The Heroes Journey!

I seemed to be squeezing every drop of juice out of the day. I had risen at 6am, gone for a run, made a super healthy smoothy, done an hour long meditation, and finished my morning routine by 8 o’clock! My mind felt as sharp as a Samurai's blade as I proceeded with 4 straight hours of piano practice, and then another 4 hours of writing. I could feel my skills improving, my mind enhancing my… dream… fading. I could feel…what could I feel? The illusion, shattering? No .. It was blackness, returning.   — — —  The dimness of ‘the Pit’ never so much as suggested that morning had come. Our flat was in a sunken recess of the building, down 3 flights of slowly-rotting wooden stairs, just out of the suns reach. The gaping hole right outside our front door, dropping to the depths of the building - and sealed only by a chicken wire cage - wasn’t the only reason we had named our flat ‘The Pit’. In other places I have lived, the sunshine would often try to burst through the curt

Lugging my keyboard, fold-up chair, keyboard stand and amplifier out of the Pit and down the narrow staircase was a brutal test of endurance. The only way to my car was down a bony metal stairwell of 3 flights - I felt like a lumbering pack-mule as I began shuffling down, certainly as awkwardly as a pack-mule. Spilling out onto the street, I re-adjusted my luggage, and marched onward to the Emerald Wagon.  The time had come to do my first busking mission to Queenstown! Busking in Queenstown was to be my primary source of income throughout 2018. It was the centrepiece of my ‘master plan’, the heart of what would keep this lifestyle I was building alive. After loading my gear into the Emerald Wagon, I hopped in behind the wheel, and headed on my way. I can’t waste any more of this day, I thought, appreciating the weather’s warm splendour which had made the Emerald Wagon like an oven. The perfect day for busking. And so, out of Dunedin I went, speeding down the highway in

The sign jutting out onto the street did indeed state that ‘The Worlds Longest Grand Piano’ was there. I still didn’t believe it. The longest grand piano… on Earth?? Here in Dunedin? Ridiculous… That’s ridiculous. I headed up the narrow driveway, just to the side of a big old building that is surely haunted, and went to knock on the big garage door. After a few moments, a friendly fellow opened it and welcomed me in. He introduced himself as Adrian, and I would have responded if I wasn’t completely gobsmacked by what stretched out before me. The Worlds Longest Grand Piano, like something out of a fictional story, lay there in the centre of the room. A majestic sight, to the say the least. I glanced at Adrian, astonishment probably ripe on my face. “You built this?” Adrian chuckled. “Yep, I built it.” How the heck..? How does one even start building a piano, not to mention the world’s LONGEST!? “Can I .. play it?” I asked. “Yeah go for it!” He said. I sat before it - the Alexa

I always wanted to feel like I was undertaking some kind of quest. Perhaps this was something I adopted from the video games I spent my childhood playing. In the virtual world, a good quest made things more adventurous and exciting, and gave me purpose. Why couldn’t real life be like that? Was there, perhaps, a grand Quest that we were here to undertake? Something we were always born to do?   I thought so.  I had found my Quest, somewhere in the Mountains of Queenstown, in late 2017. It took much journalling, contemplation, and meditation to reveal it - dredging through layers of myself, like panning for gold in a muddy river - but I had found it. I was heading down the career path of Hospitality Management at the time. But with my new gleaming insight, continuing the road of Hospitality Management would be blatantly wasting my time. I had a Quest to fulfil, and investing my time into anything that wasn’t the pursuit of that Quest seemed foolish.  Time was running out.

Hello! Welcome back to The Heroes Journey! My ‘blog’…? Not really a blog anymore.  A lot has changed. 19 months have passed since I published the introduction to ‘The Heroes Journey’. It was on the 21st of March 2018 that I completed that piece of writing and clicked ‘publish’ with trembling fingers. That was shortly after settling into Dunedin following the New Zealand Sheep tour. I could never have anticipated what the blog would become, how it would evolve, and what I would learn from it. I had a vision for it, which was to write about some interesting experiences from my own life journey as a way to discuss this concept of ‘The Heroes Journey’. What I didn’t expect was to end up genuinely writing and telling my whole life story from the moment I left home on my adventure to Queenstown in 2016. I tried my hardest to make it at least half interesting, not a bore, and not too extensive or detailed. …52 stories later… Yeah… I apologise about that. That’s a

The lounge of my Auckland family home, two nights before SHEEP’s first show of the tour… She was pulling the curtains across the windows when I snuck into the lounge, not noticing as I took a seat on the couch and sunk into the cushions. My fingers began interweaving - I was curious. “Hey mum,” I said, startling her. “I was wondering something.” She tugged the last curtain over the window, and came to sit on the other couch. “What’s that, honey?”  “Well, I wanted to know why you and Dad chose ‘St Clair’ as my middle name.” I still didn’t know story behind it, and yet, three years had passed since I had decided that ‘Joshua St Clair’ was the perfect moniker I could have as an Artist - it just sounded right. Mum looked surprised. “I really loved the name St Clair,” she began, looking up at the corner of the room thoughtfully. “I was pregnant with you when we attended Olive Bottings funeral. She was your great grandmother. I remember sitting there, reading the funeral brochure, a