FORT CLARK

BigBendDojo.com Substack: Big Bend Dojo In 2025, I lost my precious wife, Martha, my soulmate, and it left a big hole in my world. In a way I died with her, and this project is my way of coming back to Life — Helping the Phoenix to Rise from the Ashes. Drawing upon whatever I have: Telling stories, singing songs, exploring, wondering who built the Pyramids and the potential of human consciousness, visiting the people and places of my home here in the Big Bend Region of Far West Texas. It's all fun for me, and helps me to find my higher vibrational light again. Out loud, in public, and imperfectly. You're welcome to watch me thru this window on my quest for higher self. The Five Stages of Grief include: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Believe me when I tell you I've been going through all of them to this day. But I heard recently that there was a Sixth Stage of Grief called: ALCHEMICAL CREATIVITY. And when you have sufficiently progressed down the path of the first five stages, and when you have truly accepted that this tragedy is your new reality.....like it or not.....a space begins to open up. You can choose to begin to live again and form a new vision of fun and growth and contribution to the world. Amazing things can happen if you dig deep within. Your other choice, of course, is to withdraw and hide from the world, or even just do yourself in. Sometimes I've felt like that too. One of my most favorite musicians is the legendary John Prine, and he wrote a song called Far From Me, about losing his girlfriend. I heard him say in an interview that losing a girl like that would either make you want to jump off a bridge....or it would make a songwriter out of you. And when he finally decided that he didn't want to jump off a bridge...which took a little while...he started writing songs and it changed his life. I can relate to that and I want some of that. Thanks Johnny for not jumping off that bridge!! That's an example of ALCHEMICAL CREATIVITY. The transmutation of one type of energy into another type, and transforming yourself in the process. We'll see how it goes, but whatever emotion comes out of this portal, it's gotta be better that what I've felt over the last year! Big Bend Dojo is my own personal classroom or playground, my attempt to find my own Way or "Tao." The word "Dojo" comes from Japanese Buddhist temple tradition — a place for seekers of all types of higher learning and self-mastery, not just in martial arts. The term "Mojo" originally derives from the African Kikongo word "Moyo" or Soul, It is the "life force," or "spiritual spark" in each of us. I want to find my Soul again. ​ I live in Alpine, but my home and my work as a tour guide and real estate broker stretches across this whole wild region of the Trans-Pecos in Far West Texas. From El Paso, to Presidio and Ojinaga, to Marfa and Lajitas. Terlingua to the mountains of Fort Davis...it is truly its own exotic country and culture. Thank God I live here! Come visit! With much Love, Stevie NOTE: Music and Lyrics are not our copyrighted material.