I was working overtime in Sedona, self-purging, trying to scrape the bullshit off my soul with nothing but rocks and sweat. People had started calling me Tony Soprano, not because I killed anyone, but because I carried that alpha stink. You know it when you have it—when you walk into a bar and the real men, the old bulls, the other elephants, all look up. They don’t mean to, they just do. It’s primitive. It’s wired into the bones. I’d sit there, drink in hand, scan the room, and without even thinking, size up the biggest sonofabitch there, wondering if I could take him. Wondering if I could break his jaw before he broke mine. I’m not bullshitting you. That’s how it was. That was the sickness.
It wasn’t just bravado. It was money. It was confidence. It was a suit of armor I’d built out of the wrong things—capital, cockiness, cruelty—the shit that shines just long enough to attract the worst kinds of people. And they came. Parasites. Plastic. One after another, riding the energy until they bled me dry and moved on to the next bright, stupid thing. I don’t attract them anymore, thank Christ. But back then, I was swimming in it, and somewhere deep inside, I knew if I didn’t get out, it was going to rot me from the inside out.
So I started purging. The old-timers, the mystics, the kooks, they told me to go to the female vortex at Cathedral Rock. Go sit with it, they said. Go get your ass handed to you by something bigger than your ego. So I did. Hiked up past the cathedral, up through the bedrock trails, up to where the air thinned and the tourists turned back. You get to a plateau where the trees bend to the sky like they’re praying, where drum circles pound at the edges of reality, and you can feel something shift inside your gut.
Then comes the real climb. Most people don’t make it. It’s not some Disneyland trail. It’s loose gravel, tight passages, big goddamn rocks you have to pull yourself over using your feet, your arms, your anger. You jam your toes into cracks in the sandstone, find leverage where there shouldn’t be any, and you climb. Higher. Hotter. More alone with every step. Somewhere about halfway up, there’s an old juniper tree, bent and twisted like an old man who still has something to say. That tree, I swear, is my grandfather. There’s a warmth to it, a sadness too. Every time I passed it, I felt him watching me, forgiving me, loving me in a way I hadn’t earned.
Past that, another thirty yards up, you reach the saddle. To the right, there’s a cliff. That’s where I’d go. Where the tourists cluster like pigeons but none of them really see it. Below, there’s a scar in the Earth—raw, metallic rock exposed, different than the rest, glowing under the sun like a wound that never healed. That’s the female vortex. That’s where I meditated. That’s where I tried to carve the Tony Soprano out of my skin and let something real take its place.
I know how it sounds. Trust me, I hated myself for believing any of it. But I kept going. Winter. Spring. Fall. One summer, too hot for common sense, the rangers had signs posted everywhere telling idiots like me to stay the hell off the mountain. I didn’t listen. No water. Just a gallon of cheap wine swinging from my pack. Hiked up, sweated out everything poisonous in me, sat on that ledge, cracked open the wine, and drank until my brain stopped lying to me.
And there, alone, unbothered, the desert breathing slow all around me, I meditated. I cried. I forgave. I saw life. I asked to change. Not just to patch up the broken heart, but to soften the whole damn machine I had turned myself into. To stop armoring up against the world and start letting something in—something female, something real.
Coming down that day, wobbling from heat and too much wine, I hit the last plateau before the hard technical part. I was alone. The world was still. Then I saw it—the monsoons coming in, one storm from the left, one from the right, black and swollen and angry. They collided right above me. No bullshit. You could feel the electricity lift your hair straight off your skin. Lightning punching the earth. Thunder rolling like war drums. The air so thick you could cut it with your teeth. I just stood there on the rock, drunk and trembling and small. No rain. Just fury. Just beauty. Just something bigger than the tiny plastic world I’d been choking in.
And for the first time—maybe in my whole goddamn life—I felt Bliss. Real Bliss. Not pleasure. Not distraction. Not conquest. Bliss. The kind that empties you out and fills you back up with something clean. The kind that doesn’t ask anything of you. The kind you don’t deserve but get anyway, like mercy.
I stood there crying, tears running down my face, watching the storms pass over me, feeling every miserable, wonderful thing all at once. For a moment, I wasn’t Tony Soprano. I wasn’t a broken husband. I wasn’t a paycheck or a problem to be solved. I was just a man, standing still, finally feeling everything he spent years trying to kill off.
You don’t know heaven until you’ve felt Bliss.
And I found mine, that day, on a rock in Sedona, drunk, broken, alone—and more alive than I had ever been.
