S5E11: Grazing with Camels - Eric Trules: Performance Artist | Podcaster | Traveler

What is there awaiting travelers in the desert? What is there out in nature, waiting to reconnect with man? Eric Trules has discovered it, he thinks. That nothingness that means something: a nomadic way of life, a connection to nature, a cooperation with the land, a lack of civilization that means an increase in humanity. Eric Trules has been a professional in the performing, literary, and filmic arts for almost five decades. He’s worked as a dancer, in the theater, as an actor, and even as a clown. In his life outside of his work, he takes what he’s learned in his decades of performance and applies it to his thinking about travel. Trules’ show, “e-travels with e. trules,” contains musical scores, sound effects, and everything in between, and his magnificent voice telling his amazing stories. Living in Echo Park, California, and traveling all over the world, Eric has learned how to make others laugh, how to help life happen, how to parent his nephew, how to make travel his medium, how to make oneself vulnerable, and how to connect people in challenging times reconnect again. Life awaits you in the desert, if you are brave enough to seek it on your camel safari.

It’s Israel, in May of 1999, and travel is easy. As a result, Eric has the idea to go out into the Sinai Desert, the home of camels, Moses, and the Red Sea, and have the sun bake the life out of him and suck the logic out. The best of Israel comes to the Sinai Desert to escape their day-to-day lives, because the sun, the earth, and the sea will slow you down until time is lost and you have no desire to return to civilization. He went to a camp on the Red Sea and adventured for himself, feeling the desire to walk in the steps of Moses and Joshua and to sleep under an endless starry sky. First, he needed to get enough supplies and camels to make the journey he wanted to take both possible and worthwhile. He composed a team of people willing to uncivilize themselves in the desert, and together they took a camel safari.

They followed the same path that the Jews followed all those years ago, witnessing the same journey they did, navigating broad spaces, narrow canyons, and the changing day as the sun shifted. Eric found an oasis here. He realized that there is nothing in the desert: no politics, no borders, no religions. There is only a nomadic, respectful, dependent way of life, which requires a cooperation with the land and which has existed for thousands of years. In the desert, modern civilization and its instant conveniences disappear. In the desert, you realize how distant we have grown from nature, and how much we have lost touch with ourselves in the process, and with the very things that make us human.

You gain independence from nature in civilization, disrespecting and ignoring mother nature and ourselves in doing so, and you lose your sense of awe in the power of the natural universe. Eric experienced a rare perfect moment under the orange desert moon. He remembered there was bloodshed in this land now, and that only hatred and history causes problems like these, nothing inherent.

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