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.
.....


Generosity–what a concept!
I told my granddaughter today that I would be a king tomorrow, that there would be enough of everything for everyone. She was good with it. As we walked across the street to the park, I waved my arm out to the arc of mountains that flank our little town. “Those are my mountains”. She said, “no, they aren’t!” I said, “No, really, if you picked up that big one there and turned it upside-down, you’d see my name written on the bottom.”
She looked doubtful.

K. Glad I got that out.
So awhile back I was at a party, one of those parties where you know hardly anyone, moving among all the hyper-stimulated faces like a friendly ghost on an off-beat groove. Empty chair, I sit down next to a smart-dressed dude. Good vibe, we both smile. Strong eyes, a spark of hope and hunger, a dash of illusion… reminded me of Younger Me, the ‘looker’ who didn’t yet know how very blessed he was, or how strangely elastic (and short!) is the grand riddle we like to call ‘time’.
 
Anyway, we shoot straight to the topic of ‘giving’, as if our minds are super-computers that now interface in an opportune moment to identify the very spot at which we are most aligned. We speak—astonished, our eyes wide with wonder—of how very much we enjoy giving stuff to others. We admit—we confess—how great we feel when we give. 
Within minutes we conclude that the reason we like to give to others is in the way it makes us feel. We see, together, that our joy in giving is really driven by the selfish motive to feel good about ourselves.
 
Yet we both readily agree that we are not willing to change our ways.

I wonder how Generous Young Dude is doing.
And I wonder if the real question is about the inscrutable field of you-and-I, unnamed and ever-shifting in the play of mind, where giving and receiving are perhaps one action in consciousness, not two. I wonder about love, how its presence—or lack—informs all human experience.

Giving, generosity… I wonder if it is simply what happens when we let in a novel idea and then begin to feel the energy in that inscrutable field...
.....


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 rest 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’
.....


Generosity, Part 2
My mother and father were two of the most volatile, loving, wild, honest, devout, and charismatic people I’ve ever known.
And, ah yes... they were generous.
A while back I posted on generosity without mentioning Mom and Dad.
What? How? I must have blipped out.

It is as if their very reflex, to all who came into their home, was to open their eyes, their hearts, and their cupboards. This is the norm I grew within. My gratitude in having been sheltered and loved in such an environment is second only to what I feel for existence itself.
 
It is still mysterious to me, that no matter how many of us eight children arrived with one or two stragglers in tow, there always was an abundance of food to share. Never a doubt, never a word on “do we have enough?” (my family’s income was by Dad’s employ as a janitor in a hospital). 

Always a flurry of energy aimed at serving the guests, even their children’s friends. There were times—not rare—when I would return from a day of adventure to find one of my friends already at Mom and Dad’s table, chowing down with relish. And more often than not, they would not bother to greet me when I showed up; they were that absorbed in just being at our table.

Mom spoke of how gathering wild greens in local fields was an essential part of their diet back in Calabria. In PoCo she did the same, often seen climbing the back steps with an apron-full of dandelion greens, elderberry blossoms or various mushrooms, all of which she made delicious with her uncommon culinary skills. She told us how, back in the old country, she continued to breastfeed her two-plus-year old daughter even while pregnant. Food was that scarce.

Here in Canada they believed they’d found the motherlode. We children were the beneficiaries of their daily expressions of gratitude. Beneficiaries because we were taught, by example, that we will be provided for on a daily basis; that there are no guarantees (else why the daily thanks?) and that this does not pose a problem; that love and faith is the way of life. “Be like the lilies, the birds, who worry not for tomorrow.” The superb abundance of this new life, in their adopted land, must have seemed as rich and majestic as anything they’d dreamed of. 

And so as a young boy, I believed we were rich. The reality of our ‘lower working class’ digs dawned upon me, after starting school, in a kind of gentle disillusionment. It felt odd, it really did, to have gotten it so wrong—but the feeling was brief. No ‘social fact’ could bring me down from those heights of familial self-esteem, confidence in the abundant nature of life, and the gratitude I felt for it all.
All learned from my parents.

These days, if someone thanks me for my hospitality I say, “please—thank my mom and dad!”
.....


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 am not inclined to 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 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.
.....


Letter to myself… and to anyone curious about ‘Non-duality’.

I feel I’ve taken a quantum leap toward simplifying my life. Not saying easier, but simpler. And not that I can know where it’s heading.

This is a message gleaned from the motley ‘non-dualistic’ sources that have influenced me since traveling abroad in my early twenties. It is primarily to remind myself, to put it down in words so I can look at it, walk around it… yet I write also for the possibility it will be of interest to someone else.

Here is what I’ve gathered in my piecemeal way:
--keep doing what you’re doing. If you’re running a workshop, or running a marathon, keep running. If you’re a drop-out Buddhist spreading peace through meditation, or politically active, giddyup. Music, dance, working to pay the bills, ditto. If you’re building a mosque or a church or an observatory, keep building. Keep writing… maybe do a little less hiding!
--keep loving your loved ones, having fun, making love.
--keep your hobbies, feeding the poor, living on easy street, or crying the blues…
--maybe if you’re hurting others, do a little less of that.

Next, observe it all, as often as you can muster. The observing ability will increase. Keep doing it. Since ancient times it has been called ‘the witness state’ or ‘I AM’ consciousness. 
--if you are inclined, practice meditating. It will help develop your observing skills. At the very least it will help to reduce stress and anxiety.
--keep doing all the good stuff you do, don’t try to change yourself or perform as if for some cosmic spiritual school or contest. That’s just ego bunk, and it’s okay. Who, exactly, would change who? Are there two? Observe.

Which brings us to a very old question: Who Am I? It is said, by teachers and mystics across the spectrum of self-inquiry, to be a very important question. Keep asking it, as often as possible. Keep wondering.
Yet to some it is moot, or maybe annoying, or naive or self-absorbed—and its answer self-evident, even unnecessary. To others it is the fire that burns in a life-long quest, the answer to be found in the alchemy buried in the fool's gold of the obvious.

But why ‘Who Am I?’?
Great question. Well, who we think we are is a mental construct. Think about it. Everything we’ve learned about, and accept about ourselves, whatever we think, is… thinking. Imagine being raised by bushmen in the desert, listening to the wind before heading off to gather grub, or imagine you’re a twelve year-old girl trapped in a subterranean viewing cell, owned by city pimps who duped your parents back home in the hills… or you are one with more money than friends and prefer to remain in your windowless basement pad traveling the virtual realms with headset and computer… imagine the different situations, the different thoughts, and how you would think about yourself. They are conditional terms, these thoughts, and they create a sense of ‘me’ or ‘I’, an individual who barely knows oneself, and moves in the world by the awkward graces of references agreed upon mutually in any society… it is all made up. It is ‘reality’ only because we believe it to be real. But the ‘truth’ of it all… well. In truth, this ‘me’ doesn’t exist. It is the phantom self we call ego, and it is afraid to die because… it will die. Yet who we really are does not, and we are not this ‘I’, this person-in-the-world. Weird-ass shit.

And so what I have gathered, whether correct or not, is that some have transcended these veils of mind and bothered to talk about It. They speak in funny ways, and this must be so, for language, it is said, was conceived within the world of thought, mind… illusion. Language cannot possibly describe It. This is a paradox... because ‘The Word’ is vital and will lead us in any which way.

And so there is a notion that the ‘Totality’, ‘All-That-Is’, ‘God’, It... wants simply to experience what gifts can be known in the human life… and that’s why... keep doing what you’re doing!

Ah, but the thing is, we get to become conscious of It—what we actually are underneath the mind stuff, the thinking, the ‘ego’ stuff. This has been called a ‘leap of consciousness’, nirvana, kingdom of heaven, enlightenment… or, simply, the discovery of what or who we actually are. Yet there is no guarantee of becoming conscious of it in any given life.
It is why I call this focus on observing, on asking Who Am I?… (in my admittedly all-encompassing ignorance) the last frontier.
But how would I know.

And so, paradox, again: nothing in this life actually matters, yet we must behave as if every little thing... really does. We must do our best—no matter what we do. And observe, and keep asking, who…

An old story, retold:
After sitting with his master for hours listening to his words, the devotee gets up and walks blindly into the street—into the path of a moving truck. The master shouts, and the devotee jumps back, bewildered: “But master, I thought you said it all is illusion!” 
“Idiot! Of course it is! But in your illusion, that truck almost flattened you!”

I get that this is not for everyone, and there are those for whom paradox is a crock. 
Oh well.
In that case just live. It doesn’t matter. We can’t not be what we never weren’t.
Just go on enjoying life. Live, laugh, love, and leap... if you’re so inclined!
.....


I once heard a story… that every time a lamb jumps, a baby is born that will one day 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?
.....