🎶 The Highest Self Can Drive the Bus
🌊✨ LIVE ON THE WILD SIDE ✨🐆 A vision of the future Leopard Lounge headquarters parked at sunset on the shores of Rockaway Beach in Pacifica, California. This psychedelic VW surf bus art piece represents freedom, creativity, healing, music, transformation, vanlife, intentional community, and the spirit of the beautiful weirdos finding each other again.
Inspired by surf culture, tiki art, road-trip Americana, transcendental meditation, and the dream of building safe creative spaces for artists, musicians, neurodiverse minds, and wanderers who still believe in beauty, storytelling, and human connection.
Sometimes the highest self really can drive the bus. 🐆 tretaylor.com
✨ The Beautiful Weirdos Are Finding Each Other✨
Written by Tré Taylor & Bleep the Tattoo
Category: Confessions • Dispatches from the Leopard Lounge Universe
This morning, sitting in my little office near Rockaway Beach — ocean air drifting in, civilization close enough but not breathing down my neck — I had one of those quiet gold-nugget moments.
I realized something.
For most of my life, I thought strength meant pushing harder. Forcing my way through exhaustion. Ignoring my body. Carrying too much for too long and convincing myself that was just what responsible adults did.
And to be fair, sometimes that strategy works… until it doesn’t.
Over time, I’ve learned there is a difference between effort and self-abandonment.
These days, whenever life becomes uncertain, whenever I catch myself overthinking, gripping too tightly, or trying to solve everything all at once, I’ve learned to pause instead of panic.
To breathe before reacting.
To let my body settle before my mind starts writing disaster movies.
And somewhere inside that pause, I reconnect with a steadier part of myself. The calmest, wisest, most grounded part. The part of me that sees farther than fear does.
I call that my highest self.
Not in some grand, mystical, floating-above-the-clouds kind of way. More like the deepest and most trustworthy part of my own consciousness. The part connected to intuition instead of urgency. Trust instead of control.
And strangely enough, life usually works better when I listen to her.
Not perfectly. Not magically. But more gracefully than when I try to force every outcome with white knuckles and a five-year plan.
I’m actually a very good planner. But life has taught me that there’s a difference between preparation and surrender.
Sometimes the breakthrough comes when we stop fighting ourselves long enough to hear our own inner wisdom again.
Maybe that’s part of being human.
We are complicated creatures carrying memories, instincts, wounds, gifts, contradictions, and nervous systems trying their best to navigate a very noisy world. Some people are naturally more sensitive to environments, emotions, or the unspoken energy in a room. From the outside that sensitivity can look guarded or distant. But from the inside, it can also be awareness. Pattern recognition. Intuition. A deeper attention to life.
That’s where meditation, music, art, astrology, humor, storytelling, and creativity helped save me.
Not because they made me perfect.
Because they taught me how to stop working against myself.
And eventually, how to feel at home inside myself again.
And this part here:
“The deepest, calmest part of my own consciousness.”
—that’s the bridge. Even an atheist can understand that. A neuroscientist could read that and nod. A mystic could read it and nod too. That’s usually the sweet spot when writing about spiritual experience without sounding untethered.
You’re not describing delusion. You’re describing integration. Big difference.
Trauma made me leave my body.
Art helped me come back.
Music gave me breath.
Humor kept me from drowning.
The ocean reminded me I could move like water and still remain whole.
And maybe that is what I am here to teach.
Not perfection.
Not guru nonsense.
Not spiritual glitter sprayed over pain.
Transformation.
The real kind.
The messy kind.
The “I had both knees replaced, lived in a van, kept singing anyway, and still made it to the music festival” kind.
⋆｡°✩
Bleep the Tattoo says: “Spiritual awakening is great, but maybe eat a sandwich first. Enlightenment is harder on low blood sugar.”
And honestly?
Bleep is not wrong.
⋆｡°✩
So from my little Rockaway Beach office, from the corner pocket where I can hear myself think, I am taking notes. I am writing the field report. I am giving this strange third-dimensional life an honest Yelp review.
Beautiful views.
Difficult terrain.
Terrible customer service at times.
Excellent sunsets.
Music helps.
Would recommend bringing snacks.
⋆｡°✩
And maybe that is my work now:
To be a mystic woman with a clown brain.
To translate the invisible into language.
To turn pain into pattern, pattern into story, story into song, and song into shelter.
“The highest self can drive the bus.
But the human self still gets to pick the playlist.”
