finished school and I was doing another tile job with Barney. We were working on our hands and knees and I made the comment that my life was quite funny, how I had gone from being a rock musician, to returning to school and becoming a tile setter/jazz musician/anthropologist. He just looked at me and said with a wry smile:
“And as he toiled away on his hands and knees, all of the arrogance was finally burned out of him.”