January 19th, 2024

The mind seems to have a mind of its own, and I’m gonna have some fun with it so...Well, today it feels like talking about aliens. Why? Why not?

Aliens. If they’re really out there, they probably tuned into social media long before I did.
Some say they’re coming. Some say they’re already here. Others say they’ve been here all along, that in fact they are why we are here: either they seeded our planet in the first place, or messed with our DNA to tune up the primitives for further use or study... or we are them, somewhere along a random or probabilistic time-stream...

I say that whatever the story, they’re drawn here as if by a shadowy force, namely, certain attributes we primitives possess—attributes the alien folk find irresistible. The messy stuff that is real, that can be driven underground and ‘forgotten’.

For if they have evolved over time into the big-headed, possibly asexual creatures that keep appearing in our collective visions (and you know what they say about visions)... then we are like children to them. And like children we play and laugh, fight and cry, sing and dance. Just go to any park on a sunny Sunday afternoon and observe how the rather stiff, older pet owners derive such glee in observing the mindless running and prancing about of their dogs. For those aliens it would be our passion, jazz in smoky bars, myths and stories galore. Antiques, muscle cars. Toned bodies, wildly varied, mouth-quivering cuisines. Gorgeous lovers’ eyes-within-the-storm, galaxy-spinning energy exchanged in the hungry fires of sex...

Yes, they are drawn to what they left behind… in their childhood, forgotten but not-forgotten... 

But what do I know. 
Aliens. Loosen up, you old nerds.
.....


I’m gonna name these little spiels.
This one is called ‘Asshole’.

Bin’ known to be an asshole. Doesn’t come up much but when it does, the performance is awesome.
My discovery of just how adept I am happened many years ago in the jungles of the Golden Triangle in northern Thailand, where I erupted into an equal-opportunity fountain of snarls and verbal spankings at the prompting of a foursome of scholastic nerds. Who knows why—we were all Canadian and I was a couple years older, at the ripe age of 21, and looking a whole lot like a good-time swami from the cuddle-beaches of nirvana. They’d been following me around for two days like oversized, pen-and-pad-wielding gnats. They seemed nervous, competitive and lost, and I was, well, quite ready to unchain the hounds from within the duskier side of Johnny-the-good-lad. My belligerent excellence lasted for five more days after I moved on from that jungle of verbal abuse. Wondrously, no one sucker-punched me.

Or the time, one sorry evening some years later, in the presence of a veritable Master of Ass-whole-ness: I defended my position, like a whiny sycophant that I, too, knew how to be an a-hole (with a vigor that only makes sense by the peculiar dim light and logic of the liquor/cannabis-zoned.)

So what is this ‘shadow’ I keep hearing about? Hmmm.
I like being nice. I do it a lot. But sometimes it just irks me. It’s not the whole deal.
Suggestions? Ya.

Well, maybe it would be a good idea to go out, find a jungle, shake some small trees. Maybe make some noise, rant and curse and leap about. Anyone?
But I wouldn’t think any bad thoughts about anyone. 
No, for sure I would not like to do that.
Damn.
Thoughts?
​
Well, I have one rather dim one. What about those whose inner asshole is usually ‘outer’? You know, those rare ones most of us tend to avoid. What is their shadow? Is it being nice, accommodating?
Just asking.
Weird.
.....


This here’s an odd little memory of a quite unexpected experience. I think it could be of interest to some; it’s about thinking, how proficient we are with it, and how we feel or place our identity, or our ‘ego’. So I won’t claim much understanding here, only that I mean to report as best I can.
It seems that in this realm of light and substance, time itself likes to lend us perspective...

The mind is a funny thing. A big, fuzzy thing with lots of different features and angles and hidden rooms. 
I once lost a flashy part of mine; turns out it was one of the best things to have happen to me. I can say this because, well, partly because... what went missing eventually found its way back.
 
Happened in the Peruvian Andes, 2014. What I’ve pieced together is that I suffered a near fatal bout with HACE, or high altitude cerebral edema, that lasted for over three months. Back home in BC I kept getting worse, going to bed about 8 each night and glad to blink out. My light got dimmer with each week—as if I was fading away. My work is in construction; I could barely walk up three or four stairs before needing a rest. Very fortunate I could float along on my crew’s good work. There is more to the story of how I got well, quite an interesting melange of forces both mystical and mechanical. Here I will say that eventually, nineteen sessions in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber brought me back around to my ‘old self’. 
Well, mostly.

I was fortunate in that, at the time, I’d recently joined a group whose purpose employed a kind of training in regard to self-enquiry, in a course aimed at helping others. Fortunate because what I went through was ‘seen’ through the magnifying lens of the applied self-examination integral to their three-year counseling course.

Now what happened is most curious. In the aftermath of the altitude sickness the ‘sophisticated’, thinking mind went awol, resulting in the emergence of another sensibility, one that I suspect is always there, yet for me had been mostly overshadowed by the very busy and keen intellect. Perhaps one can over-emphasize the public, thinking part to the point of believing that it alone is ‘me’. Perhaps I’d been doing just that my whole life.
 
So when the so-called ‘higher’ intellect was taken out I became disoriented in the world, in my social connections. Of course my folks noticed, and some, I believe, ‘felt sorry’ for me. Since I’d only been to two or three classes before heading off to Peru, those in the first year of my counseling course had little to go by; we’d only just met, really. I believe that with the sudden oxygen deprivation and consequent reduction in brain activity, what we call ego was as if put into restraints. And although I still knew I was ‘me’, something significant had been removed, or at least sidelined. And now I—paradoxically, the same old ‘I’—was drastically different.

The part that came more clear is the part that is attuned to ‘where people are coming from’. I was more like a dog, or a horse. Ever try to fool a dog with your feelings? Or your thinking?
I could not avoid seeing through the surface chatter to what people were really ‘doing’. Privately, I’d react with distaste and revulsion. I didn’t like it, wasn’t used to it. Then I’d remember how I used to be, the proud one mirrored by the present behavior in those around me… and I would be disgusted. At first I didn’t want to see these things because it meant having to own them as how I’d always shown up in the world. Then, when it became evident that this new, and arguably duller—yet strangely perceptive—mode of awareness wasn’t going away anytime soon, I moved into a kind of resigned acceptance. My initial recoil from what I saw in others began to edge toward compassion. I’d see an old woman shuffling by, or a crack addict twitching along the road, and I’d weep.
 
When I described what I was experiencing to an assistant in the counseling course he urged me to write about it on the class forum. I refused: straight-out, absolutely, NO WAY! I was embarrassed and besides, I was a pro at hiding out. And I wasn’t about to go public now when I was all dumb and such. But he kept at me, wouldn’t give up… until, exasperated and worn thin, I said, “ok, ok! I’ll do it! Geez!” 
I tend to keep my word, so I logged onto the forum.

The strange part… writing felt different, simpler. I had more… time? To let stuff come up, as if between the usual, ‘visible’ thoughts, from… where? I didn’t know, wasn’t ‘trying’, just kept going. It felt easier, with flow and… grace? This... as compared to the years I’d ‘worked at’ writing (on a travel memoir on my years on the road as a youth.) Since the illness in Peru I’d quit writing, quit reading. Initially, after arriving home, I was amazed when I paused to remember that I’d once engaged such things as ‘to read’, and ‘to write’. There were times when I sat in my library looking around at my books and guitars, dumbfounded at the kind of guy (me) who’d clearly put this room together.
And the even-stranger-part: my classmates said they liked what they were reading. Blew me’ f’n remnant-of-a-mind! I suppose a lot of crap falls away when dumb-old-ego is forced down for a much needed spell in the penalty box.

I don’t know how many out there believe in the possibility of real change in a person, of what often is called transformation. Looking back I can see that things have not been—could not be—the same after whatever it was that happened way up high between sky and rock in upland Peru.
In this masterwork of joy and sorrow, of learning and longing, we all are touched by change. We could dig our heels in, but that hurts—and in ways we’re often not aware of.

These days, it seems that even the world isn’t in a ‘waiting mood’
.....


Patriarchy News
I am, officially, a patriarch.
A loaded word. For me it simply is a word, not good or right, or bad or wrong. Now I must wear it, just as we all must wear whatever garment biology, or society, decides to wrap us in.

When asked, in a little course I took, whether my family was a patriarchy or a matriarchy, I could not figure it to be either/or. I could see the old macho patterns, but it wasn’t quite so simple.

This is because I come from a family system wherein the strength of womenfolk declared and secured a semblance of equality through struggle in a new land. Balance, of a kind, reached for and experienced—surely incomplete, and not without suffering. For I only can take in the view through the lens of my position: middle son in a large brood, in a unique position between sisters. And I well imagine that, regarding our drive toward equality and freedom, much is yet to be resolved, for one and all. I would venture to suggest that we each live in a shadowland of biases, and that for communication and connection to be vital and honest, a key challenge is to have a good hard look at the forces that seem to have shaped ‘me’.

‘Patriarchy’ has worn some proud and ruthless masks. Its shadow continues to obscure the plain beauty of authentic connection on the streets, in the workplace, behind family walls. Regardless of where they rule, the masks of belief and domination are still masks. The work it takes to first see, then reach behind the mask, is the most wrenching, and ultimately, the most valuable work a person can engage in (thx, C. Jung; when asked if he believed whether “we’re gonna make it”… his answer: if enough individuals do their inner work.)

Even as social roles have led us here and there, oftentimes away from the simple fact we all are human beings looking for and needing love... I have not forgotten the imbalances, and just how remote is the vision of ‘natural justice’ for those who continue to suffer at the punishing hands of belief and domination. 

Yet I also have not forgotten that it is my place to drop the social mask if need be, in order to defend my love ones—an instinct that is as alive now as it always has been, an intrinsic part of masculinity that is both decisive and protective. I seem not to have chosen this, nor to be capable of ‘un-choosing’ it.

The patriarchy I have been given stewardship of is now governed by the lessons learned, on a daily basis, in play with my granddaughters. In this play I am learning that this patriarchy is an honored place within a structure devised for the purpose of learning how to love, and nothing more. This is the blessing, and offers the paradox of appearances that reveals the violence of the sun’s furnace, sublime and beautiful as we see it in the likes of a delicate flower.

I salute my father, and the grandfathers I never met.

And hear this, fickle world: I will not apologize for who and what I am.
.....


I remember, many years ago, chatting with young dude ‘Bones’, the two of us re-writing the definition of intelligence, a casual aside on that afternoon of consensual brilliance. Mind you, we were far into the myopia of utopia by then, cruising the planes of euphoria under the silky-smoke mind-spice of some very fine hash (well, at least I was). 

And so we agreed that the very best example of plain human cognition, as we could see it down here in the heavenly pandemonium of EarthTime—by the veiled graces of these limited-spectrum creature eyes—was in the ability and the will to observe and attend to all that is to be beheld in one’s immediate environment… both ‘out-there’ and ‘in-here’. Simultaneously. Not mental acrobatics, not sky-high computational abilities, not crystal-clear recall nor light-speed, abstract syntheses of disparate pieces… but yes, this ability to see and feel whatever might be seen and felt, here-and-now, outside/inside. This 360-degree awareness is the true gold of intelligence.

And it occurred to me, years later in the midst of a counseling course, that this faculty, or skill of attentiveness, was exactly what I was being asked to develop. (By and by I was to learn that I would not go the way of the counselor, that it was not where my passion blazed… yet I remember that community with fondness, that my joy and clarity soared in the company of so many individuals who shone intelligence and humility at the same time.) 

For it is this, as I understand it, that a good counselor must be prepared to offer: an awareness of the needs, boundaries and ‘openings’ of the client, and to provide a safe ‘space’ for that opening—at the same time as monitoring one’s own reactions and triggers. Surely there’s more to it than that and I’m likely missing something crucial here, probably related to why I did not go the route myself.

The point of this ramble? Perhaps the definition of intelligence is as apprehensible as a slippery snake in the tall-grass fields of the human experience.

And KUDOS to all you dedicated counselors out there, developing skills so sorely needed in this world. Thank-you for doing the Good Work!
(Coz clearly, you’re not in it for the money.)
…..


A Taoist and a Confucianist, both well known in their day, are said to have crossed paths on a bridge one morning.

They stop, and looking down as the sun streams into the clear water the Taoist says, “look at those minnows darting here and there. How free and pleasurable is the life of a fish.” The Confucianist says, “you are not a fish—how do you know what gives pleasure to a fish?”
Says the Taoist, “you are not I—how do you know that I don’t know what gives pleasure to a fish?”

I wonder, tonight, if this is the essential conversation that humankind is having these days. As we view the Taoist and the Confucianist in conversation—just as they view the frolicking fish—we might see how the play of right guy/wrong guy can phase back and forth until the right and wrong exists in both, and then in neither.

Many clamor for the protective walls of black and white answers. But are we willing to consider deconstructing those walls to go for a head-swimming dip in the waters of paradox? Somewhere it is written: to advance from opposition to paradox is to make a leap of consciousness.

Let us live, laugh, love… and leap!
.....


Ahhh, sleep deprivation...
Just who is ‘singing in the dead of night’?  Why the F!xyz%** am I awake?!!

Anyone out there find themselves alert and thinking when they should be sleeping? Maybe you had a coffee too late, or one of those wily insomniac imps latched onto you in a weak moment.

Now that I seem to be sleeping a bit better, I have a few do-it-yourself suggestions for those lamentable nocturnal interruptions, some simple practices I’ve worked out over the years. Pretty sure they’ve helped me. Well, they’re my ideas, after all.

1) When you wake up at night, do not look at the clock. The last thing you want is to attach monkeybrain to something specific and repeatable. We want to aim at ‘releasing’ the mind from specifics. Just don’t look at the clock, fer crying out loud! Crikey! DON’T LOOK!
If there is any way to camouflage the arrival of morning light—opaque curtains, constant porch light—this would be good. Don’t want MB to be guessing at what time it is when even a good final half hour of shut-eye would be glorious.

2). For sure there’s something to think about, eh? There’s an issue, juicy and complicated, and right now you feel it so bad, so clear in your head and your gut... roll over a few times, then a few more...
And you keep thinking, and you can think of so many ways it can go wrong, so many details…
Thing is, no matter how you work it out, even if you’ve almost got it wrapped in a cushy veil of facts and alternate possibilities… 
In the morning you WILL have to re-think, and think again, and figure it according to Morning Reality. So at night remind yourself: whatever I decide right now, I’ll for sure have to re-think it in the morning!When you wake, you think it over, new factors roll in, and it’s obvious: your brilliant hyper-thinking during your precious sleeping hours... was second-rate at best. 
(Instant ‘eureka’ solutions and ‘download’ kinds of info are different. These are self-evident, usually take a fraction of the time, and don’t involve churning things over and over. Very sweet indeed!)

3). If you are particularly attached to thinking about something this dark and futile night, and feel stuck in the loop… go for the eye of the storm, ramp it up!
How many issues are alive and bugging you in your life right now, ready to burst into consciousness? Make a list. Everything. Line’em all up! All the unfinished business, the official loose ends, the moral dead zones, communications with loved ones you’ve neglected, the frayed intentions... 
My list can get pretty long. The list keeps growing and wraps into and around itself, until a great ball of thinky-chaos sits like a foreign body inside your body.
Soon enough it should become numbingly apparent how absurd is the notion that you could work any of it out on this unfortunate night—when you should be sleeping. There is so much, your life so randomly spread over the good and bad, the yin and yang, the alpha and omega… Get real! There’s no use thinking about any of it!

4). Zone in on the feeling, ‘I am’. Or if that’s too diffuse, ask the question, ‘Who am I’. ‘Who is this dweeb/nerd/fool/prince/princess who thinks so much when clearly, sleeping is the only reasonable option?’ Keep asking, keep trying to ‘feel/see’ who that is. Who am I--who IS this chump?? It’s weird, I know, but even if you don’t get an answer--and you keep trying--it can just plum tire you out. Focus. And if it seems that it’s going nowhere, as I’ve felt many times, I swear I feel much more refreshed the next day than it seems I should, given how little I slept. Some kind of ‘magic’ lies therein, methinks (certain ‘holy books’ and mystics have alluded to the unique effect of these particular thoughts).

5). Read. Now this is not so simple. You can’t just read anything. Some stuff might stimulate the shit out of you. Yet I’m sure that the optimal choices are manifold.
The material must aim to stimulate the ‘whole mind’. If you’re religious, go to your holy book. 
It’s less obvious for us non-denominational folk. By the ‘whole mind’ I mean the intellect and the poet/mystic who lurks inside you, ready to shock or embarrass or inspire.
So what you read should at once inspire and fulfill you. My faves are the poetry of Hafiz, The Power of Now, I Am That, and A Course in Miracles.

Whatever Gets You Through The Night… try any of them. I hope it helps.
And remember the song, “It’s Getting Better All the Time”.

P.S. Oh, and here’s a cool thought: When you make a decision, do so from a place of strength and not fear. So if you’re not feeling that strength, the decision can wait. Both will surely come.

Wow. That’s a crapload of advice.
.....


I once heard a story… that every time a lamb jumps, a baby is born that one day will love track and field. And that if and when that lamb jumped, someone also was pointing at the moon... then that baby would grow to become a champion. Either way, it’s great luck for a baby to be born when a lamb jumps, cuz then for sure the baby will be loved.
Oh, and it’s a good thing that lambs want to jump, cuz if they didn’t, it is said that the sun would refuse to rise.

I like that story. Don’t know if it’s true, or bastardized in translation. Or whether it went sideways on a whisper through a gullible crowd doing a workshop on the power of myth.
Don’t need to know; I like it just the way it is.
Even if I dreamed it.
.....


Driving in a car in Surrey with a group gathered to explore the possibilities of growth, of ‘self-improvement’, part of an ongoing workshop… we are five, and all but me are Asian: Korea, Singapore, Vietnam. One speaks of a recent incident in a restaurant, of a patron who complains and causes quite a scene, and is arrogant and abusive to the staff. 
“White dude?” another asks. “Yup.” 

They go on to describe the white dude, how they’ve seen it all before. All agree. 
I ask, “how is it you’re all so at ease to discuss this I my presence?” 
“Well, you’re not really a white dude.”
“Well, I think I am but I get it, my father said the same kinds of things you guys say.”

I was raised in a world where we fresh-off-the-boat Italian immigrants were seen as darker, more ‘colorful’, less educated, less intelligent. And raised by a father who declared that his personal excellence proved that theirs was a load of crap, that they were small and smug and stupid in their conceit. He would often sneer at the ‘Canadese’, whose pose of condescending superiority clearly made THEM the dumb-asses.

Yet I ‘see’ none of this now; I am as if ‘color-blind’. I am (he as you are me as…) just simply a person. And when I stop to examine that, I cease to be defined as a person as well (metaphysical stuff—don’t ask).
 
I defend not against that which appears as ‘not me’. For now I need not define what I am; it is enough to recognize what I am not (spiritual kindergarten, sure, but honesty is important.)

When I was a droopy-eyed, teenaged musical dreamer I would heed the words of music critics in local newspapers. One declared that “Eric Clapton is the world’s greatest white guitarist”. 
I thought, ‘What? White? Whatthe!!?? Then I got it. Jimi Hendrix.
Until that moment it had not occurred to me that Jimi was black. He was one of my musical heroes—songwriter, vocalist, guitarist.

There was a simpler, perhaps a very brief time, a subculture within a subculture, in which the color of skin wasn’t seen. Not sure exactly where or when that was. But I was there.
And let us wonder if, perhaps, in this suffering world of injustice and bigotry, we might not have driven ourselves—in our aim to solve those very problems—into a state of mind in which we hyper-focus on our differences. And whether or not focusing on our differences, instead of on our ‘sameness’… is just plain ass-backwards.
.....


I am aware that symbols of my past, of my family system’s past, of my culture’s past… pepper my thoughts and come through as they will. 

It has been written that Carl Jung’s great gift to our understanding on the nature of psyche pertains to these symbols, often thought to be outmoded vestiges of a more primitive past and all too readily discarded. Jung tells us that this modern view—that we are now more ‘rational’ and above such fairy tales from our species’ childhood—is mistaken. That we have merely glossed over a realm of symbols and dreams and myths that still are real inside us today, individually and collectively. What we deny about ourselves he calls the shadow. It wields power over our conscious selves because we deny it. We can even hate or fear our shadow, and this is often what happens when we see it in others.

I have grown in the company of many cherished loved ones, roughly half of whom align toward an atheistic bent and half earnest devotees of the Christian worldview. My own story, as brief as I can muster: I was raised within an immigrant southern Italian, old-world Catholic cosmology in the Vancouver area. Jesus is king, the Madonna is queen, and watch out for demons, Satan and Hell. I was an altar boy in the local church—led by a pedophile priest. He went for me when I was eleven; I escaped his advances, ran home, and declared to my mom with non-negotiable gusto that “I quit the church today and I will never go back!” I held my ‘secret’ to protect my own well-being, abhorring what I imagined to be the far worse ‘trauma’ of a public spectacle. I became an atheist overnight. My science teachers loved it. At age seventeen I followed some hippy friends into a local non-denominational church; the ‘Jesus Freak’ phenomenon of the late sixties, early seventies. I watched as my compadres knelt at the altar. I remembered the priest… remembered the goulish depictions of heaven, purgatory and hell tacked up on the altar my mother created for our in-home nightly ‘rosaries’. I remained in the pews, quietly critical of my friends’ sheep-like behavior.

Yet I went home, found a red-letter Bible and felt the deep, soul-illuminating wisdom in the words attributed to the ‘Nazarene’, Jesus. I dumped what I now saw to be the creed I had adhered to for the past seven years: Atheism. But I did not become a Christian. Since age five I’ve been skeptical about “saved and damned.” Yet I would admit, as I still do almost fifty years later, that I ‘know’ very little.

I get that many have chosen to identify solely with rationalistic processes in rejecting the domination of old world orders, usually commandeered by ‘great religions’. And when I hear about the essential, epiphanous experiences that typify the ‘conversions’ of the spiritually-aligned, I have to ask: who would NOT want to be ‘born again’—that is, born into a newness of honesty, presence, humility, and love? Who would not want to know freedom from anxiety, sadness, stress, resentment, worry, guilt, regret, and grievances against others? Is this not what is inferred when someone claims they are born again? The idea is true gold. 

Are we not called—whether shaman or scientist, person of God or person of no-god—toward the piercing of ‘truth’s arrow’?

Yet what I see, mostly, is discontent, all around.
Where I stand—smack between the rational and the religious—is a zone that admits and even stares down ‘the unknown’. It is this formless dance with the unknown that is an integral aspect of my own philosophic honesty (well, as honest as this complex of feelings, ideation and fancy meat can muster!)

It is the plain truth of this unknown that keeps me from joining my friends and family in their respective ‘clans of mind’. And so I have no readily grasped foundation of knowledge on which to rest my bits of understanding or experience. If this statement is on the audacious side, there likely is something for me to look at. Do I fool myself? Pose as ‘standing between’, in a ‘special kind of place’?

Yet the overall effect is invigorating, rejuvenating, edifying… and occasionally, humbling. 
Not much, but for this small gift I am grateful.
.....


I love that I can hear your voices on these various social conduits. I love that I can bear witness to the hunger and spirit of trying to make sense of things, even of how we have perhaps stumbled sideways into a mesmerizing tangle…

It is the ‘dead of night’ and I’m at my desk, a pen and paper in hand. The daytime mind has not yet had a chance to sit up and look ahead; it is well before Captain Egor will think to pick up the reins and follow the crowd. I sit between the heart of darkness and the workaday world—more often than usual these days, it seems. Is not the fact that ‘I’ lie down each night and disappear for so many hours somehow related to the mystery of human consciousness? Of who or what possesses ‘self-reflection’ and can remember yesterday, or imagine tomorrow? It is the first mystery, at least it was for me when I was a wee tot in the crib waiting for the emptiness of sleep to engulf me—then waking up perplexed at ‘where have I been? what happened?!!’

This time, in this ‘space between’, I hold a feeling/picture of the public face of the world as it speaks in different tongues. It is, sadly, too often one of discord and disagreement. From this common zone of quiet it looks (as it can feel) quite terrible. Although, from these spare and intuitive hours, it is also a small picture: one of struggle and push, blame and attack.
 
Civil discussion, friendly debate in the public field; I remember these with fondness, nostalgia. Have they all but disappeared?

For out there in the megalopolises of talk—the screens, the nodding public heads, the towers of opinion and teams of logic—we seem to have lost that old-school respect... on the basis of different thoughts, beliefs, and hard-to-manage emotions. For what?

For what if… certain ancient thinkers had it pegged, saw through to where it would lead? What if—like the shadows in Socrates’ cave—our words and thoughts are mere images cast within the compulsions and limits of the human mind and senses? 
A few years later: ‘love your enemy’; ‘turn the other cheek’; ‘know the truth and the truth will set you free’.

With this in mind I have begun to ask: why write?
And so I attempt an answer.
 
First, I feel a kind of movement or energy, its ‘pathless land’ phasing into awareness and rousing a sense of wonder. I’m dumb to its meaning yet I follow it as I would a wily shadow. From the shadow, or from the chase, words appear. That energy and movement--what is that? A hunger, or faith, in going forward? The simple flight of exploration? The words… at times, like trying to get traction on the surface of water, just for the fun of it. Somehow... keep moving... 

It has been written, through centuries and across continents, that these quiet hours are a time between the first and second sleeps. A time when the edges of dreams go fuzzy, when the mind is tuned differently and so will bring forth colors and rhymes from other places, through an unnamed membrane from a realm many call divine. Or we call it the subconscious or unconscious, the ‘basement’, the shadow. Here the concerns of day are a loose garment left in the corner. We are graced with a visit to this ‘place’ of forgotten mythologies, symbols, dream images. Personal hells. A place where snakes will stare you up with knowing, human eyes, where birds speak in staccato yet lucid flow along the peculiar topography of the English tongue, and mountains breathe and ladders bend… where a spray of bullets can turn into harmless shadows that fall gently to the ground. Many things show up unexpectedly and in strange garb. It is a place, mostly, of questions rather than answers. And the more we pay attention the juicier it gets. Like a rolling curtain with a great and detailed painting on it that we reach to touch… I’m quite sure that these ‘mysteries of self’ are closer than we take them to be, and show themselves in our daily lives—if we were to pay attention—despite our daytime permissions, agreements, and marked access gates within the rationalism of the conscious human world.

What we rally behind in our worldly understanding feels relevant and important—today. Yet there is little doubt that much will be overturned in another two, five, ten... or fifty years hence. It’s okay—much of what we consider true today likely won’t look that way tomorrow; it has always been so. All we need to do is to look back, check out the blinkers of the time. Why would today be any different? 
We could use some of that old-school respect...

I admit that I want these pathless words—whether inspired or flawed—to be heard. By others, even by trees and birds—sound crazy? Well, I am in that dead of night, in this otherworld of shadows, and maybe it is that way. I feel crazy enough with hope to want my words to stir the love that sleeps in the hearts of those intent upon conflict and destruction, crazy enough to want to open a space of safety and quiet for those who suffer and see no option for rest.

But most of all I want these words to nudge toward mutual embrace, me and you... with joy, peace. Creativity, exploration. Love and laughter. What I believe lies inside at the heart of it all. Inside us. I think I can feel it. Why not? I want that these words would show me a way out of the cage of this small mind, that their echoes might soften the bars that hold me fixed to the shadows that flicker madly on the walls of my world.

Is it too much to ask... on this strange and lovely night?
I think not.
.....


Had our inaugural Bonfire in the Rain last night. Great umbrellas and tables cozying into the dancing heat, in a dark corner of my back yard under the huge grandaddy oak… a spot of light in the darkness.

Earlier in the day I thought about ‘bonfires in the rain’ and all my ready umbrellas, and the darker, colder season approaching. How we can look ahead from a summery day, just a couple days back, to wintry conditions a mere few weeks away. 
And how we remember the past, or want to remember it… how the spot of awareness in each of us possesses such sweeping jurisdiction over what we hold to from the past, how we filter the vastness of what exists not only for reflection and memory, but also ‘when it happens’: what we perceive, or ‘let in’… 
Skipping down my veranda stairs I stopped in my tracks and whispered, “I just want to be honest about it”. Right then a hummingbird with a nice green breast stopped less than two feet from my face, paused for three or four seconds, had a good look... darted over to my left, hovered for another second still facing me, then flew swerving toward me and away. In hummingbird time… isn’t that a freaking afternoon?
Ahh, to cherish the simplest mystery!
A little yard work in soft and easy drizzle, the light crisp and promising. 
......


Whoah, this is a tough one: Fear.
They say that fear is a bad advisor and a great salesman.

I passed by an odd door the other day, caught a glimpse of a fleeting figure. Not sure whether female or male, young or old. In the time it took for a breath to come and go something stirred, reminding of when I was very young and simple things mystified me, things I’ve maybe forgotten or have learned to take for granted. Things like trees creaking in the wind, or how cloud wisps seem to dissolve when you stare at them.

In the background, behind the figure, the glorious chaos of a circus in wild celebration phased in and out in brilliant mist like a strange mirage. Glimpses of clowns and jugglers, and acrobats tossing small dogs and children into the air with great skill and flare and joy. Balloons and giant colored wheels in motion, dancing monkeys with child-bright faces. All silent, all in the blink of an eye. I blinked again and the circus was gone in an icy storm-whipped tide crashing violently on giant, jagged rocks. I felt loss and meaningless desolation, a sick dread in my gut. Did this angry deluge submerge the happy circus? I couldn’t see, didn’t understand. I turned away and kept walking. 

Couldn’t shake it so I retraced my steps. I walked back and forth but could not find the door. 

This post is really a cluster of questions about fear: Just how much is fear running the show, and can we learn to transform it? While married to fear, how long will we delay letting go and falling in love with existence? Why do we avoid it? Why would we? And the darker side of fear, what seems to stick to so many walls in the world-out-there: when fear is ‘right’. Finger-pointing, aggression. Or inside ‘me’: how emotional affliction lives on in the body/mind, most often unreckoned. 

And how I am perhaps afraid, right now, of how anyone reading this will react. 

I do not mean to pry or to poke at what already hurts. And I suspect that my understanding here is limited, so I invite guidance/correction/criticism. Yet I’m drawn to speak on something that seems to have many of us in its grip these days of publicly shared anxieties. 

It truly is hard to talk about fear. We all know about it, or know it, but there’s a big ‘ick’ factor. Avoiding addressing it seems a common and reasonable enough reaction: the fear of going into fear.

Can anyone claim to be beyond the reach of fear? If so, how wonderful! Please come forward and speak of it!

For sure it’s very difficult to examine fear when in its hypnotic grip—the very notion of looking at it might be scary. I often want to help someone ease away from fear, and just as often I say little or nothing about it. And so I resort to offering support in a more subtle, or perhaps indirect way. I don’t claim to understand this. There are times, it seems, when it’s NOT beneficial to speak. And times when one knows this and still flubs it.

Yet I would dearly love to transmit, to those who appear especially burdened by fear or anxiety, a mere spot of understanding on their effects at the cellular level, as described by biologists, whose explanations I will trust right now, since they’ve dedicated their whole lives to staring into microscopes and fiddling with test tubes to learn stuff for all of us, as compared to the likes of me, who sits to write when he feels oddly curious, with the hope that this mind and resulting words might stumble upon something of value, or at least amusing... mine being a lot more self-propelling than the work of biologists, it seems to me. Anyway, the fruit of their continuing work is the hard info that stares us in the face, if we care to look. They say that fear or anxiety, which of course are natural and useful in certain situations, become problematic when chronic or frequent. As if stuck in fight-or-flight, cell growth slows or stops, and the immune system suffers (I simplify.) 

And so a dilemma, or Catch-22, accompanies fear like a sly ghost impersonating the host: there is information available which can ease suffering, yet the suffering itself blocks the information. 

Is this the fundamental problem in the world? How our deep drive to bloom into creativity and connection can be delayed by the tenacious grip of fear? For how long, this intimate and collective burden? How do we open a door to new territories of experience? Is it simply to shift ‘being’ our fear (unconsciously identifying with it) to ‘seeing’ it? So that one might wonder ‘who’ sees and who is afraid? So that the fear, which is now reckoned, is no longer ‘me’? And so I am the ‘discoverer’ of it and consequently, its observer? 

A mere first step? Am I completely off the mark? Took in too much of that ancient eastern lore at an early and impressionable age, have I?

Must we instead plunge into the deep and face what might be hidden there? To see and feel what we avoid so that we might more fully… see and feel? Yikes. This IS scary. Who would want to really look at it… when it often looms behind our actions and reactions like a lurking, menacing shadow we only catch fleeting glimpses of?

Let’s start by by honoring the courage it must take to be open to the dreadful places we might take ourselves to by even thinking these things.

When I was a young man on the road, alone in the vast openness of back-country Oz, as I lay for sleep one twilit evening in an abandoned shack, I was smitten with a strange sort of curiosity that came up, perhaps as a consequence of my aloneness in an alien and eerie landscape. And so I dwelt—for a mere half minute—on the memory of early-child nightmares, on their actual feeling, just to see what might happen. Well, I discovered that those ‘forgotten’ horrors lay not in my distant childhood past; for they evidently had always been there, were in fact still HERE. And shockingly close to the surface, running like a wild river just below the veneer of the conscious day-to-day—year in, year out. And it was as fresh and as real and as suffocating as if I still was that child. Freaked me out good. Immediately aborted the experiment and haven’t tried it since.

Indeed, why would we want to go there? Might we uncover, or ‘dis-cover’ what goes on beneath it? Would we go for a walk through hell to reclaim the golden egg of freedom?
Is this why those frightful experiences are still ‘here’? As potential fuel for growth? Growth that is evident, when we question it, in the power of life itself to organize and develop, to become more complex, on a journey toward... well that’s the big question no scientist can definitively answer.

I assume we all have our fears. It’s far from simple. In some ways, in some situations, I am astonished at the courage I tap into when called for, the latent ‘hero’ in each of us. In others I’m the trembling child running from those nightmares. Is it so for others? For you? Surfing this unpredictable wave I seek balance and I hope for grace, and I accept that I’ll likely be thrown into some topsy-turvy tumbles.

I’m still looking for that door. I don’t know how it is that I caught a glimpse of such joy and such pain in a fleeting instant—the sweet chaos of a merry circus, the violent crash of a pitiless ocean. 

I believe the door exists and that I will find it. 
And I want to believe that I will not turn away, maybe walk right in… or ‘out’.

When he was a boy Bobby D’s grandma told him: “Bobby, you be kind to everyone you meet out there, cuz everyone carries their own load.” 
Thx, grandma.
.....


Down at the Kitsilano waterline with a couple of buds. A noise from my phone—I glance at it: a text from my nephew... ‘must respond later’. When I pull up at home a couple hours later I turn off the car and remember the text. I look at it and see “9:21”—bold numbers, the feature of his text. I glance at real time: it is 9:21. At once I call him, say, “Hey, how ya doin’? I saw 9:21 in your text, which I haven’t read yet, then saw that it was—and still is—9:21. So I called. And now it just turned 9:22! Nice, eh?” 
“Wow, uncle!”

I wasn't aware yet that our brief conversation had inaugurated the 21st minute of the 21st hour of the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century. Not sure if this qualifies as a 'synchronicity' by Jung's definition, but... Very cool indeed!
.....


Bin hanging out in purgatory lately. More like a pub crawl without the attendant drunkenness.

It’s not just a Catholic thing with soldier-angels and demon-souls lost in a pit of flames and such. The word is related to ‘purge’ so it’s about cleansing. Showers and baths are always great, for it’s a done deal when it’s all about dirt on the skin. 

But some cleaning involves discomfort, like the forsaken chunks inside our psyches that scrape and bump around on their way up. And once the action begins it doesn’t seem to want to slow down, never mind go into reverse.

Good company here, I know I’m not alone. I know coz’ when I’m on the street, when no one thinks I’m looking, I get the sensation I’m the one behind the stranger’s eyes, I’m the one glancing back.

In our suffering we see ourselves as ‘a wretch’, as in the hymn Amazing Grace.
In truth we are majestic creatures of high intelligence and brilliant love.
A few have stood to teach us this, and in our ‘wretched’ view we fall at their feet.
​While this is not a bad thing, it is not their aim.
For it tends to keep us small, and from hearing what they mean to say.
.....


Freedom.
Ahh… noble, luminous freedom!

I love the sound of the word, love thinking about it, love chasing its tail. 
Best of all, I love feeling it, whenever life casts its fleeting grace over a ‘normal’ day…

That’s the thing. Apart from the idea of it, and those brief spells when I believe I have it in the bag… does it really exist? I mean, really, when we don’t think about it, and after its awesome feeling has passed... where is it?

Bin’ yakking about it for years with old buddy John. Our discussions have been most provocative and enjoyable, yet we haven’t come up with anything solid or crystal clear. Co-conspirator Robert, bringer of good news from far and wide, has suggested that we might follow the sparkle of pebbles on a path toward ‘free will’ by engaging three simple choices available to us: where we go, who we spend time with, and what we learn. 
Wow. I can do this. Giddyup!

I get what Nelson Mandela said: “to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that... enhances the freedom of others”. For I have felt most free when I act with the conviction that what I want for another... is exactly what I want for myself.

Yet words that speak of freedom do so by way of paradox after paradox:
“One makes a thousand moons go mad with love and blush all night, when one can surrender the illusion, the crutch, of 'free will' though still live—for the benefit of others—the highest of moral codes” -Sufi poet Hafiz.
“We are free to play the role of slaves, and we are free, at every moment, to be free” -from Reality by Peter Kingsley.
“Freedom to do what one likes is really bondage, while being free to do what one must, what is right, is real freedom” -from Nisargadatta in the book I Am That.
Another Sufi quote: “true freedom comes to those who have escaped the questions of free will and fate”. And another: “freedom is the absence of choice.”

Perhaps freedom is not as common as it is believed to be. And its ‘path’ is as scrutable as the exact whereabouts of a wave in a churning sea or a breeze through tall grass. I get a peculiar feeling that the mind is so powerful as to have the power to appear powerless to itself. What a chump. 

And what freedom!

Keep digging, keep looking, young grasshopper...
.....


I want to acknowledge and honor the ancient connection of the First Nation peoples to this wondrous land I call home. My older siblings and parents immigrated from Italia, yet I was born here, so I am a native of B.C. I have, in this small life, felt mountainous gratitude for the beauty and bounty of my beloved British Columbia, still a land that is mostly in its pristine state. It is one of the places where the great ‘Columbian Exchange’ happened most recently, BC being in the northwest portion of North America and occupying a huge expanse in a vast and rugged cordillera. 

It is strange and disquieting to consider this—my love of the land of my life—when I pause to take in a bigger view of centuries and foreign lands, of traditions that nurture belonging, and of explorations that have moved in waves of self-interested haste and subjugation—by those with the deadlier weapons. I do not intend to cast blame here, for I believe that justice and balance will find its way into the spaces within our mad parade of words, into our sufferings and longings, to lift us to a place of shared humanity.

I do not understand why, but even as a boy I felt a kinship with, and deep respect for the First Nations people. Maybe, as children are, I felt akin to my little buddy Sonny whose ‘native’ family, like my Italian one, were a shade darker than the surrounding average. But that was just the beginning of a life-long curiosity and affinity. 

Now, as an adult, I look back upon my fascination for our ‘first peoples’... and I wonder if perhaps my love of this land joins with a bigger, pre-existing love. I believe that as I grew I was moved to recognize values that have been long buried and all but forgotten in our urbanized and mercantile era. They are the values of our indigenous brothers and sisters, and perhaps they are the very values that will play a vital role in the correction of our growth-addicted, greed-rewarding, and Earth-poisoning modern system. To find a way to say this—without blame—is to find the way of the wind, and of our dreams.

And of our love for our children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children.
And to admit that we all are children.

My native sisters and brothers, it is with a child’s heart that I speak. My poor and semi-literate parents crossed an ocean and a continent to settle in the land of your ancestors. Even as they took in to nurture and love two of your displaced children, little Joni and Roy, and even as I have no memories other than those that were born in the forests that touch the Salish Seas… I ask for your blessing upon my presence here.

Amen, Namaste, and may the Great Spirit look kindly upon us all.
.....


The Book of Jonah has always intrigued me. 
I know little about the Bible. Apart from Genesis and the Red Letters in the New part, I have merely jumped around, flipping pages and allowing serendipity to call out a message here and there. And although Jesus has been the preeminent example of my early life, I do not call myself Christian. This is because all the Christians I know hold the doctrine of ‘saved/damned’ as integral to calling oneself a Christian. Even as a young boy I could not accept this.

A schmaltzy TV movie called “King of Kings” changed my life when I was seven years old. My whole immigrant Roman Catholic family sat perched before the TV set. I did not see ‘the holy lamb of God’, or ‘the savior’, for I beheld ‘sanity’ for the first time. Which revealed a very profound fact, one that had been oppressing me, ‘unawares’, right up til the moment of that jolt of consciousness in the living room. At once I realized that ‘the world’, including my loving family, was INSANE. Without knowing it I was plunged into the reality of paradox: the world can be crazy, yet love and connection can be found within it. Well, at least to a youngster, this was ‘paradox enough’.

The sweet part: in ‘seeing’ the insanity, I beheld the possibility of ‘sanity’ for the first time. And I must have assumed that it existed inside me, awaiting discovery. Because from that day forward ‘the world’ didn’t seem so big and scary anymore. Something inside me relaxed.

But back to Jonah.
As a child I heard about Jonah being swallowed by a whale (the Bible’s ‘big fish’) and being vomited free after three days. It appears that he wanted no part of being a prophet and so had hopped a ship heading for Tarshish, as if getting away… as if. God whipped up a storm… after the fish incident, with Jonah’s uppitiness subdued for a bit, God instructed him to inform the Ninevites that their sinful city would be destroyed in forty days. The Ninevites took this very seriously and—even by example of the king--all repented. God saw this... and so did not destroy the city. Jonah was pissed. 

What fascinates me is in what I have never heard any Christian proclaim: that the real aim of prophesy is to awaken our hearts and minds--so that prophesy need not be fulfilled! In other words, it’s not about paranormal exhibition, but about reckoning, penitence, redemption, atonement, metanoia: instead, it is about the transformation of conscience, or consciousness. Awesome!

Why, then, in all my years of close relationship with many Christians, have I never heard this extremely wonderful news? Am I missing something here?

P.S. And I wonder… is the Book of Jonah unique in this lesson of prophesy and repentance, and the positive results that will follow?
.....


I ask: What is my challenge?
Looking back it seems that my own ‘natural bent’ has always been toward thinking, reflection, observing my surroundings, being quiet, reserved. Feeling ‘comfortable in my skin’. I have learned—somehow, and surely not by thinking it through—that all is well, that my place in the overall jungle of dreams, in this ‘dream of wakefulness’, fits like a glove and flows like a river.

In contrast, there are those close to me who excel in physical and charismatic qualities, risk-taking and the like. Edgy. They seem to embody a ‘bigger buzz’ of inner energy, or perhaps they simply are driven by what appears, to me, as some kind of deeply held tension—I am just guessing. And for sure there is much that I do not ‘see’ or understand.

Yet I play along with my buds, and they with me.
It seems we are attracted to each other’s alternate and unique universe of experience, sensation, intuition and knowledge.

Are we different ‘types’? Born that way? Or fashioned, conditioned, by the vagaries of life?
Both?

What about you? What is your predilection? Your challenge? 
​Who do you like to play with?
.....


Lolling about naked on a beach in India back in the 1970s... I stopped a tall, colorfully dressed man to see what he was hawking from his large flat wicker basket. I bought an ancient looking coin for five US dollars, enough money to keep a street person fed for months. Barter as I might, the walking merchant would budge no lower. I still have that coin from the Parthian kingdom in Persia, among the first ever produced, made several centuries before the point in calendrical time we might call “0”. I didn’t know it then, but that exchange would trigger a series of musings in following years. 

These days I find myself imagining a world without money. No, the thought is not crazy, and neither am I. (Better yet, where would we find a worthy reference from which to determine “crazy?” I’m game to the challenge, but that’s another matter entirely.)

I say that we are “necessarily” obsessed with money. The world as we know it requires our participation in the belief in its essential role in our lives, and in our compliance to the acquisition and exchange of great gobs of it daily. Even those who are far from greedy, those who are content with enough food and a good bed to sleep in and nothing more... unless they are completely “dropped out” of all banking and governmental affairs, will be drawn into the unrelenting current of its power.

I imagine this money-less world not in the hope or fancy that it might come to pass in my or my great-grandchildren’s time, no I do not.

I do so for the “brain-wash”. Much as we are brainwashed into whatever social conventions that have set themselves into our minds from birth and which we now take as sane and normal, I seek, in such fantasies and “novel thinking”, a temporary, refreshing mind-cleanse, a fresh wind to sweep away the webs of habit... that I might set forth into the (moneyed) demands of my day with a snappier bounce in my step. “Mental floss”, if you will.

I get that money’s essential purpose is to represent, by standard and fiat, the fundamental value of human effort. At best it is merely that: a way to simplify the values of myriad goods and services we all need and want to engage in. And I believe that at its best, money is a tool and not an object of desire, let alone an idol; that we would remain committed to its usefulness only as it enables us to live well and be of service to our loved ones and our community.

And that brings up what it has become; and is likely why I’m taken to imagining its non-existence. 

Namely, this can be referred to as the shadowland—as it stands proud in our brightness of day—of the ‘American Dream’. A dream that promises, to anyone willing to go along with the ruse, a life of luxury, and perhaps, adulation. When I was in primary school, elders asked us what we would like to become when we grow up. I recall answers like “fireman”, “doctor”, “nurse”, “astronaut”, “train engineer”, teacher, and “house builder”. A few decades later it was noted by sociologists that a growing number of children responded with “rich and famous”.

I will say only that I have this gut-borne feeling, this head-ripping conviction… that the “American Dream” needs to expire, or at least to transform, likely in a radical way.

I have an idea for a replacement: it is the dream not of luxury but of abundance for all, and that “I” might be of service to my fellow blue-planet inmates. I know, it’s a bit simple, and not near as exciting as one that shows just how special I am/could be. Let’s remember, though, that all our personal dreams—singer, painter, scientist, builder, fireman, dancer, cop, inventor—remain as they always have, in our dreamy hearts and brains, and will continue to fuel the enterprises of an intelligent and productive society. Because we all are so special in this way—this way of dreaming, and being of service—not one of us really is. Except in personal relations, of course. Yet we are unique, each and every one. And that, my special friends, is enough.

Yes, I imagine a social system not unlike that of the “primitive” hunter-gatherer—but with guitars, central heating, and great libraries.

A social environment in which one’s well-being blends invisibly—and obviously—with that of everyone else’s.

Ahh, but one can dream.
…..


I sit in my lawn chair in the afternoon sun as it blazes the eye from between tall firs and mighty cloud forms. A glass of good wine sparkles in the rays. A flash rain erupts and decorates the neighborhood with liquid fire, and it pummels my front lawn in a shower of spears, and from each one as it hits the grass, a poof of mist… sudden change! 
I wonder about the world, how it has changed so quickly, or seems to have, and where it’s going and why. I imagine something emerging from an outworn cocoon, perhaps a new human creature to take flight into we-know-not-where, into territory of mind and experience we likely aren’t able to imagine. A sudden downpour of change, violent and beautiful—why not, this seemingly fantastical scene? If the natural world provides examples of such radical transformation—butterflies, volcanoes, ice ages—why not in the personal and collective of our species? Evolution is slow and irrevocable, yet there is evidence of mutation and sudden leaping about… Or, blind as a love-smitten mole, do we cycle through the ages once again, as if following a script we attribute to myth of olden times: the Atlantis of our possible future?
Could we have conceived a story of the demise of a great and arrogant civilization... in anticipation of the direction we ourselves might be hypnotically fixated on? A warning from our collective unconscious of myth and symbol, of where NOT to go? Could we be that wise—and dumb at the same time? 
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” —Carl Jung.

That there is, in fact, a ‘wise’ part, is where my imagination wants to go. I imagine that cocoon cracking open, and some strange bird of a human kind taking flight into a wondrous path, bringing the unconscious into new form. And maybe that’s us, and this suffering Buddha-realm is a very convincing performance art we unknowingly employ for the sheer joy and horror of it all. That’s our job: to feel, and to be whatever we can be. Play good and hard, yu’all!

And there are other stories we tell ourselves, stories with meaning and potential. We tell them with flaming hope, with fear and with yearning. We imagine aliens—whether real or not in the physical sense—dropping by and sneaking around, so evolved and such. Yet hidden inside that story is the drive for a return to a paradise lost. Having long lost the primitive spunk that conceives haunting melodies, lovelorn pain and brilliant dance... comedy and tragedy, mouth-watering cuisines and street car fun—yes, drawn are those imagined aliens to the messy, throbbing faith in living each day blind for tomorrow, the rough ruby of our dumb honesty haunting a dim, aching memory... Yeah, it’s a fantasy, a fiction I play for kicks, perhaps self-serving, like each stepping stone on a path to… to wherever, baby. The seeds of that dystopian future already live among us in our movies, our novels, our imaginations—and whenever we feel numbed out to the life that explodes around us every moment of any day. For if we take that story of ancient myth to heart, we already have everything to be thankful for, here and now... 

Yet I’d like to go back to the idea of sudden change, or ‘mutation’. The idea that form can change in short order (perhaps plain as sight in the caterpillar/butterfly transformation) has been made more understandable with recent discoveries in epigenetics. My spiels are often wispy or foggy, as some have pointed out, but this one—that humankind might ‘jump’ into a new era of ‘loving cooperation’—can be considered alongside a direct mechanical correlation, offering, I hope, a more palatable scenario to my ‘mechanistic’ readers (if any still remain). 
For epigenetics has made Darwinism (not among my favorite of human ideas) more believable, and palatable. I’ve often wondered, ‘how could wings just happen, as if the complete idea precedes the need and the fact? Or whales, beginning in the ocean, then sprouting legs for a season on land, then deciding it’s better to go back into the ocean…’ the mechanics of these evolutionary assertions have always seemed difficult to explain, or believe, given the idea that DNA is ‘just so’, more or less a static thing once the individual creature is born. (Thanks, cousin Nick, for prompting this discussion.)
That is, until the advent of epigenetics. For it is now understood that any of our twenty-five thousand-ish genes might be active or dormant, depending on their need; depending on environment. And further, that any single gene can be activated in myriad ways—again, by environmental triggers. That’s a momentous shitload of possibilities. And so the changes implied in Darwinism now appear more readily understood, in that genes might be suddenly ‘awakened’ in a species according to need in a changing environment. 
[I would add here the work of Rupert Sheldrake, his theories on morphogenetic fields (‘hundredth monkey theory’) as an adjunct to epigenetics, in order to better visualize how an advantageous mutation might rapidly sweep through an entire species. But this presupposes a leap in our mechanical understanding of things, in that ‘field’ might be based in ‘energy’ that we still have difficulty perceiving, never mind measuring.]

Now back to my beloved wispy fog… whatever track we’re on, whatever path we leap about on in our gleeful ignorance, I say we dream a good dream... while loving the crap out of each other.
…..


Two young men embark separately on life-changing journeys in the 1970s. They don’t know each other, and if they were to meet in their travels either one might view the other as a self-satisfied sycophant of a delusional subculture. Not really sure about that, just a guess. For as one leaves his homeland to hit the hippie trail in Asia, the other goes to smuggle Bibles into the USSR.

Decades later, in the early autumn of human years, they meet in a broader community of like-minded individuals seeking to plumb the depths of mind and spirit with questions like, “what DO I feel, and WHY do I feel this?”; “are these my thoughts?”; “where do they come from?”. And “how can I get through this shit so I can move on?” In this environment of vulnerability and honesty, they become good friends.

It is one of those abiding mysteries… that two very different individuals can find a connection worthy of the tales and legends told in any culture. What is that essential “sameness” they choose to turn toward that enables them to become friends? Had they met as young men—with the contrasting adornments of the lives they had chosen, or had stumbled into—would they have at least sensed something, or recognized common values beneath those adornments?
How can we learn to see past the all-too-common divisions played out incessantly in the worldly mind?
…..


If I could advise a younger me, as goes a current trend, I’d say, “The world, young fella, is not worth a minute of your worry, contrary to how things appear, and to the way most folks carry on. When you understand this you will no longer be its faithful stooge; instead it—the world—becomes your ready servant.”

I dream quite often. As I get older, getting sufficient sleep becomes more and more precious. Yet the dreams keep coming, and grateful as I am to receive them, I allow only the “stronger” ones to rouse me from my bed to write them down. 

Here are two, one recent and the other from a few years back. They are similar in their suggestion that appearances in the world are not what they seem—and not to be feared, as comes so “naturally” for us laughing, trembly humans.

In one I was on my stomach, along with loved ones, crawling through high grass so as to avoid a lethal spray of bullets overhead. When I looked up and focused on the individual bullets they melted into harmless raindrops, as if my attending to them with a steady eye played a part in transforming them. We all rose to our feet and walked along, smiling as the gentle raindrops fell. In the other we were under the control of a vast army, each soldier dressed in black and moving with menace throughout the town. Again, when I had another good look at them they turned into “happy hounds”, deferential pups wanting our approval and love.

Is it true, as countless mystics have maintained over the centuries? Does our view—our focus and intention—alter the very fabric of “reality”? Is it simply the dispelling of false ideas and with them, the “world” as we have known it?
…..


Way back in 1951 a clever researcher wondered about the nature of group conformity. He devised an experiment which, in ensuing years, is said to have been widely replicated under a variety of conditions, an experiment in psychology which stands firm before the test of time.

He provided a drawing of three lines of obvious different lengths, and a separate fourth line exactly the length of one of the three. These lines were drawn in a manner that left no doubt as to which two of the four lines were identical in length. The experimenter made sure there was no ambiguity in this. He had four people sitting viewing the lines, each asked, in order, which of the first three lines the fourth one corresponded to in length. Now unbeknownst to the last individual asked, the first three people were ‘plants’, a part of the experiment. The first three had been instructed to choose—incorrectly—a certain line that clearly was of a different length (to match the fourth). The results? Fully 75% of those actually being experimented on (the fourth person in line, who gave their answer last) conformed to the incorrect answer of the first three. That left 25%… of humans, in our present psycho-emotional state, who dare to see things with our own eyes, and to declare what we see to others. 

I would be curious to see this experiment conducted to compare results from dense urban folk/rural village folk, as well as those from ‘PHD’ households/’illiterate’ households. We could imagine all kinds of tests along these lines (if we dared, even on different nationalities) to see if certain environments promote conformity more than others. I wonder how these additional, imagined tests might challenge our moral nerve in simply being willing to see what might come up. Would we be prepared and willing to face and accept the implications of such experiments? 

Some time ago, four countries invaded another, less armed one—and they dropped bombs. 
Grandchildren, brothers and sisters live in every one of them: Saudi Arabia Invaded Yemen, the U.S. invaded Somalia, Israel Invaded Syria, and (oh yeah, I almost forgot) Russia Invaded Ukraine. All happened within one week, folks.

In my early years I was made to become conscious of my family’s darker skin and odd ways as compared to the surrounding lighter, more fetching homogeneity. I have never forgotten the ugly truth about our tendency to ‘go tribal’—and how most people succumb to the horrific attitudes of racism and superiority. No group appears to be above this. 

Why have we not heard much about the other three acts of war that happened at the same time as the much-publicized one? It doesn’t matter to me that Ukrainians “look like us” nor that it is a “modern nation” like ours. I care about the grandchildren, the brothers and sisters—in all nations. What is happening in our world that the news focuses where it does, and ignores so much?

I wonder, and I am reluctant to think this way, yet… if one is not willing to consider the possibility that the whole of society thinks and behaves as an insane entity, then it’s possible that one is not sufficiently ‘thirsty’ to find the waters of truth.

The paradox, the colossal mind-fuck? I am grateful for my life. I feel blessed to love my people, my grandchildren, and I choose to live in faith that love is our name for what constitutes the fundamental nature of the universe—of you and me. I must see the ‘darkness’ that informs the ways of this world, and with clarity and hope must I mention what I see… yet I live daily, as much as I am able, and able to remind myself, that we each contain the whole of everything we hold dear, inside us. 
…..


Whoever discovered that the diameter of a circle times pi (3.14…) equals the circumference… is brilliant! (An ancient Greek?) And more, that pi times the radius squared equals the area of the circle--even more brilliant! 

I had to use both these formulas for the first time, in over 30 years, to do a tile quote. Had to happen eventually, I suppose. Monkeys, typewriters.

I walked up to a giant fountain inside the giant circle of a short concrete wall… walked up like one of those Planet of the Ape types, but holding a tape measure. Without thinking, probably looking glazy-eyed and smug, I measured the circle’s diameter and the height of the wall, then turned and walked back toward my truck. In my dumb kind of peripheral figuring I had sensed that it was all the info I needed, so I said goodbye to my potential client. He couldn’t speak English, but the guy must have thought I was daft.

No, I didn’t get the job, but the numbers were sharp.
…..



Learning with my granddaughters the skills and the art of kindness, a most valuable way to meet the day. I get my crew going in the morning then step back, see what might be seen. Eyes with hunger—and with flaws and limits, ‘culture-bound’ as they are, or at least are likely to be. 

I realize it is unwise to try to understand that which is beyond my grasp… yet here I go, weak in my resistance, armed with the dubious benefit of audacity gained within the tight embrace of a flamboyant Italian clan… 

I am astounded at how much of our personal experience is private, separate. I speak of all times, not just the past few years… how we experience being human, period. I’ve heard that ‘separation’ has its costs. 

Regarding community, the words ‘parochial’ or ‘provincial’ describe locally-bound culture, and are often linked with ‘narrow-minded’. The particulars of a group’s thought and behavior are thus associated with insular, ‘unworldly’ views and attitudes.

In this worldly time we see and speak across vast distances with little effort, so the merely parochial appears to be changing, as all things do. And so the geographical fences are made more transparent and visible at the same time. 

But it’s harder to get a fix on our ‘era-specific’ limits. We modern types can think and behave in thousands of ways now, even in the same town. But the limits we don’t see are perhaps the ones we don’t doubt. We are driven, together, toward familiarity and comfort, and consensus in our perceptions. And these likely operate on mostly unconscious programs. We could call it our ‘blindness in time’. 

Parochial and provincial were good and natural for those closed-in valleys of the past. “Others” were not to be trusted. Attack, rape and pillage are a real part of our past. Still happens. 

We are good at pointing at, naming and describing a physical object and the space it occupies. We’re good at measuring our domain; we know where the valley ends and the passes that make us vulnerable. 

Time, on the other hand, is as slippery as a scent on the wind. 
I would like to find a word to describe a perceptual matrix, a local veil in time, rather than in space. This time, our time—any time. I speak of the illusion of the pre-eminence—in knowledge, philosophy, the arts—of ‘our’ times. It is the collective web of thought and emotion that fools us into believing we are wiser than all who came before, that we are closing the gap on ‘knowledge’s end’. 
I believe it would be a most useful word, one to name a reality... that we might be better equipped to ‘see’ before the slip of time would allow us to look back with smug confidence. I can’t think of such a specific word. If there is one, I’d love to learn of it. Or maybe we could make one up. The Germans are good at throwing words together, maybe they already have one. 

I was flipping through my big red dictionary toward one of those German words, zeitgeist (to make sure I wasn’t bending its meaning), when my eye fell upon another, weltanschauungen. (Perhaps a ‘soft’ synchronicity serves to suggest that I become more aware of my own folly…) But neither word is… well, not quite the word I hanker for. For it needs also to refer to an era’s self-delusion in knowledge and wisdom.

As much as I feel it, I can’t put my finger on it. A word to name... something we haven’t quite ‘seen’ yet. It’s like saying the universe is expanding, but not mentioning, nor even wondering, what it might be expanding into. 
Is there some kind of ‘Non-Universe’ out there? What could that be?
.....


A friendly universe: and so I find that I’ve been living in one all along.
‘Friendly’ sets the tempo of life on flow, illuminates the backdrop of the stage with faith, and reveals in every detail a little hologram of something greater.

‘Universe’ is so incomprehensibly huge that it contains all we can and cannot imagine, including our present ‘unseen’ before the birth of ‘I’, and after its death. Today’s teacher might well be the fragility in a child’s eyes, and the smile that eases my burden tonight might come from a prisoner of suffering.

Perhaps fear is our work order, the stick and carrot of class instruction. In the many guises and different ways it comes to us, fear could be the mask for opportunity in reclaiming responsibility for what we experience, and therefore, for our autonomy. And so after a few bumps along this rather primitive road, we get to meet with the discovery of genuine friendship with... all of THAT.

Because I love that we see things differently (otherwise, why the need for words?), because our experiences are diverse and appear as separate pieces in a vast puzzle… I am curious about, and would love to get my hands on a grand bus, fill it with like-minded pilgrims, and travel the plains of sanity to plumb the mysteries on this, Einstein’s famous question: 

Is the universe a friendly, or an unfriendly place?
.....


In the aftermath of that logging truck crash and covid… seems the air itself has been spiked with psycho-active agents emanating from some existential (some say a spiritual) field. 
So lately, I’ve kept rather quiet.

Then I happened to look back at some unfinished thoughts I’ve had in months past but didn’t have the will to present. Here’s one:

In the dark hours, I’m sorting through different shelves of mind that bleed up and downward in ways I’ve given up trying to understand. In these remorseless places I have ‘been informed’ that I have allowed myself, for most of my life, to be tossed about in the caprices of desire to the point of obsession. Music, the Mind, Woman: my great peaks of desire. 
Feels like the exquisite aura of ‘woman’ has towered higher, prouder. Of course it has, chump.

Writing is a relative newcomer and is, oddly, something I simply do, like installing fine tiles or going to the park with my granddaughter. It’s not so much about desire, more about experience and service. Alas, writing did not even exist as an identity-piece in my formative years. I saw myself as a son of peasants and more suited to the vagabond life, or digging dirt or building things—playing music if I really wanted and was lucky—than to anything so learned as ‘to write’. During my entire childhood and a good portion of my adulthood, the classic affair with words and phrases did not even appear as an option. On the seminal journey of a bygone traveling life I made a modest attempt at keeping a journal; it is what I saw a few compadres-of-the-road doing, so I gave it a go myself. Lasted for a few weeks before I flung it out a window on an Indian train as I would a nasty parasite plucked from my neck.

Now, ironically, in these quiet hours I am drawn to write, and it feels quite separate from anything goal-oriented or the ‘objects of desire’. (Is that even ironic? Sigh.) An alignment toward ‘contributing’ is roused, inasmuch as I’m able to describe and share ideas on how to recognize and perhaps dismantle some of the crazy walls we build, together and alone, between and surrounding us. Perhaps this is my modest way of testing the waters of serving one and all… that I believe we all crave. It is what brings me the courage to hit ‘post’ or ‘submit’. 

And it gives me respite from hunger for the beautiful eternity I have always been driven to seek in those desires, like some foolish madman alone in a wasteland.

Such personal stuff--sigh. What I suspect the more sensible among us are likely to keep to themselves. And, well, that’s just what I’d been doing, far too effectively and for far too long, as I learned in a classroom setting a number of years ago.
And so this note is at the tail end of a masterly run of procrastination.

It was a number of years ago, in the second year of a course, that I was challenged to set up a web page for my writing. After some modest belly-aching about my deep and abiding distaste for goal-setting, yadda... I agreed to do it. I did the web site, but told very few people.

I reckon that telling people was an unspoken part of the deal... right?

Self-promotion is something I just don’t feel. It doesn’t bother me when I see it in others, but when it comes to me, I find it repugnant. I’m sure there’s something to be curious about there. Not gonna defend my reluctance, and I’m not gonna say there isn’t a beneficial place for it either.

But given ‘the deal’, this forum/blog/love diary... seems as benign a place as any to tie up the loose end in my agreement. And it’s far more effective—and true to that agreement—than mentioning it briefly, dismissively, here and there.

So here it is: my official coming out on the writing thing: johndom.com (I know, you’re already here.) Some whack shit therein, most of it written a good while ago, probably never live it down. But I will, cuz that’s the deal,right?

My seeming lack of ambition and strong reluctance toward goal-setting, my insistence that “all is as it must be” (thanks, Mom)… I won’t explore here what drives these attitudes, for they likely show up in the tip of a hidden mountain of subterranean action on this great Earth of countless mountains in multi-colored, colliding ranges—you and me and buddy and all our wondrous joy and loathsome shit.

Yet in spite of it all, I like myself. Perhaps this is weird. 

Thx P2, and Steve and Maria.
Thx, Fortuna, Destiny, Providence, Lady Luck, and all those inscrutable forces, alignments, road blocks and such, juggled as they are in the rubbery hands of time—that always seem to play us just exactly where we are.

I will walk, foot by foot, in winsome faith that somehow it all unfolds with intelligent ease.
For in the jungles of war and love, we are the hidden treasures of an undiscovered world. 
.....


The ‘flow’ of things presents timely little jumps that make the act of choosing seem redundant. Surrender and flow: a heck of a way to run a business. Or one’s life. I take a new course of action—by happenstance, for all I know—then it’s time for reflection. ‘Reflective intelligence’, as counter point to our more celebrated ‘active’ kind, is the discovery of an experiential new land risen from some great ocean of potential.

As a result I see that much of what I think and write about leans into ideas that seek to make sense of what are described as metaphysical, spiritual, or the subtle, transpersonal realms. All this and everything between... could be described as “mysticism for dummies”. So for some, the following is likely to strain credulity, or conjure yet another castle in the sky that would add to the rarefied rubble of words I offer in a heedless scatter across our timeline of ideas. 

Lately I’ve been smitten with a holographic paradox that goes something like this: All the love in the world fits neatly inside each of our hearts. It is an idea and a feeling that is dear to me, and maybe self-serving. (But what real meaning has “self” here given that we all share that very same focus or ‘form’ of identity?) Yet the value of the notion comes through in its effect, which feels liberating, calming—indeed, it lights up my connection with others. Love puts the spark to all we value in life… in its wake curiosity and gratitude are like special mind-crafts, mysterious inner potions that can take us into new lands of experience and understanding. 

The template of reality suggested by holograms can explain a feeling many of us have, or have had, especially as children: that ‘I am’ a glorious, self-evident ‘center’ of all that is. Leaving aside the private mind’s darker or more rudimentary aspect, “solipsism” (that oneself is all that exists), we can delight in the assurance that all can share in this same sense.
And so, when I wonder about existence plain I come to a ‘shape’ of things that can be described thus: I am a small part of the whole, yet I contain the essence of the whole. Simple words that attempt to describe our central existential mystery… that surely is beyond words.

Toddler-me tried to participate in ‘talk’ like everyone else. All I got was chuckles. It was the first time I became conscious of “me” as separate from others. I remember that ‘me’, and how it felt… and I am intrigued to admit I do not perceive any notable difference from the ‘me’ of today: essentially it is self as a whole, yet one of untold many that populate our Earth. 
I wonder, how many ‘wholes’ does it take to fill the ‘sheltering sky’ of mind—personal and collective? What drives us, singularly and together, in purpose and muscle, to build great pyramids, to set out into unknown seas in wooden ships? To hole away in seclusion and write a symphony? To climb aboard a missile aimed into space? To construct a world-wide network in crude mimicry of a single brain? 
What drives us? We are numerous pieces with the same form, the same working parts. A staggering multiplicity of pieces, the whole reflected in each one.

And what wily shadowland of descriptions can account for who, where or what... we are during sleep? Do we ‘go’ there? Is sleep a common field for a collective ‘self’ we dip into each day? For me the questions themselves are exciting, even though the answers might not appear—at least not where we think to look for them.
…..


It was Valentine’s Day yesterday.
And I realize, just now, that I did not wish anyone a “Happy Valentine’s Day!” 
And so I want to say...

Love is deeply intelligent. So intelligent that it is beyond the whim or machinations of ‘not-love’. That is the place of fear and control. When it comes to controllers and ‘perps’, they appear to feed on anxiety and pain, and gain by the contractions that fear creates. I have seen and felt this myself, and I’ve been the bad guy, too. That these regrettable behaviors have no jurisdiction in the field of love… I’d place a huge bet there.
It’s as if the designers of the universe decided that where love is lacking, intelligence will be in short supply as well. Perhaps love and intelligence are directly related. Wherever the forces of control and fear hold sway, a scarcity of conscious presence is evident. Why do those who are labeled ‘evil’ underestimate the goodness and good sense of most people? Is it because they do not perceive it? When inhabiting ‘darkness’, is ‘light’ repellant, or, ‘invisible’? Is that why, in their pompous arrogance, repressive regimes stomp forth revealing their plans as if nothing could stop them? Perhaps fear and control operate in a more rudimentary strata of mind and are, well, to put it simply, kinda’ dumb. Dumb when contrasted with the creatures of limitless creativity and rollicking laughter that each of us contains—even as we might hide it all away. Love addresses suffering with compassion and forgiveness and offers redemption, a way through and beyond the agonies of the world. Love even loves... ‘not-love’.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. —MLKing.

I don’t know about you, but in my interactions with others, characterizations of ‘light’ and ‘dark’—as in forces or energies—keep coming up, especially regarding the polarized mess the world appears to find itself in these days. I don’t really buy into the division: I believe it is false, a broken view arrived at by the scheming of distressed minds. Perhaps ‘darkness’ and ‘evil’ are simply what result from a chronic turning away from each other—yes, us—from ‘connection’ itself. Even so, in our personal interactions there are those who lift us, those we feel comfortable near, and those who judge us, those we feel uneasy in the company of. In popular myth the forces of fear and dick-ness (being a mean-ass dick) are generally aligned with darkness. Now I am not ‘against’ darkness, for in walking straight into it one can experience growth and transformation (light), and find that there is no real danger in it, that it isn’t even dark, really. In my modest way I have learned that when faced, what appears as a horror tends to subside and lie placid, as a lion beside a lamb. I’m not saying that this is absolute for everyone in all experiences, only that it has been the case for me, once or twice, in my limited time here.

Perhaps, as some say, there are spiritual or transpersonal ‘laws’ that govern our behavior. For those who are reluctant to think in these terms, we might say that it is the propensity of life itself to insist upon growth, adaptation, and improvement—an observable phenomenon, among the most mysterious to science. Why should this be so? What is life “trying to do?” Perhaps what some call spiritual is, by this natural view, the expansive enigma of life’s intricate and energetic pathways, ones that appear to move as if ‘purposefully’.

We speak poetically about ‘the head and the heart’, as if the two have been pushed apart by some strange, alienating magnetism inside each of us. But it is only when the separation vanishes, like the monster in the closet, that we might come close to feeling ‘whole’.

And that is when compassion rises and we laugh at the illusion of fear as we laugh at the sky, and the sun rises like a giant heart over the world.

And as it sets, the growing darkness ignites our imagination, and we are sparked with cool ideas on songs and poems, words and pictures... and all is well in the lands of the human saga.
Happy (belated) Valentine’s Day!
…..


“We’re making a pledge to do this thing together!”
Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” comes at an auspicious time, giving us a brighter view of the Beatles in their latter days as a group. The film shows us their commitment to produce music in a deliberate, scheduled way: it was their ‘job’, even as they defined the mountaintop that subsequent popular music would have little choice but look up to. The film comes across as more light-hearted and optimistic than the earlier “Let It Be” from 1970, which was shot in the same time and place yet depicted a quarreling, darker foursome.
The quote at the top is from a dream I had last night, words that speak at the same time—and bewitchingly so—to entirely disparate scenes, as dream words so cleverly do. For me they underline the positive potential of what our world is turning through today, as if Jackson’s hand on the wheel of time has the Beatles nodding in our direction, still singing, “Love, love, love!” in these most interesting times.
…..


I will ask a tender question: to what extent is the cause of censorship, in all its forms—including hate speech laws and the urges of those who would promote ideas to “protect the vulnerable”… how is this drive to ‘clean up the world’ related to the seemingly widespread denial of one’s ‘shadow’—that interior self we seem to fear and be self-programmed to avoid? Do we fear that the darkness might ‘win’? What is our personal ‘bogey-man’? Will there always be some anti-christ or monster from deep childhood, no longer recognized as fear yet still lurking in our sophisticated lives, ever-ready to be triggered for ‘justified’ action? 

Someone once said: “the way to deal with darkness is to shine a light on it.” 
And another voice: “Hate cannot overcome hate; only love can.”
Or, as a poet said, in an unruly moment: “kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.”
Vedantists say that there are many paths on the lower slopes, but only one mountain top.
Shine on. Light and love are real power. Fear and control are intrinsically weak. 
Paradoxically, there is nothing to fear. 
Every single one of us ‘has’ a body that will expire. 
Let’s accept this plain fact, face it every day, and then see what happens.
Those who say hateful things, or produce bad art, are hurting, and need to spend more time with those who hurt less. Let’s get together.

And those who we believe will be hurt by words and images… would best be supported, and strengthened, in learning to flourish in ‘the-world-as-it-is’—and not in our attempting to silence or ‘blot out’ the parts that bother them (or, more to the point, bother us.)

These bothersome parts are the so-called ‘shadow’ of all things about us that we would rather avoid. Yet staring it down and walking straight into it is one sure way through to a less anxious, and a better life.

And in facing the dark and the ugly, we are enabled to embrace all of humanity, even those we might once have been willing to denounce and cast aside.
…..


Morning, 2021! 
This little bit takes the form of a confession. 
I was raised in an old-world, Roman Catholic home, and evidently, something there remains. Although I rejected its tenure in my belief system at an early age, it seems that its psychic action runs deep: the idea that ‘seeing’ one’s transgressions is useful; the conviction that this kind of inner attentiveness will have a beneficial, redeeming effect. 

Which leads me to wonder whether any system will leave its experiential ‘imprint’—including those that stand in opposition to ‘faith’, or self-describe as rational, or ‘evidence-based’. Is it possible that all systems are subject to this ‘house-of-mirrors’ effect? Something to think about.

Somehow it does not make sense to me that my whole life, even from when I was very young, has been blessed with insights and sensations that want to cozy up to the teachings of saints and sages, even as these have become entangled with recent ideas from the physical sciences. It does not make sense to me because it seems that I have done little to earn these; I have followed no apparent discipline of mind or body, of study or skill; and I have not learned to meditate or develop the ability to concentrate or ‘be still’, of which mystics often have spoken. Without blame or shame do I seek clarity, and I see that in most ways I have taken the path of least resistance. Why then, have I been so blessed? Am I foolish to even ask? 

As the world races and spins, shouts and cries… I see it, watch it, even as I want to engage it, to do my part for the blooming of peace and trust where suffering so clearly abounds. Yet I find that I am often stalled and silent in the face of its rapacious and acquisitive forces. I go about my simple life—running my small business, serving my guys and my customers, attending to my loved ones—like a single reed in a quiet pool at the edge of a raging river. While my own carnal hunger also continues to rage, gone are the dreams of glory that once set the bar in this mostly restless mind. Gone is the great expanse of time and existence in this world, the illusion of a ‘worldly forever’ that accompanies the imaginations of the young (and how lovely, that naive joy in imagining infinite possibility! Are the young indeed ‘closer to the truth’?) 

What remains is desire for truth, and love for my people. And faith in some kind of unknown power that I intuit lies at a deeper level within the places of rest and near-silence, felt as brief glimpses beyond the storms of world and mind.
Gratitude and curiosity follow me on my path. Or they precede me.
Surely, they are my allies. 
This is my refuge.
..…