CrowsCry Press

Adventures Beyond Belief

2006-08-16T10:48:00.000-07:00

While growing up I attended a small fundamentalist church. I found I could never follow the sermons and in fact I generally fell asleep before they were over. Memorizing and quoting Bible verses never had much appeal for me as it made me feel more like a parrot or trained seal than an intelligent human being. Even as a child I wanted to ask the more probing questions, but I knew they would get no satisfactory answer outside of more Bible verses.

Back in the late 1950s two things happened as I sat in my fold-down seat and struggled through the sermon. I was maybe 11 or 12. The first thing was that I tried to imagine who I was before I was born. What characteristics did I have and where did I come from?

Who am I, who am I?

As I pursued the questions in my mind I fell into such a void that I recoiled in fear and struggled to come back home, come back home to my small home and alcoholic family, come back home to the drone of the preacher and the monotony of the Bible verses. Sunday after Sunday I would fall into that void and then fight to come back home. I never talked about it because there was no one to talk to. I realized that no one was large enough to know the answer, let alone entertain the questions. My only solace was try and hang on to the reality I had as best I could. As bad as it was, that reality seemed better than falling into a place where beliefs held no sway and where there seemed no ground beneath my feet.

In addition to my trips to the void I also began to imagine a child like myself, an Arab child sitting in his mosque somewhere. He was being instructed that what he was being told was the true belief. I was being told that what I was being taught was the true belief. How were we to know what was true? We were both being guided by hearsay, asked to trust and believe in the hearsay, then asked to build our realities around it. I wanted some way of direct knowing, of being able to determine for myself the nature of true reality without being told to just memorize verses.

Though I write about spiritual matters, I’m at heart a scientist, a person who attempts to probe below his own conditioned beliefs about life and below those beliefs held by the cultures around him in order to find out what may or may not be true. It probably all started with those trips to the void, as I needed to know what had happened to me.

So, after many years of experiences both mysterious and mundane, I have managed to put some things together. I ask you to consider them, to think about them and reflect. I don’t ask you to believe them. Belief diminishes the deep spiritual, relegates it to the realm of rote learning and clever semantics.

If you follow these questions long enough you may bump into something so vast, so penetrating, so beyond description, attributes, and qualities, that it stops the world for a moment. Should we call it God, Yahweh, or Allah? But names are just attributes. Is it fearsome, jealous, just or unjust, loving? But these are all attributes. If I perceive fearsomeness, it is because I am fearful. If I perceive love, it is because I am loving or in need of love. Qualities are of the beholder.

How do we approach that which has no attributes? How do we embrace that which is too vast to embrace, communicate with that which has no ears or voice? Sometimes when I meditate I hold an image of my grandfather in my mind and speak to him. Sometimes I hold an image of my teachers. I deliberately use my imagination to give the Great Vastness a face and ears and mouth. These are my symbols. Symbols are like tiny doorways that open to the Great Vastness, a portal for the flow of energy and the chance to hear and be heard.

I choose my symbols carefully, though some just appear. Everything that can be named is only a symbol. Even God, Yahweh, and Allah are only symbols, doorways, to that which lies beyond. Every symbol carries it’s own impurity. Our task is to purify every symbol, make each symbol larger and larger, assign each symbol less and less attributes as our own minds expand. If God is jealous, we need to move on. If God is love, we need to move on. If God demands vengeance, we need to move on. To do this our minds cannot be rigid with belief, our symbol clutched tightly in our cold, dead hands. Symbols are tools, tools like sharp chisels and planes, tools that we use to craft the spiritual life. But then, eventually, even the word spiritual falls away till there is just life.

Every god is a limited doorway. Every holy book is a rigid document, more about social, cultural control and hegemony than it is about the truly religious mind. I can only tell you about symbols, their use and pitfalls. I cannot tell you which symbol to choose, but I can talk to you about the wisdom of choice. My words are not for belief, but only as fuel for your own direct experience. I can point in a direction, but the path is not fixed. This is not rote learning. This is life. Be alert, be nimble.

How do you react to all this? Are you angry? Are you indifferent? Why? We are dying from our beliefs and our beliefs won’t save us. We act like silly, lazy children waiting to be saved, rather than growing up and saving ourselves. What will you do about it? Can you sacrifice your beliefs for the sake of life, for the sake of what lies beneath it all, in the name of that which cannot be named? Please consider this deeply and pass it on.

I'll Meet You There

2006-08-04T14:55:00.000-07:00

When we look around ourselves at the sad state of our existence, we have to ask, “Why isn’t it better than this?” After three to four thousand years of civilization, the bulk of humanity still processes information in the same fashion, responds with the same prejudices, and glorifies the same sort of limited viewpoints. There exists a fear of becoming something larger, wiser, more profound. We cling to our frailties like the Church clung to the notion of an Earth-centric universe. It is as if we are afraid we wouldn’t exist without our fears and desires. We need a universe that circles around those fears and desires and makes them hauntingly real. This is our identity.

Can you imagine living in a universe that does not circle around those fears and desires? Your culture would want to reel you in, your religion would want to reel you in. “You must share our fears and desires, loathe what we loathe, cheer what we cheer. That’s what it means to be one of us. You must be one of us.” This can be a lonely path, punctuated by a few good friends. It’s also good to find more.

Last week was my 59th birthday and an unexpected gift arrived, an email from a young man who had stumbled on one of my articles here on BC. He expressed his great feeling of separateness and how sometimes it made him feel superior. Most of the time though, the feeling made him feel full of doubt about himself. He wanted to “stand tall” in terms of spiritual experience. He asked, “What else is there, or what else should there be?” I sent him the following reply.

“The best reply really is the shortest. In a Zen way I could say, "Just this!" and it would say everything, but not enough.

When one encounters the Great Largeness of existence, the proper reactions are both humility and awe. Both qualities are in short supply in this world. If you were to really grasp the magnitude of the process that has made you, the billions of years of the formation of the universe and suns and planets, the millions of years of human evolution, then you have to ask if your life that you lead worthy of all that great effort.

I do not know what things cause you to doubt yourself, or what things cause you to perceive the crack in the façade of the world and make you feel different. It is necessary to see the crack, but it is easy to be overcome by the separateness from the ways of the world. We are wired to be social creatures. Many spiritual traditions solve the problem by living apart in cloisters and monasteries, but that creates its own inbred problems.

Seeing the crack and seeing the delusion by which most people lead their lives can foster several different reactions. One can feel superior to the deluded or one can fall into despair at the sense of isolation. One can also simply feel compassion. I believe that compassion is rooted in a deep sense of sadness at the way humans choose to live in the delusion and ignore all the effort that has gone into creating them.

Standing tall. How do we stand tall with great humility? That is the real challenge. It is good to have some disciplines, good to have a teacher. Compassion is not the last step. When you can stand tall with humility, maybe you can then move on to extending your core energy, your core being to touch another. This is what I call real love. This is the core of why I write, my small attempts to extend what I have learned and cultivated from the old men who loved and helped me.

I have the notion of creating an online community for these things, for community and friendship are at the core of the solution. Separateness and isolation are killers. They also promote ego inflation, for seeing the crack is nothing special. I posted a comment on a friend's blog yesterday to that effect. The core of the comment is to, "Find a friend to learn from, find a friend to teach." The teaching, though, is one that comes from modeling rather than telling.

Beyond the shrinking of your ego is life, not what we imagine or merchandise or fear, but what IS. It's not easy, but it's necessary.”

How can we exist in this world beyond the crack? What do we say to our friends when there is nothing to boast, jeer, or gossip about? When I see one of my best friends after an absence of a year or two, we simply touch foreheads and smile. This world is full, but for most, it’s rejected before it’s even encountered.

Beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. 
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” 
don’t make sense any more.
 - Rumi

Zeus and the Practice of Loss

2006-07-27T12:49:00.000-07:00

Last week my wife came up to me after she arrived home from work.

“Zeus has left us.”

Zeus was one of my daughter’s rabbits. She has had a procession of rabbits in her life since she was about six years old. A friend had given our daughter a female Rex and sometime later we decided to get a male rabbit (neutered) for bunny companionship. Thus began a series of male/female companion rabbits that have spanned the years. The older female died, then she was replaced with a younger female. Later the male died and was also replaced. This rabbit pair has had many overlapping incarnations since that first root couple in the years-ago past.

Every death has been met with its own grief, an ongoing practice of loss. Loss is a difficult thing to understand, especially for a child. Ching Man Ching in his treatise on T'ai Chi Chuan counsels, "Learn to invest in loss. Who is willing to do this? To invest in loss is to permit others to attack while you don't use even the slightest force to defend yourself. On the contrary, you lead the opponent's force away so that it is useless. Then when you counter, any opponent will be thrown out a great distance." In my daughter’s practice of loss with her pets, she has loved, lost, grieved, loved again. She is a strong and resilient young adult for her learned practice of loss.

I dug a hole in the backyard beneath a Japanese maple where we could bury Zeus. He had been with us the longest of any of the rabbits. As a young rabbit he had been full of himself, taunting us to catch him and put him back into the cage at night where he could be kept safe from the predations of the raccoons and possums. As an old rabbit he delighted in eating peanuts and fresh veggies from our hands, then waited for his head to be scratched and stroked. I removed him from the towel shroud in which we had wrapped him, then placed him fetus-like in the hole. Barbara placed a few roses from the front yard along with a few fresh sprigs of basil within the cup formed by the fetal arced corpse. Fresh basil is a rabbit’s delight.

Tears came to my eyes as we paid our last respects, for the last sight of Zeus conjured up many memories. Rabbits are the cannon fodder of the animal world, surviving only by their fecundity. Why would the sight of one rabbit bring tears to my eyes? He had become a symbol. Just looking at his empty shell brought up full memories of our family and our life together. I had come into this family when my daughter was five years old, so this bunny history spanned nearly all of our time together. I remembered consoling our daughter through her times of loss and helping her celebrate her triumphs. She hasn’t lived at home for four years now as she has been off at college and has just graduated with many honors.

So, the body of Zeus has a great power to conjure up all these memories. Thinking of him can lift me from a depression because of the power of memory and gratitude. The rabbit is still a rabbit, though, with no meaning outside our little family, with no power apart from us to heal the blues or provide comfort. Symbols can provide a doorway to the deepest place or to the infinite nameless force, but symbols are not, and cannot be, the deepest place or the infinite force. You will have your own version of Zeus. In our tears we covered the body, but kept the symbol alive.

The next morning we looked out into the backyard. A skunk was standing by the gravesite. I then noticed a patch of downy hair scattered on the ground. A raccoon had probably dug into the grave and now the skunk was looking for something to scavenge. We found the bones of a leg, but the rest of the body was still in the hole. We matter-of-factly covered the hole with dirt once more, then place a board and one of Barbara’s sculptures over Zeus’ fragmented remains. The body is scattered and digested but the symbol, the memory, remains whole. The practice of loss. When the memory wanes, life will bring more symbols as doorways.

Synchronicity and Grace

2006-07-20T13:48:00.000-07:00

I met a ghost a few days ago, touched hands and minds with one of the most influential men in my life. He’s been dead for twelve years.

I grew up with a father who distrusted anything that smacked of education and intelligence. He grew up in a poor family in the rural South with eleven siblings. As his father would beat him, my father would constantly be told how stupid he was. My father dropped out of elementary school during the Great Depression when his father was killed in an auto accident and all the children had to suddenly support the family.

My father was cursed with two very intelligent sons. When I brought home my report card with its straight A’s, he would tell me that I had no common sense and how he had seen all the college educated kids die first during World War II. It is one thing to fail in life with bad performance or lack of effort. It is quite another to fail with efforts that few people can match. I ended up graduating from high school as one of the top two math and science scholars in my county. My father only slipped further from me into his drinking and depression. He died when I was 22.

I feel like I lived my life in a haze for a long time, not from drugs or drinking, but from the experience repeated over and over endlessly, the experience that nothing I could do would ever be good enough, not even near perfection. My own depression sprang from this. Why try when the best of efforts was insufficient?

It’s difficult to have a deep relationship with a woman in this state of mind. When I was 42 and returned to my 25th high school reunion I met a woman whom I hadn’t seen since my high-achieving days of high school. It was a synchronistic event that deserves an entire story of its own. I knew without a doubt that I would spend the rest of my life with her after we first said hello and then passed on by. We didn’t fall in love as much as choose to become friends who would help each other down the road.

After I had moved to live with her and her five-year old daughter, my past began to rise up to meet me again. A friend of hers gave her the name of an old man, Robert Blakemore, who was supposed to be a good counselor. When I went to see him my life changed forever. The magic was that he saw nothing wrong with me, nothing to fix. He enjoyed every aspect of my particular genius and beamed with a paternal pride as I undertook being a father myself. His depth and wisdom penetrated me as he encouraged me to take on those same aspects for myself. His very being encouraged forward.

One day Blakemore sat me down and told me the story of Parsifal and the Holy Grail as he was trained in the mythic tradition of Jungian psychology. Within this symbolic tradition, the Grail is not a thing—not a cup or a womb—but rather the place within each of us whence our own vital energy, our true life, springs. Soon after he told me this story, Robert A. Johnson, the Jungian therapist and author of the book He about Parsifal and the Holy Grail, came to town for a presentation. Blakemore encouraged me to go see Johnson, told me that something interesting might happen. He also told me to make an effort to talk to Johnson.

I went with my wife to see Johnson’s lecture. We entered a crowded hall and miraculously found seats in the second row, slightly to the left of center. After his lecture, which enfolded aspects of the Grail Legend, I turned to my wife to talk. There was a break before the next presenter was to come on. As I turned toward the front again, I found Johnson sitting directly in front of me. I fought for words in my mind, something I could say, but I couldn’t move my lips. He turned to look at me. “Did you say something?” he inquired. I fumbled for more words. He explained that he had trouble giving talks, so he relied on advice that Marie-Louise von Franz had once given him. He picked out someone in the audience that he liked and spoke directly to that person as he lectured. He said he had chosen me and asked if I minded. Here was man who had been a close student of Jung himself and he was asking if I minded. From this encounter Johnson became another mentor who helped guide me on the quest toward my own personal Grail.

When I went to see Blakemore days later, he again listened with a smiling face as I recounted my story of the encounter with Johnson. “I knew something would happen,” he said, and then laughed deeply.

Blakemore died suddenly soon after. I wept profoundly at the depth of my loss. I wept with gratitude at the depth of my gain. I loved him deeply and I loved Johnson. I had thought I would never experience such acceptance of who I really was and am. I had just started the first pages of a book when Blakemore died. At his memorial I pledged that I would finish the book in his honor as the book wouldn’t have any existence or merit at all without his interaction in my life. I envisioned finishing the book in a year or two. It took ten.

I was at Home Depot a few days ago for a last minute exchange of parts before I headed to a job. I heard a voice. “Hello there.” I looked up into Blakemore’s face, into the same beaming smile that had left me years ago. Of course it wasn’t him, it was his son who carried the same name. I hadn’t seen him since soon after the funeral and in the intervening 12 years his hair had become white. He now looked much like his father.

When he asked what I was doing, I replied that I had just published a book that was dedicated in part to his father. I told him that the book wouldn’t even exist without his father being in my life. We looked at each other as tears moved to our eyes. I can scarcely talk of his father without tears of gratitude springing forth unbidden. I asked if I could give him a copy of the book to complete the circle, the circle of energy returning to its source in order to go forth once more. This is the essence of the Grail. “Of course,” he said. He is a big-hearted man like his father.

I don’t know where this interaction will go. These synchronicities guide my life, have shaped and given depth to me. It is grace in action. This grace will have its own life and lead to its own end. In life we are taught to grow strong and beat down the doors. Either that or we walk away in angry frustration. Sometimes if you just sit and just watch, the door momentarily opens and you can walk on through. Grace. Patience, awareness, gratitude. Grace.

Stretching Rainflies in a Storm

2006-07-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

When I was teaching we used to take the kids out three times a year for trips into the outdoors. The shortest trip lasted five days and the longest lasted ten to fourteen days. The idea was to take the kids away from their learned definition of themselves and away from their distractions, take them away from their electronics and their comfortable beds so as to encounter something more elemental, more profound. I lived for those moments in the outdoors, for those moments when my own clarity and profundity had a clear, untrammeled stage.

In the middle of a three-day rainstorm once, I went from tent to tent adjusting rainflies, showing the kids how it was done in the process. I had good equipment for myself and knew how to take care of myself. I was dry and operated in a zone of joy that couldn’t be dampened by the deluge of rain. I knew my job was simply to pass on knowledge of how live in these circumstances and there was completeness in the act. What to most would be a cause for discomfort and grand complaint was to me primal, elemental, and transfiguring. There is great power in this elemental state and much to learn from it.

We spend a great deal of money and energy to avoid our elemental state, find myriad ways to distract ourselves. One of the things we had to confront as teachers was the fact that many of our students came from very wealthy families where they could normally purchase any level of distraction they wanted. Why learn to properly pitch a tent in a storm when one can book an expensive room, even buy the hotel? Indeed, one of my students was an heir to the Hilton fortune.

Once my headmaster said to me, “John, I’ve come to the conclusion that money is a detriment in these kids lives.” When Christ said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven, he wasn’t knocking money as much as he was talking about money’s ability to buy distraction from the elemental real nature of life. In our present age though, we have suffered a democratization of distraction so that distraction from the elemental real is not just the province of the rich, but is something attainable by us all. It is our way of life and something we view as an inalienable right.

I have been gone from posting for a while as I pondered my relationship with writing. It is sometimes disheartening to have little feedback or a sense of effect. I’ve found though, that teaching is a long-term proposition. One student of mine who was on the above trip came from a very dysfunctional family that was rife with alcohol and drug problems. He himself descended into addiction when he left our school. One day, six or seven years later, I looked up from my desk as this young man entered the room. His eyes were clear and there was a smile on his face as he came over to embrace me. He had gone through recovery and come out the other side.

I realized that in his days with us, we had provided the only family and stability he had known. Even in his darkest days he had drawn on that memory to help him toward clarity. We couldn’t save him from his circumstances, but we had been able to provide him with a light he could use if he so chose. So I have to write in an untrammeled way without knowing the impact of the writing. Let’s call it stretching rainflies in a storm. I do it to pass on the knowledge of encountering something elemental and of the joy that can be found in not being too distracted. Passing it on is simply what I do. Will I look up from my desk someday to see your clear eyes?

Imagine we are in the forest somewhere, far from your distractions. Here is how you tie the knot. Don’t let your rainfly touch the tent.

The New Doors of Perception

2006-02-28T11:00:00.000-08:00

“If the doors to perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”—William Blake

With the above quote Aldous Huxley began his book The Doors of Perception. The book was nominally about his experiences taking mescaline in the early 1950’s, but it was more a critical examination of the processes by which we apprehend reality and an examination of the nature of spiritual experience.
A month ago I was installing a new set of doors for two men in their eighties, a gay couple. One of the men had read my book and enjoyed it very much. The room where we installed the doors was a small back bedroom that had cinderblock walls, plastered on the inside and stuccoed on the outside, and two small windows with no direct access to the outdoors. We had to have a concrete cutting service come in to saw a hole in the wall so that I could install a small set of double French doors. As I finished the job, the partner of the man who read my book came up to me and said, “Tom and I both agree that you remind us of Aldous Huxley.”

I looked up, a bit baffled and amazed by the comment. “Do I look like him?”

“A bit,” my client replied, “but it’s more in the way you carry yourself and express yourself, your mind.”

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied with a slight smile. “We used to take LSD together.”

I immediately thought of The Doors of Perception, of how it had been a must read during the sixties. I also thought of the doors I was installing. I’ve installed a lot of doors in my time, even designed and made some of them. The time I’ve spent teaching is also, in a great sense, about the finding of doors or the creation of new doors. It’s all about providing a well-crafted passageway between the inside and outside worlds.
During the sixties I had picked up the book, but never really read it. Reading the book seemed secondary to the experience of the times. It’s pretty faddish now to diss the sixties as self-indulgent and irrelevant, but between tokes we managed to end a presidency, end a war, and help bring about a bit more racial justice. What can be said of the present?

The salient feature of the time seemed to be that many of the people I knew were trying to figure out a better way to do things and were actively trying to cleanse their doors of perception, either through drugs or nascent spiritual practice. It was a time of felt community. We were trying to gain a vision, but never figured out how to bring that vision into this world. We foundered on the rocks of drugs or the necessity of making a living. Deep within us though is the memory that we had a dream, a vision, and it’s still incomplete. It’s time for completion.

As I read through The Doors of Perception, I was amazed with the parallels in Huxley’s thinking and expression and my own. I was also aware of the differences. He was a European classicist with a noble pedigree. His grandfather Thomas had been the great proponent of the theory of evolution and was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog.” I came from a family where my father was a third grade dropout who didn’t want me to go to college. Rather than the classics, my tastes run to roots music and jazz. I can’t reference the classics very well, but I can reference our roots in this American landscape. My father’s family came to what is now the southern United States about 1650. My mother’s family came to California from Germany in the early 1850s at the end of the Gold Rush. Some family members came across the prairie in covered wagons and some came around stormy Cape Horn.

Despite our differences, Huxley and I could meet on the other side of the door. As I read the book I knew I could extend the vision and the thought even further, so I decided to create this ongoing journal, a chronicle of the mundane life butted up against the Mystery.

Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) and Timothy Leary once took LSD for thirty straight days in an attempt to stay perpetually high, perpetually on the other side of the door, perpetually separate from the mundane world. It’s analogous too trying to stay perpetually in the throes of sexual ecstasy. You may conceive your children in the ecstasy, but you can’t successfully raise your children while trying to perpetually live in the same ecstasy. LSD blows the rigid, frozen door of culture and habit off its hinges, but the task is to craft a door that opens and closes, as needed, a fine handcrafted door that bears the marks of your being, your own needs, your history, your joy and your sorrow. This series is an attempt to understand the nature of that door: what materials might possibly be used, how to get a feel for the design, what it means to be a craftsman, and the necessity of sharpening your tools.

Huxley died in Los Angeles the same day President Kennedy was assassinated, his death overshadowed by the national tragedy. Interestingly C.S. Lewis also died the same day. As Huxley lie dying from throat cancer, unable to speak, he scribbled a final request to his wife for a last dose of LSD--100 micrograms, injected. He shed the mortal coil in the company of Dr. Hofmann’s “problem child.”

Setting the Table

2006-01-22T12:25:00.000-08:00

Many years ago I had this mysterious experience. It lasted only a moment, but to describe its impact I have to create a vast visual image. In that moment I had a sense of the great process of creation, of a universe exploding from nothing, of clouds of gas and dust falling into suns and planets, of the process of life moving from single cells through greater complexity and on to me. I was the penultimate result of the billions of years of solar and planetary formation and of the millions of years of the struggle to come to conscious life. The question that struck me with great force was this. Was I worthy of the great process? Was I really conscious? Did my life honor and extend this great process, this great gift? The answer was no, I was just another monkey, aimlessly swinging around, nervously chattering and throwing shitballs in the face of the great immensity. It’s hard to know what to do with experiences like this. At first I was just depressed, not knowing the next step. The experience remained in my mind.

One of the things I’ve found to be true in this spiritual quest is that it’s good to master something that connects the body and the mind, something that helps create a unity of being. It could be martial arts, it could be gardening. One of my martial arts teachers once said that anything we choose to master can enlighten us, but if it doesn’t lead us to understanding who we really are, then the discipline is just clever behavior. Clever, clever monkey behavior. Several years after the mysterious experience I came to woodworking and I’ve been doing that for thirty years. I also earned a blackbelt in Aikido. These disciplines would have been pointless however, if they hadn’t guided me to being a better husband, a better father, a better human being.

For the moment I have left my teaching career to devote time to writing and publishing. I have also immersed myself once again in the joy of wood. I’m working on a table that has the feel of a Zen brushstroke. That in a sense is how I know I’m on to something, when its expression has the feel of a brushstroke done to a long exhalation. As for my writing, I’d like to be a Thoreau or Emerson, but we’ll see. That would be a nice brushstroke to extend through the rest of my existence. I’ve said all these things in order to set the table for our next time together. For your part, I’d like you to consider the image in the first paragraph above. Can you see this great immensity coming down to you? Does your life honor this process or are you throwing shitballs? Think about these things. How do you want to spend the rest of your existence?

The Music of Real Intelligence

2006-01-13T12:38:00.000-08:00

The poet Rumi began one of his poems, “Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.” Why is it so, and why does it have to be so? At the beginning of the new year, maybe it’s time to explore the question and possibly come to a new answer. To move in that direction I would like to post a new vision.

Though I’m older (I could be the father of most on this website, and grandfather to some) I have great affection for the technology of the time. I hate typewriters, but love my laptop. From the time of Sir Isaac Newton till I graduated from college, all mathematicians and scientists used a slide rule. I used to hold a slide rule up to my math classes and say, “Why in my day, we used to make math by rubbing two sticks together.” Now we have computers. I am astounded by the internet and I have this great vision of it. I see it as a reflection of the vast collective unconscious of humankind and life itself. Everything exists there: the good, the bad, and the ugly. No legislation will tame it. What is confined or subdued in one area will pop up in another. It seems governed by the same chaotic principles that underlie life itself. Yet the power inherent in the internet is incredible. With human life in the state that it is, this power can either aid in our quest for understanding and for healing our plight, or it can cast us into further disintegration. I have yet to see, though, anyone begin to tap this vast potential for the common good, for some form of enlightenment itself. We have yet to make anything substantial of the gift.

So why do we wake up each day empty and frightened? I believe that it’s because we spend each preceding day rehashing, posting the same old stuff, feeding the same demons, the same addictions, the same rigid notions. What I see on the internet, as in most daily life, is this Great Daily Rehash, this daily attempt to stay convinced that the Rehash is really what life is all about. I know there a great number of people who not only seek a greater vision of life, but have also experienced this greater vision. The problem is they mostly exist in their own isolated worlds. I believe that enlightenment is not that big a deal. Many people experience it and promptly forget about it, because there is nothing in their lives to nourish it. The enlightenment experience may not be that big a deal, but integrating it and living it can be a bitch. My vision is of a home where all these disparate people can link up and nourish that experience, a place where people can help each other find the courage to go beneath the assumptions about life and experience directly what life really is. This linking would be a means to forge new synaptic pathways within our common mind, maybe help us to wake up each morning less empty and less frightened because we are less alone. This direct experience could become a greater force in a rehashed world.

Today, like every other day,
we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.

Each of us has to make a choice about our relationship to life and how we use this great tool at our disposal. Do we just nervously, endlessly chatter, or do we begin to communicate deeply? Can this be the place where the music of real intelligence, real awareness happens? I know the potential is there.

Saying "Yes"

2006-01-10T12:47:00.000-08:00

It’s a coastal California winter morning and the low-angled sun is beaming through the south-facing window where I sit writing. I’m contemplating the new year, this time after the winter solstice when the sun begins to ascend once again. Where do I want to go with my life, where do I need to go? A life as a writer seems to bridge the two worlds.

Back in the eighties, Bill Moyers conducted his famous series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, but I missed the first go round and only read about it in the newspapers. About a year later the local PBS station in the San Francisco Bay Area ran the series again. One late night as a service to viewers they ran the entire series back to back so people could tape the whole thing uninterrupted. I watched most of the series, taking in the information in a hypnagogic state as I struggled to stay awake for the entire night. I seemed to be inhabiting a different world, the images and information seemed to penetrate me. In one episode, Campbell posed his famous question, “Can you just say ‘yes’ to life?” The question lingered with me and still does.

The associated question is, “What is life?” Is life the series of assumptions, prejudices, conditionings, and good and bad experiences that each of us calls our own individual life, or is real life something far deeper, something that butts up to the universal process of creation and being? How do I drop my dead estimations and evaluations of reality in order to find the life to which I can say "yes?" Religion as we know it just tends to be a massive series of assumptions, conditionings, and prejudices that keeps us from this experience of saying “yes” to real life. Most people don’t even know that this experience is available, don’t understand that personal wisdom is even possible. We hug tight to our assumptions and let presidents, popes and mullahs do our thinking for us, rigid thinking that leads us further and further from the core of being.

The truth is our little lives are not working for us on personal, national, or global levels. Can each of us choose to do something about this situation in the new year? Can we start by just considering the idea that a deeper experience exists. Can we say "yes" to considering the idea of a deeper life? Just examine what protests and objections come to mind.

Outside this window different types of bamboo grow in our front yard, dappled by the winter morning sun. Yellow and green striped “Alphonse Karr,” blue Himalayan, maroon...they just leap forth from the ground.

Quest for meaning

2005-12-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

Last Sunday I returned my daughter to college after the Thanksgiving break. It’s always a strange experience going to the campus since it’s the same place that I went in the sixties. I never pushed the place on her because I had ambivalent feelings about my experience there anyway. When I went away to school I didn’t so much go to college as escape to college. After escaping the painful experience that was my family I was left with only a few things to believe in. I grew up on a farm during the fifties with an innocent and naïve faith in both my country and my church – no matter how boring.

When I went away to college the Vietnam War began to build. The mass of contradictions that provided a rationale for the war, as well as the meaningless death, began to tear away at my belief that some benevolent order existed in the world. Some friends began to come home in body bags. When I got married at 22, my grandmother sent me a clipping from my hometown newspaper detailing my wedding. On the back of the clipping was an obituary of one my best friends from high school who had been killed on the first day of the Cambodian invasion. A brilliant student and West Point grad, he had gone off to be slaughtered. I was devastated. Over these years my world was stripped of meaning and I felt I was becoming an empty shell. I had gone off to college to gain some meaning in my life and instead ended up losing meaning to the experience of the times.

Though my life is far better, our collective experience of life is no better, if not worse. We head in all possible directions: blindly searching for meaning, cynically denying that such a thing could exist, immersing ourselves in numbing the mind or just flat out piling up the riches. One time in college my brother came up to me and proclaimed that he had figured out the meaning of life, at least in our culture. Life was about having a dump truck pull up and unload a mountain of shit on us. Our aspiration in life, according to him, was to become the driver. Truthfully, that’s the impetus that guides many lives, especially our religious, political, and corporate leaders. Many others just accept the load of shit in one way or another.

I’ve made it through the maze to a large degree, discovered my own well of meaning, but it’s been hard work. I hold out the vision or hope that many others will find their own wells of meaning, but it requires a certain relentlessness of spirit, and in a time of cynicism and despair, this relentlessness of spirit is hard to come by. Until this happens though, all our actions, fascinations, and evasions are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Will we make it? I don’t know. I simply hold out the possibility, no matter how small.

Fall Trip

2005-10-14T13:57:00.000-07:00

It's been many days. I've been traveling through the Northeast--Vermont and New Hampshire--before we head south for my nephew's wedding in Central Park. We've been skirting the flooding from the recent storms from leftover hurricanes. There has been some display of fall color, but there hasn't been the killing frost to snap the colors to full life. The leaves may just turn brown without the cold jolt that stops the chlorophyll process.

We spent a night in Brattleboro and the next morning spent a while walking around looking for breakfast and a good coffee place. After an excellent breakfast we walked into Mocha Joe's for our caffeine. I'm really more of a tea person though. Some other time I'll talk about tea. When we walked in I thought I had entered a time warp and had reentered the sixties in Berkeley. I'm not a person who looks back on the sixties with disgust and regret. I learned a lot from the time and I can say that at least we believed in something and also believed that things could change. We were just too naive and ungrounded to assume our true power. Many of us just joined in with the mindless dance, the zombie dance, of the flow of life in this country. Others just lost their minds. We ordered chais, fearful that we might get the supersweet concentrate from a box. Instead we got a custom brewed tea, full of flavor and with no extra sugar. We had to wait 15 minutes for the drinks to be brewed, but the wait was worth every minute. We sipped our tea slowly in respect for a time of when more things were held to be possible.

It's hard to believe that the President and I grew up during the same era. I learned the openness of great possiblity and he fell into the tunnel vision of fundamentalism. What cataclysm could have so collapsed his being? What event or events conspired to so make him such a devout foe of life and the natural order of things? We are all held hostage to these calamities. I wish he and I could sit down to good tea together and consider life.

A Zombie in the Game

2005-10-02T10:47:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted anything in a week. I've had to revert to my old profession of finish carpentry during this last week in order to pay the bills and to subsidize my writing vision. It's difficult to switch back and forth anymore like I used to. The writing has taken on too large a life and has its own needs. As I discovered that I was indeed a writer I also found out that writing is indeed my life's work. Writing creates a great sanity within me in the midst of this chaotic, violent world. Writing is actually my greatest self-discipline, my path. From this vantage point I can look at my own life and its foibles with equinimity and consider the chaos and violence with compassion.

Several years ago I was discussing some social issues with one of my classes. Some of the girls were into their eating-each-other-alive habits and I wanted to make some points without pointing fingers. Paraphrasing Rodney King I said something to the effect of, "Why can't we just get along?" One of the girls in class, one of the Queen Bees, raised her hand and said, "But that would be so boring!"

She is a nervous, hyperactive person from a household wracked by bitter divorce and venom. It's difficult for her to be with herself for very long. Boredom is just a way of saying that she can't bear her own company. She shreds those around her to live off the adrenaline and to avoid that kind of boredom. We are all like that in many ways. We all have our ways of avoiding our own company, of avoiding the consideration of ourselves with some grace and compassion, the looking deeply into the places that we'd rather avoid.

There are so many of us like that, that we elect leaders to mirror our avoidance. We have a President who would rather despoil the environment and and lead brutal wars than to confront his boredom and discomfort with himself, to face the things that had made him an addict and alcoholic. When I see him on TV, I see some of my hyperactive junior high boys who are unable to really focus and be here, unable to grasp subtlety. He is but a glorified zombie in the game.

We all have to wake up. How much do you want to be more than just a zombie in the game we have created? A Zen Master once awakened to knowing by just hearing a bird call from outside the meditation hall. What will it take for you? Gaw!

A Certain Generosity of Spirit

2005-09-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I was at another book festival. It was here in Santa Barbara and was yet another slow day. Children's book are popular and so are reference books, but it's tough to sell literature. The booth next to me belonged to Sally Ride the astronaut. Seeing her sign books brought up thoughts of my high school desires to go to Stanford, her alma mater, and how those desires had been so rudely dashed. I had been among the elite in science and mathematics. It was as if an old part of my life's desire was being modeled just a few feet in front of me. At that moment Denise Chavez, the noted Chicana writer, walked up to my table. She was at the festival to receive a prestigious award from the University of California here in Santa Barbara.

"I like Crow," she said, as she picked up one of the books. "I do to," I said. "Crow is always trying to tell us what we don't want to hear." She turned the book over and inspected it. "I'd like to come by later, maybe get a copy."

Later that afternoon people started to arrive for the award presentation. After the slowness of the day, I was amazed by the size of the crowd, mostly Chicano. As it began to start, a young Chicano man walked up and shyly asked to buy a book. I was moved that he felt willing to touch my Anglo experience. I hope he finds meaning in it.

As I watched the introductions by noted community leaders I was struck by all that the crowd derived from this woman. As she spoke and acted out a piece of work, I could see the vision she was spinning for the people. These people who felt unseen and unrecognized were being given a voice through her, and she was showing them what they could be. This is the true writer's work. I hope someday to provide such a vision.

Later I gave her a copy of my book as a gift and she asked me to pull up a chair and sit down. She does that with everyone. She had arisen like a figure from my deep mythic consciousness, the land where Crow dwells, to carry me a message about my future and break my gaze on the past. People do that for each other. We sat and talked, equals in age and intent, sharing a certain generosity of spirit.

The Crow's Cry People

2005-09-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

While sitting here at the window looking into the front yard I can here strange sounds, parrot-like sounds that are almost speech. It's not a parrot though, it's just a crow muttering, clicking, laughing coarsely. When I went into the county clerk to get the CrowsCry name approved for my usage, the lady told me that she could barely type the name as it was like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Where I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley there was a river called the Kaweah. We've basically lived near that river for five generations. The Kaweah were a subtribe of the Yokuts Indians that populated the Valley before my family arrived with the rest of the onslaught. The Yokuts' name for crow or raven was Kaw or Gaw. The word for cry was weah, so the Kaweah were the "crow's cry people." The Yokuts prided themselves on living in harmony and peace, however the Kaweah were as boisterous and quarrelsome as crows, holding something of the shadow for the Yokuts people. For me crows are messengers bearing something from the deep, dark unconscious into the light of the created world. Whether we want to hear it or not, crows will bring it to our attention. That's probably why many people hate them, because the people don't really want to examine what the crows have to say. Among other things it would be too embarrassing. I've paid attention, though, and the crows have taught me much.

Last week I saw Kurt Vonnegut on The Daily Show. He is a huge old crow, wheezing, rasping, cackling with delight at the words he launches. He described our democracy. "After a hundred years you have to let your slaves go and after a hundred fifty years you can let your women vote. At the beginning of democracy it's ok to have genocide and ethnic cleansing." In the aftermath of Katrina we are rushing to provide needed aid to all the displaced and homeless with promises to rebuild what was destroyed. It's all totally necessary. I can't help but think though, of the genocide of the Native Americans. We have never rebuilt their homes and land and the money spent to rebuild the Gulf Coast will probably be greater than all the money ever spent on Native American welfare. We as Americans never really wrap our minds around this great fact of genocide. We push the things we don't want to know into the dark recesses and submerge them. If anyone brings something to the surface they are called godless or un-American.

My great-great grandfather settled on the site of a Yokuts village situated at an all year spring in the summer dry foothills of the Sierra. My family is complicit. I have learned to listen to the crows, listen to their dark stories and learn from them. That is my salvation. Sometimes people ask me if I am Native American. The answer is no and yes. No, I am not genetically, but yes, in that I was raised walking the same ground as the Yokuts, listened to the same bird sounds, and learned from the spirits of the place. I am native to this American place. Listening to the stories from the darkness is not Hell, is not the work of the devil. Ignoring them is. That's what creates the world we live in.

I'm Sorry, Mr. Kinnell, I Failed

2005-09-18T17:22:00.000-07:00

I think that growing up in the San Joaquin Valley of California tends to impart a certain frustration at being really heard. Within the dusty farmland conservatism it's hard to find one's unique voice, and culturally and politically the voice of the Valley is lost to the overwhelming power of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Just growing up in the Valley creates this muted longing for expression with few apparent venues.

About twenty years ago I attended a poetry conference and my poems were critiqued by Galway Kinnell. This was several years before he won the Pulitzer Prize. When I entered the room and sat down, he said, "I see you're another Western poet," with a trace of distaste. He found little good to say about what I'd done and suggested that I read Rilke for some inspiration. I tried, lord I tried to get into Rilke, but it didn't work. I thought maybe there was something wrong with me. On the charts I'm a real intelligent guy, but maybe due to growing up a farmboy in the Valley I don't do well with purely intellectual exercises. To me they are akin to masturbating when the real experience of life is on the other side of the door. I can build a house from foundation to finish. I've stood among the rafters at the end of the day after cutting and fitting them precisely because they were to be left exposed and felt pride at what my hands could do. I've kept sneaking back into the shop in the evening to look at a piece of furniture I was making because I wanted to maintain the awe of creating it. I've felt the surge of energy as I've led a group of teenage boys on bicycles to the top of a ten mile long climb and then surveyed the panorama. I've been deep into the backcountry of the Sierra. Rilke couldn't speak to that, all-up-in-his-head as he was, speculating, speculating about the nature of life. If possible, I would say to him, "It's just this," and point to a piece of walnut or oak.

Building houses and crafting tables have taught me more about everything, and my daughter is a chief beneficiary of the changes this knowledge has wrought in me. I write poems about my grandfather and San Joaquin Valley peaches, about hawks circling and Skilsaws spewing wood dust. I'm sorry Mr. Kinnell, but I failed. Failed miserably, thank God. The Valley spirit still guides the way, now with a voice.

The Necessity of You in this Task

2005-09-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

Last night I lay in bed unable to sleep. The overwhelming task of marketing my book played through my mind. Sometimes at moments like this things suddenly gain a little clarity and make sense. I only hope at the time that I'll remember come morning.

I'm a writer who enjoys the performance, the moment of standing before an audience with my particular performing chops--the particular phrasing or the unintended catch in the voice as I read something that still touches me. There are also the moments when communication happens and things between us become more clear. So, I need an audience, not only for these moments of performance and clarity, but simply so I can make a living and have the ability to keep on creating these moments on the page or on the stage.

The fact is that I need you. I've always been a bit of a populist (politically and spiritually), preferring to see things evolve from the ground up, rather than dispensed from above. In my life I've experienced tragedy, but I've also experienced moments where things have mysteriously come together. How does one explain such moments? You can't forcibly try to create them. Someone recently asked me how you get readers to find your blog. I replied that it was like ants showing up for a picnic, it just happens. I hope somehow we can mysteriously come together here and that you can find a reason to return and tell others. I have to trust in this mystery, because I don't want to be a human infomercial for my product. This is a piece of what I remembered with the morning.

I welcome your comment, not only to know you're there, but also because you never know what fruit the communication will bear.

The Esthetics of Making Nothing

2005-09-15T10:27:00.000-07:00

For a few days I've been mulling how I want to change the design of this blog page. None of the templates really do it for me the way I want. I guess I'll have to dive into the HTML and make the page come to life. Esthetics are important to me, not the kind that come from the culture or a book of style, but the kind of esthetics that leap out from someone as they encounter their own deep sense of who they are. I wonder what kind of world that might look like. I'd wager it would be better than this one.

I'm certainly no slave to culture. It hasn't served me very well, hasn't answered any of the deep questions that I've had since I was a child. Depression has been a curse in the family and I think a lot of it has come from the lack of answers. During World War II, my father, who was an MP with General Patton, had his jeep blown from under him three times. Each time he was the only person not killed or seriously injured. Not only did he have survivor's guilt, but I'm sure he wondered why the insanity of war had to happen in the first place as he looked around at the pieces of his friends. He suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress for the rest of his unhappy shortened life.

Times are not easy now as I venture into this world of writing and publishing. I manage to be very busy at making no money. I picture this as being at the tidal interface between two different realities, kind of like it is when you exit the Golden Gate by boat and enter the Pacific. The competing currents and tidal flows create a turbulent world of chaotic wave patterns that make no apparent sense, that tend to throw a person randomly one way and then another. I don't know how long it will take to navigate through this. To remind myself why I am willing to go through this turbulent time I have to stop long enough to touch my inner esthetic and express it, whether by writing a blog to an unseen (maybe non-existent) audience, by designing a piece of furniture, or even by fiddling with the HTML for this page. The page will probably take awhile though, I'm busy making nothing.

Acorns

2005-09-12T11:34:00.000-07:00

I come from a family with deep roots in the landscape of the Sierra Nevada and the central San Joaquin Valley. The roots are so deep that it shapes the landscape of my mind. My great-great grandfather settled in the 1850s in this region below what was to become Sequoia National Park. In May I returned to present my book to the Sequoia Riverlands Trust at their annual banquet. It was held in a small oak preserve about one-and-a-half miles from the old farmhouse where I grew up. As I walked through the magnificent old towering valley oaks and sycamores along the St. John's River where I used to go swimming I could feel my feet sink into the soil and toward the center of the Earth, toward the center of things. I exhaled as if I had held my breath forever and then begin to breathe deeply.

There are very few acres of this old forest left. It used to be over ten thousand acres spread around the delta of the Kaweah River. There used to be more of this forest across the highway along one of the sloughs, but the farmer who owned it went out one night with friends and some chainsaws to cut most of it down. He thought he was saving his land from the curse of ecology. He'll be dead some day, if he isn't already, and his legacy will be the dead landscape. It's better to leave a legacy of life. When we do these things we are actually taking the chainsaw to our own mind and to the minds of the rest of the community.

If I could, I would be the Johnny Appleseed of these great valley oaks. Johnny Acorn. I'd hope by planting them it would restore a bit of sanity to my home and leave a little legacy of life. This posting is a bit of an acorn.

The Crafting Life

2005-09-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting on the porch on a cool late summer morning, the sun now making longer midday shadows. The miracle of wireless connections allows me to sit here and still compose this blog online, to post this into the communal mind. It's a great freedom and a great responsibility. Around me clumps of various kinds of bamboo move in the breeze. There's a lot of work to be done in the garden, the vision of it only partly completed, yet I stop to just sit and write this weblog.

Yesterday I was at my first book festival as a vendor and it was a slow day. I had a reading in the afternoon where only three people showed up. It would have been so easy to be frustrated. As I talked and read I could see their eyes begin to light up with the recognition that they were listening to good work. I think they were surprised at the fact. I don't think they really expected to find it here in this corner of a small festival. "Your prose is poetry," one said. A man at the booth said, "You write good sentences." Where did I learn to write? I paid attention to my life and I paid attention to wood. I learned to glue up the rough multiple pieces with a vision of where I was going, then begin to shape the result. Understanding craft is important, but I didn't learn it from a writing school. You have to feel the craft in some vital place, feel the design. I lived the reading fully and the three people were genuinely happy. I planted seeds that now will have their own life beyond my reach.

It's sometimes frightening to think that I have left the security of my teaching job, where I was head of department, for small book festivals, blog postings and the constant threat of rejection. It seems insane on the surface. The wonder in the eyes of my three person audience keeps me going. I need this because I don't exist in a vacuum. Our (my) best endeavors do need support. I can't see your eyes on the other side of this screen, don't even know if they exist. For the moment I have to imagine them and keep going.

One Thing Through and Through

2005-09-09T09:19:00.000-07:00

I've read that Zen master Suzuki Roshi once said, "If you understand one thing through and through, then you understand everything." I've developed several disciplines to enable me to understand my own life through and through, things I love like fine woodworking or the martial art of Aikido. Ultimately though, this task of writing forces me to the deepest understanding. I sit and face this LCD screen like sitting in meditation facing a wall. I know that on the other side of this screen are potentially millions of faces. What shall I say? What responsibility do I bear with the words that I release into the void toward the sea of beings on the other side of this screen?

For the most part people live mired within the holes of their being. A lot of our creative effort is spent trying to get others to join us within these holes and validate the way we lead our lives. Much of writing or art does this. Come join me in my hole, my personal bomb crater. So what is an authentic thought, a real untrammeled thought? Is it the first thing that pops into my mind or something that has been mulled over and over? Does raw impulse guarantee authenticity? The more I delve into my various beloved disciplines the more I know how to sort this out, the more I begin to feel or sense the authenticity of things. Things come, things go. At least I can tell the difference.

The Dusty Feather of Flight

2005-09-07T21:29:00.000-07:00

Great red rocks tower over the Santa Ynez
and the ancient spirits of time and place seem
as real as the stone.
Young people come here restless to party and drink,
then climb the red towers and
throw themselves down to the river,
barely missing the rocks.
Some do not miss.
A few hundred feet away we walk the dirt road
lined with sedimentary rock and white sage,
and by the road
a redtail, dead from some unknown cause.
I kneel, turn it over,
gently pluck a long feather from its wing
to hand to my daughter.
Keep this, I say, it is an omen,
a gesture from the spirits to you.
Behind us the young ones throw themselves down
over and over
desperately seeking the sensation of flight.
Here is the dusty way, its creatures,
its gifts,
this poem a feather.

Being seen

2005-09-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

I just retired from one of the best teaching jobs in the country in order to pursue this persistent vision of writing and publishing. At our school (I still feel a proprietary interest in it) we would take the kids out on three extended trips a year. There are two bicycle based trips in October and June and also a mid-March trip where teachers are able to create their own journey. I was able to take kids cross-country skiing in Yosemite. All together I would spend 22-25 days a year outdoors with the kids. The teachers slept on the ground with the kids and would also lead them up the mountain both literally and symbolically.

In November we would hold conferences with every student and their parents, with all of the student's teachers in attendance. We would try to paint a picture in depth of the student based on our experiences of them in and out of the classroom. I might observe that a student who struggled in math was more than willing to help a classmate on the road with a flat tire or be an inspiration on a very hot, long, hard climb. As we would go around through the teacher's stories there were many tears, not from students, but from parents. The parents would then comment how they wished this experience for themselves and how painful their own middle school/junior high years had been for them. They were joyful for their own children, but realized how much they had missed for themselves. We all crave to be really seen, especially at this age, but it just doesn't happen and the hole that is left carries on with us all through life.

Why as individuals and as a culture do we inflict this gaping hole on each other? It doesn't have to happen. Most people can't even identify what the hole is, because they don't even have a name for it or any idea of what they're missing. For them the hole is simply the way life is. There is more. I know this.

To stop and see clearly

2005-09-04T13:29:00.000-07:00

Well, this is it, the first post. I'd like to start with a quote from my book The Great Western Divide.

At this moment in our history of fear and in this present place we are called to stop and see clearly. It is the great act of being.
What is dream and what is real? What is spirit and what is of the mind? I have stories to tell and stories within stories. I'll light a fire and ask that we sit awhile together.

The book is frameworked around this discussion over the fire and in a sense that is what this blog is intended to be. What is dream and what is real? What is spirit and what is of the mind? I do indeed have stories to tell. When I was eleven or twelve I looked around and realized that no one I knew had any knowledge of life in depth. Everyone endured life as best they could. I have spent my life probing those depths to find what I could and move beyond the limitations of this heritage. I know some of you probably have encountered this same soul deadening experience and that's why we're here.

Times are crazy, that's for sure, and we have to stop somewhere and begin to see things in a clearer light. I hope you'll return and see what happens.