Sometime in 2010, I changed my name from "Pluto" to "Joe Cyrus". As many are aware, I saw my art as a meditation guided by divine will (and when off-the-mark, unfortunately steered by a human consciousness) with the intent of "awakening" the masses, myself included. As Joan Didion stated, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." With that being said, I hit a point after releasing Actually Happening with DMLH when I thought my next release, The Space Between Thoughts would be the album that finally broke my career. However, fall-outs with the Portland Hip-hop community, difficulties in my personal life, and general disinterest set-in and I became depressed. With that depression came a general feeling of dismay culminating in complete disregard for the artistic process, and a year went by where I felt like I had absolutely nothing left to say.
During that time I became more serious in my "professional life". I signed up to be a a child/adolescent treatment specialist at a local psychiatric residential treatment center for children (which shall remain nameless) and I regained--at least for a time--a sense of purpose and adventure in life. Other areas of my life began to open up. My girlfriend, Vanessa, bought me a bicycle and I began riding every day. I gave up smoking. I began rock climbing. I reconnected with a friend, Garth, whom I had met through Kung Fu and began immersing myself in primitive wilderness skill-building/tracking in order to help re-establish my connection with nature and embody the shamanistic themes running through my songs. But the inspiration still remained astray.
My grandfather, James E. Rudy, passed away in mid-2012, an event which seemed to be a culmination of the process I had undertaken the previous year in becoming a Reiki Master, and suddenly many connections began forming. This is where things began to get interesting.
"Pap" and I had really connected in his later years on the planet. One of our final moments together before I moved to Portland from the East Coast entailed me giving him an amethyst replica of a "Crystal Skull" found in Peru, supposedly an ancient relic connecting "the Gods" to people on Earth. On that particular occasion Pap and I discussed Native American spirituality, and he shared that while he was stationed in Anchorage, AK with the US Air Force he was in charge of "search and rescue" operations in the area. I asked him what that meant. He replied, "We're in the middle of the Arctic, Joe. What do you think we could possibly be recovering up there?" I shuttered. He continued, "One day we were out on a mission. Now, you have to understand that we are days, even weeks, away from civilization on these missions, so you can't just get medical attention when you need it. I happened to contract a cold and was in a state where I couldn't travel. So the Inuits, who were our guides on these trips, set-up an emergency sweat lodge for me. I spent two days on a vision quest in the lodge. And when I finished, I knew my 'power' animal." "What was it?" I asked, and before I could even finish the question we both said simultaneously, "Eagle." I knew it. Pap would later tell me that he meditated on the skull everyday (despite being an ordained Methodist minister) and found a connection to Orion through the skull.
Two years later Pap was on his deathbed, I was struggling to put any music together whatsoever, so I began working on visual art. It started with rudimentary, pixel pen strokes of animals on paper. But one day I drew this:
and I wasn't quite sure why. I spent some time thinking about it, and finally concluded with Vanessa's help that I should send it to Pap, as it seemed very connected to the journey of the afterlife, along with the Mayan skull in the painting under Pacal Votan's foot. Pap received it that week. We spoke on the phone Thursday, and he said he had gotten it, and "Thank you". We didn't discuss the message I had written on the back that said, "Take this with you on your journey so we can be together forever." He died on Saturday, and was buried with the picture that week.
I decided to look up the Mayan Astrology for 8/11/12, the day he passed, and to my astonishment the sign was BLUE PLANETARY EAGLE. Holy shit, I thought. That's quite a coincidence, considering we shared the Eagle as our "spirit animal". Since he passed later in the day, I decided to look up 8/12/12, as well, knowing that the soul doesn't just jump out of the body the second it's dead. YELLOW SPECTRAL WARRIOR aka MY MAYAN BIRTHDAY was the VERY NEXT DAY! That's a 1 in 260 chance that he would pass to the next realm on the day I entered this one, according to the Maya. I was floored.
A few days passed and I received a message from Garth, my friend with whom I do the wilderness skills training, and who had introduced me to a new way of life. He said he had been invited to a sweat lodge, and--though he needed permission from the elders for me to be there--he wanted to invite Vanessa and I. I finally agreed to go, and what transpired is nothing short of a miracle in my eyes.
When we got to the lodge I was immediately asked by the water pourer (or Shaman of the ceremony) to help tend the fire, an honor generally reserved for people of the Tribe. I was extremely surprised for having this bestowed upon me, and worked very hard to stack the wood for the ceremony. I must leave out many of the details to honor the sacredness of the ceremony, but I will comment that the water-pourer greatly emphasized the relationship between Grandfather (sky) and Grandson (man) throughout the ceremony, which immediately struck a cord in me due to the fact that "Pap" was still journeying according to ancient traditions. After the ceremony, an outspoken Native American Man began telling tales of Alaska and his upbringing in "Indian Country." I sat across from him and we began to communicate about ourselves. I quickly learned that he was a Native American born in Alaska around the time Pap was stationed there. I asked him where he was from. He said, "Anchorage." My jaw-dropped. "My Grandfather was the water-pourer running the sweat lodges up there in those days," the man continued to tell me. Either this was a coincidence of astronomical proportions or I was missing some unseen thread that linked everything together. After all, I could not bring myself to logically advocate that I had just been initiated into a sweat lodge ceremony the month my Grandfather died by the Grandson of the man who had initiated him 40 years before.
I left with a sense of wonderment, mystery, and concern. How had all this come to pass? What was thread linking this all together? The questions lingered; however, for the next few months things seemed to hover in a purgatory of unknowing, until events of the past week reinvigorated my NEED to KNOW.
