I don’t remember the first time I felt like a reject but I do know when it happened for the first time: it was 11:59 in the morning on February 9th, 1972 in Memphis, Tennessee. I was ejected or rejected from my mothers womb just a month into the third trimester. My wombmate followed right behind me at 12:02 in the afternoon. “Boy A” and “Boy B” we were, there at first. There is a picture of us two from that day, there me with my eyes violently shut and my fists clinched so tight and face so anguished in tears. It’s clear I wanted back in the primordial maternal liquid warmth of the darkness. I was not ready for the light, not by a long shot. My mother has told me we didn’t stop crying for months on end that I never smiled. Except when I had gas, she said, so at least I wasn’t completely humorless.

We all come into this world, as rejects, in that sense. We are all ejected from one home into a new, secondary home and maybe that primal or original fear of rejection stems from that? We all carry the fear of rejection deep inside us in the cavernous darkness of our unconscious and it probably does originate from birth. It’s our birthright, or rather our birthwrong. Birth is the birth of our journey home. And what a literal, metaphoric, mythic, mystic, mind-bending, gut wrenching, heart-breaking, soul sucking, life-affirming, chaotic and circuitous, and ultimately grace inducing experience, such is life. For me. For you. For everyone. Just a bunch of rejects, the whole lot of us, scared to life by rejection and ever-fearful of that chorus playing itself out over and over, again and again.

I know that song well. Maybe too well. I was sixteen when I was ejected from my mom’s home and seventeen when I was literally evicted from my dad’s home. There, staring at all my shit splayed out on the street, it was undiluted homeless humiliation. I got so used to rejection I would reject someone else before they had the chance to reject me. That’s a hard-hearted way to live but a natural way to cope.

My journey to a state of “home” has been one of softening that ole heart turned to stone and the quest has taken me home and then away from home again and again through adventures and challenges that are as archetypal as any fairy-tail or folklore. Tragic death, divorce, disgrace, eviction, crazy circus carnies, con artists, mental hopsitals, jail, hurricanes, pirates, caves, treasure are all literal elements in my story to find my way home. The real story has been the eternal internal parallel quest to find home and that involved a “re-birth” from a womb of a nuther sort.

My true quest was a sacrificial act: I had to sacrifice my “self” to my self. I, like all of us, had to grow up! I had to go through the ritual of adolescence and learn to be accountable for the hard truths of life: that it’s painful and often not fair. I had to leggo of my ego. I had to surrender. I let go with the flow and that’s when my life became truly mythic. I softened my heart and became a caregiver and returned home, to the womb! It was that feeling! It was the same primordial, maternal, liquid warmth of love and it was coming from me! I had found my way back home! And that opened my heart to love and marriage and becoming a father and then I literally discovered my purpose in life professionally in the most womb-like place on earth: a cave!

In 2007 I became a father and experienced a transcendent moment in time and it forever altered, like it does for so many, my relationship to love. The next year in 2008 I entered a cave for the first time in my life and had an epiphany: that a cave is the ideal space for a concert venue. Music. Art. Caves. Caves are the place where humanity first birthed art. Art! Art itself is a reaction to the fear of rejection. The original art mostly depicts the hunt and the graceful and reverent beauty that these animals are rendered leave little doubt of the respect and awe that was felt towards the ritual of the ultimate rejection: the sacrifice of one animal to death so that another could live. It is hypothesized that our archaic ancestors, in grief and sadness and shame of their need to literally consume other creatures, created art as a ritual to the spiritual. Their art achieved art’s highest ideal: to mythologize, that is to summon truth through metaphor. Cave paintings were usually produced deep in the cave, far beyond where anyone would live or seek shelter. This suggest a ritual role and it is also speculated that cave art was used in initiation ceremonies for cave boys to become cave men and join the hunt. Art as initiation. Art as a guide through adolescence, art to light the way from the hero’s journey we all take from dependance to independence. Art as a map to freedom! Producing concerts and television shows from the cave became my purpose in life and that led to other music productions and partnerships in a barn and everything seemed, well, like home!

And then I became a reject again. I was rejected from my marriage and ejected from my home, where I lived with my two young children. And then, we were evicted from the cave and the barn too. It was that time again, another premature ejection from multiple homes on multiple levels, all essentially at the same time. I guess I had more to discover, more to learn, more to grow. Homeless again, I resolved to journey deeper and deeper into the cave of my own fear and, well…you’ll have to read the story to see how it ends but I can say, I feel at home now, more than ever. I’ll also say it did involve opening my eyes wide to the stark and blinding reality of burning light that sears the soul, of rejection and the fear of rejection, it involves unclenching your fists and it involves smiling, even when your not gassy. Home is a space where you do not react to the fear of rejection. You can’t be rejected anymore, your home. There is no fear to react to anymore. Your home-free, literally. That’s the place we all want to be.