Pastures of Plenty

Finches in Aspen

2012-01-30T09:17:00.000-08:00

"The succour of the needy

Incredible scenes

I'll believe you in the future

Your life and death dreams"

~ King Crimson from "Larks' Tongues in Aspic"

A beautiful and unexpected sight turned my head around this morning: finches in the aspen tree at dawn. My sleep was deep, with intense and seemingly meaningful dreams, the kind of dreams that do not truly fit into the parameters of "just a dream". That's me, always searching for Truth and Beauty, as if - as if that were some kind of valid pursuit in this modern world. The finches, clearly a mated couple of house finches, were a welcome sight. This winter, so far, has been sparse of birds. And if you look closely at the trees you can see clear evidence that they have the daffy idea that Spring is in the air. Afternoons in the 40's F. Overnight lows in the lowest double digits possible.

What I am trying to say is that I saw two songbirds this morning, of a kind that I have not seen in months. Make of it what you will. It brought a smile to my heart and my face. Truth be told, my hope is that winter is not gone to spring. That is my hope. Whatever comes, I will take it in stride. That much we owe to Nature.

Afterthought. Last week I had a photo of mine displayed and shared on KOB TV from Albuquerque - a sunrise photo. I had to work at the time of the broadcast but Carol got a snapshot of the thing that shows the crux of the event:

This is one day that I truly feel palpable trepidation at going in to work for the day. I'm going anyway.

A Book, Film, a Cat, and Drama.

2012-01-29T20:03:00.000-08:00

The moon came up out of the mountain this morning. It was one of those archetypal things, like a high summit giving birth to a new world, but nothing more than a coincidence from a materialist point of view. I was wandering about in the front yard with my camera. Rosie the cat had gone out early as well. My brain was all fogged up with the depth of a hard dreamless sleep, enhanced slightly by red wine but mostly so intense because of the particularly awful day that yesterday most definitely was. I don't get resentful of a day like that, not usually, but I've not seen a day be such a stinker in quite some time.

Twas trouble in the work place, the details of which I care not to share on these pages. It is significant to this blog for other reasons, however, partly because the horrid anxiety levels in which I was immersed do get to sinkin' in through the sheer force of entrainment, and partly because the shields used to keep the toxic flood of bad vibes from bowling one over are generated from a space of mindfulness, with one thumb solidly lodged in the astral while the other is primed and ready to be hoisted in the air should a gesture of positivity be needed on an emergency basis. The feces have not yet hit the rotary ventilator yet. Not completely.

It probably did not help that this here planet has some sizable geomagnetic storms afoot, and is also swarmed with clouds of rogue photons cast asunder from the big star right next door during Friday's X-class solar flares. Makes a people edgy. More than just a tad.

So there I was this morning, spending time with the cat outdoors, both us us squeezing out some cabin fever vibes like pus from a carbuncle. Walking with the cat, swimming in waves of excess photons, wishing, oh so deeply wishing for a new job. Rosie was purring away, ecstatic to have some quality outdoor time with her pet human and I was thankful to have a planet on which to set my tired and aching feet. She and I both were in a low-level reactive mode. I don't know about her but I sensed coyotes watching, since there were ravens chattering nearby, "Sneaky bastards. Look at them! Think they're gonna get that house cat. Why, boy howdy, that human will whip out his didgeridoo and blow those puffed up four-leggeds into the next universe!". The ravens can be quite supportive at times. Other times they just laugh. Go figure.

After making breakfast for Carol and I, then doing the dishes, I settled on the front porch, sporting a red sweat shirt, my Pendleton polar vest, and my journalist hat, with Rosie at my side on the rocker, and Whitley Strieber's new book in my hands. It was too cold so I finished reading the book inside, under a blanket, in the chair I inhabited while recovering from spinal surgery last year. My comments on Whitley's book are undeveloped at this point. But I can say that he is writing about a new level of humanity, already under way, but also being notched up into more general distribution. Life, death, and consciousness. I'd already, years ago, noticed a few striking similarities between Whitley's experiences and mine. Kenneth Ring had covered some of that territory in Heading Toward Omega, Jacques Vallee did as well in various books. The bottom line here is that we are looking at an evolutionary leap in human consciousness, one that is strongly inferring that consciousness without a body is not only possible, it is absurdly commonplace, hidden from us literate monkeys only because we say so. "Ain't there, no way". But it is there. All around us. Inside and out. Others on the current stage, upcoming voices that I will repeatedly remind you of as we walk along together, are Dr. Eban Alexander and Dr. Penny Sartori.

But that was just this morning. This afternoon I laid back on the couch, electric heating pad clutched tight against my neck and chest, and covered by my mom's old quilt. I flipped the Smart TV over to internet mode and then on to Netflix. What a surprise! I found that Dr. Rick Strassman's movie adaptation, by Mitch Schultz, of DMT:the Spirit Molecule, is now available on streaming video. So I watched it. Tied in quite nicely with my morning's musings.

All that aside, I am heartened tonight whereas my heart was besieged yesterday by unfortunate events. Hear tell these here End Times are rollin' through our little cove in the oceanic cosmos. I'm tired, tired near to the point of tears, at times. Yet joyful. How could I not be?

Porch-sitting in January

2012-01-27T08:52:00.000-08:00

Rosie and I went out front together this morning. Temperature just above freezing, me in my light flannel blue plaid pajama pants and a generic baby blue t-shirt, not to mention barefoot. The cat was in her usual fur coat. She ventured maybe three meters from the porch, after a good bout of pets and scratches, where she found some edible green grass. During the petting session she and I both hear the distinctive barking of coyotes in the sage field across the road from the house, which, I presumed, is why Rosie did not go far. I'm in one of my neuropathic phases, so I felt just fine in the cold of the early morning. I walked around earlier and found that the Chinese Elm tree has premature buds on it.

Here I am, hankering for a good and solid snowfall and the mesa flora is making gestures of springlike expression. NOT cool! But we did have a conjunction of Venus with the waxing crescent moon last night. That was sweet to behold. This time last year we were right on the threshold of "as cold as it CAN get". The -30 degrees Fahrenheit dip that caused the natural gas crisis, which in turn caused our new governor, Susana Martinez (the Honorable) to venture shutting down the gas in these Democratic Counties we all live in. Also, I was only weeks away from spinal fusion surgery, deep into what the surgeon called "deep pain" and wondering how much longer I'd be walking on my own two feet. I'd gone down our State capitol, Santa Fe, for pre-op tests, and returned home only to be greeted by a blizzard on the way home. The blizzard began as a solid wall of white at Velarde, which it where the highway enters the Rio Grande Gorge on it's way up to the highlands where Taos lies. I wrote of that day in this blog: click here.

As usual, this blog post ends with me going to take a bath. Good, that! You can find light in the strangest places, but the bath is highly reliable as a conduit of the spiritual light.

Red Willow River Refuge

2012-01-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

Have a look. In the photo you see my little car, a 2003 Ford Focus, parked along the wetland red willow forest of the Rio Grande de Ranchos, which is commonly call the Little Rio Grande. It's little alright. At least compared to the big one that runs along the nadir of the Rio Grande Gorge, just a few miles to the west. One thing I really like about this photo is that it doesn't show how dirty my car is.

I've shown a photo of this place before in this blog, with my mother walking along, just about where the car is parked, with an aster sprig or two in her hand. That photo was digitally enhanced and embellished to depict a somewhat more mystical quality. She was about 200 hours away from her death at the time the photo was taken. I'd unplugged the drip nutrition pump that was feeding her through a gastroenteric tube (g-tube) which had been installed surgically just left of her navel, then helped her to dress warmly, loaded her into the Focus and took her up into the mountains for a final look-see before she let go the reigns (sic) which held her to this mortal coil. I told her that I was taking her up into the mountains to let the Mountain Spirits instruct her as to what was happening to her. She bought my story, lock, stock and barrel, which is good because it was the truth. That makes things a far sight easier to navigate - the truth, that is.

I went back to the place yesterday, as a getaway from the anxiety of life (plugged in to a weekend that exists because of the work schedule). I enjoyed walking along the icy mud of the river bank, positioning myself to get the best gander at the play of light on the rippling waters. I enjoyed stepping into the 10 foot high red willow forest to feel myself ensconced within a growth of sacred trees. The only regret I have, at this point, is that I did not take off my shoes and dip my weary feet into the icy waters of the Rio Grande de Ranchos. Might a done me some good, that! My feet run a close second to my brain in the attrition from doing commerce for a corporate entity. Sho' 'nuff my soul gets fed and my spirit gets to exchange light, but the central nervous system really takes a beating in the marketplace. Little things like demographics and marketing strategies, enhanced by trendy customer service techniques, can really run riot through a fella's nerves. That's why a trip to a sacred place helps, as it does. It breaks things down into the basics, where the way that light plays through fields of form and information is more important than who does what, and why.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

2012-01-21T05:46:00.000-08:00

Up early, 90 minutes shy of time to clock in for work, excited about snow in the forecast tonight. Good coffee, sky lightening ever so slowly over yonder above the Taos Pueblo Nation, deep pale gray. The high strangeness continues, goddess laughing softly in some other place that is also here. "Real Time with Bill Maher" is back on the air on HBO for a new season. Weekly sessions with Bill are a far sight better than talk therapy when it comes to seeing the light in the today's shadowy world, along with an occasional glance at David Letterman's show things seem pretty good in the world, laughing along the way of truth to power. Here I sit with my Dancing Trickster Coyote hat on, not really longing for inspiration because inspiration is so friggin' easy to find these days. The hat rather reminds me that wisdom and folly, Coyote's version of the Libra scales of justice, are sometimes truly impossible to tell apart in the heat or the deep chill of the moment.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is still my favorite poster boy for the Will to Power crowd that places abstract business theory above basic human decency. Now that he seems to be facing recall from his elected position he seems even more the buffoon. It is hard to call someone a buffoon while they are actively and willfully inflicting suffering on people. That may be a rather harsh thing to say. Maybe it is, no? But, as I said, inspiration is not hard to find these days. It is not so difficult to lighten up and simmer down even though the flow that so many people seem to take as immutable is toward hardness, dourness dressed up in clown's clothing, and mundane pop cultural drivel. Don'tcha know? That's where all the magic is, wrapped up into the very fabric of the world, warp and weft, needle and thread, the whole nine yards. One hour of ansias, one hour of longing for things to be different, or better, or over, contains enough magic to light up the morning sky with blazing colors that grab the soul and shake it out of the misery made real by mindless adherence to cultural bullshit.

Rambling writer here had better get is assets up and away from the computer and step into a stream of steamy hot well water before heading out into the cartoon world of corporate market and modern savvy, not to mention the abysmal stench of fossilized revolution. There I will sit, upon my wooden stool, while the world comes to me, gives me money in exchange for food, but, more importantly, they also bring me countless examples of true humanity, in glorious actuality, though few seem to be aware of the power of the magic contained in the moment which they have so carefully crafted into routine and boredom. Sweet!

Peace out, y'all!

High Strangeness and Low Expectations

2012-01-20T08:39:00.000-08:00

"He sees angels in the architecture,
Spinning in infinity"

~ Paul Simon, from "Call Me Al" ~

Mrs. Riddle once stunned us all by breaking into a Broadway tune, right out of the blue: "Who will buy this wonderful morning? Such a sky you never did see. Who will tie it up with a ribbon and put it in a box for me?". It was right at the beginning of class, 7th grade English, which if I am not mistaken would have put it at the tail end of the Summer of Love, in 1967. Mrs. Riddle was our English teacher, who would often answer our queries by saying, "What's it to ya?". She taught me so much!

There was one other teacher, five years later, who broached that surreal territory of what it means to actually be alive, what it actually feels like to be alive. That would be Mark Gillette, my first of three U.S. Government teachers in my senior year at Coral Shore High School in Tavernier, Florida, down at the tail end of Key Largo. Mr. Gillette was a professed fan of Tom and Jerry cartoons. He told us seniors that Tom and Jerry was the most accurate portrayal of human society that he could hope to show us. I was just about to turn eighteen, an unavoidable occurrence that very nearly sent me to Viet Nam. I registered for the Selective Service six months late, luckily avoiding penalty, and the draft was suspended just as I found out that my draft lottery number was 10. Which means I would, for sure, go to war.

Just last week I came across a strange but hauntingly beautiful blog by Dan Mitchell: "Well of High Strangeness". I had nary a week to peruse his blog before the whole thing just vanished from blogspot.com. What instantly endeared me to Dan Mitchell's writing was his eloquent discussions and descriptions of what he called Mundus Imaginalis. Now, I've always called it The Dreamtime. Or Faerie. Or Hilbert Space. Maybe even, on occasion, the Imaginal World. It is what old Tio Carlos Castaneda called the Nagual, or "the left side of awareness".

I've been dealing with that realm for years now, much to my benefit, safety, and survival. It's all about consciousness, kids. Keep an eye on Dr. Eban Alexander in the coming months. I became aware of this Other World right after, and as a result of, my Near Death Experience (NDE) back in the late winter of '83-'84. Twas a dream that showed it to me. In that dream I was shown that any material situation in this living and breathing world also has a "back door". Also what was shown to me is that some humans who know about this "back door" consider it to be private territory. In that dream, or rather as an educational update analysis at the tail-end of that dream, I learned that what I had just experienced was not a dream in the conventional sense. In that non-conventional dream I confronted a man who was married to a dear friend. I reached him by climbing hundreds of meters of rickety wooden stairs which took me to the back door of his soul. This guy was somehow connected to the Medellin Drug Cartel. The upshot of the dream was that the guy was appalled that I would use non-ordinary, or paranormal, means to look in on the welfare of a woman whom I loved, and still love, like a soul sister.

I'm not sure how I got on this riff this morning. It's Friday and I gotta go to work at noon, having dutifully cleaned the living room and the second bathroom before I go. I do know that this is a cryptic response to Jane Odin's comment on the previous blog entry. "Danger, Will Robinson!!". The mysterious event I was referring to in that post evoked an unexpected reaction from me. I took a situation in which I felt I was being accused of a illegal act in stride. I don't rightly know why people do some of the sh*t that they do, but I do recognize rhetoric, and I am intimately aware of the difference between rhetoric, truth, and for that matter, actuality. It's kinda like rain in that you know when your skin gets wet via precipitation.

Maybe this is just a generational difference? A brother insulted me. Usta be that was considered an insult. What do these kids call it nowadays? A game?

I swear, sometimes I begin to believe that the world is peopled with solipsists!

Bath time!!!

Gale Force Change

2012-01-19T06:02:00.000-08:00

Both sunrise and sunset have taken the beauty awards for several days running. Right now a complex array of pale coral clouds are nestled in the notch of the canyon yonder in the Taos Pueblo Nation. The sight evokes an ethereal feeling in me, which makes me glance, again and again, over my left shoulder, out the front window, a move that one year ago would have probably induced pain enough to deaden my conscious awareness for a spell. That former deep pain smack in the middle of my neck was a thing of wonder, which ultimately was manageable only via the assistance of what most people would likely call my Guardian Angel. I'm never quite sure what to call her. Nor am I ever quite sure what she finds is so funny. But I am grateful for her part in my life. She was with me yesterday when I entered, by invitation, a seemingly impromptu conference with management at my place of employment.

What was said to me in that conference is and shall remain confidential. It's the feelings that arose that surprised me. I remained calm as I listened to a hypothetical speculation that pretty much sounded like it should've been quite insulting to me. Since I am avoiding details here I'll go straight to the heart. There are times in life when what is occurring is only a surface phenomenon, whereas the underlying dynamic actually points an accurately aimed finger at the truth of the spiritual conflict which permeates the moment and the ongoing relationship between the people involved. It's about the soul. And I am pressed by time to shower, shave, and get on to work, my mind very much riveted to issues of power trips, primate politics, and those who seem to be angels or something like it.

Snowy Morn: Transformation & Life

2012-01-16T07:51:00.000-08:00

This is the best morning I have seen in quite some time. Viewed through the front window it displays in visuals that so many trendy moderns might call dreary. Go figure! In contrast a morning like this, the closeness of gentle snow, with temperatures hovering just above freezing, evokes hope in this middle-aged human male. Said human male may well bemoan the necessity of going to work in such weather, and rightly so, but the weather is not prohibitive of gainful employment, nor of any other form of self-imposed stasis. It is 8:30 AM, Mountain Standard Time, Monday morning, and Martin Luther King Day here in the USA. The government and the banks take the day off. See?! They do have their moments!

My head has been swaddled in thoughts of the higher realms of human consciousness. I've been reading a newly released book, Solving the Communion Enigma by Whitley Strieber. Seeing as how I'm always endeavoring to look beyond the mundane aspects of our lives it does my heart and my soul good to read the thoughts of a man who has gone at least as far as I have, out into the finer realms of what and who we are. More than that I cannot say at this time. This all ties in with my upcoming attendance at the International Conference on After Death Communications, in April.

With the fresh though slight snow cover I can go out and see if there have been any coyotes encroaching upon our land. But, more importantly, I can go out and walk barefoot in the snow. Them yotees will see the human paw prints. And my beleaguered Central Nervous System will benefit in countless ways from my using the soles of my bare feet to engage this here planet upon which we walk as if we had any other choice. Then, and only then, I can slip into a hot bath and somatically engage the physicality that I have been led to believe is so rightly our sponsor. It is part but not all. Not by any means. If you have heard otherwise - think again.

Evolution is sometimes best manifested through perusal of the past. Transformation without a recursive loop or three probably ain't worth much. Nope.

Peace out y'all.

Summer Memories

2012-01-14T06:21:00.001-08:00

Smiler

2012-01-13T07:03:00.000-08:00

As usual I smile in wonder at the sight of the birdbath steaming on a frigid morning. These are strange times and I find myself enchanted by the simplest actualities. To all of your regular readers: apologies for not providing more voluminous posts. Now is the time for experience, sweet and simple. More later . . .

Grazers

2012-01-11T07:09:00.000-08:00

Toy to the World

2012-01-09T07:58:00.000-08:00

Odd thought for a Monday morning: how many of us are consequentially coached by silent beauty? Drawn hither to the place where "All That Is" is pretty much alright at the moment, at ANY moment, so why don't you just simmer down? I'm fairly certain that it would be a healthy field in which to roam.

Stepping out onto the porch just after Carol left for work I noticed that the deep cold of morning, embellished as it was with migratory humidity, did not feel dangerous. Harsh, yes, and conducive only to brief exposure, but not the really deadly effect that signifies hard winter at its best. Lacking the requisite training I did not fully relish the transference of moisture gone from the air onto the leaves of the gray-green and golden leaves of the sage fields that surround this hearth and home. I saw it happen. I understood what happened. But I could not explain it.

Today's highlight is the bold display of the squeaky toy known as Dennis Hopper. How the odd use of plastic came to be named after a late, great actor is a story for another time, if at all. Cutting to the chase, we simply point out that Mr. Sky the rat terrier loves Dennis Hopper. Very much so. He has worn out two of these things already. I bought him a brand new one as a New Year's present. The dog sleeps soundly and peacefully knowing that the toy is at hand. Or under paws - I haven't quite figured it out yet but I do know that when I saw Skyper sleeping with his toy in tow I felt good!

Universal Banter

2012-01-07T05:54:00.000-08:00

A bit of banter yesterday . . . . . .

Three of us there, two men, one woman. I made a quip then said, "Pardon my momentary outburst of negativity".

The man said, "I see you're starting the New Year out on the right foot".

The woman said, "That caused a ripple in the Universe".

I replied, "How do you know that the Universe did not cause a ripple in me? Oh man, I was just, ya know, like, surfing' dude".

A Writer's Studio Tour

2012-01-06T08:50:00.001-08:00

I awoke this morning to an extremely agitated dog: Mr Sky. Usually I am inclined to pass off Mr. Sky's moods to his personal insanity, his issues, or whatever. He barked incessantly as I emerged from the bedroom, sidling up to his mommy/protector as I approached to calm him. But he would not be calmed, although he did stop barking. I went to open the front blinds, which reveals the sumptuous beauty of the mountains before us, and exclaimed: "Those bastards!!".

The coyotes had upturned the heated birdbath. From tracks in the frozen mud I had already deduced that the coyotes knew about the standing liquid water in our front yard, the water that did not freeze when the temperature plummets. That explained why the dog was so inspired to hyperactivity. He'd had to endure the sounds of the coyotes' incursion, in the dead of night. His barks to warn us had not aroused us from our deep winter sleep, ensconced there atop a Vera Wang designer mattress. A threat to our well-being by thirsty coyotes?! "And these people just SLEEP through it?!". I hope Mr. Sky does not have to endure the burden of narrative-based thought.

Cut to the chase: I had to restore the birdbath to a condition that would serves the bluebirds and the flickers. Then I had to scoop feces out of Rosie the cat's litter box. All of this before coffee. Like, wow.

Above you see a photo of my writing studio. Studio tours are a big thing aqui en Taos. Let's give it a go.

To the left, immediately above my Field Journalist's hat is the bulletin board. The larger papers are a magazine article with some trendy and delicious alcohol-based drink recipes, and the confirmation papers for my attendance at the International Conference on After Death Communications, come April. As the Veil between the worlds of living and dead is stretched thin these days I am really looking forward to somehow sidling up to the spirit of Great Uncle Friederich Ebert. I am pretty sure that my deep compulsion to jump up in defense of Worker's Rights comes from Uncle Friede, whether it be through the auspices of DNA or via reincarnation. The penchant for journalism? Uncle Friede had that as well.

Just below the big papers on the bulletin board are two photos of the Strawberry Fields Memorial in Central Park, New York City, which is dedicated to the late John Lennon.The photos were a gift by the sweet Marlene Tafoya of Talpa, New Mexico. Marlene is the daughter of the late Alfelio "Cisco" Tafoya, who worked at my side as I sold booze through a drive-up window behind the famous Saint Francis Church in Ranchos de Taos. Cisco had a nasty form of leukemia. It killed him. We were friends.

To the right is a Mexican-made cabinet. Atop that is Rosie the cat's loft. You can see her ears poking up a bit. Behind her bed basket is my lovely didgeridoo, with which I serenade the wild coyotes in the dark of night. The bookshelf if probably the best part of the studio to peruse. First the signed copies . . . . .

Robert Bly's The Sibling Society. Robert not only signed the book, he also drew a mustache on his author's photo on the back of the dust jacket. Two books from Stephen Levine: Unattended Sorrow and Breaking the Drought. No other books on the shelf are signed by the authors, nor by anyone else.

Others? Stephen and Ondrea Levine, the famous Who Dies?. Fred Alan Wolf, The Eagle's Quest. Christian de Quincey, Consciousness from Zombies to Angels. Frank MacEowen, The Mist-Filled Path. Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance. Neil Gaiman, the beautiful and haunting American Gods. Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus and The Prague Cemetery. Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac and Against Depression. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal. A biography of Great Uncle Friederich. Al Burt, Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes. John West, the amazing The Last Goodnights. Bernt Heinrich, Mind of the Raven. My sister-in-law Debra Weyermann, The Gang They Couldn't Catch and Answer Them Nothing. Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend from Far Away. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes the World. Several more as well, including The Tao of Physic by Fritjof Capra. Usually I also have a copy of Rick Strassman's DMT: the Spirit Molecule but I don't know where I put that book. I need a new copy anyway as the old one is coming apart at the binding. But I do have a DVD copy of "The Spirt Molecule" on the shelf, Mitch Schultz's film documentary from Rick's amazing book. A little promotion here: a screening of the film can be seen at the Guild Theater in Albuquerque, NM on January 25th, 2012. The author and the filmmaker will be there to answer questions after the shows. See the film, but do Rick the honor of reading the book.

I could sit here all day long and write about the things in my studio. Not possible. I was home sick from work yesterday(!), spent the morning waiting for a walk-in with my primary care rep, the lovely Marty, then waiting for the azithromycin scrips to be ready. Slept the afternoon away. The antibiotics started working almost immediately so I am going to work this afternoon. I really hated to miss a day of work! It's not just the money. In fact that the money has anything to do with it at all is strictly circumstantial. Too bad that few writers can support themselves with their writing.

One other thing is that I am awaiting arrival of Whitley Strieber's new Solving the Communion Enigma: What is to Come. I love Whitley's writing! His bold publication of Communion, about his personal alien abduction experiences, was a major inspiration for me to go ahead and write about my NDEs. This stuff is kinda embarrassing, ya know? Taboo and scorn, anyone? And Whitley also wrote about the embarrassing stuff with the great wordcrafting that portrays the immense depth of the experiences much better than so much of the New Age stuff does with it's "factory" wordage. By that I refer to the predominating styles of New Age writers. Not that they are bad. They are not. When I began to write about my NDEs I found that it was not enough to merely report what happened, then supplementing the prose with industry standard commentary. My experiences implored me to move into the multidimensional areas that require poetic musing along with a dose of literary expression. Our day to day life is so small. There is much more to life than the mundane refuges we inhabit by necessity. Much more.

Bath time for this literate primate. I need a steamy soak. It's not all about cleanliness, although that is a part of it all. It is about aligning my consciousness with the somatic experience that is unavoidable once it begins. Water is good for that. Aromas. Mindfulness. Ahh!

Call It What You Want

2012-01-04T07:53:00.000-08:00

“Acceptance is usally more a matter of fatigue than anything else.”

~ David Foster Wallace ~

Two friends, both named Alan, are in Sedona, Arizona right now. What are the chances?! Well, it seems to me that if something has actually occurred then odds and statistics have already been relegated to the dustbin. Does it seem that way to you? It would be funny if they should meet. Of course there are many people in this world who prefer rummaging in the dustbin to perusing the actual world.

Goddess save me: why am I writing like Andy Rooney?!!

I'm pretty much in a state this morning. Woke at 3 AM, got up and read for a spell, then went back to sleep. Watching the media coverage of the Iowa Caucus may have been part of the disturbance. Listening to explanations of why some people claim that to be conservative is to figure out how to get the most out of defenseless people without enabling them to rise above their "defenseless" status.

I should perhaps forsake politics for the coming year, but that ain't gonna happen. In fact, I am in soooooooooo deep that I am seeing the issues that are being bandied on the national stage, here in the United States of America, right here in my daily doings. That can't be right. Can it? Can somebody clarify this for me. Y'all that live outside of the USA - can you tell me - does the plight of the people who are governed have anything to do with how they are to be governed? If I have any powers of observation at all I can surmise that in this country ideals trump actual human needs.

Take a man, use a man, squeeze him for all he is worth, call him a lazy ass when he can no longer keep up with the increasing demands on his body and soul, then cast him aside after he has been spent and insulted. Huh?

I have two friends - not the two who are in Sedona right now - who are feeling the squeeze of the corporate mindset in their day to day life. I've been there recently and reckon I will be there again. I think we can safely say that the feces/fan continuum is in high gear.

Anyway folks - here's Tennessee Ernie Ford followed by Foster the People, spanning sixty years of musical excellence . . . . . .

Walk in Beauty

2012-01-04T03:29:00.000-08:00

Last night's sunset.

Walk in Beauty?

Given a choice,

Would you?

2012: The Year That Was

2012-01-02T08:24:00.000-08:00

I'm fairly sure I had it wrong the whole time. I thought there would be something to see! As if . . . . as if there was nothing to see in the first place. 2012 is here, the overhyped year discussed ad nauseum, the End to End All Ends. Granted, we still have nearly one year before the before the Big Day, before the arrival of . . . . . . . Hey!

Wait a minute. Not so fast. Turns out that all I know is what I've been told. Thanks, folks, for tellin' me what to look for and what to expect, but I've decided, after much deliberation, to walk the road myself, eyes open, ears primed to hear beyond the din of tinnitus, brain reassured as to the veracity of the primate tendencies within, and without. I've a wee bit to go before I turn 60 years old, but I can feel that point and place in time, feel it now, and how it totally wrangles with the inner child . . . and how it don't make a "never mind" in the scheme of things.

I'm primed, perhaps inappropriately, from two weeks of holiday celebrations, and hard work giving service to those who celebrate more because they have the time. And money.

I think it's time to stay home. Not from work, for that is home as well. As is every other thing I can possibly engage in my time here on Earth, which IS the home. And I'm a fixin' to see for myself, so please don't block the view.

On the New Year

2011-12-31T05:50:00.000-08:00

Sunrise on the final day of 2011. Right off the bat go read William Rivers Pitt - he's a great writer. In fact, why don't you go read him and I will go to work.

Nah, just kidding.

I must say good riddance to this year. That's about all I have to say.

Nah.

Truth is I don't have time. What's new?

Shower time.

2012 is and will be a good year.

That's all.

The Power of Silence

2011-12-30T07:39:00.000-08:00

"We don't need anyone to teach us sorcery, because there is really nothing to learn. What we need is a teacher to convince us that there is incalculable power at our fingertips. What a strange paradox! Every warrior on the path of knowledge thinks, at one time or another, that he's learning sorcery, but all he's doing is allowing himself to be convinced of the power hidden in his being, and that he can reach it. " ~ Don Juan Matus, from The Power of Silence by Carlos Castaneda

Have a quick gaze at the opening photo. It is the place where my mother's ashes were dispersed, cast into the Rio Chiquito, and to the wind as well. The winter of 2006-2007. This spot about two miles from where mom died, perhaps 1000 feet higher in altitude. Carol and I hiked up along Rio Chiquito Road, National Forest Road 437, from mom's house in Talpa, New Mexico. It had snowed 18 inches so the walk was rigorous and cold. But this story shall be told elsewhere, at another time.

Mom requested that her ashes be given to the river and the forest. She would have loved the point and place in time when we did as she asked. A place of solitude. In the thick of winter, in the Carson National Forest. Not to get all spiritual on ya, but I had the feeling, today as well as on that day, that I was acting out a grand drama on a stunningly beautiful stage.

I don't know exactly why, but this place, and the act of dumping mom's ashes into a tiny, icy river, came to mind as I read an article this morning on the value of solitude. Click here if you want to read it too. Because of my research for the new book my reading has taken me to some very isolated places, including the apparently misunderstood realms of death. Dr. Eban Alexander, Ben Breedlove, and my immersion in the marketplace, where being at home in and with myself is an indispensable tool when surrounded by countless people involved in the group activity called commerce.

I am somehow drawn back to the teachings of Don Juan Matus, via Carlos Castenada. Don't ya know, it's that silent place inside, where the Universe whispers, silently as well. That place, inside and vivid, is the saving grace for a recovering agoraphobic lad such as I am. There, in the thick of the human condition, the Power of Silence is invaluable. It's hard to describe. Think I'll just go take a bath instead.

Please Watch This Video

2011-12-29T05:59:00.001-08:00

Commandeered by Sensibility

2011-12-28T06:56:00.000-08:00

Five degrees Fahrenheit, fairy lights of crystalline frost calling forth from countless sage leaves, snow pack rock hard in the vivid rawness of year's end. I take a quart of tap water out and pour it into the heated birdbath, the steam rising and swirling to remind me that once this body knew the tropics - knew them quite well. In less than one minute the blue birds come to drink. Grateful, as always, they drink their fill then fly away. This being year's end I've been nudged into contemplating the past year. The nudge came from internet media, "best of" lists and things of that ilk. Looking back, I remember that last year at this time I was not at all certain that I could continue working much longer. Dulled by Neurontin I shuffled through the days. Sad, old - oh man! Wow.

This year it is better. The neck has been repaired, another nudge that came from the hands of a skilled and meticulous surgeon, the body doing the rest. My heart whispers that it is coming near time to seek and find a different job, yet that same heart pales at the thought of ending this one. One of them thar paradoxes. Life is full of them, thus the importance of making sensible choices. Not all choices are sensible. In fact, some of them are unseen, having donned the habit that is called a habit.

But I have not come to complain today. Gratitude is my focus and gratitude shall be held in focus in that practical way that Castaneda called "having to believe". It is a point and place in time where one dare not mistake the solid, persistent beating of the heart for fear. Nor take the subtle trembling of the hands for trepidation, or worse yet, for a hangover from holiday cheer.

I've got a new book to write. All of the flash and dazzle of anticipation has dwindled, displaced at first by the demands of my job and the commandeering force of commercial celebration, with all of its creepy grins and expressions of true joy. I look over at the photo of my mom, taken by my own self, up yonder at the scenic overlook on U.S. Hill. It hangs to my right, beneath a photo of her painting of a Florida panther, which is a kissing cousin of the Rocky Mountain cougar. The photo, the panther's gaze, reminds me of a truly beautiful book by James McMullen: Cry of the Panther. Somehow, in my looking to the right, in my viewing of mom's face and the panther's sidelong gaze, I am looking for encouragement. "Come on, Ken. You can do it! You can".

Think I'll draw that bath and soak the bones now. Can I do it? Yup. One more holiday weekend to endure in the thick of the marketplace, and then . . . . . .

Acquiescence, Recalcitrance, and Courage

2011-12-27T15:46:00.000-08:00

"Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain

or freed a human soul".

~ Mark Twain ~

If I had a penchant for acquiescence I'd likely refer to it as a bad habit. Three hours of naps this morning seems to have eased the deep fatigue. Such naps require acquiescence to be of any help at all. Yes, it takes a lot for me to give in and actually lay down and rest. What clued me in, this time, and thus inspired me to wisdom, was the column of itchy granite that stems downward from my sore throat and bronchus. For all my yakking about mindfulness you'd think I would take the time to tap out relief with my fingertips and give the poor body some rest. After one week of highfalutin commerce in a busy market at the busiest time of year I left work last night with deep body chills and a lump in my throat. Sometimes, when it gets over-the-top busy I begin to get an inkling of just how poorly we are designed for high-intensity shopping, in a highly popular supermarket no less! Then again, considering that we floor staff were admonished to not call in sick, I took the low road and took the statement for it's passive aggressive implications, assuming that we were supposed to come in and work sick.

In the long run it will make no difference. And I will continue in my more natural venue of recalcitrance. I just can't seem to help myself, so I end up questioning the wisdom of the authorities and the honchos. I mean: no, the tail don't wag the dog but iffin the dog bites his own tail everyone bleeds. Sigh. I pushed myself too hard, and will do so again. And again. It takes courage to do so mindfully. If illness is called for illness will come. But the healing runs throughout in its quest to align the heart with the mind rather than aligning the pocketbook with currently accepted opinions that smack of marketing spin and one-sided mind games. Managers and marketeers all know the rules, and that ignoring them selectively is the most efficacious way into the pocketbook. For all my lack of formal education I can't help but to see this selective ignorance as a real bugaboo in the management of human beings as well. Like, ya know, mmmmmm, it's all a big friggin game. Thusly, I feel commodified to a level that tests my tender heart. The tender ones are the strongest one, ya know. Hardness is a habit that is infinitely more harmful than the habit of acquiescence. But they work together so well, nearly seamlessly in fact. Like peace in a pod (see trailer, below).

Maybe next time, instead of calling in sick, I will call in sic instead. No, really! I MEANT what I said.

How Real Do You Want It?

2011-12-26T08:20:00.000-08:00

Now I don't know but I been told
If the horse don't pull you got to carry the load.
I don't know whose back's that strong,
maybe find out before too long.
One way or another, one way or another,
One way or another, this darkness got to give.
~ The Grateful Dead ~

I hit the ground running this morning. The dog woke me up. He had just come inside from his morning relief of peeing after being in his cage all night long. I was sleeping on the couch because of the respiratory muck and exhaustion: it makes me snore. Sky dog likes to jump onto the couch when he comes in from his morning pee, especially when it is down near zero Fahrenheit.

When he landed on my legs I awoke with a giggle. I've been chilled with this viral incursion but I felt a deeper cold. Turned out the wood pellet stove had run out of pellets, so in my sleep stupor I grabbed a forty pound bag of pellets from the car port, hefted it onto my right shoulder, and carried it back in to refill the hopper on the stove. While carrying the load I noticed that the floor was very cold as well, so after filling the hopper I went back to the utility room only to find that the pilot light on the radiant floor heat boiler has gone out - went and got the butane lighter, lit the thing, held it until the burner flared, and then, finally, I got to pour a cup of hot coffee. Good morning!

Recently I wrote about Dr. Eban Alexander III, a neurosurgeon who endured a near death experience (NDE). I want to point out that this is different from a brush with death. In an NDE powerful perceptions of a life beyond physical existence is prevalent, often in visionary form, also in the form of a journey to and through a place that is, as Dr. Penny Sartori calls it: "Realer than real". Question is: how real do you want it?

In my previous blog post I reported the similarities between Dr. Alexander's NDE journey and my own. If you've taken the time to listen to the interview with Dr. Alexander go and have a read of my own report, an excerpt from my book, Theater of Clouds: A Near Death Memoir.

All of the previous has been, in part, a circumlocuitous way of referencing the opening photo in this post. Walking out in the sage fields after a heavy snow is the closest thing, on the material plane, to the "realer than real" experience, that I have found. With all of my gripes and troubles at work, reported here, hopefully in a compassionate and fair manner, I need the reminder that existence is larger than life. Especially when I am sick.

Dr. Alexander has inspired me, and I must thank Dr. Sartori for the head's up on Dr. A. Reality is cracking wide open. Science is on the verge of poking its rigorous and exacting head through the Veil between the worlds.

Workers' rights are another thing altogether. Right? And business men aren't scientists just 'cause they use algorithms.

Bath time!! Later y'all!

The Cold Truth

2011-12-24T05:49:00.000-08:00

"But the actual world revolves around meeting our genuine needs, which may or may not involve money. In the big picture, money is just one small, much abused abstract tool. Money has been abused from the beginning, probably about fifteen minutes after the first shekel was minted, but now the abuse has reached such levels that the entire notion of money is collapsing in on itself. Our concept of money needs to be reevaluated and probably abandoned in the distant future."

~ the late Joe Bageant

Mostly I want to draw attention back to a great writer that we lost last March. If you have even an inkling of wonderment at what the corporate mindset and worldview is doing to human beings click here and take the time to read Joe's beautiful prose. Go on. Read it. You can plug back in to the hive mind after yer done, K? Won't hurt ya none!

I came home for lunch yesterday and saw a huge coyote standing in the yard down by the Faerie Garden. Of course he ran right off when he heard the car approaching. Predators are canny that way. But I was relating nearly all of existence to the odd notion that I can be told to NOT call in sick to work. How did it come to this? Truth be told I feel pretty good, alright, and I would NOT stay home from work on Christmas Eve if Jehovah his own self came knockin' at my door a tellin' me to keep close council and stay indoors, because I love my job! I mean, really? Really?

The Light Shines Regardless

2011-12-23T08:24:00.000-08:00

"Here we come to a turning of the season
Witness to the arc towards the sun
A neighbor's blessed burden within reason
Becomes a burden borne of all and one"

~ the Decembrists ~

My favorite song these days is a real foot-stomper by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils: "Standing on the Rock". A YouTube video of that song, portrayed by OMD as older gentlemen, can be found at the end of this post. I am nearly as old as them, at this point, and still an endlessly devoted fan after all of these years. How can I describe their music? "Feel good". "That'll do, pig. That'll do". The Daredevils' song recites to me the value in the virtue of patience. But, more importantly, it makes me smile and go "heehaw!!!".

Yesterday a local group of the "Occupy" movement had a table set up out front of the food market where I work. The afternoon temperatures were vacillating in the lower 20's Fahrenheit. The store was crawling - no, make that swarming - with consumers. I was compiling all of my strength, filtering it through all of my will, and maintaining as best I could in the thick of the onslaught of shopping frenzied human beings. My appetite for input was satiated by noon, just around lunch break. My tolerance for input was flagging only in the final hour of my shift. What bugged me most about the whole screamin' match was that all of them folks, me included, were all in it together, beyond doubt, yet the majority seemed to be in it for themselves. And THEN, there was the corporate entity that sponsored, in fact thrived from, the whole event: aloof, sterile, and charged fully with 'boosterism on steroids'.

Don't get me wrong: I love this season at work. I love it! Yo! Management? Do you hear what I am saying? I LOVE it, k. But I have not come to gripe today, nor to call out the slackers and the dimwitted attitudes.

These days I am much more looking forward than backwards. I am grateful for my friends in the scientific community: Penny, Burt, Bob, the other Bob, Scott, Rick, Martha, Dr. Smucker, and I can't remember the other guy's name. It seems to me that science is at the tipping point. The veil that separates the worlds of life and death, consciousness and drudgery, time and the moment, is becoming thinner.

I found out the hard way, by smacking my head against the planet, which triggered an NDE, which conclusively demonstrated to me that this here reality that we all is dealin' with in our brief and lovely lives is much, MUCH larger in scope than we can even imagine.

With that in mind I must defer to my animal needs. Sigh. Yet another shift in the market madness beckons, replete with spending and politics among the workers who facilitate the whole nine yards. I am so friggin' tired today! Bath, shave, eat food, brush teeth, take a deep breath. Then head out to the job site to be of service to the masses and the bosses, all the while fantasizing about forming a union. The Light shines regardless. Yup.

On the Birth of Light

2011-12-22T05:52:00.000-08:00

It's time to sit still, at least in the privacy of one's own heart, if a broader definition of stillness cannot be mustered at this time. Explanations of what the solstice means and why it happens are abundant and easy to find at this late date in history. 'T'were it my choice I'd likely get all the chores rounded off and settle into the day in the thick of the shaman's old trick of feeling into the day. It's kind of a nice thing to do because, like clockwork, the day feels back into you. Something about sentience meets good sense and the presence of predatory behavior in the world goes down one little notch.

As for me, I will be sitting behind a cash register all day. From that vantage point my touch can go anywhere in the world, through the internet-based system that electronically transfers money hither and yon. Seein's how Taos Ski Valley has a healthy blanket of snow there will be a tide of tourists flowing through town. I'm just sayin': LOTS of friggin' people! It will be a non-stop joyride of intersubjectivity channeled through the narrow confines of objective commerce. I will enjoy it. And I will be aching like a plow horse when it's over. I thought that's why they make tractors? Don't trust your robot cashiers, folks. That friendly voice ain't real.

I raise a coffee toast to Brigid, she of the Light. It is and will be a beautiful day!

Peace out, y'all.

Calling Out the Darkness

2011-12-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

The morning is on the yellow end of the gray scale. Cloud ceiling low, about 10,000 feet. There is a stillness to the energy that can easily be attributed to the Winter Solstice, which happens only hours from now. The shortest day, the longest night. Rosie the cat just crossed my lap on her way up to her personal loft, a basket bed atop the five foot Mexican cabinet to my right. The wood pellet stove hums its customary monotone. The way I feel? I'm a subdued dude, and it's a hurried and bothered world out there in the marketplace. With three hours left before I head to work I can afford to snuggle into the creature comforts for a while. The feel of the chair against my body is something that is usually relegated to the subliminal realms. The soreness around the place where my spine attaches to my head. The always pending hesitation in my breathing. The faintly quivering tic on my chin. All of these things, beckoned forth into attention through a bout of unintentional mindfulness. I don't rightly know if I can by definition call this an existential moment but I do know that it is a sweet time.

I did an unusual thing last night, something spontaneous. It started by my following up on Dr. Eban Alexander, the Harvard neurosurgeon that experienced an NDE, near death experience, after the part of his brain that makes him human shut down during a rare, unexplained bout of bacterial meningitis, e coli being the culprit. I listened to an interview with Dr. Alexander yesterday morning while I drove into town on errands. Due to his training as a neuroscientist he was quite specific in describing how his mind came back online after a week-long coma. Certain parts of his description resonated deeply with portions of my own NDE journey: beginning in a dark underground place, followed by the appearance of a brilliant light, and the presence of preternatural music which helped me get into a beautiful valley of extraordinary colors and sounds, where I met a female spiritual being who helped me accept my bizarre plight. There is much, much more I could say about this but the bath awaits. As for the unusual thing I did last night?

I registered for the International Conference on After Death Communications. Dr. Alexander will be giving a Keynote address at that conference. So I will be driving over yonder to Phoenix come April. I can't really afford the trip but there are some things that are larger than life. They beckon. I sometimes follow. This is one of those times. The existence of NDEs is such a continuing shock to the sensibilities that during the times when it pokes into daily mundane life it creates a daunting cloud aggregated from the countless things that we do not know about our existence and place in this grand cosmos. It often looks like light yet feels like darkness. The darkness is ignorance.

Today, I am calling out the darkness.

Working Under Duress

2011-12-19T07:12:00.000-08:00

It is time to pull the blanket over, to curl lightly into a semi-fetal position, and to slip off into that surreal space that predominates when a respiratory virus is having it's way with you. Time to choose a sweet mental image and hold it while drifting off into sleep, to doze in and out of consciousness, to sink, and to push society away from the door so that healing may proceed unimpeded.

Yeah, right!

I don't know where I get these big ideas. I stayed home sick on Friday. This is a big holiday week in the retail market. I work in an upscale natural foods supermarket. The store is closed on Sunday. Calling in sick on Monday raises red flags with the powers that be. As luck would have it I can stay home tomorrow, my usual day off, and, if the forecast is viable, there will be fresh snow. Sweet. Bottom line? It is best to work today, while maintaining the brave face of mindfulness, then reset (a delicious typo! I meant "rest") when time allows.

I read a nice article this morning, from the late Christopher Hitchens, about the dark patriarchal state of North Korea. My interest was inspired, of course, by the death of Kim Jong Il. The article? Read more here >

Sometimes I wish I could go back to the New Age days, when one could be sweet yet grumpy, all at the same time. You'll have to forgive me but a large part of me still cleaves to the idea that freedom would increase as time passed, due to the many and various triggers that were tripped during the social upheaval of the 1960s. I am downright pissed off that the world has become more socially tyrannical in its major leanings. I mean, it's bad enough that millions of people live under the threat of harm in North Korea, no better than slaves to an idea, doing as they are told, or else . . . . . Big Daddy is watching YOU. You do the math.

Don't get me wrong, I did get some rest yesterday. I'm going to bathe then nap before working today. And I will have a grand old time at work - working hard, spreading joy and good cheer. The God of Commerce knows the value of such behavior. Me? I prefer the great god Pan, but fessin' up to pagan leanings these days could get a fella labeled as a - well - as a pagan. I'll take my intelligence where and when I can find it. I don't know about you.

No snow yet. Blizzard warnings on the far side of the Sangre de Cristos Range. I'm going to the bath now. Christopher Hitchens is on my mind, as is one other remarkable man. Hitchens professed to atheism. This other guy didn't really say one way or another, but he sure did point directly, with the finger of a skilled neurosurgeon, at the existence of consciousness beyond the bounds of our quaint little ideas of morality, right and wrong, and who should do what because so and so said so or kind of implied that deviation will not be tolerated. Go read Hitch for yourself. His body of work is easy to peruse on the internet. But this other fella? Take nine minutes of your life and listen to this guy. He's an NDEr like me.

Christopher Hitchens and the Sick Day

2011-12-17T05:44:00.000-08:00

I read of the death of Christopher Hitchens at a time when I already felt awful. Head packed full of leaden cotton, something I tried in vain to ignore. Focus? What focus? It took me about an hour to convince myself that I should call in sick, but within that hour was not the weighing of the pros and cons or the valid assessment of the severity of my illness, it was more of a philosophical argument. What if they thought I was faking it? I knew that, in my condition, it would be unwise to even attempt a busy day in the retail arena. I'd be not only risking a worsening of my condition through needless stress, I'd be risking the thoughtless spreading of whatever viral scourge I was harboring. But that manner of altruism would be risking being seen as weak and lacking in dutiful loyalty to the company. They'd asked us, at one point, to "suck it up" when we felt puny so as not to lay further load on fellow workers.

On and on, the arguments swirled in unison, one big maelstrom of polemics. Polemics? I'd had to look that word up to remind myself of it's meaning. Christopher Hitchens was a polemicist, said those paying tribute to his passing. Somehow I was able to read a few nicely written tributes while the polemic gyre further removed all traces of rationality from my beleaguered mind. It made it all the more difficult because Hitchens died of the same thing that killed my mom: esophageal cancer. How could I "suck it up" with images of blood oozing from around the G-tube penetrating mom's abdominal wall, through which she took nourishment? I thought of Christopher's amazing prose, and of his lighting wit, his incisive powers of observation.

After a while I got up to look for my cell phone in case I decided to call in sick. The wave of dizziness pushed all of the deliberation away in one fell swoop. I called. Sick. Stayed home. Had some food, tidied the kitchen, made a hot toddy, drank it while reading a bit more about Hitch, then laid down on the couch and slept the sleep of the dead: four solid hours. Upon waking I found that all traces of guilt and uncertainty had left me.

I'll be considering Hitchens for some time to come. Great writers do that to me. Especially the witty ones. When you are too sick to work you stay home. Polemics are appropriate for larger, more complex issues. As Richard Feynman was fond of saying, "What do you care what other people think?". I'm glad I stayed home. It was the right thing to do.

The Cat in the Green Burrito

2011-12-15T05:50:00.000-08:00

Hmmm. I wonder what today will bring. Of course, all told, there's no shortage of wondering nor wonderment with this old boy. There are so many - SO MANY! - stories in this big world that I'm usually not lacking for entertainment. Can't tell all of 'em. Have to pick and choose. Finding enough time to tell just one of them is a challenge.

The other day, Carol stripped the bed to change the sheets and launder those removed. Rosie the cat loves the bed during the day, during this cold winter weather. The cat came to me, fussing, so I followed her and she showed me what was bugging her: the bed was bare. I took a shirt of mine and laid it out flat for her to lay on, then left her to her doings. Later, when I went back in I saw that Rosie had rolled herself up inside of the shirt like a burrito. Yet at the end of the bright green burrito was one wide-opened cat's eye, looking right at me.

That's kinda how I feel these days. Roll it right up into comfy zone but keep vigilant. Sounds like a plan.

The Revolution Starts Now

2011-12-14T07:55:00.000-08:00

"Physicists do the most lovely thing: they quantify conviction. They know what they believe to within four decimal places".

~ Anne Finkbeiner, from "Higgs and the Certainty of Physics" > read more

Day three of the Big Storm: foggy, just below freezing, the only sound when I stepped out onto the porch this morning was that of the ringing in my ears. The storm has at times been characterized by huge banks of fog moving through. Corralled by chaotic wind currents into gyres, and sometimes even piled high to mimic the mountains, the fog never fails to do the expected, adding visual vagueness to an otherwise stunning landscape and firmament.

I was out at sunrise yesterday, during a break in the snow. Walked nearly a mile before seeing any fresh tracks in the snow. No birds showed. The feeling of solitude was welcome. Of course it was: that's the point of the exercise. That, and the drive to deepen my feeling of connection with the world at large.

There are so many wonders in the world today. Just loosely keeping tracks of the discoveries in the field of astronomy is dazzling on a nearly day by day basis. It is all beauty that penetrates these blankets upon blankets of anxiety. Reminders that these anxious phases come and go. They arrive, they depart. When they are here no amount of positive thinking or attaboy psychology can exorcise them. And it doesn't help working in an environment where uncertainty, unpredictability, and the nearly unhinged adherence to people-pleasing, make self-determination and personal integrity the stuff of "Wanted!" posters.

There! I done gone made ma self laugh. I remember from reading Carlos Castaneda that self-importance can be a real pain in the ass, to others, sure, but especially to one's own self. It makes one all grabby and grasping. But just because you've got no points left to defend doesn't mean that you don't defend anything at all. I guess that's where the convictions come in. Imagine quantifying your convictions. It might be fun.

Come the revolution I will write at greater length. I will take my bath first, then write. But it ain't here yet, so, once again, it is bath time and time to go to the gainful employment that so casually squeezes the bejeezus oughtta l'il' ole me.

Easy Come, Easy Go

2011-12-12T08:51:00.001-08:00

Bleak and cold, it is in fact frigid beyond normal human endurance. But not really. Not today. Have no doubt: there is a storm moving in from the west. It's going to snow. It's going to blow. But not this morning. This morning, we'll see how it really goes. It is cold, but not so bad. After all: it's Monday.

Lately I've noticed that more than a few folks are talking about Kurt Vonnegut. New books about him is the way I see it. There was always a sadness to Kurt's writing, and a bitterness that tended toward the sweet. I'm no different. Vonnegut was a pervasive influence during my teen years, as was Mark Twain, as was Henry David Thoreau. Isaac Asimov was in there as well, but he wrote about the future and it didn't look like we were going to make it that far. As it turns out, we have made it that far. Things have progressed far enough that Vonnegut has since died, and people are writing books about his work. It seems he was sad. As was Twain. As was David Foster Wallace.

I've been sad lately, if you consider "lately" as pertaining to most of the latter part of the 20th century and all of the 21st. If you dial it down, bring the sadness into a sharper focus, you could highlight a period that spans, at this point, less than two weeks. I've blogged about it. You have, perhaps, read about it here. Prozac dosage upped from 40 mg to 60 mg, six days now. So what? I'm part of the epidemic of anxiety and depressive disorders. Is there strength in numbers? Not in this case. Not yet. But that can change.

Also, lately, I've noticed that people keep writing about and/or referring to David Foster Wallace. I must confess: David came into my field of awareness only because of his depression, when he hung himself a few years back.

What is it with these guys?

Please take that last sentence to be rhetorical. I'm aching this morning. I have a pain in my neck, along the right side, that is radiating down my right arm. It reminds me of the old pain that was vanquished by spinal surgery last February. Because I have Sundays and Tuesdays off from work Monday sometimes elicits feelings of longing, or nausea, in me. Sure, I could call in "sick" but that is such an overworked theme. Better to just sweat it out. Go to work. Complete the shift. Day off tomorrow. Storm moving in, for my storm watching pleasure.

It will be day seven of my increased psych-med dosage, but seven days doth not a difference make. Up until the 10-14 day range it's all placebo effects. That's how I see it.

What we are all looking for is for life to make sense in a trans-perfunctory humane way. That's why I cherish my morning bath, or shower, before going to work at the emporium that sponsors my gainful employment, not as a personal thing, rather because it takes people to run a business. I could go all drone-ish at work. But there are humans there. They can be kind of fun. They can teach me as well, by word, but, more importantly, by example. Meanwhile, the shower shows the biological organism to be not only sentient, but also to possess awareness, caring, compassion, and an appetite for meaning. Depression is part of that appetite - what David Foster Wallace called "The Bad Thing".

Now, we won't go into anxiety today. There's not enough time. Did you understand exactly what I just said? THERE IS NOT ENOUGH TIME! But, luckily, there is more where that came from. I've gotta go, but I'll be back, K?

The Sidled Gait of Necessity

2011-12-11T05:42:00.001-08:00

There is still novelty in the deep cold. At dawn, on this Sunday morning, it is 2 degrees above zero, Fahrenheit. I've already been out to top off the water in the heated bird baths. Waning full moon to the west, golden morning light spilling over the mountains. Whereas some people bemoan the deep chill right away, I've noticed, it's different for me. This stuff is fresh. This weather is sweet as it assaults my central nervous system with the inspiration to let survival instincts fully awaken.

Tis a joy to watch, in the early morning, as the bluebirds and flickers drink sparingly as they perch within a cloud of vapor. Just to take a moment to sit still, as the cold day awaits, and will continue regardless. The reports call for fresh snow tomorrow but what's cleft on the ground right now is all corrupted with tracks from rabbits, birds, mystery rodents, one bold young coyote pup, and the man who lives in this house.

So, I wait for new snow, and I wait for my shifting consciousness to settle into a new normal. I'm on day five of the increase in my fluoxetine scripts. It's a pretty world, no doubt. There are some truly amazing people to meet and connect with. There is music, art, literature. Likewise, there is an immense amount of seeming unrest in the world. It's really not my place to comment on all of the madness that goes on these days. Doesn't mean I CAN'T comment. But sometimes it's best to just sit still, like that flicker in the vapor, all spots and stripes. Still, for a moment. Eyes shut to the sweet cold air.

Yesterday I had a brief but fulfilling session of commiseration with a lovely young woman of Spanish descent. Nibbling on homemade carne seca, giving chat time to the snowballing effects of the work on us workers. Speaking of tears, some expressed and some withheld. Dancing around that sane place where communications get sidetracked and fussy somewhere between expectations, aspirations, and actuality. Some triangulated region where awareness and articulation dance a pas de deux yet never quite merging to provide a sense of wholeness of mission that just might lend hope to a person. Not that this commiseration went so far as to answer some thorny questions. It's just a matter of letting frustrations out into the open air on occasion, instead of binding them up in a web of positive thinking. I don't know. Do you?

I've been semi-awake since 5 AM so I shall post this and lay upon the couch for a spell. With any kind of luck at all this will be a restful day. This body aches from the ever-increasing output of energy, sidled daily through downsizing, upscaling, and that always convoluted logic called duty. That said, it is good to rest, once in a while.

"Those one track minds

They took you for a working boy

Kiss them goodbye, you shouldn't have to jump for joy

You shouldn't have to jump for joy"

~ Tears for Fears

Chillin' With the Willin'

2011-12-07T06:52:00.001-08:00

Human tracks on left, Coyote tracks on right

"It was at no time darker than twilight within the tent, and we could easily see the moon through its transparent roof as we lay; for there was the moon still above us, with Jupiter and Saturn on either hand, looking down on Wachusett, and it was a satisfaction to know that they were our fellow-travellers still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny. Truly the stars were given for a consolation to man. We should not know but our life were fated to be always grovelling, but it is permitted to behold them, and surely they are deserving of a fair destiny. We see laws which never fail, of whose failure we never conceived; and their lamps burn all the night, too, as well as all day,-- so rich and lavish is that nature which can afford this superfluity of light".
~ Henry David Thoreau

They celebrate here in the high mountain desert. At least some of them do. At long last hard winter has arrived and has also settled into the land. Copious snow lies upon the steep slopes at Taos Ski Valley. I'm not a skier. I learned to ski, years ago, back in Massachusetts, on Wachusett Mountain, where Uncle Henry, Henry David Thoreau, walked and reported his close encounter with the beauty of life. There on Mount Wachusett I decided that going downhill at breakneck speeds would heretofore be done only on a mountain bicycle. That folly has passed at well, since my neck, damaged on that fateful day back in 1984, deserves prudence. Ten months after spinal fusion surgery I am content at having, at long last, a stable pedestal for my oversized head. I shan't partake willingly of any activity which may lay low that stability. It's been nearly thirty years, this instability, so I ain't backing down now!

My primary care physician, just yesterday, expressed joy in the arrival of winter. She's a skier. Young, blond hair and blue eyes, pretty like the girl next door. And here she was, not on the slopes, rather in a little examination room listening to a nascent old man attempting to articulate the changes in his psyche that may signal a necessary change in his medications. We volleyed ideas back and forth, me interspersing the volley with subjective observations that might influence the decision we were there to make. The outcome? We decided on a 50% increase in the dosage of the famed Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor: Prozac. A regular daily dose of anti-anxiety medication would also be applied to cover the lapse in time before the SSRI changes could take effect. Also we decided to shift my daily dosage of Prozac to bedtime rather than in the morning. This morning I woke up refreshed.

I've been haunted by an incisive article I read a few weeks ago, on Alternet.com in which the writer really pulled back the blankets from the truly amazing pervasiveness of antidepressant usage in this country. Read that article here: "The Great Antidepressant Hypocrisy", if you so wish. I first used Prozac back when it was first released, 1990 in my case. Since I have already shared that fact in my published book, Theater of Clouds: a Near Death Memoir, there's no need to be coy at this point. The drug probably saved my life back then. I have not used it ever since, not at all. But I did resume usage a few years back when the ugliness of my seven months of caregiving, helping my mother to die, washed over me like an afterthought come to desecrate my life. Her death came at this time of year, as has, yearly I'm afraid, my coming under punitive/corrective scrutiny at work. My pretty doctor also noted the possibility of SAD, seasonal affective disorder.

It's been an endeavor worthy of the incisive skills of Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, he ain't a real guy! At this point all I hope for is relief from the anxiety that is hounding me this season. My walks out in the snow are a big help. Watching the birds, stalking coyotes, laughing at rabbits. All good as well. Putting up with the petty bullshit of daily mundane social politics while trying to keep a clear head and some semblance of focus is another story. It shall not be told today.

"Like Da Vinci on the roof with his arm in a sling

A man's got the power but the bird's got the wings"

~ Ozark Mountain Daredevils

I feel pretty good. Think I'll go to work. Bath first, of course. It is worthy of note that Prozac, and other SSRI meds, help the biological organism to better relate to the levels of light in the immediate environment. I'm not so sure that SSRI usage is so much different from smoking marijuana, 'ceptin' that said "wacky weed" makes me kinda stupid and generally makes me tend toward solipsism. I prefer to be able to relate to society with a firm belief in society's validity. Can't do that when I am stoned. Peace out, y'all.

Monday Morning Mopery Elicits Joy

2011-12-05T06:31:00.001-08:00

"Whoa, Where do you go?

When you don't want no one to know?
Who told tomorrow,

Tuesday's dead?

~ Cat Stevens ~

A Sunday morning walk in the snow is one of the great pleasures in life. Walking an easy two miles I wound up following what I suspected were fox tracks. Canid, small, could have been a little dog. I can't say for sure. That's one of the joys of tracking: sometimes the most explicit information you can garner is that the quarry is a mystery. This Monday morning is a different story. Sixteen degrees Fahrenheit, at most, and the Sangre de Cristos are pressed to the earth in the icy grip of steel-gray clouds. If I did not have to work at noon I would likely be out there, bundled to the max, flirting with desperation, trying to reawaken my sensuous self under harsh conditions.

The forecast is for heavy snow and high winds. I saw it on the local broadcast from Albuquerque, where they are sunk thickly into the heart of the storm. Pretty news anchors and equally pretty field reporters. But up north here, it has yet to kick in. We got the gray, the frigid and humid air, and a stasis that would if it could chill the population into compliance - stay home. Stay home.

This time last year I was in the thick of a storm of my own making. Gripped in that loopy fear that no on wants to hear about - no one, that is, that gets any less than $9o an hour to listen and maybe help. The cosmic road trip started out with diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome, and from there it led right on down into the Pit of Despair . . .

The MRI found syringomyelia in the cervical spine, and a subsequent MRI of the thoracic spine found that the damned syrinx were present throughout the spinal cord. So my primary sent me on to a pain specialist who was a little lax at masking alarm. She gave me explicit instructions on just when I should hightail it to the Emergency Room to save my ability to move much at all. She also gave me a reference to a brilliant young brain surgeon along with a prescription for gabapentin, which, quite frankly, made me wish I was dead. But it also calmed down my central nervous system so that the chronic pain abated. This all led to surgery, which greatly enhanced the inspiration to share my little life with y'all, here on my blog.

I see my primary again tomorrow morning, and if those pretty broadcasters are correct I will be headed out into air cold enough to freeze seawater, and there will be six inches of snow on the ground, and I will wondering if a new tweaking of my psych med will help me step out of the anxiety that I have come to know like a sister. From within the balmy grasp of anxiety it feels as if escape from said grasp would be inconceivable.

Carol went off to work over an hour ago. I went out, barefoot of course, and pulled my car into the car port where hers was parked. Out front, the birds have shown up. We have a heater in the birdbath which has fomented a ruckus between three flickers and countless mountain bluebirds. The biggest male flicker is hogging the little oasis, which reminds me that I need not get too verklemmt about the petty dramas I have been weathering as of late. Nah. A hot soak in the bath, preceded and followed by a barefoot walk in the snow, should set me straight. Lately I've been contemplating the Buddhist non-violent way. Now don't get me riled, I'm not gonna get all scholarly nor even poetic right now. I mean, whatcha gonna do with someone who doesn't even know how trigger happy they are, and how much damage can be done by reactive bullshittery. A guy "just following orders", or just doing his job, can deliver seven levels of hell upon an undeserving quarry then turn around and go out for a chimichanga and a Big Gulp, without even a flinch of conscience.

I mean, look at them flickers. The big one was drinking from the bath. It's 14 friggin' degrees out there and there is standing non-frozen water for all! But when the second flicker showed up it was met with a flurry of wing-flapping squawk-inducing fury. Not that the loser ran away. He just kinda slipped around the corner away from the deadly pecker above. This is WAY better than cartoons . . . .

Now, about conflict resolution . . . . . . .

The Terrier and the Tipping Point

2011-12-01T04:55:00.001-08:00

The fella you see here is Mr. Sky, an authentic rat terrier, twelve years old, smart as can be, and a nut job from the word go. But he is my hero. Since, due to seasonal drift, the ground is not yet frozen, I have had an ongoing battle with the surreptitious ones. Ground squirrels, both the common variety and the golden-manteled. Not that it matters. You never get to see the critters. They could be tiny burrowing robots for all I care, but Mr. Sky likes the rodents.

When the squirrels arrive you can tell by the mounds of fresh soil they leave above ground, and sometimes they leave an actual openings to their tunnel network. My way is to grab the pick and take out my frustrations on the squirrels' handiwork, then neatly pack it all back down. I've had to do this several times in the back yard recently. But Tuesday last I looked out the kitchen window and could see Mr. Sky's little tail protruding from the catnip patch. I reckoned he was messing with the cat, so I let him stay. Looked out a while later and he was still there. Tail wagging away. So I went out to see what he was on about in that catnip patch. Turns out he had located a huge tunnel opening that the squirrels had made in the midst of the mint patch. I never would have seen it but for the dog. And it was especially notable because Sky dog is not really "Mr. Natural", if you catch my drift. In the past he has much preferred to chase imaginary squirrels in a dust patch than to dig at the real things in a hole. But on Tuesday he did so. I left the hole open so he could have his way with it. Which he did. He worked that hole unto fruition. By the end of the day the squirrels had pulled the hole back in on itself, obviously having given up their gained ground to avoid having that dogs teeth and breath in their faces.

One other thing of note before I shower is a new post over on Dr Penny Sartori's blog: "Science at the Tipping Point". This is for those of you who have an interest in near death experiences, NDEs. For those of you who think I just write here to pump me little ego up a notch you can skip this one, although I would love for you to have a look. This is a matter close to my heart.

Penny discusses two lengthy quotes from Dr. Howard Berman of Cornell University, a neurosurgeon who has experienced an NDE and he seems to be opening new doors in the researching of the phenomenon. From what I read I can see where he is headed with this. The scope of our existence, of our very being, has been understated, corralled by notions of and from science, religion, and philosophy. This earthly stage, where we play out our little dramas and power trips is but a small part of it all. We are bigger than that. As are our motives, loves, and plans.

Now, about that shower . . . . . . (winks, and walks away)

Waiting for the Storm

2011-11-30T06:16:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago it was all green, yet now that it has gone to brown the memory is of brown. The forest fires of summer, the smoke-filled air, the dry conditions that had the sage fields looking beleaguered. That changed. It always does. And when the snow and wind come tomorrow it will change again. Green, to white. As is my proclivity, I feel grateful that my work shift is a morning shift, so that by the time the high winds and snow come rolling through in the afternoon I will be home to watch the show, and a closing shift on Friday gives me a morning at home, to appreciate the new fallen snow and the feelings that emerge when the world chills around me. I hope it's a big one.

The deeper hope, of course, is that I still have a job to go to. That has been the underlying tension as I navigate through the shark-filled waters of late. That's what really gets me about working for a corporation - you never really get to talk to the corporation. The corporate entity is sociopathic at its core. No, bad choice of words. The corporate entity is more of a psychopathic entity. It is what I have been calling the Predator, partially because it is an apt metaphor and partially because the feeling of having my job hanging in the balance is akin to the feeling of being stalked by a predator. Luckily for me I have been well-versed in the works of Carlos Castaneda, where a Warrior is beholden to actuality in acknowledging that Death its own self is a predator that could strike at any given time. So do you just lay low and take it? Do you bite back? Nope. Too specific. In the world of Castaneda you simply dance with Death, be it the death of an idea, a heart-held adoration, or a banal significator of actual physical death. And that's where the corporate entity really mystifies me. When news that one might be having a life-changing experience at the hands of the corporate entity it is always delivered with the dispassionate tones of "it is what it is". So and so and such and such. So any striking back is useless, says they. But a corporate entity could give a rat sass about any one human. That is left to the corporate representatives. Enough!

Yup, the photo above is coyote tracks in the deep snow we had winter before last. I'm hoping for a significant snowfall like that one. Also, I am hoping that I retain my job under the auspices of an entity that is, at it's very core, deaf, dumb, and blind. My goal is compassion, for myself, and for the others involved in the struggle. But compassion for the corporation? I can't wrap my head around that one. Can you?

They say this storm is going to be a big one. I'm ready.

Inner Peace

2011-11-28T10:16:00.001-08:00

Slivered moon setting in the southwest, huge and clothed in mists. Magic. It is fascinating to see how the waves roll through us all. I used to think that dreams were the essence. Now, I am not at all sure of that. It's not about what we can, or may, bring into being. It is about what we actualize: what we accomplish. This is where James Ray strayed. I wish him peace. And y'all, as well.

A Dog's Life

2011-11-26T05:39:00.001-08:00

"Good night. Sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning".

~ The Dread Pirate Robert

It was one of those mornings when the starry New Mexico sky was simply astounding in its intricate beauty. Now the wind blows strong and cold from the north. But for now I must cleanse and groom. The smart thing to do would be to bundle up and go out for a long walk on the mesa. I still haven't figured out the actual difference between a walk and a hike except that it seems that hikes are for people who have more time on their hands. Which I don't. Gainful employment and the like. So I can't do the smart thing. Not today. THEY say it's a dog's life, eh? I'd like to have a talk with that dog and hear what he has to say about THEM.

Earth Stories, Glory & Gold

2011-11-25T05:26:00.001-08:00

Air thick with moisture, gray skies at dawn. The morning is subdued under cover of clouds. Yet my feelings are virtually golden, the usual anxiety upon awakening lacking intensity, and even the hissy and growly squabbling of the dog and the beleaguered cat doesn't seen to be a bother. It is the kind of morning where it seems as if the day is designed to sit around, eat good food, play the Ozark Mountain Daredevils at low volume on the Bose, sip cognac, and let this writer's soul run free range across the keyboard. Ain't happenin' though. Nope. Not even. High noon will find me at the OK Market, where I will relish the skiers.

Ski season opened yesterday up at Taos Ski Valley. My friend who does IT work up there tells me that the ski conditions are the best for opening day in many a year. That means that a fresh injection of strangers will enrich the flow of humanity that acts as a carrier wave for the cash flow. The store will hum and burble with novelty, novelty being like a sacred dog biscuit to this particular literary primate. Fresh faces complete with flatlander missions or other foreign capers will help me to keep my analytical mind out of the abstract realms where "a fresh injection of strangers will enrich the flow of humanity that acts as a carrier wave for the cash flow". Pain may not be an innate artifact in those abstract realms, but it does seem to pain me when I think about it. Especially when I realize that I can be so easily commodified, squeezed like a sea sponge in the high desert when the banal gods of productivity come a callin'. But let me stop that train of thought right away, before I get stuck in the headspace wherein I seem to sense republicans under every rock.

My friend who does tech work up in Ski Valley shared an Earth story with me the other day, and she gave me permission to tell the story as well. She saw a large flock of ravens (a group of ravens is an unkindness of ravens) near her house so she climbed up on a vantage point to get a look at what all of the fuss was about. Turns out this large flock of ravens was in pursuit of a lone coyote which had a raven clenched in his jaws! I have to wonder how it turned out. But that sense of wonder made my heart glow warm at the idea of a predator having to cope with being engaged by a large group supporting the prey.

"Earth stories" are what I call tales of actual happenings that harken back in bold reminder that we are players in Nature, embedded in Nature, and not just physically but also conceptually, playing our part in the overall story. We get to spin our own narratives, for ourselves and each other - in fact it seems that such spinning is part and parcel of our existence as sentient beings. Or perhaps that is simply my bias as a storyteller? Not!

This is why I love a rainy morning out here on the mesa north of town, with the sky rolling low and gloomy. Seeing gloom as essentially negative is a choice. These mists and clouds are carrier waves in their own right, carrying visions and memories from the realm of the the ancestors and delivering them directly to our unsuspecting hearts. Where but for a moment we stand side by side with these ancestors and other spiritual entities, rather than apart and severed from that timeless place by our very notions of being. Out here on the mesa north of town I relish and revere being on the edge of forever. It's that simple. Ravens and coyotes, chickadees and rabbits, hares and flickers. And sometimes a big cat. A really big cat. Then there are the spirits . . . .

Excerpted from David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
“. . . . . . such magicians rarely dwell at the heart of their village; rather, their dwellings are commonly at the spatial periphery of the community amid the surrounding rice fields, at the edge of the forest, or among a cluster of boulders. For the magician's intelligence is not circumscribed within the society--its place is at the edge, mediating between the human community and the larger community of beings upon which the village depends for its nourishment and sustenance. This larger community includes, along with the humans, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the myriad plants and animals that inhabit or move through the region, to the particular winds and weather patterns that inform the local geography, as well as the various land-forms-forests, rivers, caves, mountains-that lend their specific character to the surrounding Earth”.

Old and in the Way

2011-11-23T07:30:00.001-08:00

"You see the extremes
Of what humans can be?
In that distance some tension's born
Energy surging like a storm
You plunge your hand in
And draw it back scorched
Beneath it's shining like
Gold but better
Rumours of glory"

~ Bruce Cockburn

Got the Ozark Mountain Daredevils crooning' on iTunes: "Standin' on the Rock". It is oddly clear out here on the mesa this morning, perhaps in perceptual contrast to the thick smoke layin' low over Taos. They've got a controlled burn up NM 518 toward Fort Burgwin and when the warm air rises with the setting sun the smoke from the burn flows like water down the pass, through Talpa, (where, local legend has it, the witches live and thrive), and into town. I am grateful to be up north and am feeling apprehensive considering that I have to go into town, into work, this afternoon. You see, I am feeling old today: old and in the way. Feelin' I gots 'bout 'nuff wisdom to get my shoes tied and my zipper zipped, my hair combed and teeth brushed, but as for my frontal lobe, amygdalae, brain stem, and all that other good stuff, I cain't say a lick seein's how they ain't likely workin' like they's supposta. Leastways not accordion' to the status quo "and all that happy horseshit". That last quote was a favorite saying of Brother Phil, bless his soul, who died when he hit is head falling from a barstool laughing.

I'm heartsick from hearing of all the brutality and intolerance that is surging throughout the world today. Cracked heads and ribs, pepper spray and sound cannons. 99% vs. 1%. I think it's more a power trip by those who can and those who've had enough. It's nothin' a healthy heart multiplied by one billion couldn't fix. Nah. It'll take more than that.

I've been whining the past few weeks about having trouble at work, and I reckon I've sounded pretty harsh along the way. But the thing of it is - well it's the old 'as above so below' thing, the holographic oneness that has enough gumption to be much, much more than just a static cloud of wordy (sic) bliss. When confronted by insurmountable odds and ends the soul must shout in whispers, persistently and clearly, until the shouting is over. Yet, what's that? Something approaches. An ally? A comforting presence? Something.

Something.

Grateful, I am. K?

Fly Away Home

2011-11-22T04:39:00.001-08:00

Tis a crystalline clear morning, with first light slipping up silver-gray over the crest of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range. Nineteen degrees at 5:55 AM. November 22, 2011. Eight years ago on this date I had the pleasure of telling Gregg Braden about a bizarre series of numerical synchronicities that involved his appearing in accordance with the numbers 22 and 22.22. That's a complicated story that I shall not tell here. Two days before that I had dream in which I was being chased by demons and John Fitzgerald Kennedy came to my aid, taking me down into the earth into catacombs where we escaped the demons. Heady stuff, no doubt, but not so heady as what followed two days after speaking with Gregg. My second near death experience occurred then, three days before Thanksgiving. I remember calling in to work from the Emergency Room at Holy Cross Hospital and telling the owner of the store that I would not be in to work because a van had crashed through the wall of my house and nearly killed me. I still remember the poignant pause and then he replied, "You what?!". I did go to work the next day, but to this day I still don't know if I was loyal or stupid, or maybe both. A brief article about that accident is in the archives at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Click here to read that. A more thorough telling of that story can be found in chapter eleven of my NDE memoir Theater of Clouds. That book can be purchased through Amazon by following the link in the upper left hand corner of this blog page. It is also available here in Taos at Moby Dickens and OptiMysm. I keep forgetting to promote the book more often in this blog. Self-promotion is not one of my strong suits. Please read my book. The first three chapters are available online at my website kenebert.com. Sales have slowed to a stop. It would make a lovely Christmas gift! What the heck, I don't like marketing. Yet I work in a market. Go figure.

For those of you who have an interest in biorhythms - I have a strange sort of anniversary coming up on December 3, 2011. On that day my biorhythm cycles will be nearly identical to the day I had the bicycle accident that opened the celestial portal in triggering my NDE. I had always thought it to be odd that the accident happened on a triple critical day, the point when all three of my cycles were peaking. I can't help wondering what might happen this time around. Here's a photo of the two days' cycles on a biorhythm graph:

Now that I've had entirely too much fun this morning, playing with the technology at my fingertips, I think I'll get out of this chair and have a look at the day. Lately I've been having that old wish of just flying away from it all. I gotta watch that stuff - "careful what ya wish for" and all that good stuff. It's an odd feeling to love my job yet be on the precipice where it could end at any time. Not a good feeling, especially with the way the economy is these days. But ya never know what's gonna happen. Sometimes a van comes crashing through the wall of the house when ya least expect it (AS IF, eh? Who would ever expect such a thing?!). Some days the boss may get a bug up his butt and hand you a pink slip. Regardless, it is good to be alive, and even better to be able to feel truly grateful for this immense mystery in which we are but a grain of sand, seeking to become a grain of truth. Now: here's today's musical offering . . .

Peace out, y'all!

Showtime At the OK Market

2011-11-21T05:45:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving week in the grocery business means it is showtime. I love these busy times, when personal performance can be tested within the flow of high volume people-pleasing service. It is also a time when true teamwork can manifest naturally from the sheer essence of the action. There may be some who cannot appreciate the joy of hard work and unconditional cooperation, indeed these things may not even occur. It's still fun to bathe in the high energy of egos in montage. Tough times on Planet Earth? Whatever. I still plan on having a good time. I am grateful to have a job that I enjoy. I would hate to lose it.

Sunday's Outlook

2011-11-20T08:13:00.001-08:00

Change is good.

The Sculptor & the Scammer

2011-11-19T04:55:00.001-08:00

John? John Grisham, for those of you with insatiable appetites for detail. At the time the photo was taken the cat was expressing one of those moments of calm demeanor. It might not have been the best idea to venture a hand near to the poised beast. But I did venture a camera. Said beast is asleep in her basket bed at this time. Just as well. She is still pip, five years later.

Two things this morning. First one, the good one, is a show by my friend and long time neighbor Gustavo Victor Goler. The show is at the Millicent Rogers Museum. Please look at his work, over yonder at the museum or right here on his website victorgoler.com. The man is a true wonder of an artist.

Second one, the bad one. That James Arthur Ray fella got sentenced to two years in prison and $57,000 in restitution for the sweat lodge deaths in Sedona, two years ago. Got yer Law of Attraction right here, Mr. Ray! Dude, what were you thinking? Best to avoid people like this. Blessings to the families and friends.

Killer Snails and Other Idiosyncratic Wonders

2011-11-18T06:46:00.001-08:00

The horse conch is the world's largest predatory snail. It is the Official State Shell of the State of Florida. This particular shell somehow ended up in the high desert of Northern New Mexico. Stranger things have happened.

Looking south-southeast I see a layer of smoke over the micro-city of Taos. Some people may not feel comfortable in calling Taos a city, but my doing so arises from my 23 year sojourn in the Florida Keys. I deemed it to be a city spontaneously, seventeen years ago, upon my arrival in this magical place, and since then have occasionally contemplated the veracity of my seemingly prejudicial assessment. The thing that really set me off, the tipping point, was when some local Taoseño told me that this town was “laid back”. My response at the time would likely not fit into today’s vernacular but I am fairly certain that said response was perceived as being somewhat arrogant. ‘Back in the day’ (a vernacular phrase that I thoroughly dislike) we would have said, “Say what?!”.

So, what’s new? The bluebirds are back for the winter. We saw one yesterday, sitting atop the birdhouse attached to the corner post of the front porch. I wondered aloud if I should remove the old nest from the house, then stepped out to look. What I saw made me chuckle because before I could sit down at the iMac and Google the information the little blue birdbrain had given me the answer. He had already begun removing the nest through the hole in the front of the house. When I did google the info for verification I found that bluebirds “do not” remove their old nests, so the human sponsor has to do so. Of course, I went out right away and removed the old nest, but I was mystified by the empirical evidence: the bird, contrary to authority, had begun doing what his species supposedly does not do. Go figure, eh? It gives me hope. Maybe it’s not just us after all!

I’m still pining for snow. The deep nighttime chill does work to some degree but I find that snow and ice is the only truly effective balm for the torpor in my soul, which surely makes me come across as aloof. Not to excuse myself, but the NDE (near death experience) made that little character trait into a critter that is part big ol’ bugaboo and part warm fuzzy faux-delirium. It made life considerably more interesting as well.

This morning’s readings were focused on the rising “Occupy” movements, in this country, and around the world. I find that this open and bold speaking of truth to power is inspirational beyond words. I’m still of the ilk that attributes the massive abuse in this world to patriarchy, and to - come to think of it - matriarchy as well. My years of membership in the Institute of Noetic Sciences (read some of Van Jones’ stuff to get a taste of that delicious perspective of IONS) showed me that transpersonal evolutionary trends are in essence meant by their very nature to address the bullies and power-trippers. The bumper-sticker distillation here would be:

Power with, not power over.

So there ya have it. I really miss IONS at times. But my major stumbling point with them was that they are so seemingly steeped in things that require ample money. I mean: here we stand at the brink of a new world, with abundance, technological wonders, nearly instantaneous communications capability, all at our fingertips, and damned if it don't all still feed back into the same old story. (S)He who controls the narrative need not rely on justice, and may establish a definition of fairness that only slightly resembles what most people call truth. The folks on the street are NOT rolling in cash. They are out of work and seemingly out of luck. But they mean to tell you otherwise. Why not listen?

I've never been fond of other people deciding what is or is not real for me. People whose job description is to manage suddenly become experts at psychology and sociology, not to mention rhetoric-as-truth, and any number of other forms of "because I say so". What's up with that anyway?

"Yo mama" - "whose yer daddy?". Mine are both dead. Do you care to talk or did we just come here to dance? Mind the toes folks. The world is waking up from history. I'll see you there.

Mindfulness: Mischief & Melancholy

2011-11-17T07:34:00.001-08:00

"Oh, they like to get you in a compromising position
They like to get you there and smile in your face
Well, they think they're so cute when they got you in that condition
Well I think it's a total disgrace"

~ John Mellencamp

Have a look at that guy up there. Yes, it's me. We'll get that out of the way, right away. Also, if any of you find a writer's speaking of himself in the third person to be creepy or something just walk away while you have the chance because I'm gonna do that up front.

This fella is less than five months into recovery from a near-fatal bicycle accident. He has healed quickly so the scars from the involuntary facial reconstruction surgery hardly show at all. This is partially due to the world-class medical tech at the Jackson Memorial Trauma Center at the University of Miami. It is also partially due to the preternatural healing that is one known after-effect of a near death experience (NDE). This sorrowful young man found the quick healing to be a bother. People did not believe he was hurt severely. Dazed, having experienced something that irrevocably proved to him that there is more than one world, and that there are veridical active intelligent beings that seem to be divine in nature, the young man often found himself confused and unwilling to speak. The lean of his head to the right shows the as yet unknown spinal injury. This injury would not be detected for 27 years, and then only by serendipity. The injury was addressed and corrected by the hands of a brilliant young brain surgeon, but by that time the young man had already constructed a worldview based on constant pain and existential uncertainty. An ancestral proclivity for depression had been activated. He addressed the depression with the reading of inspirational books, the practice of mindfulness meditation, and the playing of music. When he played, when he performed, he looked like this:

The place of his employment, where the young man performed his music, was rife with drug use and drug trafficking. Not to mention the prodigious consumption of alcohol. He felt angels around him, and they often offered impeccable protection due to his naiveté and unwise trust which he placed in folks because of their spiritual selves, regardless of the harshness of their worldly doings.

Today, I show you this young man and assure you that he is still, in his old age, uncertain of the safeness of humanity and society. The drugs, the meanness, the power trips. I've had four days off from work and face some rather daunting opposition from people who are purportedly only seeking to help. Things haven't changed that much. And, as usual, I am posting this then I will climb into a salt bath. Those in authority will have their way with me. Have no doubt of that, my friends. But I will be clean and fresh, remembering that Rabbi Schmuley suggests that directness of truthful expression is immoral.

Peace out, y'all!

Tuesday's Still, Small Voice

2011-11-15T05:03:00.001-08:00

Tuesday is my usual day off from work, has been for ten years now. I've sandwiched Tuesday this week between two "personal days", which is what they call it if there is no expressed specific purpose given for the day off. I'll use hours from my vacation pay to pay myself for this mini-sojourn in immediate selfhood. I'm getting some long deferred work done at home, going through old family stuff, sifting, culling, but the truth of it is I am throwing almost all of it away. Feels weird. I am getting some rest as well. Some rest. Not a lot. I'm also looking at the past few weeks of these blog posts and am being reminded of how marginalized I have been feeling at work, and of how it only seems to make it more so if I try to change anything at all about my work situation. That being said, the importance of taking a brief respite sounds like a good idea. This could easily turn into an opus on the dark side of micromanagement, but I ain't goin' there today. For all of my gripes about my job I have not forgotten, for more than a few minutes at a time, to keep compassion upfront and center. The workplace politics are so complicated that I might as well be scrutinizing astrophysics and fussing about how unfair existential life really is.

Late last week I had a chat with my buddy, Joe. We are the same age, Joe and I. He's more of a drop-out than I am: a sculptor who lives on a commune of sorts. We discussed the rising tide of hope in this world. We discussed several other matters, all in the course of a few minutes. I was on the clock, squirming because I was afraid some middle management muckity muck might bust me for wasting company time. Never mind that it is common behavior to waste company time. You can't have double standards without having inequity - even I know that! Some peeps gets all the wiggle room they want. Some don't. It's human nature. Such things happen in the left-handed world of power politics, and as far as I can tell they have no actual relationship to the details of any given situation. Sigh.

"Something, calls to me,
The trees are drawing me near, I've got to find out why?
Those gentle voices I hear, explain it all with a sigh".

~ The Moody Blues

The sun is just now cresting the clouds above the ridge over yonder. Golden light wafts into the room through windows chilled deeply by the frigid air outside. I've got errands to do so I have to go into town after all. Then, and only then, can I come back and listen to the "still, small voice" as I again chip away at the task of removing a lot of my past, that has been all wrapped up within items and stuff.

Monday Morning with More or Less Joy

2011-11-14T04:20:00.000-08:00

"Beautiful despair is slouching forward
Toward a past you might regret
All to suck the marrow out
Of every magic moment that you get"

~ Rodney Crowell

Probably not the best idea, I started out my morning reading, at 4 AM, with a quick foray into the latest by Christopher Hitchens, who is toughing out his battle with esophageal cancer. I love Hitchen's writing for his scholarship, but more specifically because his erudition is unpretentious, or it at least comes across to me like that. Really, I simply love to be witness to open expressions of acute intelligence: Hitchens, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes. But in doing so this morning I inadvertently triggered a flashback for myself, back to mom's slow death by way of the same damned form of cancer. You'd think I'd be over that by now, no?

I remember how it felt, five years ago, when I was just coming out of the intense passage, feeling that I had accomplished some great and noble thing, the best thing I had ever done, would ever do, or could ever endure. I helped my mother die. How cool is THAT?!

I've been up since 4 AM, Monday, second day of four days off in a row. Part of me feels as if I will not be going back at all. I'm just so tired of trying to maintain an equanimity worthy of the service I do in return for a living wage. I've been feeling the weight of my own difficulty in dealing with other people, been feeling the depth of my own impaired ability to perform in an expected and accustomed manner. It's enough to set a fella off on an unrepentant spree of ardent psychobabble!

But, instead, I pour a cup of fresh coffee and sit back down. There, that should do it, right? Easy does it. No worries, mate.

"It is well advised that you follow your own bag

In the year of the chewable Ambien tab"

~ The Decembrists

Gray, it comes, the color without which a poet may as well be spouting nonsense. The color seems to be more smug than such a drab color should be. But there it is, calling itself Monday morning, settled down like dust bunnies overflowing in the mountain crevices, in the canyons, and over the valleys. Actually, the look is one of winter, the feeling is one of melancholy. The dust bunnies? Clouds, no mas. The caffeine in my system has done nothing to dispel the tendency toward metaphor, which is bound tightly by codes of what is good to say, and what is bad to say. I'm letting the crazy loose for a little roundabout. Knowing both children who lunge surgically at the drop of a hat and children who woo silently the tides of approval. Knowing the brother who lifts and the sister who's got a right hook that could drop ya on a dime. It's days like this that make me wish I was a cartoonist. Instead, allow me to recommend you listen to these fine young gentlemen. I saw them on Saturday Night Live. They blew me away! This video is of that performance:

High Roads and Byroads

2011-11-11T04:14:00.001-08:00

Let's start with a picture. We always do. This trail has gone cold, covered over with a slight blanket of fresh snow. The proverbial "snow job". Censorship is like that, in the world of metaphor, but sometimes snow is just snow. How Freudian, eh? Actually, the trail you see in the opening photo is at the bottom of the arroyo that runs by our house. The condition of the snow tells us that I will be the first creature to traverse the trail since the snow fell.

But I have no time for a nature walk this morning. The temperature sits steady in the upper teens. I'm content where I am, in the green chair, cat at my side, mom's old blanket, blah, blah, blah. This is yet another workday, another day of pushing limits. My early rising winter habits are gradually slipping into place. This morning it was an hour and fifteen minutes before the alarm, the cranked out jabber-mind makes it hard to get back to sleep these days. But I can still pretend that the sleep disturbance is a part of the natural cycle, which of course it truly is. Regardless of all the disturbing trends in my personal world and in the world at large I can still sincerely smile. It is 5:30 AM. It's happened again. The world goes on. And so it goes.

This being 11/11/11, I could easily fly off on a high-falutin riff about just what such a number means mystically. I'm an old New Agey guy and there's still countless people who are willing to listen to such speculation.

Something odd happened yesterday. I was chatting with a coworker about what I have been reading pertaining to the plight of the James Arthur Ray trial. My little brain is really getting tremendous pleasure feeling all clever and stuff lately by seeing Mr. Ray, with his self-help limit-busting motivational hoo-ha as a kinda sorta proxy archetype of the business world in general. Bear with me here, okay. I'd hate to be writing at this ungodly hour of the morning to no avail. The three people who died in Ray's sweat lodge two years ago were pushing themselves beyond the limits of their ordinariness. It was a more-for-less type of thing, I suppose. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. It's a good day to die. You can choose your aphorisms at will. The bottom line here is the old shaman rascal guru schtick: take 'em to the edge of death and the rest of all this worldly BS looks a lot tamer than it used to. But I cannot see the value in paying good money just to flirt with the edge of physical existence. I got my training for free. And in some odd way I suspect that it is worth more because I didn't have to fork out a downpayment.

So, anyway, I was chatting with my coworker about the Ray trial, and a couple came up to the resister. I was bagging groceries and the woman customer asked me what we were talking about. I told the couple about Ray and the deaths at Sedona and the trial. Simple corporate supermarket chatter. As they were heading out into the cold night air the man stopped and said, "Ya know, I lived in Sedona for 32 years and ran sweat lodges for 25 of those years and in all of that time no one ever died and I never charged a cent for my services". His wife chimed in, "We left Sedona for that very reason. It became all about money. So we moved here to Taos". After they left my coworker and I both got the gooseflesh chills, which lingered as we admitted to having both just experienced a cosmic moment of ineffable truth.

I don't know about my coworker, but what gave me the chills there was the woman saying that they came to Taos because Sedona became "all about money". See, that's what I've been afraid of lately: that Taos is becoming that way as well. I mean, what if the sweat of a sweat lodge, in the grand scheme of things, is no different from the sweat of my brow because my employer has to tighten the ship and squeeze the crew just to maintain the accustomed bottom line.

James Arthur Ray may be a carnival barker of sorts, but I can't help but wonder if those who could not stand the heat were really so strong after all. They could have just walked away, no? I think sometimes we get our personal cost/benefit ratios all catawampus. Sometimes the guy cheering us on has other things on his mind.

Pecking Order Perspective

2011-11-10T09:41:00.001-08:00

Tis the nature of the pecking order,
I suppose,
regardless of the species:
those in the lowlier position always
end up with
the same view

Peace out, y'all!

The Bold and the Brilliant

2011-11-09T07:57:00.000-08:00

Some people never learn. I am one of them. At time. Only at times.

Listen to this, then c'm'on back to read this post.

The "broken mind" I wrote about last week is on the mend. At least I think so. The Central Nervous System is running on low+ grade alert, ready to be upped a notch at any given moment, but the mind is more rightfully aligned, with the heart, with the soul, and with an Indie rock band from Oregon. I can feel it.

I had to get my teeth cleaned yesterday morning. The only reason I did not fall asleep in the dentist chair was because the woman was cleaning my teeth: rather an invasive procedure. I find going to the dentist to be a relaxing affair. There is something purely soulful about sitting back and letting someone actively take care of you, and that someone is asking nothing in return - no favors, no paybacks, no license to alter the mold at whim. And now, if I should lose my cool and actually bite someone I will likely not cause an infection.

After the oral hygienist I stopped by corporate supermarket for some cat food and some beer (Sam Adams Winter Lager), stopped by the other corporate supermarket (where I work) for some reverse-osmosis water and some raw meat, and then came on home to get the heck out of civilization and out into the wilderness. I looked like this when I headed out into the tail-end of the little snow storm.

An ongoing theme in my writing is the contrasts between our encultured selves and our instinctual natural selves. As my formal education is uncertified you will just have to take my word for it. The only thing I can actually prove is how the effects of mainstream enculturation, in these times of corporate power and codependency-as-Oneness, can take a fella to the brink. Maybe beyond, or maybe slipped back into the fold, but being on the brink is where us worker bees are most useful. Just look at me. I'm a wreck. That is until I get back and align with my heart, at which point I am still likely a wreck from the POV of the business world but I am fully engaged in my creaturehood, my mammalian nature, and my purported nodal connection with the spiritual world, so I may still be of some use to my fellow humans, regardless of the needs and rights and suppositions of my corporate sponsors.

For those of you who follow my friggin' dramas I have to say that I am about up to hear (sic) with it all. Iffin you stand there and downplay my concerns as "dramas", as if your own concerns are of a more refined and evolutionary nature, then we have nothing to talk about. Your drama seems to be being above all the drama, no? My drama is the problem whereas yours is the solution. Yeah, right! Dude? Really? Really?

Only one question (I'm lying for rhetorical effect) haunts my mind this morning. If I were to articulate it, which I am not inclined to do at this point and place in time, it would likely come across as a - oh, I don't know. What I am getting at here is that, in the name of business, efficiency is being wielded as rhetorical tool with no actuality in practice besides maintenance of a profit margin. There! I said it. Efficiency is not - I repeat: IS NOT - squeezing loyal people until they hurt, until they act out, until they break, and then when they stand at the edge of breaking you go on to pressure them even further. That is the way of the bully.

Attributing systemic illness to an individual is stupid. It's no smarter than making policy decisions based on the gossip of favored workers while busting those who are on the receiving end of the gossip for gossiping in return. The stupidity is not that it will hurt the bottom line. That takes long enough that it can ultimately be blamed on other unrelated factors. The stupidity is that this classy bully pulpit rots one from within. It's not likely to stop once it starts. Not right away.

Anyway, I had a nice walk in the snow yesterday, but I got out there after it had already begun to melt . . . . . . .

Time, Eternity, and a Dancing Critter

2011-11-07T04:48:00.000-08:00

Snow in the forecast and I am up, having awakened at 3 AM. I can easily blame it on the cat. She's only now, an hour later, quieting down. And me? After one hour awake I finally decided to make the coffee and make the best of it, which somehow brought me to some sort of recapitulation of the past two years. Having such a deep interest in the mysteries of healing I should not be surprised. And, as it turns out, I just lied about the cat: she's still meowing about something. It is my way to assume that it is something wrong. But I don't reckon that annoyance at an animal's unwelcome and repeated expression really rates as 'wrong'. The signal that nails down wrongness is sometimes not much more than a funny hat worn by illness. That's when you know something is wrong.

Two years ago I had an unusual attack of uvulitis, which is to say that the little thing that hangs in the back of my throat swelled up and acquired a translucent red color that shouted silently of disease. It hurt like hell. I went in to the early morning walk-in clinic. This was back before they started calling it Urgent Care. The young woman who was on duty that morning, a PA-C named Marty, did all the right things yet also showed that tone of perplexity that I like to see in a doctor. She prescribed a hefty antibiotic. I dropped off the prescription - this was back before the medical computer network came to town - and decided to kill the time by going to browse at WalMart, where I ended up buying some flannel pajamas. This was really odd because I had not worn actual pajamas in perhaps as long as thirty years. Something about the night before, I couldn't figure it out, but the night before I had found myself standing stock still and feeling suddenly void of cause at our bedside. Carol had already slipped into the ambience of sleep. And there I stood in the darkness, gawking openly at the sudden vacancy of my mind. Something was wrong, which led me to the clinic, to the PA-C, then on to WalMart to buy some pajamas.

Dear Uncle Henry Thoreau wrote: "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity". And - I know, I know - WalMart is not considered politically correct by many folks. But there I was in the big impersonal store and I walked out of the door with a pair of pajamas. Dear friends, I testify: the healing had begun!

It was shortly thereafter that I encountered the dancing coyote while returning home from a visit to the lab at Holy Cross for some early morning blood work. This is not something that you see every day. It was not a metaphor, this coyote, and his antics were more like dancing than anything else I had ever seen any animal do in the wild. There I was, car window rolled down, car braked to a full stop, and some goofy canid critter hopping back and forth while keeping his eyes locked tight with mine. It didn't make sense. But somehow this odd encounter further opened a door that changed my world from one of pain, anguish, and contraction, to a world of expansion, hope, and healing.

I've since had two surgeries. Both surgeries addressed issues that stemmed directly from the bicycle accident back in 1984 when I had the full-blown NDE, near death experience. First they fixed my nose, restoring the balance of ventilation, whereas the right side of my head had been stagnant I could now breath freely. That set all sorts of changes into motion. Long story short, it led to the spinal fusion that restored stability to a neck that had been rickety-at-best for 27 years. Pain that I had learned to accept as normal was suddenly gone. Now I've got a pricey little chunk of titanium in my neck and a song in my heart.

Which brings us back here. Rosie the cat finally reconciled her restlessness to some degree and she now lays quietly in the wicker basket bed, up and to my right, just on top of the bookshelf. My second cup of French roast sits here at my side. I've just raised the shades on the front window, though it is still dark out there. I've got a strong hankerin' for snow. Should it start I want to know, as soon as possible. Ever since the spinal surgery I've gotten even more pleasure out of walking barefoot in the snow than I used to.

I sometimes wonder about what happened to me back then, when momentum nearly had my head yanked right off it's accustomed position. I wrote a whole danged book trying to figure that out. In reviewing my book, Theater of Clouds, Dr. Penny Sartori described how I have yet to fully integrate the NDE, all trauma and travail, into my life. Read her review: here.

The sky lightens to the east, pale blue-gray in the canyon yonder on the Taos Pueblo land. Another sip of coffee. Wood pellet stove sings in its usual droning way. Time to step back out of the writer's mode and start to shake the sleepiness from this body and mind. I've been awake for 2.5 hours and have nothing to show for it except for this blog post. But this blog post is fodder for the next book, so I wasn't just killing time. Goddess knows I'd rather be able to quit my day job and write full time but that ain't happening' in this lifetime. So, in the meantime, here's a prototype book cover, offered as a tease. Thanks for readin' me.

No Friggin' Time

2011-11-05T05:54:00.000-07:00

I simply DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS! In fact it is so disturbing that I simply DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS that I actually used the 'caps lock' twice in one blog post, whereas I rarely use it AT ALL! Make that three times, k?

Can you imagine having time, much less taking time, for simply standing around in the garden, sniffing around rocks for bugs, and stuff? Can you conceive of actually ripping your eyes away from texting on your cell phone, or from scanning for buzzwords and vernacular from people in your actual vicinity, to just stand there looking around, at the sky, the clouds, that scruffy sparrow in the brush, or even just letting your gaze go without cerebral focus for a spell?

Listen, I gotta hit the showers and then go not only entertain countless hyped up people I have to also sell them stuff, take their money, and pass that money along to the folks who sponsor my remunerative activities in this little laid-back mountain town.

LAID BACK?! NOT EVEN CLOSE!!

Make that four times with the caps lock.

Did you look at the serene smile on the face of that young and healthy predator in the above photo? Look again. We'll talk later, k? Text me and we'll do lunch.

Coyote and the Magic Circle

2011-11-02T08:08:00.000-07:00

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” ~ Mark Twain

She sat on the window sill, looking out onto the gentrified area of the desert floor that surrounds the house, separating it from the wilderness. Usually she might chatter like the predator that she is, watching juncos or wrens, or sit at full attention when the scaled quail emerge from the knee-high sage forest. The songbirds could still be prey if my cat was so inclined, yet the quail have no patience for felis domesticus: they will chase the big cat away. But this time it was not noticeable that Rosie the cat was watching anything in particular.

Carol had just gotten home from work so she had gone to the cat to say hello and to give a pat. It was not the cat that got her attention. A beautiful young coyote pup was out fiddling about in the Faerie Garden. Carol said, "Baby coyote!". So I ran to locate my camera. Found it as well. Pretty child, no?

At this point you may be wondering what the heck is a Faerie Garden and why do I have one. Faerie are the supposedly mythical critters that live at the far edges of what is materially possible, more creatures of probability than of actuality. The more New Age inclined among us might refer to them as devic spirits. Don't make me get all scholarly on ya, okay? Faerie are usually ghettoed out into realms of magic, or to realms of the sinister. The explanation doesn't really fit here so let me just say that I have known Faerie in actuality. I've seen them, and I have transcended the need for belief, yay or nay. But the Faerie Garden?

It's a stone circle I constructed, alluding to ancient monuments such as Stonehenge. Just in case there was any truth to such things as geomancy I also aligned the circle and its small standing stones with the magnetic field of the planet. For you more metaphysically inclined, there is a spot down in the arroyo that runs alongside our house where two ley lines cross. There grows the Chinese elm tree, about five meters from the nodal point of the crossing lines. The Faerie Garden is essentially a monument built to honor the lost physics of the world, the forces that have been relegated to apocryphal status by some of them pedantic folks that ain't learned beyond the confines of their own dogma. Boy howdy, it don't take me and my blog to make those forces real. Said forces could give a rat's sass about who believes in them or not.

Now I've gone off track. I've become tangentially distracted by trying to qualify my prose. Rightfully, that pisses me off when I do that!

The Faerie Garden is a man-made (that's me, folks) device that serves as a gateway, not only between the cultivated structures of our homestead on the edge of the wilderness prairie and the wildness beyond, but also between the mundane and the magical realms of the world we know.

So, that being said, it was truly wondrous to see that coyote pup standing inside of the circle. See, he could have come from anywhere! Coyotes are critters of legend as well as critters of the material world. Magic and mundane, get it? I'm just sayin'.

Listen y'all, I built me a magic circle and a magical critter appeared in that circle. I just happened to get to my camera before he vanished once again.

Now, as is so often the case, I will post this blog then go sit in a hot bath. Gray wintery skies are slowly descending toward the valley floor. It may snow before day's end. Peace out, y'all!

A Story About Mom

2011-10-31T08:25:00.000-07:00

My mother died on November 5, 2006. The above photo was taken on October 26th of that same year, nine days before her passing, up at the scenic overlook on U.S. Hill where NM 518 heads from Taos up to Penasco. I had roused her from her hospice bed with the promise that the spirits in the high mountains would help her to find peace with her fast approaching death. We'd been holed up together in the living room of a small adobe house in Talpa for 30 days at that point. The ordeal had been going on since Memorial Day, but as the sixth month of my care giving arrived mom asked that she not be left alone any longer, so I called into work to tell them that I would not be coming back until my mother was dead.

In retrospect I wish that I had given in to temptation and allowed myself alcohol in my diet, but I did it all sober, mostly because that mysterious force that some would call my spirit guides suggested that I do it that way. Admittedly, I had a drop of morphine once in a while, slipping it under my tongue while delivering five drops into mom's gastro-enteric feeding tube, which by that time was oozing blood at the place where it penetrated her abdominal wall. The spirit guides seemed to be alright with that. I am reminded of John West, who wrote a book about helping both of his parents self-euthenize: The Last Goodnights, where he wrote, "if that doesn’t justify throwing back an extra glass or three of Jameson’s on the rocks, then I don’t know what does". Bless you, John. GREAT book, man!

The death of the Mother is no small thing. Helping it to happen doesn't even qualify as big. There is no big or small at that point, where timelessness commandeers rationality, subjecting it to the realm of mere necessity. Perhaps my mind was slipping, or cracking, but I think it was being eased open by some sort of conceptual entrainment. It hurt like hell, I assure you, but what was revealed was magical.

I am writing this today because today is Samhain (sow-en), which is so drolly called Halloween in our modern American culture. But Samhain is an ancient celebration of the Ancestors. Today, I honor my mother, especially because of something that happened on Samhain of 2006, only days before her death.

I spent a lot of time on the internet in those final days. A friend up in Massachusetts was a major supportive figure. She also happened to practice Wicca, which celebrates the sabbat of Samhain with a ritual circle. I asked my friend to please include my mother and myself in that ritual, sending us energy to endure the excruciating passage that was upon us both. Just the day before, upon the hospice nurse's recommendation, we had ceased feeding mom and had upped the dosage of her pain meds to sedate her. This was in response to the emergence of what the medical community calls "terminal agitation". Mom had me up all night the night before because she kept falling down every time she clambered out of the hospital bed and tried to head toward the kitchen. "I have to go cook the fish!", she said.

Terminal agitation is a very strange thing to behold, but as I told a friend in confidence, it seemed to me that the spirits had come to accompany her across the veil into the other world, and something in the palliative medical treatment was keeping them from taking her across. The feeling of otherworldly spirits was palpable by that time. I was not so much creeped out, rather I was beginning to admit that I was impatient for the dying process to culminate.

So, on Samhain just after sunset, I sat at the computer while mom lay in her bed, right next to me, with only scant signs of life. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, and used the internet pages more as a place to plunge my focus into oblivion than as a vehicle to learn or communicate. The night outside was still, and cold. The television was off, and Rosie the cat was nowhere to be seen. She was never comfortable with the dying woman in her proximity, so she stayed away from mom.

All of a sudden a fierce gust of wind arose outside. It's force slammed the front door twice, as if a huge fist was pounding on the locked door. Simultaneously the lights in the house flared with a power surge, and the brightness remained rather than diminishing after a few seconds. Also, at the same time, Rosie the cat came out of hiding and leapt up onto the little wooden footstool at mom's bedside. There she sat bolt upright and craned her neck to gaze unabashedly at the dying woman. The whole confluence of events happened within the course of maybe two seconds, no more. My amazement was off the charts. I immediately wrote and sent an email to my Wiccan friend and described to her what had happened, and the precise time of the event.

She wrote back later. It was the precise time, 2000 miles away, that the Wiccan circle was releasing the Cone of Power.

Today I find myself missing mom sorely. She has been away from this corporeal world for five years now. This morning I write about her and request that she walk with me today as I go through the difficult currents of the marketplace. Blessed Be.

Thoughts from a Broken Mind

2011-10-30T09:29:00.000-07:00

"Let the yoke fall from our shoulders
Don't carry it all, don't carry it all
We are all our hands and holders
Beneath this bold and brilliant sun"

~ The Decembrists

Once in a long while it seems like staying in bed would've been the wisest course of action. Rosie the cat knows it. She is often in her basket bed atop my desk side bookcase throughout the day. Yesterday turned out to be one of those days, for me. By the end of my work shift I was dazed, perhaps to clinical levels, and although still able to function in a perfunctory manner, safe driving or what have you, I found the utterances and/or clear statements of other folks to be confusing, even sinister in some respects. It was a paranoid state of mind, without a doubt, and I prudently reminded myself that paranoia can be seen as pattern recognition on Red Bull and Everclear.

Here sits the writer in his usual chair, coffee at his left hand, cat in her bed to the right, and wondering what in the dickens happened to me yesterday. You may find this to be somewhat of a confessional, and I am alright with that. Why not?

One characteristic of the mental state I got into last night was that in venting my frustrations and fears I found myself being uncharacteristically honest and direct. Boy howdy, I've been warned about that before at work! Ya'd think a guy would learn. Folks don't generally cotton to unadorned truth in observation. Why would they? Political correctness, like some Benjamin Spock clone run amok, protects people from having to be confronted with the consequences of their actions and attitudes. Shooting the messenger is, these day, more appropriate than wasting time actually analyzing a situation. I know of only two coworkers who read this blog, so I feel safe enough to put some of my frustrations out there to be heard, not for manipulative value as that backfires and ends up with a trip to the high tower where the big man sits and proclaims. Manipulation is strictly reserved for a chosen few. Period! Same goes for gossip.

It may be that I am simply old and cranky. Goddess knows I've earned my curmudgeon merit badge. But this new millennium has enshrined giddy childish behavior while actively marginalizing those who cannot or will not go there, ostracizing thems who find that childishness is not at all the same thing as behaving in a childlike manner.

This post could easily turn into a scholarly exercise replete with footnotes and hyperlinks, but I ain't in the mood for that, and my central nervous system took a beating of major proportions yesterday. Partially it was from noise levels that if originating from actual children would have met the kibosh in short time. My happy coworkers get so loud in their perpetual banter and chatter that I often have to shout at my customer to be heard over the din. And when customers complain about the childish behavior I recommend they go to high management with their concerns. But they never do that. Never. So when I go to high management and relate the concerns I get asked why no customers ever complain to the higher ups, and I must simply state the truth: "I don't know. I guess they don't care what I think".

There, that's enough for now. I'll be curious if this comes back to me at work. This is something I do in my private time, and the tone here is most definitely meant to be one of finding an equitable solution to a problem that has turned me into a living metaphor for all my empathic sensitivities: the proverbial canary in a coal mine. I am loyal to the company, even more so to the clientele, yet I am edging closer to cracking psychologically from voluntarily enduring bullshit of tremendous power, and said BS is nearly ubiquitous as well. What's that about 'survival of the fittest'? Maybe I should just pitch a fit and get it over with.

Sometimes I feel I am grazing alone.

The Silence of Constraint

2011-10-29T05:55:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a simple phrase catches my attention, stands like a sentinel at the gates of a new world, burgeoning with implications yet not yet quite ready to burst forth in spreading the seeds of change. I like to think of it as an evolutionary force. Heck, I like to think of almost anything as an evolutionary force, if I can get away with it. And bear in mind that I am well aware of how convolutedly pretzeled this post is becoming, but I am resolved to let it run on as it will, k? So, chill. Here's the thing . . . . . . .

It is 6:38 AM and I must be at work by 8 AM, where the retail cashier in my toolbox will spring forth like a jack-in-the-box. I am sitting cross-legged in my cozy little forest green velour easy chair. Mom's old blanket is wrapped around my shoulders. The pellet stove rattles and hums over yonder. And I simply must get on into the shower in a timely manner. Yet here I sit writing a friggin' blog post, which can be construed as a self-congradulatory activity, whereas Facebook is seen, for some strange reason, as a "social" function. It is such thoughts that make me tend to want to hurry into the shower rather than to finish my train of thought, which at this time of the morning is more like a an 80 pound puppy on Ritilan than a bullet train.

The Silence of Constraint

I just like the sound of that. It brings to mind how suppressed we can come to feel in the thick of conventional social situations. Especially today when the rise of corporately induced necessity commodifies us even as it welcomes us into the family. Then said corporate entity will wag a giant finger iffin' ya don't tow the "happy happy joy joy" line with a velcro smile on your hardened face. Those of us who came out of the 60's with our self-awareness in tact will know how it feels. How it feels to withhold commentary when commentary is so sorely needed, simply withhold it so that no one comes out swinging a big bat at every single imagined slight.

This is freedom, my friends. This is freedom. Just cause ya know its right doesn't mean ya gots ta say it. So, chill, k?

A Walk in the Snow at Dawn

2011-10-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

"In the dawning of the day
Nightime's panic swept away"

~ Procol Harum, from "Something Magic"

The perfect storm, not fierce overall, but the snow that came satisfied. I had my alarm set for just short of 6AM and very nearly blew it off, wanting to go back to sleep. But I got up, put the coffee on, and sat down at the computer to read. At 6:45 AM I got dressed for the weather, snow boots, fleece hoodie, felt-lined pants, and Indiana Jones hat, then headed out into the snow. Call it a function of a 57 year old man who recently realized that there is still an awful lot to experience out there in the wild world. The responsibilities and obligations of modern life can be so all-consuming, greedy for our time and energy, and unrepentant when the stress of the rat race smacks us two steps this side of useless.

My morning reading came from the world of brain and mind science: "The Importance of Mind-Wandering". Certainly it set the tone for my walk. My image of our minds under the suppressive influence of daily life is that of a raisin which is contracted as a matter of attrition rather than as a result of drying in the sun. Neural pathways so well-traveled that they become freeways which eventually end up as toll roads. When you think about it a tad you may realize that the man-made world arises from the primal undercurrents but our brains are designed for either road: primal or edificial.

Another consideration in my walking out in weather that most folks would call nasty or gloomy is that five years ago I resolved to learn the neighborhood from the wild perspective. I began the endeavor to gain communion with the coyotes, which rule the food chain out here on the mesa north of Taos, New Mexico. I reckon that the term for it is 'stalking' and I can live with the connotations of that designation. But there is something deeply soulful about going out into a storm, all cold and biting, and I am pretty sure that this soulfulness emerges from the place of animal instincts, which when observed through a lens of meta-awareness becomes a feeling force of incomparable virtue, of nonpareil value. The Goddess is out there, with her ever-offered embrace, and the heart beats as purely as can be if the encumbrances of the edificial world of men can be repealed, if only for a time. Of course there are spirits out there as well, but we shan't go into that this morning, rather I will head for a fragrant bath.

Walking in the storm relieves the social conditioning that leaves one looking like this:

. . . and this . . .

Storm Front, Narcissism, and Joy

2011-10-26T07:59:00.000-07:00

"May the road rise up to meet you"

"I was walking alone through the lofty San Juans
With a heart full of light and a head full of songs
I was thinking of time and how much it will cost
To recapture the souls that we surely have lost"

~ Dan Fogelberg, from "The Wild Places"

The turning point has come at last. Arctic air mass meets Pacific moisture: details at eleven.

By all accounts, by eleven tonight it should be snowing. As the temperature plunges it will cross the line where there will be no overnight lows above freezing for the next ten days, at least. The song this brings to my heart harkens back to my Celtic heritage, back to the British Isles, then brings me right back here, to the mesa north of town. Listen:

This morning's reading took me onto the road less traveled. It's so easy to go to the political news just as it is nearly impossible to steer clear of pop culture. Of course, when the skies drop down to stroke the mountains with their cloud veils my thoughts run to the soul. When moisture prevails in the air is where the world of spirit intermingles indeterminately with the material world, as was so elegantly explained by Frank MaEowen in The Mist-Filled Path. It is perhaps my favorite place of all.

With my little Mac keyboard here upon a beautiful cherry wood lap desk, and a sky full of low-rider clouds, I can feel the ancestors gathering near to see what young Kenneth will write about today. His favorite weather emerges at the avant garde of a storm front. His favorite toys are his multimedia lab that exists within the thin shell of Steve Jobs' mini-miracle iMac. Little Kenneth is in his element today. Earlier this morning, before the sun crested the high ridge, he read an interview about narcissism and self-esteem, on EnlightenNext.org.

Lest I go too far I will now wrestle the flow of this blog post back into 1st person present. The interview, by Joel Pitney with Jean M. Twenge, resonated deeply with me. I am so often baffled by overt expressions of self-esteem. When they come from teenagers I can laugh and take it for what it is worth: growth, plain and simple. But something sinister creeps in slowly when that adolescent self-esteem sets up camp, digging in its heels for the long haul. My cynical side likes to say, "No one ever told me that it would never go beyond middle school (which we ancient ones might call Junior High School)". I mean, like, ya know, if everybody gets a trophy for just being here then no one really has to apply themselves, to accomplish something, to better themselves, or even to look any further than the back of their own eyelids!

I don't know about you, but I am up for a bath soak. Warm the bones, soothe the mind, exfoliate the skin, and maybe even settle in to that place where self is foremost yet peaceful.

Alive in a Living World

2011-10-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

"But it's all right now, I learned my lesson well.
You see, ya can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself" ~ Rick Nelson

Looking into the glare of the early morning sun I see it as a metaphor, glistening with the sweet chill of first snow. The snow was fat, heavy with water and not at all dry, as if water could be reticent in approaching crystalline perfection. Two weeks later, as I review the photos taken that morning, I remember the joy of being out in the sage wilderness, held tight by the intimate embrace of moisture and aroma. Out looking for tracks in the mud and snow, to see what animals have been out, imagining what they might be doing, and keeping an eye out for the wily coyotes.

This morning it is dry. They say that snow may come on Wednesday. I'd like that. Don't have to work until noon so I will have plenty of time to go out for a morning walk. But today I sit in my chair, blanket wrapped around my shoulders, wood pellet stove burning, and the waning crescent moon rides a pale blue-gray sky to the east. I chose the opening photo for this post because it shows the crossroads, where the community road of the humans crosses the old trail that I call The Animal Highway. So . . . before going too much further I remember reading David Foster Wallace and his literary grimace as he noted that he found some uncertainty in writing about things that he found interesting, but might not be at all interesting to other folks. That is one of the lovely things about a blog: you can write what you want.

The coyotes use the crossroads as a meeting place and message board. One night I saw one of them critters on the crossroads with his snout poked high into the glimmering stars as he let his soul run free of his body, the resultant song cast into the darkness of a moon-free night. I called out to him and he hesitated only briefly before resuming the deep beauty of his soulful howl. That scene touched my heart so deeply and thoroughly because it harkened back to a song by CPR, the band formed by David Crosby and his once long lost son, James Raymond. Listen, then read on, okay?

Back when I still had my cervical collar on I took Mr. Sky the rat terrier for a walk one morning, and he insisted we stop and closely examine the crossroads. I call that place a message board because as the coyotes pass by they will urinate or defecate. Skyper got all excited, and we stood there and peed on the coyote scat together. It was a bonding thing, sure, but it was also a message to the yotees: "we too are here!".

It's about being alive in a living world. As a human I reckon that it isn't likely that I can lose the human perspective. What I get from communing with Skyper, or Rosie the cat, is a harmonic stepping stone that gives me passage into the deeper realms of existence, where it becomes cottontails, or weasels, or coyotes. By peeing together upon the scat of a wild animal Sky and I reaffirm that we are part of the grand scheme of things. I suspect that Skyper has it built in and openly accessible whereas I have had to pay dearly to regain something that is innate, however shrouded in BS and poppycock it may be. Many people pay dearly as well, monetarily, which is why the plight of James Arthur Ray and his sweat lodges intrigues me so. For I paid in a different way, taking myself unwillingly to the brink of death, perhaps even a tad over the brink. I'm not proud of it and it ain't no macho thing to convince you of my prowess.

Steve Jobs brought it to light by dying. I hear it in the spoken words of Dr. Penny Sartori who's sweet and simple descriptions don't quite reach professorial levels. Which is a good thing.

Any nitwit can go about life in a state of constant anxiety - the bills, the family, the love life, "what will the neighbors think?". I'm one of those nitwits and I like to remind myself of that on a regular basis. But the truth of it is: I could die at any moment. Staring into the eyes of a coyote, or a mountain lion, grants entry into the place where "it is what it is" is about as profound as your left big toenail. Serves a purpose, sure, but it is also a perspective that is little more than safe temporary harbor when it viewed in the grand scheme of things. Which is why me an' ma dawg likes ta pee on coyote poop together. It is an affirmation of life!

That's Elton John on piano!

Report from Home

2011-10-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

Cafe Bustello to my left, within reach, hot and bitter in a double-walled stainless steel mug. It harkens back to calmer times, in the concrete cottage on Windley Key, where strong Cuban coffee was just the right thing to accompany the hard copy Miami Herald on a pristine tropical morning. With only one sojourn of fourteen months in Abbie Hoffman's old hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, I'd been in the Florida Keys for all of my adult life, which I measure from my point of return after being whisked away to Seattle, kidnapped by hippies is what my parents called it. They had a point, but I can't be so harsh after all these years.

I'm three days out of the gate from my 57th birthday. Sitting here with a head and chest cold I feel old of body. The mind is a delightfully different phenomenon altogether. These are remarkable times. Muammar Gaddafi, the wily dictator that has oppressed and abused Libya ever since my voice was still cracking with hormone rushes, has just died in battle. Alas, the current events fall away like dead skin flakes as I slip into time passages.

"The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." ~ Albert Einstein

My walks to Wydown Junior High School took me all along a tree-canopied boulevard. Closer to home, the far side of the boulevard was lush with wealth, mansions, and a level of material being that was merely the stuff of legends. Farther along the road these posh estates ended and the campus of Washington University took over. Just beyond that was Forest Park, including the St. Louis Zoo, the Art Museum, and the Planetarium.

Those were remarkable times. John Kennedy had been murdered while I was nursing a swollen jammed finger from playing kickball and a young infatuation with Sally Husch. That was in the third grade. His brother Bobby was murdered during the time I walked the boulevard each day to school. Martin Luther King as well. Daily body counts from the Viet Nam War. It's all to big to get my head around.

Nothing has changed, as far as that goes. The human world is as bugfuck as it has ever been. Maybe even more so. Who can say? But my default position in life is that concrete cottage on Windley Key, when reading the Herald in the morning gave way to long aimless bicycle rides through paradise, simply because there was nothing else I wanted to do.

I'm glad that one supermarket here in Taos, New Mexico sells Cafe Bustello. It's not nostalgia, rather time travel. That truly timeless place where the writer abides, frequently dazzled by the profundity of life, humbled to silence by its richness of complexity, and yet fatigued from participation. That timeless place is here today as well, on the mesa north of town, along the Animal Highway, where Autumn is locked in a battle of predetermined outcome with the Chamber of Commerce and a whole cadre of Sunshine Gurus. Three days ago, on my birthday, a cold front swept down, clinging to the west slopes of the Sangre de Cristo range, swirling on a level that had my heart aflutter in a very, very good way. I was in the front yard removing goats head stickers from the adobe clay soil when the tiny weather cell came through on the threshold of the cold front. It was only noon, but I went inside, got a cold Santa Fe Nut Brown Ale from the fridge and sat down on the turquoise love-seat rocker on the front porch, bathed in dusty 50 knot winds, to watch nature in all her power and glory.

Such is reverence. It's a magical world and iffin ya don't sit down and pay it homage at times, raise a glass and give it a heartfelt "Salut!", you loose the magic by default. It doesn't care if you are watching any more than it cares if you exist at all. Back in that concrete cottage my magical observations were more on the cosmic scale, consciousness evolution and all that heady stuff. These days it's more fine-tuned. How to continue to cultivate communion with the eco 'hood where Coyote and Redhawk rule the pyramid, or wondering iffin that was a sending from a local bruja the other night, when I awoke to find a spectral figure at my feet, looming over me while making a striking motion with its ghosty right arm.

No, it was not a dream. None of this life is, as far as I can tell, but, ya know, at times it sure does seem like it is a dream. Now: I've got a headache and I need a bath. How existential can ya get anyway?!

Peace out, y'all! There! That's better.

A Blessing

2011-10-19T07:20:00.000-07:00

The second cold front of the season blew through on Monday. I was out in the front yard cleaning goat heads, prickly tumbleweeds, from the soil to prep it for the second snowfall (First snowfall pictured above). That is my way: I like to sculpt the yard so that when the snow accumulates it shows to be the work of art that it is. The wind, a cold high speed force, chased me indoors. Then this morning a dip below freezing proffered yet another reminder of the coming season. I've been so weary of late from navigating the choppy waters of social politics, primate politics, and ego games - forces that rankle me at best. So the advent of weather that demands attention and mindfulness is a blessing of the highest degree. A blessing is a blessing, eh?

This is the season of the dying of the Sun god. He always comes back, continuity prohibits otherwise.

To the Moon, Alice!

2011-10-18T08:14:00.000-07:00

Ready . . . set . . fly! Gary Wright, the original keyboard player for Spooky Tooth, sings on Sirius Satellite Radio, channel 32 "The Bridge". The song: "Dreamweaver". I opened the front blinds now that the sun has crested the mountains and climbed higher in the morning sky. Poured another cup of strong black coffee, the sat down with my cherry wood lap desk, which hosts the wireless keyboard and mouse. A short while ago I sat in this chair and gazed out over the window box of basil plants, down toward the high peak of Jicarilla in the Pecos Wilderness, while my iMac read an article from James Randi's website to me. Randi, of course, is the famous skeptic, a stage magician who aspires to debunk all manner of fraud-based spiritual and paranormal claims.

The article by Reed Esau was about attending a James Arthur Ray seminar shortly after three people died at one of Ray's sweat lodge ceremonies. Here's the thing: I find that I am grateful that I was already deeply steeped in New Age mumbo jumbo when I was young. I could have hurt myself criticizing the movement. I was in search of magic back then, yet now I am more amazed by the technology that I have before me, which seems quite magical to me. And in my heart I know that James Ray had a seed of deep truth all swaddled up in BS and marketing savvy. It's not that the magic I sought was all a matter of horsefeathers and poppycock. On the contrary: I found it and it is real.

These days, for me, it comes down to the difference between knowledge and hope. I used to hope it was true, while now knowing the truth I can move on to other novel forces. Back in the day, when I was chasing rainbows and faerie folk, the venerable Steve Jobs was preparing to unleash a form of novel magic on the unsuspecting world. The product of Steve's magic sits before me here and now: an iMac. This machine, through it's magic/technology, allows me to express some of what I have learned in my own search for the numinous and ethereal wonders of grand reputation. Dig this: when I said that my computer read the article to me, I mean that literally! I don't know about about you, but boy howdy! - I find that to be friggin' amazing!

Don't get me wrong, I am still amazed when, say, some ominous potential event is foreshadowed for me by the appearance of three magpies at the back door of my workplace. Messengers such as these corvae tricksters are legion throughout recorded history. Where you might see three annoying birds I saw an omen that indicated that there was cause for me to be at the height of vigilance because danger was afoot in the world, and it was fixin' to grab on to me. Nor were they wrong, them birds. My previous blog post addressed only one portion of the adventure that was introduced to me through prescience and magpies.

All sounds so mysterious, eh? I'm saddled by time constraints here so I can't slather you with wondrous glamours all borne on the wings of my words, all that BS and poppycock that might convince you to suspend your critical faculties and follow me down the yellow brick road to the land of sassafras, milk, and honey, all the while plying me fair wages for introducing you to yer own danged imagination, which in concord with your heart and soul could lead you to plug in to the most powerful friggin' form of magic you could ever possibly ask for: life, Earth, and eyes that are willing to see. It could be a bluebird of happiness or a messenger of pending doom, like my buddy, Magpie. When life takes a swing at you wouldn't it be nice if you had some way to see it coming? Whereas you might rely on Aikido I am content with the allies Nature gave me. Grateful, I am.

What Color is Your Bluebird?

2011-10-16T07:27:00.000-07:00

"You just moved your finger. Doesn't that make you happy?"

~ Fezzik the Giant

Does winter make you happy? I must admit, I found the first snow of the new season to be thrilling, and I felt sad when it was gone. That it was followed by a week of perhaps the most beautiful days of the year does not quell the longing for cold crystalline moisture that seems to drive my soul at this time of the year. Not at all.

After a week of gut-wrenching emotion-sucking bovine feces, which manifested suddenly and unexpectedly when I found myself having to stand tall, acting and speaking from personal integrity, my Sunday morning reading began in "the high country of the mind". The quote is from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty...”

In "I Was an Underaged Semiotician" Steven Johnson reminded me that I dropped out of college after only one month, never to return. He also reminded me that Umberto Eco's amazing novel Foucault's Pendulum was a formative influence in the way I view the world. To this day I feel, and believe, that the way we use language shapes the way things turn out. Other writers (such as David Abram, Christian de Quincy, and Terence McKenna) have prodded me in the that direction as well. That said, after reading Johnson's article in this morning's New York Times I realize as well that I live in a place where it would not be at all difficult to find someone(s) who might react accordingly with something like "The Times? Like, you mean New York City? You from the east coast, or what?". And in that lingering silence where, for a moment, no one remembers what humor is, I would again remember that I dropped out of college.

The Miami Herald was my newspaper: Carl Hiaasen, Al Burt, Leonard Pitts Jr., Sydney J. Harris, and the great Ellen Goodman. Barefoot island hippie boy that I was, riding out for the paper in the pre-dawn darkness, I saturated myself in idiosyncratic lore which arose like bubbles to the surface into the not so clear air of hopes for a New Age. As I sit here this morning, having just closed the blind against the vivid glare of the sun rising over the Sangre de Cristos, I find that regardless of college, I have what I have to work with. Yes, I like to look clever and thoughtful. Don't you? But, little did I suspect that society and culture would NOT become more enlightened as history shuffled on in boots. Then again: how would I know?

My uncertainty this morning is the casual critter that always comes around when I buck the system, when I heave ho at the status quo, or when I tell the big boss what I think and feel. Don't get me wrong - he's seen me in tremors before, shaking mad yet unable to dispense with formalities and such.

Oh, if he could only see the posse of spirits that stood behind me as I shook and expressed! Come to think of it, I don't rightly know that he couldn't see them, those imaginal friends and allies. Nor can I say with certainty that he actually knows that I prefer, above all else, to be nice. I honestly don't know what the lad was, or is, thinking. That was, pretty much, the point I was trying to make in that private meeting. That point wasn't on my mind when the meeting commenced.

When the meeting commenced I was still on a simple quest to defend something that I hold dear. But the lad responded thoughtfully, carefully telling me what other people thought of me. He was cool about it as well, when I told him that said others were mistaken. Simply mistaken. No one had conferred with me. And I was pretty sure that they were still looking at old photographs of me rather than at the living breathing being that I have become since being released from 27 years of deep and oppressive pain. Six months after corrective spinal surgery and more than a year after the first indications of imminent aging smacked me up side the head, I pay written tribute to the lad. Why any tribute at all? He was just doing his job, after all. Right?

Here's the thing: by listening, by asking sincere question, and by cleaving to impartiality, the lad reminded me that he is also a man. Him being a lad is just because of the clock: I got here first. He actually heard me, this man. He didn't habitually fall back on interpretation, that deep and wily realm where prejudice lurks amongst the unattended shadows. I love it when that happens!

Compassion and Otherwise

2011-10-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

Compassion recommends tolerance of ignorance. But voluntary endurance of bullshit is another thing altogether.

Aphorism

2011-10-11T04:14:00.000-07:00

Some days peanuts. Some days shells.

October Soothes the Heart

2011-10-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

The rain began around 3 PM yesterday, at first in waves, but by 9 PM it had been raining steady for over an hour. I sat on the porch in the dark, letting the gentle rhythms and melodies of the rain soak down deep into my heart. It amazes me how strongly I'd been hankering for true autumn weather. Now that it is here I feel a childlike excitement.

There's no more to say this morning. Fulfillment replaces the need for words, at times. But I would like to share a fun photo I snapped the other day. It says a lot in a humorous manner.

Survival Guide for a Monday

2011-10-03T05:52:00.000-07:00

Science as much as politics, sometimes my morning online reading reminds me that things overlap at the best of times. It wasn't too long ago that I would habitually include New Age spirituality along with my dark roast coffee. Yet, here I sit, this morning, all modern, having just read a lengthy article on how neuroscience is perhaps ready to dispense with the idea of evil, replacing it with a gray-scale measurement of "empathy". It somehow reminds me of Dr. Bauer, years ago, telling me how the brain scan of a depressed person is "all lit up like a Christmas tree". Suffice it to say that I was on the rebound from the worst bout of depression I had ever known when she told me that and I used the teachable moment to bootstrap myself accordingly.

It was during those dark and painful days that I first discovered (rather than being told by an expert) that during the deep depression the light of life is as bright as can be. Harried, weary, and metaphorically bruised beyond recognition, I found that a little mindfulness in awareness showed me that alongside of the animal nature that so profoundly guided me via survival instincts ran an equally compelling current of what can only be called spirituality. That was twenty years ago. Where this morning it was neuroscience, yesterday morning I read about James Arthur Ray, the purported "self-help guru" who sits awaiting sentencing on his conviction for negligent homicide in the deaths of three people in the course of one of his sweat lodge gatherings.

Don't worry, I'm not going to compare Ray to Anders Breivik, that fella that killed all of those kids in Oslo. What intrigues me here is more of the idealistic bent. The not-so-modern idea that we can bend reality to fit our imaginations. Transcendental surges that bust up and dispel human limitations are said to be within the grasp of our little selves. Really? Ya think?

It's not an idea that I can pursue this morning, however. Not at this point. I've got some responsibilities to attend to before I can get on to the day's gainful employment. The lowly retail cashier beckons me onward. He lives and breaths in the survival mode I spoke of, as well as in the clear zone above the clouds of reason and earthly concerns. Go figure.

Working Daze

2011-09-29T08:54:00.000-07:00

Her barking was soft yet prominant through the brain-haze this morning. I'd just awakened and come out into the house. Amber, the neighbor's big golden retriever, sat on the far side of the arroyo, about 150 yards from our house, looking west, out over the sage fields that run for miles in that direction. Amber was proclaiming to the coyotes that run wild and free out there, and also here along the neighborhood road. We could hear them in the night, in fact, we can hear them many nights, out there where they flourish.

Amber outweighs the 'yotees (sic) by half, at least. We watched her save two older dogs from the wild ones, early one morning. The older dogs were big, but were far enough along to have hip troubles, and a seeming slack in reasoning. From our dining room window I saw the two old dogs running frantically through the tall sage at the bottom of the arroyo, about thirty feet below my eye level. Just as I saw the dogs I could see what they were after: four coyotes were across the arroyo, up on the far crest, standing side by each, like dudes in an old western movie. As the dogs mounted the slope and approached the four coyotes, two of the coyotes split off and disappeared to the sides. Within a minutes we saw these two reappear, down in the arroyo, behind the dogs. A flush of terror ran through my body: these coyotes were outflanking the dogs! Strategy was being played out by wild animals and two domestic canine were fixin' to go down. But Amber came running from her house, barking fiercely, and the whole scene dissipated, right before our slack-jawed faces.

I hadn't planned on sharing that story here this morning, but the Muse, She runs where She will at times. The opening photo of this post is a view from south of town. I went out to a friends place last Tuesday to photograph a spider. No, really, a spider! In the photo you can see the town of Taos, looking tiny and quaint against the backdrop of majestic mountains. I know - I should leave home more often. The trip south of town gave me the fresh perspective that feeds my heart and soul, that wakes me up from my many-faceted jeweled sleep of tiny prejudices. Usually I go to work and go home. That's all. Being a bartender and a retail clerk for so many years, I really do love being at home, at the edge of the wilderness. I love to serve people all day then get the heck away from them, pronto. Out here, just minutes north of town, the immensity of the world settles in around me like a hug, gargantuan in scope.

On my way home from my friend's house I stopped at Walmart to buy bird seed. The clerk at the checkout stand was new in town. A woman, seemed about 70 years of age. Gray hair, glowing cameo skin. And very much on edge. She began to explain to me how in transferring her to Taos, Walmart cut her from full to part time employment. I asked her if she could work her way back up to full time, and she hissed, "No!". Walmart is such a showcase of facsimiles of humanity that the confession from the old lady really fastened my attention, out of place in the big box store, to say the least. She went on to tell me of a TV show she watched that detailed the list of the world's wealthiest people, a list that includes several Walmart muckity-mucks. "The big one", said she, "ONLY has 40 billion dollars".

Of course, it is the big news in the world of late. I've been loosely following the doings on Wall Street, not within them hallowed walls, but down there on the street, where young people, who cannot get a job while seeking to enter the showcased world of the purported American Dream, are amassing in protest. When such action happened in Cairo we cheered. But here? Now wait a minute! You mean to tell me that Occupy Wall Street is a valid social force? Click on that link, k? Go read on Michael Moore's website. Check it out!

Being blessed, as I am, with a mathematical mind, I can see the validity of modern business practices, which subtly skirt issues of true humanitarian concerns in cultivating the bottom line. The old woman at Walmart gets it worse than I do but we all - I mean all of us who live so low on the social scale - we all have to deal with the residue of the practices that squeeze us for all we are worth. Face it, regardless of the sweetness, reputation, or facade of a company, they still have to cleave to modern business practices to compete, even more so to flourish. Bless them and walk on, eh?

But an image emerges from deep within my creative self. An eerie image. Yes, I feel squeezed. Yes, I feel commodified. Yes, I feel marginalized, Yes, yes, yes, as I age I know that I may begin to look old and tired when seen in the midst of slacker youth who's energy is abundant in a fizzy way. But when I look at the process of squeezing the maximum benefit out of the minimum investment it looks to me forever like a carbuncle. Call me Danny Downer iffin ya want. More and more, I get tired. More and more I see my constituency walk innocently into the mythical realm of platitudes. Our faces reflect the requisite positive attitude. Yet our shuffling feet betray our inner response. And the philosopher in me looks at it sadly, wagging his head slowly yet surely, side to side, and does his best to compartmentalize the phenomenon and keep his attention away from the big picture which can so easily toss him out along the roadside as the vehicle of fortune races down the freeway of progress. My inner philosopher is a little shy about milking obvious metaphors, having been raised and honed in the sea of rock and roll. I need a bath, then I must go ply my trade, get tired, then come home and rest.

Peace out, y'all!

Dancing With the Shadow

2011-09-26T07:42:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed how cats seem to see things that we can't see?

Rosie the cat is looking down in this photo. That's effectively the mood I've been in lately: looking down. When Rosie sees things that we can't see she is most often looking up, at the ceiling, and she will talk to whatever it is she is seeing up there. It can be pretty unnerving to witness, especially if you are watching a scary movie at the time. With the help of a cursory knowledge of String Theory, with it's multidimensional worlds, I can easily imagine other levels of being, right here right now, only a phase shift away. You can see these on your television these days, what with all them vampires and witches, them super powered mutants, and my personal favorites, them ghosts.Werewolves, shape shifters, and extraterrestrial marauders. Possibly the most fun comes when I can manage that rare yet pure solipsistic perspective. The trouble is that along with the fun comes a certain dive of ginormous scope. Mood swings, anyone? They're free!

It's so easy to go off on myself and lean, ever so solidly, on the old head injury rap. Or perhaps to voluminously cite my dazzling lack of formal education. The more adjectives and descriptors I can come up with, the further away from the truth of the moment I can go. Feeling anxious? Feeling sad? Grieving past mistakes or fearing futures bumbles? Come on in! The water is fine!

Of course I do have it within my power to break out my Sammy Sunshine mask, and tell everyone I meet that "I am fabulous today, thank you very much! How's the family?". But the trouble with that mask is that I then have to act like I am free of all of the inner demons and glitches that corral my personal behavior on a constant and highly affective level. That's the Shadow. I'm telling' ya right now . . . . boy howdy! . . . . don't ever assume it ain't there and vital. That Shadow can really do a number on a fella!

Now don't take this the wrong way, k? I have been feeling down due to some uncomfortable dancing with some free-floating anxiety. Writing this post this morning is perhaps equivalent to the Catholic practice of Confession. That's how I'm playing it, anyway. And I do have to go on to work pretty soon. Seems that by doing so I might be seen as a guy who gets his own strokes on and then leaves the reader going, like, "WTF! What is this guy talking about?".

Join us next time for yet another episode chock full of moral ambiguity, nuance, and lots of scary critters and entities!

Keynote at the Equinox

2011-09-22T10:12:00.000-07:00

This morning I tossed my gray plaid scarf, the one I bought to use on my neck after surgery, into the microwave to heat up the grain pouches within, then sat down to listen to a one hour keynote speech given by Dr. Penny Sartori before the Annual Transpersonal Psychology Conference of the British Psychological Society. I highly recommend this speech as Dr. Sartori provides a solid and entertaining presentation about her research into the Near Death Experience. You will find her website link in the upper lefthand corner of this blog, and can find the download link to the mp3 file of her speech right here.

As Penny began introducing the topic and her research with some anecdotes I felt the chills rushing throughout my body, an internal phenomenon, not your normal goose-flesh. That's actually when I put the neck warmer in to heat up, because I knew from the intro that I was going to experience the same visceral sensuous reactions that I always get from listening to other peoples' stories about NDEs. The NDE is a living, breathing system that has taken up permanent residence in my soul. To be reminded is to be there, with the whole kit and kaboodle, once again firmly couched in that transcendental realm of being that hugs this living phenomenal world so subtly yet completely. It makes me feel all poetic, ya know? Like, whoa. Yup, it hits that deep, and is always ripe with that exquisite blend of discomfort and bliss. Those who are not familiar with my writing style might, at this point, assume that these are the ravings of an old hippy, posting on the internet to get some smidgen of attention. If it's come to THAT then just stop reading, k? I ain't that old, yet. Or take my wink and a nod and read on about something that is near and dear to my heart. I'll get the other self-promotion for my book about the NDE out of the way then write on. Ondrea Levine recently posted a review of my book on my Amazon.com page, right here.

I like that. Name dropping aside, I am watching myself closely as this is the 12th house part of my personal yearly cycle, which gives ya all the shadow access your dear heart could ever hope to endure. It is also only hours away from the Autumnal Equinox. For some reason Coyote, that grand old Light Being, is at me upon this change of season. That Penny's speech should be posted online at this time is synchronistic for me as well. Coyote, through some Native American legends, is credited with introducing permanence to the occurrence of death. Before Coyote's trickery death was a temporary thing. Hear tell, as well, that those dust devils that blow through here pert near year round are the dancing spirits of those who can no longer come back to this living world, ever since Coyote meddled with the way things are. Maybe meddle is not the word since Coyote is also purported to be the Creator as well. That stuff is way over my head, but ever since reading some of Peter Kingsley's work I am reminded how cozy death and deity are with the legends of yore. Maybe someday I will tell you the story of how Coyote beat me in a race with my little Ford Focus coupe, but I must amble on to work. After listening to Dr. Sartori's speech this morning I no longer can view my little day job as a bother. There are more important things in life than work, finances, and power tripping alpha primate behavior.

Peace out, y'all!

Gifted Life Musings

2011-09-19T07:24:00.000-07:00

Last week, on Sunday night then again on Wednesday night, we had an unusual visitor in the night: an elk. I never got to see the animal itself but the tracks all over the yard were undeniable. It ate a good part of our little dogwood tree and chowed down on some savory silver leaf vines along the back of the fence. A mystery, to be sure. It must have been separated from the herd, and it is danged lucky that the coyotes didn't try to take it down as a loner. So, add a new species to the many that travel along the Animal Highway.

Friday night around 9:30 PM the house was literally surrounded by very vocal coyotes. The primal tones of their serenade sounded to me like hunting cries. Whatever they were on about they really did a number on me. I went out on the front porch to listen and found myself transported to some ancient realm of consciousness, viscerally impacted by music from canid neighbors. Of course, when it became certain that they were all around the house I stepped inside to get my didgeridoo. After several meandering tones from my horn the coyotes quieted to silence, leaving me the wind as my only accompaniment.

I feel honored as well as gifted to be able to live alongside this ages-old trail through the arroyo. As tolerant as I am I still find myself wanting to turn and run from society, even from those who also want to do the same: to run. The Animal Highway gives me an out. Often something as simple as a visit from the coyotes on a chill night in mid September will give me the necessary portal to travel in my mind's eye until that mind's-eye view stirs some ancient notes in my own DNA and I feel the freedom that surpasses understanding. But what I really want right now is for the snow to fly. See, I'm impatient about some things. The jittery zeitgeist of my central nervous system is so readily calmed by a barefoot walk in the snow. Sigh.

As I sit and type, right now, I find it hard to believe that I must go to work today. But, alas, I must. Sigh number two punctuates the morning and I tap to publish this post. Burning daylight. Yeeeeahhhhhh!

Chuckling Coyotes Along the Animal Highway

2011-09-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

Pine siskins, wrens, and finches . . . . I took the liberty of spreading some wild bird seed mix out front on the ground. They are having a blast out there this morning. It is 48 degrees Fahrenheit at 8:30 AM, September 14. Cat and dog, both resting in bed. Human male, sits before a contraption of truly lovely proportions. That contraption announces the time, in a male voice. That's me. The one sitting, not speaking. The sky consists of a gray cloud ceiling overcast. The chill, the birds . . . . everything shouts of autumn. Here! Now! No . . . wait! That's hyperbole. Not suitable for a peaceful morning. The little geek in me still gets a rush sometimes, even though his preference is in the natural and wild world, just to think that a peaceful chill morning in late summer also contains a really nifty computer. Isn't it nice to have a computer that says "Good Morning"? Yes it is. Yes, indeed.

Yesterday morning, about 3 AM, I was awakened gently by some truly odd sounds that were surely coyotes, just across the road from the house. I listened to them for quite some time, a sound like a chuckling dialogue, not to anthropomorphize the whole danged world, but this coyote conversations did sound to be the intimate sharings of young mammals. After a while Carol was also awakened by the sounds. She slipped out of bed, raised the window blind with her hand, and sat on the floor listening. When I realized, in my half-dreaming state, that she was listening as well I said, "It's the coyote version of Beavis and Butthead". We both laughed our way back to sleep.

Those same coyotes - I'm certain it was them - were out front later in the afternoon. Rosie the cat was out on the front porch, right about tea time, and I was fixing to go out there with her, to sit on the love seat wooden rocker with a mug of Sam Adams, to watch the world go by with my familiar gatita at my side. But here came the yipping and barking: much like a dog's bark then followed by this manic yipping. "Woof. Yippie yeah yeah yeah yeah!". I went out and snatched the cat, forcefully plucking her out of wide open spaces and put her away in the back room, where Carol is putting together her weaving studio, where the cat stays at night. The coyote was just across the road, in the arroyo. I, camera in hand, walked out and chatted at the beast: "Hey, buddy, what's happening'? How ya doin'?". Carol had procured the permanent focus binoculars, which she brandished on the porch while I tried to catch a photo of the wily beast. It turns out there were more than one of them: Beavis and Butthead indeed! Carol called out to me, locating the animal for me, and reporting continuously. But a magpie was down in the arroyo, avidly following something, so I knew that Carol was seeing a different animal than the magpie.

The opening photo of this blog post was taken when the magpie gave up chase and headed east. You can see him just above the sacred mountain. I'll have to tell ya about the elk in the yard some other time. I am chilled, like a fool, sitting here with the windows open, to remind me that the world at large is a friendly and encompassing presence. But it is also predatory as well. I can reconcile the two. Can you?

Here's a shot of the wily coyote. I took it from about a quarter mile away, using a shoot-from-the-hip locate-and-shoot technique, much like I used to use on the pinball machine while playing for hours at a time with the late Lori Mellon. Wait? You haven't read my book yet? I wish you would.

Open Range Among the De-Ranged

2011-09-13T07:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the right words are just too easy. Sometimes it takes too many words to say what I have to say. And then . . . . sometimes I just spit out the words, cranking out text in semi-automatic writing, and someone says, "whoa, that says it all". On Saturday morning a customer/friend came to me at work, asking over my left shoulder, while I was with another customer, what it was I had said about true freedom. My flip answer would've been "uh, I'm working right now. How would I know?". But I know what he was talking about, and I also am fond of allowing myself the grand luxury of actually living my full life while under the thumb of my day job. So I was free to answer his question, thus walking the talk about what true freedom means. Here's the quote:

"Seems to me that the concept and practice of freedom is a confusing one for most people. Like, "I wanna be free to do whatever I want, when ever I want. I wanna wear sandals in the winter and drink beer for breakfast. I wanna exist without selling my soul to the company store". But, again, for me, it seems that the ultimate freedom is to accept things as they are. This manner of acceptance is not acquiescence or capitulation, per se. This acceptance is a choice: choosing to remain 'okay' with feeling so and so or such and such in a situation that is really corrosive in it's petty annoyance and has one feeling all put out, put off, and puny. A good example of this is the pandemic of seeming entitlement with which so many workers and bosses are burdened".

The bumper sticker version would be: "The ultimate freedom is to accept things as they are."

Now, I have to admit, this is pretty basic garden-variety mindfulness, the kind I learned, oh so long ago, from reading Stephen Levine's A Gradual Awakening. As far as I can tell it is pretty much the same thing as Carlos Castaneda's "place of no pity". Castaneda's take on it was that the "place of no pity" is the point at which one's self-importance withers on the vine. If you want to take it up a notch by looking at the underlying schtick of modern self-help gurus it's also quite similar, as far as I can tell, to losing one's "victimhood". Now, if you ask me (I know, you didn't ask. I write this stuff without the slightest provocation) this true freedom can be construed in, at least, two different ways. One way tends to reek and eek of self-importance gone to Higher-Self-importance. I don't want to look at that way because I am already suspect for even portending to know what the heck I am talking about. I like the milder, and wilder, way for all that it has to offer. Just what his that? What does it have to offer?

Let me put it this way. Bear in mind that I am writing with two cups of free-trade Nicaraguan coffee in my belly and no food. The bottom line of this milder form of freedom is that it encompasses what is actually going on anyway, regardless of attitudes, buzzwords, and any number of other assumptions, expectations, and interpretations. When I get to that place, I find that I may very well be feeling sad, or put out, or angry, or even blandly amused at my suddenly deflated gumption. I could be feeling anything at all! It don't matter none. That's the point. If I feel offended, so what? As long as I have sidestepped reactions, yet with my instincts also sitting idly by, I have time to think about what is happening. If I have that much friggin' time on my hands then I have averted another disaster, or at least another squirm-inducing moment. If I have that much time then ain't no sense in shaking my fist at happenstance. Unless, of course, it is done in jest, with the fist dripping irony while the heart basks in a pool of golden honey.

Stephen Levine put it this way in A Year to Live: How to Live This Year As If It is Your Last . . . . . .

"We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive".

Lowland Fog and the Big Fusion

2011-09-10T06:01:00.000-07:00

The pre-dawn morning before me is thick with lowland clouds which envelop the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, my mood deeply sparked by the sight. There was snow on the high mountains yesterday. There will be snow there again this morning, when the clouds lift to set the mountains free. With two weeks left before the Autumnal Equinox the coming winter is foreshadowed sweetly. The Longing runs powerful through my feelings. I'd love to sit on the porch all day and watch the world go by. Sometimes it is nice, perhaps even wise, to step back and regard a world that is there regardless, that goes on with or without us, and to feel into the rich tapestry of sensation that serves as our connection to that other world, outside of our skin. But such is not on the agenda today. Another work day beckons, sits waiting for me to plug in and do what I do. There was a grand snarl-current running deep within the public's psyche yesterday. I am butting that it is still there today. My psychic shields will be up, cast with a facade of sincere and goofy good humor. I saw the brain surgeon on Thursday. Young Dr. Smucker showed us the x-rays and proclaimed my vertebrae to be fused and stable at last. I celebrate. Ya wanna hear a pretty song? Peace out, y'all. . . .

Young Mockers

2011-09-07T10:35:00.000-07:00

Still savoring the joy of the season changing. It's the light, don't ya know. As raggedy as I feel physically these days, as tired and world-weary, as soul-focused, I still cannot separate myself from the phenomenal world around me. Also this morning I listened to Stephen and Ondrea Levine speaking of karma. What you do with what you get, is how I paraphrase it. I am on my way out to work in the marketplace, which is, I am reminded, an exercise in healing, a process in jockeying for position to feel most at home in the world. It's all good? No, not hardly.

Below you will witness a photo of a young mockingbird. Now that the air is cooled and moist and clean several bird species have returned after an absence. Ring-necked turtledoves, mourning doves, and two pair of young mockers, which are my favorite all time birds.

Toeing the Line While Longing in Time

2011-09-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

Machinery mars the usual morning quiet of our mesa home along the Animal Highway, a small airplane overhead, copious traffic on US 64 and State Road 522. There is a fair amount of moisture in the air, at least as compared to our usual dryness during this summer of oppressive heat and caustic air. That characteristic phase of the season is gone now. Good riddance! Labor Day weekend being past, the tone of the marketplace will no doubt emerge with less huzzah and more of the seriousness so rightly aligned with the harvest time. Perhaps it arises from the gray skies this morning, but I feel plush with the Longing, set suddenly upright after toppling like a senior citizen through acquiessence to gravity and boredom. Knew I more about Yeats I might dig into his bounty of words and thoughts, to express just what I mean by the Longing, why I capitalize the word, and maybe, just maybe, give you an inkling of how Longing can feel plush in such an exquisitely visceral way. Pure sentiment? Nope. I'm thinking more of the way that Frank MacEowen writes of Longing, a way that I personally feel as a beckoning, burgeoning force, like Terence McKenna's Transcendental Object at the End of Time, which coaxes as much as it can in convincing me that I am headed toward something big, and not slowly slip-sliding away.

I could go, ya know, like all poetic and stuff this morning. Why bother? Because, had I more time to play this morning before going to work in the marketplace I could explain to you how poetic muse and natural flow are two peas in a pod. Now, my cynical take on the marketplace on this day after Labor Day is likely to get a workout today, as I restrain it like a dog on a barbed wire leash, best kept at bay, and best kept from swinging about in frustration. If anything at all would rouse my musing mind it might be a lament on how many people seem to have mistaken niceness for civility. Now THAT deserves attention. But not today, alas. Today, in honor of Labor Day, I show my steel-toed work boots to you, free of charge....

Grandfather

2011-08-31T07:58:00.000-07:00

I rode my bicycle 1500 miles to take this photo. The man you see here is legally blind, sitting on the deck of the house his eldest son built in the late 1940s, on the shore of the Lake of the Ozarks. The family moved to the lake in the winter of '47. The reason for the move is unclear to me, but I know they moved from St. Louis, Missouri, upon purchasing this land to build a fishing camp in the ancient mountains called the Ozarks. The man had been a socialite in Chicago, Illinois, back in the 1930s. A wife, two sons, one daughter, all housed and fed through the man's job running a company that manufactured typewriters. When World War II smacked the world, the man went to work for a company that manufactured small arms and ammunition.

After the war the man moved his family to St. Louis, and from there they went to the lake in 1947. There is a tale which suggest that the man was uncomfortable with his role in creating devices that killed people. Also known is that a relative, Friedrich Ebert, had served as the first President of the Weimar Republic at the end the the first big war. Also known is the tale of his youngest son, John, who left the McDonnell Douglas corporation at the end of the 1960s at least in part because of his role in manufacturing warplanes that killed people in the Viet Nam War. That youngest son was the guy that upended my life as a teenager by moving his family to the Florida Keys.

I am the grandson of the man you see in this picture. He was My Grandpa Ed. In 1981 I used the insurance payment earned when I was struck by an automobile while riding my bicycle, in front of Jerry's Sunset Inn in Islamorada, Florida, to purchase another bicycle, some pannier packs, and a helmet. Perhaps it was the trauma from the accident, the pain from the broken leg, or some bold yet odd idea I concocted while walking for miles at a time, barefoot, to heal the injury. But when I could ride again, I did. And, as it turned out, I rode all the way to Missouri, where I snapped this photo of my Grandfather, who was fond of just sitting and gazing out over the lake with whatever senses his failed eyesight allowed him at that point.

I like to just sit as well. But in the early morning it is difficult to sit on the deck because the harsh glare of the morning sun, freshly risen over the sacred mountain. Besides, at 56 I am stilled gainfully employed, and find little time for such sitting, such passive enjoyment. I take after grandpa in that respect, but he did well for himself and found retirement, and the time to just sit. My dad used his retirement time watching television ands doing crossword puzzles. I'm still working. But at least, through the advent of the internet, I can write about this life I have so little time to enjoy. Grandpa used to like the squirrels and the chipmunks, but when I sit I watch for coyotes. Their sparkling intelligence remind me to use my own, not for war, or acquisition of goods and services through the auspices of a consumer-driven society, but for observing and, when I have time, for commenting.