A Gathering of Voices: Essays from Oregon

Essay / Nonfiction








A Gathering
of Voices


or Pearls at Random Strung







John E. Darling





Vol. 1 of A Gathering of Voices







To my children
 Heather, Hannah and Colin

I sing you good heart




John E. Darling
Jdarling@jeffnet.org
Ashland, OR





c. 2011 by John Darling. All essays appeared in periodicals 1997-2011
All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher, except for quotations in critical articles or reviews.

Published by Oregon Darlings Press, Ashland. Printed in USA

Darling, John
    A Gathering of Voices: Essays from Ecotopia...Spiritual life...Political life...Psychology...Relationships









About the Author . . .

John Darling, M.S. is a writer, journalist, teacher and counselor in Ashland, Ore. He has been published in Gnosis, CoinAge, Living Simply (Australia), Pacific Northwest, Oregon Magazine, The Celator (Ancient Art and Artifacts) and others.  John writes documentary shows on history, the arts and nature for public television and wrote “Crater Lake: Mirror of Heaven,” shown on PBS.

He has been a daily journalist on the staff of The Portland Oregonian, Medford Mail Tribune, Ashland Daily Tidings, United Press International in Salem, Ore. and was news director/anchor for KOBI-TV News in Medford, Ore.

He was executive assistant to the Oregon Senate President and press secretary of campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate. He was U.S. Marine Corps journalist and editor of Pilot Rock (alternative magazine of Southern Oregon) and People Newsmagazine of the Ore. Dept. of Human Resources.

He has been a counselor since 1976 and led seminars in men’s consciousness, loving relationships, rebirthing, shamanism, prosperity and hypnosis.  He also writes and performs weddings.

He has a B.A. in history from Michigan State University and M.A. in counseling from Southern Oregon University.  John is a fourth generation journalist and was born and raised in Lansing, Mich. He has three children, Heather, Hannah and Colin.





CONTENTS



That Most Blissful and Felicitous Moment
A Love Letter to Oregon
We Are Not Afraid of Crater Lake
The Breeze That Fills the Sail
Pioneers and Motorcycles; Making Good Time
They Bring Me Tokens of Myself
Joanie: the Last of the Wine
Like a Ten-Story Mona Lisa
Vacationing in the Stars
The Middle of Nowhere, the Best Place to Be
When Merry Pranksters Battled the Venusians
Why They Really Want the Toilet Seat Down
What is it Saying: the Pain in Men’s Faces
JFK: With Great Leaders, It Seems Nothing is Happening
A Soul Emerging from the Cheesecake
Patriarchy: Men and Women in Standoff
This Magic Vessel of Words
Moments, Like Beads
A Point from She-Walk-On
The Discipline of Bliss
A Childhood Stolen - and Redeemed
Male Feelings: Stand and Deliver
Yummy Ribs with the Soccer Mom Cult
Those Dreaded Words on the Phone, Late at Night
Attention Deficit: the Rebel’s Disease
Baby, You Gotta Shake That Thing
The Yule Wine Tasting: It’s Two Stars to the Right
Riding the Whaaa-mbulance
An Epitaph in the Beach, a Glass of Wine in the Desert
Blinded by the Light
Piggot’s Folly: Pearls at Random Strung
A Portable Blessing







That Most Blissful and Felicitous Moment


On the first day I was in Oregon, in fall 1967, driving north on the freeway between Medford and Grants Pass, I experienced a most singular phenomenon.

   I was just out of college and on my way to a new reporting job in the capital.  It was Saturday. I’d dropped my girlfriend at the airport, so she could get back to her job.  Now I was alone and heading deeper into this lovely state I’d never set foot in before.

   Gradually, something began to shift, to open. I began to feel elevated into some sort of unaccountable happiness.  Everything began to look and feel different than it ever had in my life.  All things seemed keenly alive with knowledge and possessed of a bliss and wisdom it readily shared with me.  I was in rapture.  All trees, hills, clouds, every atom revealed its knowing love to me and took me into its secrets.  This went on for 20 minutes, then faded, leaving a delicious afterglow.

   I pulled over to the Merlin rest stop and wrote in my journal: “I have never known such peace, such sureness of myself, such a positive knowledge of the unity of all times, all places, all people. I have accepted it all at last. How difficult it is to tell of it without cliches. This is no surge of idealism. This sense of the truth of things shall never leave me…(I write of a girl I loved in high school and how) it has so often seemed another life, another world, but it is this time, this place. There must be no more repressions. Come forth, all experience and be claimed!”

   I understood what people meant when people say God spoke to them. Yet there were no words – just content. The intelligence of the universe was palpable and spoke in everything. It’s like the gods pulled back the curtain on all the secrets and energies of the universe and smiled and welcomed me in. They let me sit on the throne for a few moments and wreathed me in bliss.  They seemed to say: when you make big choices about things in life, like love, work and children, if they feel at odds with this, don’t do them.  I knew it all as absolute truth.  I knew I would never forget this moment, although I would never be able to even partially describe it. The universe just said, hey, this is it, this is what it’s all about, this is my naked body of love for you.  Got it?  Have a nice day, bye.

   Remember that famous woodcut of a shepherd flinging himself on the ground as he beholds the dazzling wheels of heaven? That’s it.  That same thing happened to that artist.

   People may work for years, meditate, study, do vigils and vision quests, yoga and fasts and perhaps not realize that moment of bliss that often just settles on people who haven’t sought it and have done nothing special to earn it.  All of us have this coming to us.  It’s part of life, a natural function.  And it changes your life.  It’s something no parent or guru or university can give you. It can’t be made to happen. It’s a kiss from God, a blessing, a beatitude-epiphany-glory thing from nowhere.  It becomes the “north” on our compass, the deeply felt yes-ness we orient to.

   In his 1963 book “Mysticism,” F.C. Happold describes seven key elements of these glimpses of heaven.
--The universe stands shimmering, pervaded by a sense of oneness in which you experience what you can only call divine.  You see and know it is present in all things, including you.
--Any sense of one’s ego, with all its fears and separateness, seems to vanish. You sense there is a bigger “you” of which you are part.
--There’s no sense of time.  All is now.
--You don’t feel you’re doing this. It’s being given to you. You’re passive.  You feel you’re being held by a power outside you.
--It’s ineffable. It’s not like anything else.  It’s non-rational and can’t be put in words.
--It’s brief, coming on suddenly from nowhere and slipping away in a few minutes.
--Knowledge and insights are gained. Things have new significance. What you learn, you trust as real and as coming from an absolutely authoritative source. It often changes lives.

   In “The Root of Matter,” Margaret Isherwood recounts a woman’s experience at age nine: “Suddenly, the Thing happened, and, as everybody knows, it cannot be described in words. I remember saying to myself, in awe and rapture, ‘So it’s like this; now I know what Heaven is like’…Soon it faded and I was alone in the meadow with the brook and the sweet-smelling lime trees. Though it passed, I was filled with great gladness. I had seen the ‘far distances’.”

   Is it brain chemicals?  Is it something you can get in the endorphins of high-risk adventuring or from long-term stilling of the mind? I think it’s quite different.  As Leonard Orr, the creator of rebirthing observed, we’re always in a state of bliss, but our minds, crammed with suppressed emotions and conditioned for survival, see life as a constant problem to be solved, a threat to be defended against.

   Mystic transcendence always lies near at hand. It has taught us much, prodded the growth of human intelligence and given us our grasp of the divine.  We’re likely the only animals who experience it. As an artifact of nature, the gratuitous mystic opening must have some purpose, as nothing in nature is superfluous. Perhaps it’s a remnant of paleolithic days, when we experienced our world and the divine world as one -- and such visions were common. Now they’re rare, a one-in-a-lifetime gift, which only hint at the paradise we came from and shall return to.   ~





A Love Letter to Oregon

Without getting to sentimental about it, I’d like to confess my love for Oregon and say that when I fell in love with her (I think Oregon’s a she), I had little idea she even existed and no idea how good she was.   And I had no idea I could love a place as if she were a living being.

   I was not escaping urban life or California when I found Oregon.  They just sent me here for a job.  That’s what I thought I needed right after college.  They said it was in the capital, which was named Salem.  I’ll take it, I said.   It was the start of the rainy season, in October 1967.  It was like she wanted me to see her at her worst first.  On the wall of the office of my job in the capital building was a huge state highway map which mesmerized me with its half-dozen long highways dotted with these towns and rivers with amazing names I immediately loved to pronounce – Bend, Tillamook, Cascade, Eugene, Ashland, Owyhee, Willamette, Rogue, LaGrande.

   Early on, Don, my boss and reporting partner at UPI wire service told me that Oregon was kind of different.  What was going on here, he said, was that Oregon was the type of place which had, many decades ago, invented the presidential primary and the initiative petition process and also made the ocean beaches public in perpetuity.  Coming up soon, he explained was a legislative battle called the bottle bill, which would put a nickel deposit on pop containers so people would stop throwing them on roadsides.  And there was going to be another battle to ban billboards on highways.  And the governor, Tom McCall, was a Republican who had set out to clean up the pollution in the Willamette River and was succeeding.  He became most remembered for daring to say, “Come visit, but don’t stay.”  Their two senators, Morse and Hatfield, a Democrat and a Republican, both opposed the Vietnam War and were practically alone at the time in doing it.

   So.  It was a place where people try to do the right thing.  And they’re free to speak up.  They have the courage to speak up. 

   Don threw me into the churning maw of the Ways and Means Committee, which is where they cut budgets and speak a dark, Byzantine language only the players understand.  The chairman, Lyn Newbry of Talent, took pity on this extremely young man, me, who couldn’t possible know what they were talking about.  He introduced himself, then introduced me to the whole committee.  “You just take lots of notes,” he confided, then come up and ask us what the hell we’re talking about and we’ll explain it all for you.”  Which they did.  He showed me his meat cleaver tie tack and said all the members were wearing them.  It was a joke, because agency heads always asked that they cut budgets with a scalpel, not a cleaver.

   So.  They were all nice people.  Don said they all held actual jobs back home – farmers, teachers, lawyers, and they came here only five or six months every two years to legislate and none of them were power-hungry or dishonest.   They wouldn’t dare be dishonest.  Everyone would know about it.  Oregon just didn’t work that way.  These were the descendants of the Oregon Trail pioneers.  They had Midwest roots and so possessed that groundedness, good will and plain talk of farmers.

   Then Don took me skiing and, from the top of the lift, I could see the sweep of the Cascade Range from Mt. Hood down to Sisters.  The peaks were stunning and rapturous and wild.  And the air blowing up here was thin and dizzying in its purity.  Three-Fingered Jack and Mt. Washington snaked crazily and beautifully toward their summits.   They were all volcanoes, Don said.  What you are looking at is places where lava built up and blew out and kind of got frozen in mid-explosion.  This was all just too good.  How come no one knows about this?  No one ever says, gee, I really have to move to Oregon.  “It’s the rain,” Don said.  “We have that as a bar to people who would love her just for her beauty.”

   Oregon, he explained, was kind of layed out in four bands.  Left to right, you have the coast, then the western valleys along I-5, which is what most people think of as Oregon (lots of firs and hills), then the mountains, then  the two-thirds of Oregon which is desert, a fact which almost no one outside Oregon knows.  Four beautiful worlds in one.   I couldn’t believe my luck.  And it held only 2 million people, or 1 percent of the U.S. population.  It was a little square, but it was so darn nice. 

   And then I remember the moment it happened, when I knew she had got me, that I would never leave her.  Don said let’s have dinner in Bend and, along the way we drove through these high desert groves of juniper and sage with the Sisters perched roseate in the gathering dusk.  “I just can’t believe all this,” I said.  Don just smiled.  He knew he was creating an Oregonian.  “Yeah, it’s pretty nice,” he offered, in a typically understated way of old Oregonians.

   That was all then.  “Then” lasted into the early eighties.  Oregon’s still a fabulous place, but I got to experience her childhood’s end.  “Now” happened when people started coming here to get away from something.  They must have known that, by not solving the problems of where they came from, that they would only bring those problems here and so were only buying themselves maybe a generation of time.  Then their children would solve the problems.  They came here in large numbers, adding a million people and creating a big demand on housing, which went from about $10,000 then to about 20 or 30 times that now.  Which is one of the problems they were getting away from.  It used to be cheap to live in Paradise.   Now it’s a piece of work.  It’s ironic.   The things Oregonians had fought for and held – simplicity, natural beauty, availability of resources, honesty, community and just plain space – now became the lures for a nation which would flock to grasp them and in grasping them, would find them slipping like water out of a fist. ~







‘We’re Not Afraid of Crater Lake’

We often hear, when the story of Crater Lake is told, that the Indians were deathly afraid of it.  That’s what I heard and read in 1972, when I did a special on it for Medford tv. And that’s what I broadcast.  I’d like to apologize for that.

   The conquerors get to write the history.  The white settlers conquered the Indians, so this is the white story, which implies that Indians are full of childish superstition, that they lack proper awe and that they hadn’t a clue about what really makes a volcano – magma being forced to the surface by pressure from the tectonic plate which subducts the coast – and therefore whites are smarter, more realistic and generally more grownup and that’s why we run the place now.

   After a 1904 journey to Crater Lake, the florid poet-essayist Joaquin Miller summed up the white bias in a Sunset Magazine article:

   “No Indian has ever set foot here or near here. No doubt the story of the explosion, like the story of the Flood, handed down by tradition, had something to do with their fears. They had peopled the lake with goblins, sea monsters and so on…[when whites brought some Klamath Indians there] only a few would look on it and that with reluctance. One very old man kept his hands clasped and his head down…he stole away and hid behind a tent.”

   Miller was right about one thing: the eruption and collapse of Mazama, then the tallest mountain in Oregon, made a tremendous impression on the region’s natives and their mythos.  Will Steel, who fought 17 years to get Crater Lake set aside as a national park, found this out when he took down the legend of the Klamaths in 1885.

   The eruption, they said, was not a geological thing we call a volcano.  It was an elemental battle between Llao, the god of the lower world, and Skell the god of the upper world we live in, the world of air, trees, people, sun, life.  Llao wanted the chief’s beautiful daughter Loha as his love.  She didn’t want him. Sound familiar?  It mirrors the Greek myth of beautiful Persephone, stolen to the lower world by its god Hephaistos.

   Llao’s anger showered the surrounding forests and desert with flames, lava and ash, reaching into the homes of the Klamath, who took refuge in the waters of Klamath Lake.  Two shamans of the Klamath saw that a sacrifice was needed.  They walked to Gewas, as they called the mountain, and threw themselves into the flames.  Skell respected these brave holy men.  He descended from the skies to the top of Mt. Shasta and battled Llao through the night, driving him back to his lower world.  In the morning, the Klamath people looked to the West and saw Gewas was gone.  They made pilgrimage there, wept for their departed heroes and filled the crater with their tears.

   Which tale is “real”– ours or theirs? It’s likely the pre-contact Klamaths would find our geology bizarre and heartless, just as whites found their story charming and naïve.

   With the centuries, the Mazama crater filled with water.  It’s majesty was just too much for the Indians and they never went there – so says the persisting white legend.  But Steel got a different story in a talk with Klamath Chief Allen Davey, published in 1890:

   Ages ago, a Klamath hunting party found the now water-filled Crater Lake. “They silently approached and gazed upon its face. Something within told them the Great Spirit dwelt there and they dared not remain.” They camped far away, but one Klamath was compelled to return and sleep at the lake’s rim.  He did this each night. “Each visit bore a charm that drew him back again…each night strange voices arose from the waters and mysterious noises filled the air.” Soon, he went to the water and bathed in it.  He saw wonderful animals and beings who looked like his people, but lived within the water. “He suddenly became hardier and stronger than any Indian.” Many from the tribe repeated his rites.

   This is a classic tale of vision quest, probably handed down for 5,000 years. Prof. Theodore Stern, University of Oregon anthropologist, details it in an ethnographic report: Among Klamaths, “supernatural power is sought by visiting places where sacred beings were thought to reside and, through ritualized industry, gaining their favor.”  The Klamaths sought power for fishing, war, lovemaking, gambling, footracing and curing. Post-menopausal women also sought power.  “The questor went alone into the mountains where, for five days, he fasted, piled rocks, wrestled with trees, ran, perhaps took sweatbaths and climbed hilltops to sleep.  He might swim in springs inhabited by spirit beings.  If granted power, he might dream of a token…the spirit itself might appear…his spirit song in his ears.”

   All this magic happened right here around us, but through warfare, disease and removal to reservations, was wiped out almost before anthropologists could record it.

   At first, whites weren’t sure they could trust legend about Indians witnessing the creation of Crater Lake about 5700 BC. Luthur Cressman, noted UO archaeologist, erased any doubt when he and his students dug below Mazama ash at Fort Rock Cave in 1936.

   “As we dug,” Cressman wrote, “we went through a bed of volcanic ash…and suddenly, under this, came upon a sandal.  It was made of rope of twisted sagebrush bark, unlike any we had ever found.  Many more came to light, about 75 in all, every one charred by fires set by hot pumice when it fell.”

   You can still see a pair of these sandals, made of sagebrush, framed on the wall of that large café-bar just off the main drag in Lakeview.  It kind of blows your mind to stand there in 2000 A.D. with waitresses bustling around you and realize these shoes were worn by someone right here about the time Europeans were making small, Neolithic farming villages and still hunting with bows-and-arrows. 

   On the last day Crater Lake lodge was open we sat on the deck watching the sun and clouds stir the beings of the deep.  The magic is there, even at a casual glance.  I, too, felt afraid of Crater Lake.  But it was deeper than fear.  It was awareness that, for 77 centuries, this place was a Lourdes, a Stonehenge, a Great Pyramid, an unimaginably holy place.  If the Klamaths want to return to their vision quests here, I’d like the whole national park shut down for it.

   I’ve come upon these conflicting myths through writing a public tv documentary for the centennial of the National Park in 2002.  In my research, I spoke with a Klamath.

   “We were just talking about that,” he said, “how we’re supposed to be afraid of Crater Lake.  We’re not afraid of Crater Lake.  We just have respect for it.”   ~






The Breeze that Fills the Sail

I get to talk to people every day and find out some amazing thing they’re doing, building or journeying to and I get write about it for the newspaper.  I’ve been a journalist since age 16 and, though I’ve gone off to many other endeavors, I can’t seem to shake this one.  I’ve been given this present – being allowed to walk in and sit down with strangers and have them start telling me their most closely-held visions, joys or tragedies.

   At times when I didn’t need the money or was interested in other things, I would miss this life and it would come back to me.  If I won the lottery, I would still have to do it.  It’s like Walter Cronkite said, the cycle of talking to so many interesting people, the information flow, the endless learning -- the words – it’s like a farmer with his dirt, hoe, corn and chickens.  You can’t leave it.

   Fate and intention have now given me a life of freelancing, where I seem no longer to do stories on the red meat of journalism – crime, accidents and government – but hang out with people, writing feature stories or public tv documentaries about their lives or their ancestors’ lives – or about the business they’re trying to run or the house they’re trying to restore.

   Almost always in these interviews, there comes a moment when they pull back the curtain and say something about themselves, about how they understand life, about what it all might mean.

   I was doing a story with D., who makes sports braces at the factory he created here in Ashland. He pulls out an anatomy book to show me how carpal tunnel pain works.  The book’s pictures are photos of a real corpse. We start turning the pages.  It shows a whole human back opened up, the spine and nerves laid bare.  We look at each other.  “Amazing isn’t it?,” he says.  “All those nerves inside us.  So beautiful and intricate.”

   I ask him why he moved here from Arizona.  He just points out his office window at the spring sun playing across the sweep of the Grizzly Range.  There it is again, the pulling back of the curtain.  We nod. We both know. 

   I pick up an old book at Goodwill for 50 cents. Idly, flipping to a random page, I invite the book to serve as oracle, to supply me with the perfect thought for this moment.  The author, W.K.C. Guthrie tells me the founders of our Western thought, the Greeks, looked at things differently than we do.  While we assert there is a God, then define his qualities, the Greeks would be “so impressed or awed by the things in life or nature remarkable either for joy or fear that they said ‘this is a god’.” They called this phenomenon theos and to them it meant things more than human, not subject to death and that would be here after we’re gone.

   So it was in the moment with the anatomy book or D. pointing at the mountain.  We are touched constantly.  We seldom feel it.  It’s like a wind; we have to turn our sails to catch it and let them fill. And it's usually a breeze, not a gale. A god goes here.

   So it was in W’s double-wide in Phoenix.  We talk of his grandfather, who, in a 1905 poker game, won this apparently genuine Charles Russell painting in front of us.  Our talk is all about art and authenticators.  I’ve got my story and want to leave and meet deadline.  Then I ask him what he might do with the several million dollars he could sell this for.  He’ll use it to help market a blade he invented to cut blackberry bushes.  He wouldn’t stop his work with blackberries.  Here’s that curtain pulling back again.  And he wants to use it to help his dear friend, a woman who’s been there for him all his life, when he went through really hard times and he takes care of her everyday and she’s 100 years old now.

   So it was in talking to B., out in the Applegate. Healthy, active, positive, organic, loved, she still got breast cancer in her mid-fifties. It spread.  She tells me she asked her friends and kin from all over the country to send her special totems – a stone, a shell, a picture.  She spread them in a circle around her on the floor and thanked them all for their love.  She wept.  And, yes, a god went there.  And from then on her life became about missing nothing, letting the sail fill with these incessant, divine breezes moving about us.

   She says, “One day the earth opens up and things are never the same. You realize life is terribly fragile. My relationship with my children and husband is all different. No one can tell you how sweet life is until you’ve faced this.”

   Cancer does this and I cannot help but sense the theos of it – a god walks with cancer, a god who sometimes demands your life, but always invites your love of life.

   Guthrie tells me of another old Greek word, dike (DEE-kay) – a path or way of being what you are and were destined to be, of “following the way which is properly your own and not mixing yourself up in the ways of others and trying to do their jobs.” How direct and clear were the Greeks.  In one word, they create a concept and a value, to be sought for, lived and fulfilled. No matter if you’re serf or warrior, Guthrie says of the Greek way, do that and do it with arete -- utmost skill and efficiency.

   From a life of endless freedoms and choices in be-all-you-can-be America, I come home like a farmer to my dike, my earth and tools, my desk and keyboard.  My children all their lives will remember the image of me with my back to them, plowing the fertile land of my keyboard.  It’s all right here, theos tells us.  One dike contains all dike, no matter how mundane or heroic. The face of the beloved contains all love. One day contains all days. And one story contains all stories.   ~












Pioneers and Motorcycles:
Making Good Time

Getting mail has shifted into a lovely experience in recent years.  Among the bills and junk, at least once a week, here’s a padded envelope with a book from abe.com, site of 10,000 used book dealers. If you can’t find it there, it can’t be found.

   Riding up to Earth Teach Art Camp, Hannah flips through the latest arrival, a hardback of Pirsig’s 1974 classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  “This title is a metaphor, right Dad?”  Right.  It’s really about life.  The author uses a bike to symbolize man’s lonely journey westward, as he enjoins the search for values in a culture of anomie – and seeks answers to his own journey into madness.

   She begins reading to me.  This has never happened.  It’s always been me reading to her.  But she’s headed for Wilderness Charter School at Ashland High School this fall – and this is the kind of book they read.  The ones that question why we’re really here and what alternatives to the standard issue life – college, career, marriage, mortgage, kids, retirement – are possible.

   We stop at the Mountain Ave. light.  The thunderheads seethe and pile up over the Siskiyous.  Time slows.  I look over at this 16-year old young woman, so on a run of questioning all the answers, reeling off the lines from the book, “…plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere…Secondary roads are preferred, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on ‘good’ rather than ‘time’.” 

   She looks up. We laugh.  Oh, this guy is telling the truth.  It’s one of those real books someone writes from the heart.  She has a stack of them by her bed.  Makes me want a motorcycle, the quintessential American vehicle – going fast alone to nowhere, maybe to find some lost chamber of the soul.   We come to the Dead Indian Road sign.  I tell her the story of how this big committee held hearings, seeking to pacify irate residents, finally inserting “Memorial” in the road name – a quintessential committee gesture, doing nothing but confusing the meaning.  She shakes her head.  Why not just Indian Rd?  Or rename Hwy. 66 to Dead Pioneer Rd., making things equal.  No one can handle those two words together – dead and Indian.  They will always offend natives and remind the invader that 300 million of us are here because we did that.

   For the Independence Day issue of the paper, I do a story on three pioneers, Helman, Hargadine and Wagner, whose names are all over the south valley. Researching, I learn they’re nice guys who westered with their families and took advantage of their government’s Donation Land Claim Act, which handed them each 360 acres of land for the taking.  Where did the government get the land?  They just took it, by making Indians dead.

   As Helman built his mills around Ashland’s plaza (essentially creating Ashland), the locals fought for the homes they held for 12,000 years.  The settlers occasionally had to hole up at a fort built on Wagner Creek. Within five years from the first claim here, the Shastas and Takilmas were gone, decimated by our diseases or removed to remote reservations – concentration camps, really – all this before anthropologists could even do them the honor of recording their language and folkways. 

   We do know they lived interdependently in long lodges, not independently, as we love to congratulate ourselves for doing in our half-million dollar boxes. We know they seasonally shifted around the valley, following food sources – berries, salmon, deer. But, sixty years after the fact, a 1909 Daily Tidings story I’m reading lauds the pioneers for bravery against the “savage” natives and animals, meaning wolves and grizzly bears – all quickly wiped out. 

   I finish the story, shaken, frankly.  And Hannah reads on, “On this trip, I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it.”

   Hannah closes the book, holding it between her fingers, feeling the universe magically compressed within its smooth covers. They will assign her some other book to read for the summer, one she can’t get into.  “I’m reading this one,” she says, declaring her independence from the program designed to teach her independence. I smile, secretly gleeful at her departing from the script.  She’s conceiving the next mode of westering and she’s making good time – with the emphasis on good.   ~





They Bring Me Tokens of Myself

It’s the perfect swimming hole, with clear, deep green water and a big diving rock, right by the middle fork bridge on the Applegate.  After much hooting and diving, our boys, six of them, smiling often, sun themselves on the other bank.  Their voices rise occasionally above the water. They are beautiful and we can scarce take our eyes off them.

   We guzzle beer, while Ann prepares hot dogs and potato salad and Beckie reads Dylan Thomas poems to us. She named her son after him. Do not go gentle into that good night.  He wrote that. The words go good with the beer, the hiss of the river, the amazing sass, humor, profanity and energy of the smiling boys.

   Seeing the unusual number of lads perched on the rocks like a menace of ravens, the Forest Service ranger decides to stop and see if he can find any trouble – not hard with half a dozen 14-year olds. “Do you own these boys?” he says good-naturedly. “Well, it’s getting harder and harder to say that,” we respond.

   We tell him that I, along with five other long-haired “freaks” (as hippies were known 30 years ago) lived in a log cabin on this very spot, where we had shinin’ times for a few years, without running water, except for the river, or electricity, except that which ran around in our brains.

   “What happened to the cabin?” he says. “You guys tore it down,” says I, adding (not out loud) “so that, under the mixed-use policy, the timber companies could have it all to themselves.”

   We’ve only a few more weeks of summer and must come back here at least once more.  I want to burn these memories in the software of my soul. The boys and the moms are doing that, too.  I can feel it.

   I say to Ann and Beckie, don’t you wonder how the kids can leave a place like this and go live somewhere, probably a big city, so they can have a job and raise a family?  And if they do, don’t you know they’ll wake up in the middle of the night and remember this river, not to mention Ashland, and ask themselves -- what the hell am I doing here?

   They nod. If they go for the big city, career, big bucks and all that, it won’t be because we taught them.  We laugh. Yeah, what ARE we teaching them, anyway?  All the rest of it – that’s what.  And we’re not really teaching it.  We’re living it – doing life – and showing them this loose clan of parents who love each other and know each other’s happiness, sometimes pain, too. 

   It’s getting time to head back. I challenge myself – again wanting to take this old river into my mind, my bloodstream – to walk up the center of it, where it thunders down the rocks under the bridge.

   It’s not easy.  There’s risk.  You have to pay awareness, find firm handholds and streamline your torso, so the current doesn’t carry you away.  I try to get the boys to join the strange quest, but they won’t touch it.  It’s just me and the river now.  They think I’m a bit odd and old, I’m sure, gritting my teeth, talking to the river, learning its ways again and struggling to do this pointless, somewhat shamanic feat of controlled folly. 

   But I do it, finally, coming up in the still water at the fork, where you can still see the treehouse Ron and Carol built and lived in, in the summer of ’71, when they were so in love. You never get over things like that and I doubt he has. The poles are broken and hanging down -- still unreachable unless you cross water.  My throat catches at the memories, the crazy passions of those days.  I hold it back.  I dive into the slow water, stroking even with the clean stones on the bottom.

   Driving back in the slanting August sun, Beckie reads Whitman to me.  With the windows down, I hear only snatches, which seems right…I think I could turn and live with the animals…they bring me tokens of myself…I do not know where they got these tokens…I must have passed this way untold times ago and negligently dropped them…Swift wind! Space! My Soul! Now I know what is true, what I guessed at when I loafed on the grass…I am afoot with my vision…All this I swallowed and it tastes good…I like it well and it becomes mine…I am the man…I suffered…I was there.  ~










Joanie: the Last of the Wine

It’s strange how when a person dies, she looks completely different. It shows how, we react, not so much to the facial features, as to the spirit, energy and intent coming through them – or the absence of it.

   If I’d recognized Joanie laying dead in the blackberries, I think instead of calling 911, I would have called a lot of friends and had them call their friends and asked them all to bring sage, wine, cornmeal, little Goddess statues, candles and come down for a night of prayers, chants, reading of poems and saying our goodbyes to Joanie in person.

   We’d all have had the opportunity to engage the body and its lingering spirit on site, as would have been good, right and healing in a sane society, allowing us to move – with her -- through the denial, anger, bargaining, despair and acceptance together.

   Instead, the day after the memorial, we do it, as best we can, just us two, A. and I, the ones who found Joanie.  We do it without the body, but not without the spirit.  She is still here, in this murky dusk, in her little 6 x12 foot, rough, damp, vine-floored nest by Bear Creek. 

   It is not a place of peace.  We don’t want to be here.  We’d put it off for days.  It – the finding, the writing, the ritual of release -- is, as my friend P. writes me, a sacred contract fulfilled between us.  I’d come down earlier to mark the spot, as asked by G., who wanted to leave flowers and speak her prayers.  I’d cleaned out the random junk there, like packages of Depakote, a bipolar med and Mirtzapine, a depression med. 

   We smudge the place with sage, keenly aware of the feelings of loneliness, pain and despair that had to engulf this dying person -- no doubt clouded and confused by the OD of meds.  Would that confusion and despair persist as the spirit sought her way to the Spirit World?  We thought so and we felt it.

   Ann sprinkles corn meal – a grounding, nourishing staple of life – and places roses where her body had lain.  On a driftwood log, we place an earth goddess, pretty stones, ears of corn, all the precious kind of stuff you keep around the house, waiting for a day like this.  We open a bottle of Rogue Valley red – this Irish lass was no stranger to the joys of wine – and talk/pray with her, toasting her and sprinkling wine about the space.

   What do we say?  I don’t know.  The words just come.  Something like, hey, old gal, we love you and your dazzling presence, love and enthusiasm in our community, your plays, your smiles and hugs and we are here to walk with our arms around you and to call on you now to say goodbye to all the things of this life and go with heart into the spirit world and onto the new life we feel you so eager to get to and, with Goddess’s love, may it be one where you find love with a good partner and children who see how beautiful you are, and a life where you work to change yourself, not the world – and relax into all that love and let it hold you and give to you each day because, baby, you earned it here and you deserve it.

   We take out Walt Whitman and let Joanie choose the page it opens to.  We read the one starting, “Swift wind! Space! Now I know what is true, what I guessed at…while I lay alone in my bed….My ties and ballasts leave me…I am afoot with my vision”  Then he lists pages of the beloved things of everyday life – shop windows, picnics, baseball, kisses, cider, sundown shadows, the splash of swimmers, a cemetery, hummingbirds, on and on.

   It is dark now, only the waxing half moon and a candle to light us.  The poem is long, but she chose it and I will finish it.  Finally, Whitman says, “My right and left arms round the sides of two friends and I in the middle, coming home…by the coffined corpse when all is still, examining with a candle…solitary at midnight in my back yard, my thoughts gone from me a long while…speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars…speeding with tailed meteors, throwing fireballs…carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly, storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, backing and filling, appearing and disappearing, I tread day and night such roads.”

   Tears fall over these final lines, the tears, till now, held back.  Here, finally, we walk Joanie’s spirit world with her.  Truly, Walt, a word-shaman like Joanie, has opened the doors for her.  A beat or two of silence, then the coyotes in the hills across the freeway take up their crazy, happy, mournful yowl.  They are welcoming her into paradise, says A.  Yes, she’s crossing over, and as I pour the last of the wine for us and we climb back up to the bikeway, the nest suddenly feels empty.  We can laugh again, kiss again, big wet lover’s kisses and we feel her laughing, enjoying them as she leaves. 

   The wine is gone, all but a half cup that we leave for her.  She would appreciate the humor. Printed on the cup is a young girl and the legend, “You’d better not pout.”  We are laying half on the Greenway, laughing, scourging out, one hopes, the last of the sadness with lover’s joys and a bike whizzes silently by, unlit, driven by a hooded being (Charon, usher of souls?), headed west, the place of the end of journeys.  It’s so Joanie -- always knew how to make a grand exit, didn’t she?  One that leaves you smiling.   ~






Like a Ten-Story Mona Lisa

I was an adult when I saw my first mountain.  I'd seen pictures of them, but it was like seeing something fabled and far off -- the Mona Lisa or the Taj Mahal. 

   In the fifties classrooms of flat Michigan, I would look out the windows much of the day.  I think I was looking for mountains, there over the drug store, but all I could see were the cumulus empires abuilding, then stratifying, then blowing away south, then building again. 

   The clouds of the Midwest prepared me for mountains.  They had ridges, summits and long canyons.  They caught the sun - bright on one side, steel blue on the shadow side.  They showed me centuries of mountain-building in just minutes.  I wanted to reach them, to stride their ridges and gullies, so I became fascinated with biplanes, which would someday carry me there with my head sticking out in the wind, and it wouldn't be the fifties anymore and there would be no class.

   Then I came Out West.  They flew me out through the night on a Super Constellation and when we landed in Bakersfield, I walked out onto the tarmac facing three years of military service, rosy-fingered dawn and mountains.  "I'm home," I thought.  The mountains lay silhouetted black against the rising pinks, oranges and blues.  A warm wind blew off them.  They seemed to exhale the desert wind.  A huge room, nay, a suburb, a bioregion of my imagination woke up.  My IQ jumped 15 points.    "I will never leave here, the West," I whispered. 

   The mountains slowly filled with light, bringing out the details of their pines and sage.  It was unutterable and exquisite.  There was nothing on these mountains, nothing people put there, that is.  Then I knew.  I could walk and sit on these mountains.  It would be like flying a biplane in the cumulus towers.  But better.  I could stay up for days, weeks.  In time, I forgot about airplanes.  I knew these mountains  would always be there for me and they have.  Mountains are the central fact of the West, holding snow up there through summer, growing timber, creating rivers, saving the other animals and, above all and in such contrast to the Midwest, keeping people tucked away in the valley bottoms.  Mountains have little love for the buildings and roads of busy bipeds.

   When I found Ashland, or rather, when she chose me, it was The Mountain -- Grizzly Peak -- who spoke in my favor.  We recognized each other.  It was like when you meet the Right Person.  You see it happening, now, all those years of delicious everyday touching, of looking on the changing, welcome face of my beloved, of hearing her voice in summer.  And the smell.  The wind coming off her hair.  All you have to do is say the beautiful word -- yes.  And I did.

   "I'm home," I whispered again, as I stepped out of that VW bus with my longhaired friends.  It was 1971 and there was a working man's clothing store in the plaza, homes in the low five figures, Nixon in the White House and adventure in the blood.  "I'm not leaving," I said to my friends. 

   I built a tipi with the door facing her, this long, sleek, muscled, cunning, slow-talking bear of a mountain, this ursine mass looming 4,000 feet above Ashland, laying there stretched out all the way to Medford, with her young sleeping about her and her ears pricked up at the south end, where the sun comes cracking over the ridge in summer.

   Thousands of scrubby, burned-over, garden-variety mountains surround us, but then there's Her, She, the big one, the good one, the beautiful one, the one standing baldly, perpetually over our shoulder like a ten-story Mona Lisa, with the same half-smile, but much prettier, like a Taj Mahal (but alive!), like a holy Stonehenge put up by the race of giants who preceded us. 

   From the local legend-keeper Marjorie O'Hara, I learned she was named Grizzly after some early white hunters who got torn up by grizzlies they were trying to shoot up there.  Good!  And she was called Grizzly by the Natives, so one of their descendants told me.  It was the mountain that took the hunters, though.  She's Mother Bear, the grizzly spirit and that was what she had to say about men coming up there to kill grizzlies.  She's the local diety -- Ursula (ursa=bear), in the same sense the Greco-Roman-Celtic world had "the gods" plus the local divinity who protected them, gave them "home" and held the spirit of place.

   We've had a good relationship.  I speak to her and check her moods often.  I've watched the shadows swoop surreal over her sweet swells and valleys in the late summer evenings.  I've drunk in the moon bulging full like a lava lamp over her metamorphic flanks, which are sea-born and much older than the volcanic Cascades that grew up around her.  I've stood on her summit, watching Shasta, Red Buttes, Mt. Pitt and this tiny town of Ashland which looks like a streak of lichen splashed across the Siskiyou foothills.  I've watched her give up her trees to lightning in the night.  I've thanked her often.  I've put her in the background of our wedding and all the outdoor pictures of our children.  A stone from her summit sits on my altar.      

   She is never mentioned in the tourist brochures, but she is the central fact and feature of Ashland.  She is a given, like your mother.  She is the energy, the feel, the atmosphere that drew in the millers, shopkeepers and Chautauqua ladies, the college and Angus Bowmer's dramatic imaginings and, later, the skiers, swans and real estate agents. When a listing says "views," they mean Grizzly.  You rarely hear people mention her, but she's the only feature here that gets looked at by everyone, every day, several times a day, sometimes for just a moment at a traffic light, and in that moment, the mind empties of business and she touches you.  ~







Vacationing in the Stars

We're all looking for the perfect getaway that isn't more work than our real work and that won't plunge our plastic in and isn't too packaged so as to make us have too cute an adventure and doesn't torture our buns in a seminar.  Something real.  No spa-sprawling.  No life-risking.  It would be nice if it felt like the word "party!" felt when you were 21, free and had a pocketful of cash and car keys. 

   Well, I may have found it. It's the moral equivalent of partying.  It costs $20(!), it's less than a day's drive (a pretty drive) from anywhere in Oregon, they feed you pasta, you're with other relaxed, good-humored people, you're outside, safe and remote in the high desert of central Oregon, it's not strenuous or dangerous at all and you get to go billions of light years into deep space.  Also, it has the word "party" in it.

  They call it the Oregon Star Party.  In August, hundreds of nice people who own expensive telescopes camp in this big prairie, and, for three nights, let you look through their telescopes, absolutely free, and even tell you what you're looking at, how far away it is and what it means.

   You're stumbling around in the dark with 300 other people, talking softly, like you were in a cathedral.  Which you are.  The desert is lit up by the Milky Way, which, if you have not seen far from light pollution, you've not seen at all.  It's what our ancestors for 5 million years had as their nightly wallpaper and we, since Edison, have not.  We need that awe.  We need to feel small at least once a day.

   You hear the word "wow" whispered a lot.   You've seen pictures of these nebulae and clusters before, but until you walk up to a yard-wide scope and put your eye to that eyepiece and let your whole eye and mind and self just leap out of this world across countless light years, I mean, you have not seen it.  It's like the difference between reading about the facts of life and finally experiencing them.

    "Wanna see Andromeda?" says a voice in the dark.  "Sure.  What is it?"  They are helpful.  "It's the galaxy most like ours, a flattened spiral, has about 50 billion stars, only about 750,000 light years away.  It's our sister galaxy.  Actually, we’re going to collide with it in a few billion years." 

    I climb the stepladder and put my eye to it.  "It's what our galaxy would look like if we could get outside it," someone adds.  I have never seen a whole galaxy before.  It's like looking at a real cave era skull or a real rock from the moon.  Your mind has to regroup itself around a much different and larger concept which does not include you and your job and your bills and your world history and your anything.  And that's stress-relieving.  And awe-inducing.

    I show the children for a moment, but don't seem to know what they are looking at.  I've tried to tell them on the drive over the Cascades and at my favorite espresso bar in Bend.  "You see, we're on this planet and the sun is really a star, but just one of billions in the Milky Way..." 

    They sort of get it at age 7 and 9, but the word billion is not awesome to them yet.  They want to get back to our camp and sleep.  What really teaches them proper awe is spreading out the sleeping bags under the Milky Way and laying there cozy and letting that big white band fill up their retinas.  I think our eyes have some actual biological need for looking at stars as we drift off to sleep.

     "Dad, can we ever go out there?"

     "Sure.  We will.  We have to.  You know, we've been to all the worlds and moons that go around the sun. With cameras, that is."

     "Was anyone there?"

     "No.  Only here. We have to look farther, many light years away, which is, well, you would grow old and die trying to just get there."

     "So how are we going to get there?"

     "I don't know.  Probably like Captain Picard.  Stars whizzing by.  Do you guys want to go?"  They think about it.

     "I want to be safe and have air and trees," says Colin.  "And my family," says Hannah.  "I would be lonely."

     They fall quiet.  I look at them.  Their eyes are open.  They don't need no stinkin' telescopes. They're doing the stars as our ancestors did.  Now the air cools and they pull close.  A meteor leaves a fat trail across the sky.  They gasp, then settle back into the Milky Way.  They will never forget this night.  That's why I brought them. 

     "Tomorrow, we'll get scrambled eggs in Bend," I say.  "With ketchup on them," they add, "and hot chocolate."  They roll over and fall asleep. I get up and, for hours, make my annual pilgrimage to the "billions and billions" (Sagan) of stars and the lightyears of deep space, worshipping with my eyes the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius, the Great Orion Nebula and the Galilean moons of Jupiter, one of which is transiting its face and leaving a tiny shadow. 

     It is a ritual homage to stay up til dawn, to show my respects to vastness.  I have to drink in Andromeda again.  "We're coming, sister," I tell her.  This cozy, verdant Earth is our cradle, but we cannot be limited.  We will always be like children with too much energy, too many dreams -- and we make too many messes for one little world.  The cradle is already too small. 

     That feeling when homo erectus, a million years ago, fanned out from Africa into the mystery and majesty of an unpeopled world?  And when homo sapiens followed 100,000 years ago?  That's a central and driving myth of our species, imprinted in the genes.  We will not settle into the tiny cubicles and routines of an overpopulated Earth, but must fan out again, no matter how sheer the cliff presented by the word "lightyear."

     Dawn is coming up crimson over the Ochoco Mountains as I crawl in between the children.  I like to tell them good things to program them while they sleep.  "We're going to the stars," I whisper.  "You'll figure it out.  Or your children will."   ~









The Middle of Nowhere…The Best Place to Be


It was that day when it got over 100 degrees and you knew the thunderheads were going to build up over the Siskiyous and bring us lots of lightning.  The kids were free and wanted to climb a mountain, a local one, not real big. 

   What they really wanted was to hang, just the three of us, as we had done so many thousands of times over their 17 and 19 years of life, just walking around, going in stores, cracking jokes, eating lunch out on some bluff, looking at this vast, beautiful, natural mystery we get to live in here, so, though I could have worked, I dropped it and we grabbed some fruit, drinks, trail mix and took off, beyond Siskiyou Pass to the trailhead at Pilot Rock.

   What is more perfect than trekking up a trail with people you love, gaining elevation, stopping to catch breath, sharing in a common mind about the beauty, and our good fortune, as we scramble up the scree of this columnar jointed volcanic neck, the only one in the populated part of the Rogue Valley?  We reach that narrow, steep chute, the final path to the top.  The kids haven’t done rock groping and we stop and talk it over, how it would be better to live and do it another day, when they’ve had some training and are wearing the right shoes.  In other words, too scary.  I gladly agree.

   We do lunch on a big lava rock, with sweeping view from Shasta to Mt. Ashland, taking grandiose pictures of each other in poses, serene to goofy.  I’ve always taken every chance to turn something, anything into an educational op, so I point out the rusty field with nothing growing on it. Know why? It’s all volcanic ejecta, porous to rain, so ain’t no roots gonna get water. 

   This is a time for story-telling, I decide, so, looking at the sweep of the valley up to the northwest, I tell them how I’ve been reading on the internet about the first mass UFO sightings in June and July of 1947 – and that one of them was right here, on the cloudless afternoon of June 29, a formation of nine flying saucers, “white as snow geese,” witnessed by Dr. Peter Vogel and his wife Kay, plus 18 other people in their group. 

   It was five days earlier, near Mt. Rainier, I relate, that a pilot saw a formation of nine UFO’s and called them “saucer-shaped,” causing the press to coin the term “flying saucer.” Ten days after our incident, the notorious Roswell encounter happened, where the Air Force reported finding a crashed UFO, with alien bodies, in New Mexico, then quickly retracted the story, starting in motion the mythos of willful government cover-up.

   Kids, I say, there are a lot of looney stories out there, maybe including Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster, but a lot of “illegal information” is likely true and it’s important that you read everything and make up your own minds.  Remember, continental drift, evolution and destruction of dinosaurs by an asteroid (not to mention racial harmony and environmental sustainability) all once were considered the province of unstable, dangerous, barking-mad thought criminals – and we wouldn’t get anywhere if we didn’t keep pushing our way outside that box called normal.

   Are the kids impressed? Nah. They ignore me.  But you know it went inside them and will be there down the road when they need it and it might seem wiser to go with what’s comfortable and agreed upon, rather than step off the beaten path, question things and be unpopular.

   We drive down old 99, east of the freeway and stop to watch a rattlesnake, its belly swollen with some unlucky kangaroo rat, sunning itself in the middle of the pavement. Colin is amazed. He’s never seen a rattler.  He takes many pictures of it, which will be on his MySpace before the next sun rises.

   At Hilt, the charming, blue-collar remnant of that company town, we have the best malts and shakes I recall in many a moon and check out the cracker post cards, one showing a couple watching UFOs overhead and commenting, “darn, more Californians moving in.”

   Down the Colestine Valley, we drop in on the Buddhist temple garden, spinning all the prayer wheels, making a joint wish for world peace and quietly marveling at the great, colorful statues of Buddha, White Tara, the female Buddha of compassion, long life, healing and wish-fulfillment and Green Tara, the female Buddha of enlightenment and liberation, towering above us.  The heat bears down on us. We are silent.  We take a movie of Hannah walking, young, lovely, down a corridor of spinning prayer wheels.

   Climbing up to the ski road, we splash off in the cascading creeks. Colin makes a movie with the digital camera hanging by its strap out the car window, crazily spinning. We go into hysterics watching it, seeing our faces flashing by.  We swim in Emigrant Lake, which is almost too warm to be refreshing.  The thunderheads tower up madly in the heat, getting ready to unload their miles of lightning, one every second or two for hours, thrilling us.

   We’re so lucky not to live in a big city, Hannah says. There’s so much to do, even in the middle of nowhere, the best place to be.  You hand yourself over to it and let it find you.  It always does.   ~











When Merry Pranksters
Battled the Venusians

So we’re flyin down 99 to Medford in the back of an old pickup in the June dusk and Kesey was wankin on his mouth harp, always trying to shift the energy, his golden hair curling out of his red bandanna and we’re headed for Bend in the River, this town meeting that he got 12-grand of Oregon Humanities money to do and it’s the Summer of 74 – that’s 25 years ago this month, man – and we don’t know it yet, but it’s kind of the swan song of The Sixties, a good last act of it and we’re trying to “work within the system” – remember those words? – and still have fun and keep some of that soul we found.

   There are 200 people in this hot, sweaty room, a lot of hairy freaks, but really all kinds of people and we all get in little circles about land use, the economy, transportation, energy, health care, education, communications and – ready? – consciousness.  The Medford tv news guy says “What’s consciousness?” and I say I don’t know, man, some hippie BS they dreamed up.

   Then Kesey, ya, Ken Kesey who wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” ya Oregon’s own bad boy genius Merry Prankster who lit up the West in psychedelic colors, he decides to walk into the buzz saw of newly budding feminism and says hey, don’t have abortions, just give your kids to me.  I’ll raise em.  The women are thinking now here’s a dumbass farmboy who just doesn’t get it and they tear him apart.  There were screams.

   So all these sweaty citizens in town meetings all over the state earnestly get down and draw up a list of issues called a “media referendum” which are printed in all the daily newspapers and 5,000 people send them in. And each town elects delegates to go to this four-day Bend in the River convention in Bend over the 4th of July for a big final vote.

   You’ll recognize some of these people who represented us there: Carol Dunning, who worked at Ashland Women’s Health Center (now Community Health Center), kindly, slow-talking Mort Newman of RV Council on Aging, Mary Duhaime who went on to become a good cop and lawyer, Helen Wilson of the great wall weavings, Paula Cracas, then of the Community Food Store, Barry Grant who farmed in Talent, Fred Lorish who ran Shinto alternative school and Elizabeth Muller who taught high school in Ashland.

   The guy from the Trib in Medford writes an analysis saying Kesey and his gang are a bunch of rich artists just running a prank on public money which is sort of true, but it really nettles Kesey so he writes this response saying the media has been infiltrated by Venusians.  You can tell because they have no aura, are always trying to undermine our life support system and “they don’t like love.” 

   Its kind of a mindblower what Oregonians 25 years ago wanted: no nukes in the state, public access tv and amnesty for Vietnam resisters.  That all came true.  Some of it partly came true: preservation of all farmland (ever hear of land use planning?), guaranteed health care based on income (at least we got Oregon Health plan and a net of Community Health Centers), alternative schools with vouchers (didn’t foresee it being used as a fundamentalist training camp).  Just plain forget about these: no personal info amassed in computers, steady-state (no-growth) economy, higher tax rate on higher energy use.

   So off we go to Bend to debate searing issues over which we have absolutely no power and we sit in these groups at the community college and there’s so much hostility and people want change so much and don’t feel they have access to the system so its all boiling out here and of course we party bigtime at nite and then go live on Oregon Public tv with final debate and voting and I’m anchoring this freight train with Karen who has a women’s show in Medford tv and everyone promises to just get to the point without the flaming and be good boys and girls and Kesey keeps order by ringing this schoolmarm bell with a handle and its all really quite a scream and when its over Kesey and Babbs, ya Ken Babbs his old sidekick open their brief case and pull out the Jack Daniels and let me tell you that tasted good.   ~






Why They Really Want the Toilet Seat Down

 One day, when I was a little boy, my mom told me not to leave the toilet seat up after I tinkled.  I said ok.  I went off.  I didn’t want to discuss toilets with my mom.  But it started eating at me.  I felt I’d crossed some line – left the toilet seat up!  And it seemed to have something to do with women.

   The next time mom told me to put the seat down, I had to ask. “Why?  Up, down, what’s the difference?  When it’s your time to use it, you can put it down, can’t you?  Like, when I use it, I have to put it up, right?  Who cares?”  This is called guy logic.

   Mom tapped her foot and looked me up and down slowly.  I was crossing that line again, I could sense it.  Women stuff.  Her look said: this is only one of hundreds, nay thousands of things about women that you aren’t meant to understand with your male rationality; you are only expected to intuit that it’s good for you to put the stinkin’ seat down. 

   But her mouth said, “Because my skirt can touch the rim of the toilet.”

   Oh my God, so that’s it!  This could mean only one thing: I had soiled the rim.  Shame crept over me like a disease.  I put the seat down and rushed outside for air.  I – me! – had befouled my mother’s skirt!  How long had this been going on?  My father could have spared me this, but did he say anything?  Nothing. 

   I started putting the toilet seat down all the time and doing a lot of other intuitive, seemingly nonlogical (to a guy) things that women seemed to want.  And one day, trying to further my understanding of women, I asked this very candid, down-to-earth woman friend why guys always confessed affairs and women rarely did. 

   She laughed.  “Guys.  You think you got all these brains.  No!  Guys are slow, man.  Let me clue you, ok?  Women are like cats, guys are like dogs.  Cats cover it up in the flower bed, like it should be.  They walk away.  You can’t tell anything happened.  Discreet, yknow?  Dogs do it in the middle of the lawn, then kick grass all over it, like they were trying to call attention to it.  Hey look!  I have nothing to hide! 

   “And that’s why men leave the toilet seat up.  Well, we don’t want to hear it.  The home belongs to women, get it?  If you want to go do it on the lawn, fine.  But this is ours.  Put the stinkin’ seat down.”     ~














What is it Saying: The Pain in Men’s Faces

Back before urban civilization and organized religion, boys at puberty were initiated into a sense of mission for their lives, of belonging to the tribe, of reverence for women, of connectedness with earth, nature and the cycle of days, seasons and lives, of their coming role as fathers and their place in the web of spirits and deities.

   The older men led them in this and it was usually out away from the village and their mothers and younger children. It was secret, so they didn’t know what they were in for.  It was terrifying, so they would shake lose from their accustomed ego roles and go through a death-rebirth, but, since it was secret, they wouldn’t have any idea what they were being reborn into.  But they could see by looking at older boys that the rites of passage had made them different.  The older boys knew something. 

   It was a ritual experience filled with pain, darkness, drums, chanting, masks, suffering, fear. It was an intentional and permanent severing of the ties with mother and her world.  It was childhood’s end and the creation of a new being, one bonded to other men.  It was intended to shape men who could handle the job of being warriors – men who would ensure the survival of the tribe by understanding their place and the tribe’s place in the cycles and balance of nature – hunting, territory, birth, mating, death, storytelling, ritual and the tribes relationship with powerful and unseen powers.

   We don’t have that now.  It’s almost gone from even the most remote tribal systems.  While many bemoan the loss of immersion in tribe, nature and spirit, it’s hard not to think our progression into mind, ego, urban life and individual isolation was not inevitable – if not intended.  It often seems we can never live that deep connection so many of us long for. 

   But thousands of men are making a beginning – not living in tribes but beginning to find other men and enacting that same initiation.  They’re called the New Warriors and they’ve been doing it for almost 20 years in North America, Europe and South Africa. What goes on is secret but it’s founder, Bill Kauth, now of Ashland, says, “You come Friday night and go down into some intense games that bond you with other men.  On Saturday, you work on your life’s mission and we create a situation for each man to go deep into his heart. We use ceremony and ritual. On Sunday, we prepare men to take what they’ve learned back into the world.”

   I’ve been asked several times – what was the most important thing I learned.  Well, the games were intense all right.  And the “situation” indeed took me deep into my heart.  But what shifted everything was looking straight into the eyes of 60 men and seeing who they really were.  A lot of pain there, in every face.  I’ve seen it – but never really seen it.  It’s called the Shadow, a Jungian term meaning everything we, most of our lives, don’t want to see and spend a lot of energy stuffing, managing, hiding and being run by.  But these men have learned to bring it out of the dark, learn its secrets, love it and integrate it into their lives.

   The Shadow is what Iron John is all about.  In myth, he’s a large, slimy, shaggy, smelly humanoid living in a swamp near the king’s castle. He is captured and caged by the king because he makes people disappear in his swamp.  When the prince, a young boy, lets his gold ball roll into the cage, Iron John keeps it.  He’ll give it back if the prince gets the key to the cage and sets him free.  Where’s the key?  Iron John answers: under your mother’s pillow. 

   In this myth, the centerpiece of Robert Bly’s bestselling book Iron John, we have all the elements of the mystery around what happened to men’s power, fire, energy, intelligence, passion, during 5,000 years of civilization.  Iron John, though obtuse in the refinements of urban or courtly life, somehow possesses the golden ball -- emblematic of the missing spirit, self-reliance and wholeness of a prince coming into manhood.  To possess it, the prince must embrace the shadow and free savagery itself – though this wild energy may bring harm to the order valued by King and Queen.  What stands in the way?  Mom.  To be whole and have his power, the prince must betray her, seek to his own instinct and basically cut the cord with mom.  He does.  And he rides off into the wide world on the shoulders of Iron John.

   That’s what was on the faces of those men: Iron John, reclaimed.  The shadow brought to the light and worn, like a cloak won in battle.  The making of men distinct and apart from their mothers and from that energy embodied in their wives or lovers.  What initiated men grow out of is the old patriarchal mask of strength and domination behind which we live out (and hide from) an unhealthy relationship of fear, dependence and mother-fixation toward women, said Dennis Mead-Shikaly, an Ashland personal coach, New Warrior facilitator and executive director of New Warriors in the mid-1990s.  “Men coming out of the training tend to be strongly committed to healthier, more honest relationships with their partners. It can shake a woman up but most say they love the men we send home to them.”

   When Bly began lecturing and writing articles in the early 1980s – and especially when his book and PBS show with Bill Moyers came out around 1990 – men responded with a huge hunger for initiation and for knowing other men without the long-conditioned competitiveness, distancing and armor.  Huge numbers were and still are hungering – like every man in the van ride to the training – coping with the end of marriages and long relationships.  They couldn’t explain it.  But it begged the question: why are we all here together, seeking initiation into the camaraderie of men right after…well…after not finding it with women?  Our American mythos says the family will give us all we need.  But what happens after the first divorce and millions of shattered men can’t see their kids half or all of the time…and are mostly clueless why the pairbond dream didn’t work out.  Something’s missing.  Is it the key that frees the wildman?  It’s under the female’s pillow.  Who put it there?  One immediately thinks mom did.  What if we put it there?  What if she doesn’t even want it?  But it hardly matters.  There can be only one concern – to get the key.  And that’s a big part of initiation.

   And what is initiation?  It’s taking males from the psychology of the boy to that of the man, says Carl Griesser of Ashland, executive director of the ManKind Project, the umbrella corporation for New Warriors.  In our culture, we pretty much leave that to just happen – with rituals of driving, drinking, drugs, sex, leaving home and getting your apartment, sometimes going into the military to seek the direction of older warriors of a different sort.  But it doesn’t just happen, Griesser said. You have to become spiritually conscious and only older, conscious men can teach that.

   The primal urge for initiation is largely lost in the culture but lives on in instinct, says Mead-Shikaly. Its absence across the planet accounts for much of how life is out of balance.  Men are out of touch with themselves.  What the Warriors are working to bring back is that ancient practice of being accountable, responsible, emotionally awake and able to relate to women in good ways, he said.  Spiritually conscious, he adds, means learning again to be part of the fabric of life and knowing that what we do impacts everything else, all people, all life in that fabric and not thinking we are above or exempt from it.

   At the training, men are confronted with the question: who do you serve?  We don’t get asked that very often.  We are conditioned to believe we serve ourselves, our bank account, mortgage, our career track, our ego images and when we make family – our partners and children and their agendas.  Men quiver at the question, said Mead-Shikaly.  “It confronts their denial and takes them out of that get-what-you-can mindset. Their mission can shift to service.”

   This opens the door for men to create a deeper mission that includes all life and the fate of the planet, creating what Kauth calls “social capital” – the trust, vision and mutual relationships that are the “glue of society.”

   Warriors often say their best work happens in the ten-week Integration Groups that follow the training and usually go on for years.  I was judging and terrified and told the facilitators I couldn’t think of any six guys I’d less rather be with – a comment we would laugh heartily about later, as it became clear how much of what we see in others, especially in intimate relationships is projection.  We externalize our Shadow on that person doing that thing that we most don’t want to look at in ourselves.  But in doing the work, one always ends up looking in the mirror at that scared little boy trying to hide out from the deeper work. Finally, I laughed, “It’s all projection, isn’t it?” Yes, the facilitator said, a huge part.  But that’s how we bring out the Shadow, own it, love it and integrate it.

   Griesser nails is succinctly: “Most men are terrified of other men.”  Hence all the man-chat about sports, politics, cars, hunting, fishing, etc.  We’re bred to compete, says Mead-Shikaly, and it’s become almost instinctive.  It’s painfully isolating. “We hide our weaknesses and that keeps us lonely, separate and afraid. From that place we get sick and do sick things, like trying to dominate women and the planet.” Kauth adds: “War is obsolete and men now must battle what’s inside, not outside.”

   We live in chaotic, often painful times, personally and globally, and a lot of this is coming from a death-rebirth in the way we do relationships.  Men are realizing that they can’t get from women everything they need and want in life -- and that this in fact is part of the shadow of patriarchy that men themselves created over many millennia.  In isolating women in rigid roles with home, marriage and motherhood, men isolated themselves, too.  And, although love-marriage-children-home are huge steps in life, they are not men’s initiation.  A woman can’t initiate a man – only men can.  Men who’ve been there.   ~




JFK: With Great Leaders,
It Seems Nothing is Happening

John Kennedy needed help.  I helped him.  He was trying to get off a stage after a speech in Lansing so he could shake hands with people.  He asked if he could put his hand on my shoulder and get down.  I said sure.  He had a bad back.  I didn’t.  I was in high school.  It was fall 1960 and he was the nominee for president.

   I asked for his autograph.  All I had was a playing card in my wallet.  I handed it to him.  He flipped it over and laughed out loud. There was a naked woman on it playing strip poker and holding up her halter, smiling.  “It looks like she’s losing, but not unhappy about it,” he said as he scrawled on the back.  He added, “I don’t usually get handed things like this to sign.”

Then, off he went into history, the best years of our history.  The best are the ones you scarcely remember because you’re happy, but it seems not much is happening.  That’s what’s supposed to happen if you have a good president – nothing.  Nothing bad, anyway.  But something bad did happen 40 years ago.

   Major McShane strode into the press room where I was a journalist. It was the Marines.  It was Friday, gorgeously sunny for November.  It was almost lunch.  He had a look of terror, almost anger in his eyes.  He was a decorated Corsair pilot from the South Pacific.  Never seen him look this way.  With both calmness and fury, he said, “Does anyone have a radio?”

   “In the radio shack there’s one, sir,” I said.

   “Kennedy’s been shot,” he whispered loudly.  We all went with him and there were those words, read from the UPI wire, “…cut down by a hail of assassins bullets…motorcade in Dallas…First Lady was not hit…rushed to Parkland…”

   So began Four Days in November.  Finally, tv caught up and got the anchors on their tacky cardboard sets and Cronkite would glance up at the clock to mark the moment, “…official now, at 1 p.m., Dallas time, President Kennedy is…”  No, the mind screams, not that.  Don’t say that.  Heroes always get wounded in the shoulder, but they go on.  Only the bad guys get their brains splattered all over the street.

   Anyway, they picked up some runt loser in a torn t-shirt.  He’d learned to shoot in the Marines.  They were good at teaching that.  I looked down at the crossed rifles on my chest, the expert medal.  Then that horrid dirge music and the muffled drums, all but chanting the words: dead, dead, dead. 

   They swore in that person from Texas who would take us into Vietnam, wasting 58,000 working class American guys for nothing and ten times that many Vietnamese and seeming to start a huge, unending period of alienation, conflict and broken heart for the nation.

   Years later, as the war ground down, I would be interviewing Schlesinger.  He was at the center of the brain trust of Camelot.  I asked him, would Kennedy have gone in there?  No, he said, he wouldn’t have.  He would have found ways.  That’s what he was good at.  It broke my heart again to hear that, though I’d always felt it was true. 

   Why wouldn’t he have gone in there?  Intelligence.  That’s what he had.  We don’t get that often.  Listening to him talk and watching his mind move among the facts, the realities, it took your breath away.  He would do some spin here and there, if his aides wrote it, but it wasn’t bombastic and disgusting and inherently non-credible, as it all has become since. 

   And always the humor running under everything – like being asked if he would recommend to young people that they grow up and run for president.  The pause, the scanning of his own mind, the half smile – “No, I wouldn’t recommend it.”  The whole press corps bursts into laughter. 

   His mind was spare, like the language of Greek drama. He’d already died and come back from it.  The patrol boat getting run over in the South Pacific, the Addison’s disease, the endless back pain and surgery, the brother shot down in Europe.  He’d been shredded already. He had nothing to prove. He wasn’t much of a liar.  He took nothing personally.  He made famous the saying, “Don’t get mad, get even.”

   He loved reading and could do it fast, tossing out the extraneous.  He read Ian Fleming’s 007 novels (this was before the movies) and Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of
August,” which detailed the immense folly of getting dragged into World War I – of thinking there were no options and that saving face was everything. 

   Fleming had the same spareness of mind and humor as Kennedy: “Bond took his usual place across the desk from M’s tall-armed chair. He noticed there was no file on the
expanse of red leather in front of the chair. And the In and Out baskets were both empty. Suddenly he felt really bad about everything.”

   Those words, like Kennedy’s, invite participation by their very subtlety, their insinuation, their beckoning to the unfolding fun.  That sheer class, in our political process, all died with Kennedy.  He was having fun.  We talk a lot about self-love.  Here, in Kennedy, was a man loving himself – and that’s why, to the disgust (read jealousy) of many, he was irresistible to women.

   From the Guns of August, Kennedy said he took a huge lesson, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, that you always have options.  It may have saved our world.  You always have friends, ways, choices -- something can and will happen.  There is magic here, in each person and in the society.  You don’t make it happen -- you reach, you wait, you work, you keep talking, you let it happen.  But war is making things happen.

   I get on the internet and find the IQ’s of presidents.  There it is -- JFK at 181, Clinton at 183.  (No polemic intended, but did notice the present Bush last at 91.)  What pattern emerges here?  It’s a presence.  Both Kennedy and Clinton had an amazing ability to take punches and keep their wits and focus.  Their hearts, drenched in mishap and misery were disciplined instead to task – and to happiness.  And with that they could take their battles to the highest level.  And have fun doing it.

   The killing of the man stole something out of our hearts – the mojo, the yeast starter in the bread, the confidence to reason, suggest and dream and not just work the system, with contempt for the adversary. 

   Once, thirty years after the act, I went to the Dealey Plaza memorial, up on the sixth floor of the book depository.  There was a huge book you could sign and write your thoughts.  I stood there and wept, reading it.  We loved you so, it said, thank you for giving us so much hope, you were so good and beautiful, if we could only find someone like you again.

   He was, finally, really making the country work for everyone.  “Negroes” were on the bus instead of at the end of a rope. It was happening.  So was the red phone to Moscow, the Peace Corps and the Test Ban Treaty.  It was all going to be possible and no one was going to get left out of it. 

   I would go on to Oregon and travel with his brother Bobby, reporting his ’68 primary campaign here.  He was beautiful, too.  Everyone wanted to touch him.  At breakfast once, I asked him who he thought killed JFK.  He said the Warren Report summed it up fine, but history would show he thought the mob did it, because he and his brother pursued them so relentlessly – and why would he want to say that publicly and risk another hit?

   But that was all gone and now, through his suffering, he knew the hypocrisy and hate were not in the mob. They were in the human heart – and he was speaking truth to that
and going light years beyond his brother.  And of course he would get his brains blown out too, as would King.  Both of them would have been presidents, too – good ones. 

   It was hard for my generation to believe in much after all that, plus Vietnam and Watergate piled on it.  You turned to your own life.  What consciousness and hope were in the sixties, became kids and real estate in the seventies – and sickening profiteering in the 80s.  But there was a moment there, several moments, when, as Bob Dylan wrote, I gazed upon the sound of freedom flashing.    ~










A Soul Emerging from the Cheesecake

“If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred…
I swear to you the body is the soul”
                --Walt Whitman
“I Sing the Body Electric”

A funny thing happened on the way to the city council meeting the other night.  I’m interviewing a couple dozen people who are about to take off their clothes on the city hall lawn to protest the council’s new nudity ban.  I’m munching plums with them and listening to this young woman talk very thoughtfully about shrinking civil liberties and about how the only legitimate nudity in our society is the cheesy kind used to sell stuff.

   What does that do to women?  It makes them crazy.  It makes them dislike and be ashamed of their bodies.  Why?  Because the glossy cheesecake we see in every slot in the magazine rack in the Safeway checkout line is a sleek, perfect 10, no cottage cheese thighs, no dimpled butts, no pulling of gravity on protuberances.  What they see in the magazine rack is “not me.”  I’m not that.  I’m not a babe.  I couldn’t be used to sell a 20-year old Geo Metro.  Guess I’ll go home and, in my unacknowleded grief, stuff down these groceries I’m buying.

   What does it do to men?  Well, take my reaction.  It plays me like a cello.  My interview subject is wearing clothes, although I know that’s about to change.  She’s 25.  The midriff shows.  The cleavage moves in and out of view in her low-cut top.  The eye follows it, entranced.  The mind imagines what she must look like in all her naked glory.  How many man hours have been spent in this pursuit?  Conservatively, it must be in the low hundreds of thousands.  If these lovely shapes, shades, textures are used in an ad, will I watch that ad?  Yes, I will.  It’s called conditioning. 

   Just like the depressed woman at the magazine rack, I can’t control my reactions, even after decades of reading, group discussions and seminars on automatic, imprinted behaviors.  I have to catch myself and say, wake up, man.  This is how it works.  We’re conditioned to want what we don’t have, to always be reaching, struggling and strategizing to get it.  But we never get there.  It’s this sense of disconnection from source, supply, fulfillment (bred in disconnection from the tribe we evolved in) that’s at the heart of civilization and makes it go round.  Without isolated, disempowered, self-rejecting individuals -- capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism and patriarchy don’t work.

   But then, something happens.  She takes off her clothes.  And guess what happens?  Nothing.  She keeps on talking.  I glance over her body and within 10 seconds at most, the great mystery, the allure, the sell, the distance between us – it all evaporates.  All her “naughty parts” become supremely not naughty or any more interesting than a foot or forearm.  The game halts.  As Whitman wrote…this is the soul.

   That’s the great puzzle about nudity, so feared, hated even.  The body is not a big deal.  It’s only a big deal as we dress it in class, flash and mystery -- which is kind of fun sometimes -- and tease ourselves with its distance, unattainability and questions of our worthiness for it.  Or, much worse, if we make laws that say bad things will happen if its generative organs get loose in the sunlight.

   Bad things won’t happen. It’s like making rules that Johnny can’t chew gum in class, pick his nose, play doctor or look at girlie websites.  What’s the first thing Johnny is going to do? He’s going to check it out and learn that nothing bad happens -- except he feels inexplicably guilty, not only now but for the rest of his life. How do we handle guilt?  By stuffing it.  That’s the whole meaning of shame – it’s that naughty, no-no shadowland we mustn’t go to.  Result: depression, alcoholism, religiosity and other external fixes.

   My favorite interview is Susan, 58, a clothed passerby. She danced naked in the Sixties musical “Hair.”  I did too, in a theater in downtown Ashland, now in the nude-free zone.  But you have to keep doing it or the conditioning closes over and makes you afraid. She calls the law sad, nasty and underhanded, part of the “death machine” growing in our culture. Again, the awareness, she says, of how the ban tunes her into the feeling her body “isn’t good enough.”

   We gaze on the playful, picnicking crowd, tossing frisbees with their naked kids in the warm, slanting sunset. Smiling drivers (mostly) honk and wave. Whitman, my favorite poet, said it. These partying protesters are singing the body and the reason it’s electric is not because it’s sexy – though it is that.  It’s because, right here on Main Street, they’re showing us what we’re really afraid of -- the soul.   ~







Patriarchy: Men and Woman in Standoff

We’re riding over to the coast with the soccer moms, one of whom is doing a paper on patriarchy for a woman’s studies class and after grabbing our chais and lattes at a Grants Pass Dutch Broz, yummy, we jump into the big question, ok what is patriarchy?

   We all know its obvious forms and they’ve been addressed – women get equal pay, credit and housing and they don’t get abuse, rape or sexual harassment. And you don’t even make jokes at their expense – although jokes about women drivers are big among teen boys (Why can’t Helen Keller drive? Cuz she’s a woman).

   But, driving through the lovely mists of the coast range, it’s like a verbal-emotional dam has burst.  The first thing the women agree on is that patriarchy is everywhere and insidious, which is a word for diseases that become firmly entrenched before the symptoms appear. In other words, it’s destructive and, to most people, not visible.

   R. takes notes in the back seat and puts them in her paper for her SOU teacher, Rosemary Dunn Dalton, who created Dunn House, the safe zone for abused women. If there’s a big “aha” experience in this long talk, it’s that virtually all men and most women, no matter if liberal or conservative, are blind to the evils of patriarchy.

   And what are these evils? They’re a constellation of assumptions and attitudes that women are great for meals, sex, housekeeping and kids – and that men work hard, lonely jobs to support wife, home and kids and neither feels much appreciated or respected, let alone empowered by it. And resentments build up over the years and ruin marriages.

   But yet, we all say, the people we’ve loved, married and had kids with are all nice people and wouldn’t intentionally exploit, abuse and oppress the other gender, based on sex roles, would they?  Nah. And we’ve all done our best to raise awareness and be fair and non-chauvinistic, but patriarchy goes far deeper than that.

   But, where do you see it, says R. Where does the rubber hit the road in your real life? I look back over the manuscript of R’s paper and see us all quoted. It starts coming back.

   “Even my husband,” says C., “who thinks of himself as a liberated man, he really feels women are different and less than men. He believes they’re really happy in their roles, doing housework, raising kids, so what’s the big problem?”

   “Ya, We follow in the footsteps of our mothers, thinking if I’m a good enough wife, keep the house clean, have sex when and how he wants it, take care of the kids, then he won’t abandon me,” says V. “But the bottom line issue of patriarchy is to make us feel powerless and afraid, so we can be controlled. We’re dependent on men for money and this ties into capitalism. We’re shown by the media that we must buy and buy in order to feel good enough, so both patriarchy and consumerism create codependence.”

   Now voices are raised, caffeine is kicking in, people are completing each other’s sentences, and the big shock of recognition hits – we’re all being run by this. And, as usual, so many issues come down to the love between men and women – and, says C., 99 percent of men will not deal with that.

   How, with all the books, groups and publicity around patriarchy, how aren’t men getting it? Because, hey, conditioning. Men are conditioned to be in control, says I, so anything that weakens that is inimical and scary. Men don’t like that and most women don’t like it in men, either.  Result: denial.  Let’s just go with the cultural myth that people fall out of love after a year or two and the old thrill cools off. You become pals.

   Where did patriarchy come from and why did we need it, R. asks? Wow, great question.  This one gets chatted up and kicked all over the van like a box of ping-pong balls, but we’ve all read our history and, says C., it’s not hard to find the barons, bishops and warlords, century after century, telling the common folk that, without a higher power to run their lives and protect them from evil, they’re toast, both here and hereafter. Patriarch wants the average person scared and isolated – and not consulting one’s own heart for answers.

   “We can’t be left to our own devices,” she says. “What would happen to men and women then? But it’s totally run by fear, fear of this or that happening, fear of loss of control.  Now the current fear is being fed by terrorism ruining our lives and that our God is the right one and theirs is evil.”

   We touch on the first farmers 10,000 years ago, who realized, from penning animals that females didn’t create life by themselves and the male seed was needed -- and the kids were not “ours” but “mine” and men got into using force to gain farm land and “improve” it to pass onto “their” offspring. Men saw themselves as doing all the heavy lifting, so they’re more important. Women, instead of being the miraculous portal for life and union with the Sacred Feminine, now becomes a miraculous portal of dinner, child care and sex.

   How patriarchy shows up in relationships is that both people are “in love” at first, comfortable in the zone that doesn’t threaten patriarchy, then the woman naturally wants more intimacy. The man, looking at it through the eyes of a patriarchal land owner, warrior and clan father, views this as weakness, not fear of emotion and freaks out, demanding the woman, if she is to earn his love, become more independent and have better self esteem, says moi, who’s been down that road.

   “No wonder women start to develop lousy self esteem!” shouts C., slapping her thigh.

   “They tear down the woman,” says V., “but of course still want her for sex, on their terms.”

   “It becomes the Mexican Standoff,” says C. “If he’s not going to give it to me, then I’m not going to give it to him.”

   So, eventually, the woman has to focus, not on trying to get him to change, but on how to change and grow herself,” says V. “We must be willing to deal with the pain, grief and anger, over and over, that comes up with these issues and seeing all that we’ve given away over the years.”

   We’re pulling into Crescent City now, where the boys will surf all day, while we build a fire, cook them hot dogs and sip our wine. 

   “You know,” says, V., “I was trying to tell (a guy friend of ours) how things can only change when men go back to the roots and start again to see and love women as the sacred feminine, the life force, the very meaning of it all. I told him women have to have this – and if men learn to give it, they can have everything they’ve ever dreamed of from a man.  And you know what he said?”

   We smile, waiting for the punch line, watching our boys catch the little waves, hoping they would be the generation to break out of this.

   “He said, ‘Men need it, too’. I just walked away.”   ~





This Magic Vessel of Words

On the day the first man went into space, I got myself a fat spiral notebook from the Michigan State University bookstore and lay it open on the desk in my bedroom.

   With my cartridge ink pen, I wrote “1961” large at the top of the page.  Finally, it was here.  I was ready.  I would write.  The pages didn’t belong to the school or teachers.  I would not fill my book with the nonsense they wanted.  The pages were mine. The smooth, blank, white paper had a silken, almost sexual feel as the black ink flowed onto it.

  I would say what I liked here.  It didn’t matter.  I had complete freedom.  An era was coming to an end soon: I would be out of high school and leave my parents’ home.  I wanted to write about the last few months of it.

   Here’s how the world registered itself on me: “I took my aptitude test in the sick room.  Who walks in and takes it too?  Valerie. We were all alone. She is sharp as hell, brown hair & sweet.  I didn’t even talk to her tho we were introduced at the Civic Center dance.  I’m just a chicken when it comes to hustling girls.  Went to the Starlite Drive-in but there were no chicks there.  The Cuban Castro regime is upset about a rebel invasion and who does Russia accuse?  The good old scapegoat USA.  Ann is crazy about me, I think. I shouldn’t be so cocky, I know.  But she waved at me and I think I can tell. What a drag Sunday is.  Nothing to do but look forward to homework and facing my teachers without it on Monday.  I found out I was working out wrong.  I should do less reps with more weights to gain weight and have large muscles. Slept 13 hours last nite.”

   It’s rough but it’s got soul.  I love the guy who wrote it.  He had honesty that those blank pages and those words helped him hang onto.  Stalked by anxieties and longings in an adolescent jungle, he found out how to own himself.  One of the ways he did it was with words. 

   His way with words, his need for words was a gift from his journalist father and journalist grandfathers and it led him onto a life of journalism which is largely this exotic, post-tribal, quite recently created occupation of sitting there listening to people tell you stories, then going off and telling their stories to the whole tribe.

   I learned to love listening.  I learned that listening created space for the other person to put words to that big, fluxing watercolor wash we all carry inside us and which is our story.

   Once, a Medford tv station owner asked me – don’t you get tired just listening to people and not saying much?  I laughed.  It had never crossed my mind that I could be bored with it.  I get invited into people’s lives for an hour to hear what they most want the world to know.  I am touched by it constantly, by the heroism of each journey.

   This past month, I listened to Frank Merrill of the Karuk tribe pray that we “open our hearts and let all the confusion, bitterness and hurt leave us.”  I sat there as Don Wells told me of being a conscientious objector in World War II and that his Minnesota-Methodist upbringing taught him that “If we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of human beings more than in any one nation, it would be impossible to wage war justly.”

   I listened to Richard Straub talk about how he teaches non-artists to let go and paint, by following some simple rules which I took to be rules for life itself: “Don’t listen to negative thoughts of yourself or others about what you’re creating, feel free to modify it lots of times, never repeat exact features you’ve done before, remember the eraser is as important as the writing end and expect to feel uncomfortable.  If you’re satisfied, you need to move to a less comfortable place.”

   I stood there in the sunlit plaza as SOU junior Ben Davidson basically gave up all claims to future respectability and government employment by publicly leading a parade in opposition to the jailing of 7,000 Americans a year for marijuana use. I listened to his story and his Voltaire-like eloquence: “They tell us pot can ruin our lives and to prove it, hey, we’ll yank your student financial aid, seize your house, fine you beyond your ability to pay and put you in jail.”

   I’ve talked with John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy, Tom McCall and Wayne Morse and Nancy Peterson, all dead heroes now, all with the amazing knack for telling true stories even though in elective office, and for speaking visions, which are stories they were bringing into being by their own guts and intelligence.  I listened to them and told their words.

   All ancient societies recognized the magic power of words and revered those bards who committed the tribe’s lore to memory and who, by firelight, would carry their people to distant events and be there and know it and love the deeds and thoughts of ancestors and deities and love them as if they were here. 

   And yes, I love the listening, I love the cybernetic screen now, instead of the earth-tree-paper I used to impress with pen and clacking typewriter and I feel guided by voices of those who, all my life have brought me the tribe’s stories to repeat and to remember.   ~






Moments, Like Beads

We dive into the lucid, cool waters of the Applegate. Toasting pine sap wafts on the air.  If sunlight has a smell, it’s this smell.  We look for a nice rock to take home, a standing stone for the garden. I pause by the bridge at the state line where our cabins stood in the early seventies, where we lived happily without running water or electricity, learning the subtle light of kerosene lamps on our beautiful, young faces, the mysteries of splitting malls and outhouses, wood-burning stoves and bread-making, mu tea and rolled cigarettes and long, amazing talks into the night, living on love and a few odd dollars and getting our jug of wine and guitars into a circle and singing Dylan’s words:

   I wish, I wish, I wish in vain, that we could sit simply in that room again. Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat. I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that.

   I find my old treehouse and, without looking, my hands still know where all the spikes are to climb up there and be with my thoughts and sway in the wind.  And their faces and voices all come back to me – Louie and Jan, Diane, Carol, Romeo, Ron, Cynthia, Jim, a tribe chosen by happy chance.  We knew it was to be but a moment but here we are and let’s drink the wine and live it.

   Moments, like beads, strung on the threads of our incessant thoughts and we create them as we will from the stuff of our soul, never really knowing how or why.

   Do you miss it, she says -- and I say no, it was what it was, some kind of perfect time and so is this and I won’t do life any other way. Moments.  It’s summer and I love the kids being around all day and they’re edging into adolescence and I know this will pass quickly, too and I fill it with walking for ice cream and throwing Sacajawea dollars to the bottom of the pool and reading as they dive for them and memorizing their young voices and faces.

   Moments again. She gets me a telescope for my birthday. We set it up in the backyard and the first thing we see, I swear, is a UFO. A red, green, blue flashing, but unmoving light high over Medford.  We tell our friends at the café next day and, amazingly, every person says they’ve seen one, too.  We laugh. What the hell. They seem to be a fact of life.

   More moments. We’re driving to camp in the desert out past Klamath and we read aloud that eclectic, happy genius Colin Wilson, who’s saying that Socrates started a revolution because he was the first to use the human mind not just for survival, food, housing, territory, ego, etc., but sheerly as a tool, a toy of joy, a personal instrument of power -- and that sets the tone of the camping trip. The mind!  To grasp all this!  We read Roadside Geology of Oregon to each other as we sip coffee and smell the juniper and we marvel at how only a 100 million years ago the coast ran from the Klamaths up through the Blues and Wallowas and the ocean plate once subducted these ranges and pushed up volcanoes and we look around and it’s no longer just sage and mute hills but a story with a trillion moments.

   We go hear the aging seer-sage Dylan at the Fairgrounds and these are my people now, my generation still talkin’ bout itself, older now and still a bit hairy and everyone with that look in their eye of, man, we’re here and it’s happenin’ baby, let ‘er rip, let’s pump it up and get down and it’s just like some ancient harvest festival of abandon and it’s probably the first generation to be doing this since before the Dark Ages and it’s wild to think that someday the Southern Oregon Historical Society will be running exhibits about the strange immigration to this area in the 1970s and they’ll be showing artifacts like an alligator clip with burn marks on it and a card saying “often found, but purpose unknown.”

   I’m surprising myself these days by scanning the obits. I look for people I know.  They’re 15, 20, 30 years older than me.  I find myself reading their lives, marveling at the people they’ve loved, the children that came from this love, the places they all moved looking for work, where they were in the Depression and the war. I hear their voices in my old house and in the other old houses of the Rogue Valley. They started an auto parts business or ran a hairdresser shop. Their children moved to California. I read that 30,000 World War II vets are dying each day now. These are my parents and the people they loved and worked with and ate with and slept with, the ones who loved Stars Fell on Alabama – a million stories gone and I hope they told them all to someone. When I interview people for articles now, I find myself going beyond the fact-gathering and wanting to hear the other story.  Tell me a yarn, I seem to say, string the necklace of moments.  And most of them do.   ~


A Point from She-Walk-On

Outfitted in our tightly-packed, newly acquired 12-year old Escort wagon, we set out over the Greensprings  – she and I her dog Scout -- to camp in the desert at a spot not yet known, but suspected from reading the new 70 Desert Hikes by fellow Ashlander Andy Kerr.

   The new car is sliding nicely across the Cascades. A while after buying it, we were told it was used by its previous owner to help him leave this life and it’s peculiar, but in my first ride with it, I’d found myself talking to him and sensing him somehow.  I’d told him I’d try to have fun with this car, which he’d kept amazingly clean. I’d wished him well on his journey. He seemed happy with the new owner.

   We descend into Ponderosa country and the tethers of phone, computer, errands, things-to-do-today all seem to snap at once. Words of Walt Whitman, ally of my life, kick about in my memory: “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me…Here is the profound lesson of reception …I think heroic deeds were all conceived in the open air, and all free poems also. I think I could stop here myself and do miracles…I am larger, better than I thought. I did not know I held such goodness.”

   The breath deepens and slows. The software of the mind opens, accessible to reshaping. A sense of possibility presents itself like some jeweled box before me. And here they are again, the soul and the ego. I recall a long talk with friend Jo, who’d pointed out that it’s the soul that longs for new experience and understanding, while the ego loves to organize and control life, to look good and be right, to belong and to repeat things which have worked in the past. They must learn to love each other and work together. The ego must learn to trust the soul’s lust for newness, instinct and ecstasy – otherwise there is no creativity and no love. The soul must learn to respect the ego’s uncanny skill as manager and integrator of what the soul learns. Together they are the self and in their best times, halfway to divinity.

   I become aware of the little fears, worries, regrets and resentments, which, I’ve noticed, regularly ping on the back of my mind and, from years of counseling, loving, parenting and being a friend, I notice they ping on the minds of everyone. In the interest of efficient functioning, the ego turns them away. However, said Jo, these pings are signals that we’ve gone off the path, away from who we really are and the work we’re doing.

   I let them come up. I let them be. I experience them. I realize they are really nothing, but that they derive most of their power from the energy which the ego naturally puts into shunting them off somewhere. Whitmanlike, I embark on heroic deeds and promise myself I will never again let them run me. I have nothing to fear but danger itself.

   We motor past Klamath. Suddenly, I toss the desert hikes book in the back. I remember a river I’d camped at some decades back. It’s time to go there again. We turn off into the Forest Service roads and when we arrive, the natives of the nearby one-tavern town quickly inform us it isn’t pronounced anything like we say.  The river’s name, an Indian word, is pronounced She-Walk-On.

   Up the She-Walk-On, on a broad sage prairie, we hunt arrowheads for hours. The surface is littered with obsidian flakes and hide scrapers, but the big prize is the projectile point. For 30,000 years, they hunted here, lurking in the pinon and junipers, laying for antelope. It is so hot. I glance over at her blonde hair glinting in the sun and her deep freckled tan. She concentrates like I do. I can feel her thoughts.  She finds a point and lets out a pleased little squeal.  I’m finding only scrapers and tightly curved tools that look like they skimmed the bark off arrow shafts. 

   Finally, I let go. I ask the Great Spirit: Let me find an arrowhead. I need and want one. I know we wiped out the people who were sitting here only 150 years ago, blithely knapping and hafting them and I don’t understand why whites had to have all this land to themselves. And now it sits empty.  I always feel this pensive grief around Native things.  Yet I am so drawn to them. In only a few more steps, they give me a finely worked obsidian point.  I carry it still in my left pocket, the one always full of powerful trinkets.

   We make camp by the She-Walk-On and that’s what she does, she walks on, silently, clear as glass now in the moonlight, a foot deep and a dozen wide, as we drink our red wine and smoke our ritual one-organic-cigarette-a-day by the fire. We eat the delicious steak, kind of grinning guiltily, as we’d both been vegetarians at times – and yet it tastes so amazing out here in the wilds. If only there were a vegetable that tastes like steak! If only there were a detoxifying herbal tea that tastes like a cigarette by the campfire! If only there were a spiritual devotion that feels like sex! (Ah, but there is. It’s called sex.) Finally, with night, we lay naked on our backs in the She-Walk-On and let it carry off the skin salt of the day.  Then sleep.   ~







The Discipline of Bliss

Clouds dapple and dampen the hills again and I note each day the deepening saffrons and scarlets of that big sugar maple by the market.  There’s a lottery ticket on my dashboard and they’ve already announced the number and maybe I’m already worth $3.5 million but I don’t care if I am.  I’m thinking about going to Lorn’s shop and picking out a nice bottle of red for tonight.

     The kids chirp – what’ll we buy if we win?  Let’s get a hot tub and a horse and a new VW Bug and go to France.  I say hot tubs are a lot of work and so are horses and I’ve been there and to France too and I like this old car.  I want to clue them to other uses for money.  I tell them I would set up an endowment to buy and preserve beautiful land, to provide respite care so spouses of disabled people can go to the movies and to provide scholarships for young Oregonians who promise to get an old-fashioned liberal education, including the philosophy, Greek and Latin.

     I pronounce: I don’t live this way because I’m poor; I live this way because I like to live this way.  And they say I’m no fun and I laugh.  We all laugh.

     I don’t want to go to France.  I want to be here.  I want to drive through the leafy streets of Ashland, where I’ve gotten used to the slow pace of traffic.  I want to be driving the kids to soccer practice and the gymnastics meet, where I sit near my ex and when the kids do well, we exchange those parent glances, shaking our heads from side-to-side: aren’t they doing well and aren’t they unbelievably cute?

     I love talking to the other mothers at meets. We’ve been through so much and can speak plainly about the travails – and the happiness it’s brought the kids.  They were just toddlers when they started all this.  Now they’re budding out and still pretending they don’t notice boys.  They run at that vault with a look of savagery that would stop a buffalo.  They touch and hug each other after each victory or stumble.  They sit on the floor in their little group in their sparkly deep-blue leotards between events.  Their gymnastics is a fierce girl-warrior society in which they harbor the last autumn days of girlhood together before that first kiss that will start changing everything.

     As the days count down to the deadline, I want to make Nicki happy and write a relevant essay.  She’s the best editor I’ve ever had.  She always signs her emails “love” and always thanks me for my work.  Most editors have no idea of the vulnerability of writers and how much it hurts when they put a lot into a piece and get rejections, which, for freelancers, is most of the time. She liked the last one, about what’s happening to our town and thanked me for putting up with the abusive phone call and the email that directed me to a website that gave me the finger. “The wages of truth-telling,” she said.

     So, by way of relevant essays, I’m thinking of thanks, as in Thanksgiving. I recall a wise and gentle medicine man in this town who taught me to journey with the animals and find answers and healing.  He’s a well-known professional man and didn’t want townsfolk to know he’s a shaman, too, as his professional role would suffer.  During a hard passage once, I asked him to do a soul retrieval ceremony for me. A big part of my soul had grown sad and left me.  He found it, played with it, persuaded it that I really wanted it to come back and help me start having fun again.  And I did.  It wasn’t easy, but I started having fun again. 

     This man taught me of the Huna of Hawaii, who, when they do their rituals, spend an entire day giving thanks.  They thank not only the gods, but all the animals, the trees, sky, clouds, rain, sunsets, their bodies, the bugs, the ancestors, night, fire, sex, food, everything.  I tried it.  It’s a very consciousness-altering discipline.  Very soon I realized, like that bumper sticker says, it’s all bliss.  There’s so much here.  We’re all gifted.  But being problem-solving animals, we have this unfortunate tendency to look for problems.  Eventually, we solve them all or nature solves them for us.  And in the meanwhile, 99 percent of the work we put into solving them was in replaying the thought of them, also known as worry.  And so…

     Thank you worry, thank you problems, thank you Huna, thank you my medicine man-friend, thank you soul come back to me, thank you Ashland, thank you leaves, thank you Nicki, thank you lottery ticket, thank you France, thank you my children, thank you mom and dad, thank you bugs, thank you autumn, thank you mother of my kids, thank you fellow parents, thank you my old car, thank you laughter, thank you Ashland growth, thank you red wine, thank you gymnastics, thank you bliss.   ~





A Childhood Stolen – and Redeemed

If psychology has one governing principle, it might be this fact -- we suppress.  We stuff and deny that which causes us (and others, especially family members) pain.  We learn this in childhood as we try to survive and put together a world that works, a world in which we can be like other seemingly happy people. 

   As children, we don’t understand that most of those other seemingly happy people are also suppressing pain and doing what we’re doing: creating a secondary or false personality after the first one was not welcomed and validated by our parents and peers.  This process creates a split in us which could be called “normal neurotic” -- the me I show the world and the real me.

   I’d tried all my adult life to be the real me and thought I’d succeeded.  I’d done my deep work in the 1970s, doing primal screams in Reichian therapy, breathing through my birth trauma, parental disapproval syndrome and the unconscious death urge in rebirthing, plus tons of positive affirmations and visualizations, self-hypnosis, est, Wings, men’s groups, entheogens, truckloads of self-improvement books and just plain prayer.

   It all helped but – and here we go into the embarrassingly frank disclosures of what hasn’t worked about my life that’s so familiar to the 30 million adult children of alcoholics – I’d left a trail of ex-wives, ex-jobs, ex-homes and ex-friends and it had happened over a long enough period that the pattern was painfully clear.

   The only problem was: I didn’t know I was ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics).  I thought I was cool, hip, wise, intelligent, self-sufficient (a big one for ACA), experienced, adventurous and truthful enough that I’d beaten the devil and wouldn’t turn out like my alcoholic parents.  I did pretty well.  I wasn’t an alcoholic or anything-oholic.  I was conscious, evolved.  My kids were happy, loved and smart.  There was no “problem.”  But denial is an ugly thing and it’s spell began to lift with my mom’s passing into the spirit world last winter.  My younger sisters would go on and on about what a great lady she was but my older sister and I started talking over our nightmare memories of abandonment and shame that come when alcoholic parents disconnect from the basic instincts of love for the most beautiful creatures on earth – their own children.

   My big sister Linda sent me some books on Adult Children of Alcoholics which, not wanting to even think I could be part of those 12-step (“I acknowledge my life has become unmanageable!”) programs, I let lay on my nightstand for a month.  Finally I picked one up.  I was on every page.  It was one of those omahgawd moments.  It’s all right here.  I was never ready to see it.  Till now.

   The books were full of Linda’s underlines and margin notes: “Don’t talk, don’t feel, don’t trust” – the three rules of an alcoholic home.  Ow!  Was I still going to pretend that didn’t affect me?  After all (denial here), my parents were high-performance alkies, afloat in the social, political and literary swirl of Michigan, my dad an author-historian, my mom a sort of Jackie Kennedy of the Great Lakes area.  I grew up thinking maybe booze made you cool, happy and popular. 

   It didn’t.  It only took parents away.  Maybe they were gone already, I thought. I tried to fathom how they could override life’s most basic drive – to love and parent the next generation and ensure species survival.  But what if they had their own big pain, too, I reasoned, like from two world wars, the Depression, and – their parents – the rigid and racist Victorian morality and class system, immigration trauma, the dehumanizing Industrial Revolution and the schizo Prohibition era that glamorized booze.  Maybe my parents were ACA themselves – descended from generations of folk who loved the good, traditional “merriment” of Scotch and Irish whisky.  And now, in the mid-twentieth century, life was unsettling and changing fast – cars, appliances, tv, the cold war, divorce, juvenile delinquency, Elvis!

   Fine, they had pain.  The pain caused the alcohol and disconnection, not the other way round.  Fine.  But it didn’t matter.  As I read further, I realized I was running a classic ACA coping mechanism: excusing the alcoholic parent and trying to patch together the family by rationalizing a system under which it all could make sense.  But it couldn’t.  Not to a child.  For us kids, it was a Stephen King voyage into the soul of darkness.  Mommy and Daddy aren’t here, even when they’re here.  No one touches, speaks, looks at you, asks about your grades or friends or what you want to be when you grow up. 

   What do children do with this?  They blame themselves and immerse into shame.  That’s how innocent the kids are.  The parents, godlike, are the source of all love and of life itself.  We would die without them.  Period.  Therefore, we kids must be causing this.  I will try to do better, be a better person, do more chores, never fight with siblings, not be loud at my games.  The first casualty is play and laughter.  We go from being 7 to being 30 and we lose that sense of play for good.  Focusing on playing grown-up also carries us away from the parental war zone.  We’re busy.  We will (and do) win respect by overachieving.  But we don’t win love.  That’s the biggest casualty.

   In every relationship through life, we struggle with intimacy – scarcely even know what it looks like.  I read in the ACA books that it means trust, vulnerability, acceptance, empathy and genuineness.  Cool.  Sounds awesome.  Seen it in movies.  Finally experienced it, as most ACA people will say, when raising my children. But with an adult?  Now there’s a storm-shrouded mountain to climb.  I never understood what was running it, never saw the elephant in the back seat of the VW.  I thought it was wild, the real, freedom-loving “me” distancing myself from intimacy and then scalding in the familiar childhood sense of shame and unworthiness.  Or I would externalize, finding fault with the partner, engaging in fantasization that I just loved freedom too much and needed my space for spiritual growth -- or I would look on societal codes about commitment and marriage as just unworkable attempts to suffocate the free individual.

   Without the facts, this chaos rages in the minds and souls of ACA people for years.  They think it’s their real personality, character and soul that does these things.  They respond as they did in youth – finding ways to survive as an individual.  They continue the dysfunction of self-condemnation and shame.  This morphs into anger and, finding no cure or resolution, into isolation.  Gee, maybe I’m a hermit, like that great philosopher Thoreau!  Then back around to working on the false personality.  I’ll someday cook up a really neat, positive, charming, brave (seemingly unwounded) front and then I’ll click with people!

   But all this is not the real me. It’s attempts to use a childhood strategy to solve adult issues.  I realized, hey look, here’s the real me, still innocent and good as I was at age 5, and here’s the overlay, a complex of symptoms and syndromes that someone finally described for the first time 20 years ago, ripping away the Sinatra-Dylan Thomas-Cole Porter-Bogart mystique of booze.  Or rather, the mystique of treating the stuffed pain and fear of large numbers of singers, poets, politicians and all sorts of glamorous and ordinary people with good, old heart-warming likker.  Or even a working-class six pack each night, my dad’s favorite.

   I felt fury toward my parents.  I screamed, with abundant profanity at the west, direction of the ancestors: “Goddam you, how could you do this to your five children?!  You’d better be out there absorbing your lessons bigtime and seeing all the damage you caused!”  I cried for days.  Even in my pain, I cried for mommy to forgive me for dissing her with my rage.  As if, in death, she could still abandon me.

   I knew I had to see “Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood.”  It was searing – the young, smart, creative woman with the boozy, crazy terrified childhood, her fear of having her own children, the dread it might get passed to her kids.  I emailed my sisters. One told me I was “self-absorbed” and “get over it” – classic lines from alcoholic parents (and self-talk of an ACA person in denial).  Another didn’t answer.  But Linda congratulated me and sent me another classic on surviving the nightmare: Suzanne Somers’ “Keeping Secrets.”  There it was on the first page: “My childhood was robbed…I was beginning to understand…Everyone thought I emerged from the family intact and ok…I didn’t drink…I did not understand why my life had been messed up for so long…I always blamed myself.”

   It was the golden key, the thing that explained everything, the only thing that ever had.  I realized then that I could love.  And deserved it.  I felt the skin was ripped off me.  Everything hurt, but finally I could feel everything.  Instead of feeling surrounded by this immense plastic wall, I could finally feel compassion for myself and for all the sufferings of all people.  I was one of them, at last.  I didn’t need no stinkin’ freedom, I needed love.  And now I could comprehend how I’d systematically distanced it all my life.  Love had always been for other people, for the “good” kids I saw at school who “deserved” it.  But now I knew half of them were probably more like me than not, trying to comprehend that churning sickness in the belly, fearing going home, sitting there in class, smart enough but getting bad grades, warily looking out at the world, given up on hope.

   The way back, the way home, I’m reading (and know instinctively) is self-love, lots of it, constantly, like a balm, a poultice – and gradually, one day at a time, letting in the love all round me, starting, of course with that happy, good and unconditional stuff from my children, from plants, nature, my cats and dogs, letting mom and dad have my forgiveness (I know they’re asking for it) and, getting beyond those self-hating notions that one can “ask too much” of the Divine Presence who made us all with love, letting myself pray and be loved by Her (I’m making this genderless presence feminine, I need that now, a mother), a constant mantra of prayer whispering out from me – thank you Linda, for those books, thank you for the people brave enough to write them, for my cat Merlin who sleeps on my chest, for this good day (one day at a time) and, finally -- crossing that big line – thank you, mom, through your death, and your love, for helping this all happen and being here with me.   ~





Male Feelings: Stand and Deliver

I always wanted girl babies. I even wanted girl dogs and cats. They’re easier, everyone says.  Boy dogs and cats are gone missing a lot more, are messier and jump up on you.  Boy humans are noisier, dirtier and just more trouble.  Why else the folk chant -- little boys are made of  “snips and snails and puppy dog tails?”

   I raise two girls.  They’re right: girls are easy.  And it’s nice to be loved by them. Then, when Colin is conceived, we can tell he’s going to be a boy and I begin to deal with my unspoken prejudice against males. There it is: I’m afraid of guys. You can be closer to girls. They’re more, well, sensitive, open, sweet -- as in “sugar and spice.”

   I interview the New Warriors for a story. Trainer Dennis Mead-Shikaly, says,  “Men are bred to compete. That’s why we’re isolated. We hide our weaknesses and that keeps us lonely, separate and afraid. Under the façade of strength and domination, men maintain and deny an unhealthy relationship of fear, dependence and mother-fixation toward women.”

   My men’s group agrees: men are afraid of other men. It’s homophobia – not just the fear of homosexuality but of male violence and ego. As we work through it and deepen our talk of feelings, it’s dizzying to open to other men, to just say what’s on your mind.  The fallout is a change in how we relate to women.  We don’t need to take all our feelings to them to “make it all better” with their supposedly superior powers of intuition, empathy and support. Another gender role falls.

   Now Colin is 12. He still asks me to tuck him in bed and tell him stories, then hold him after the light is out.  He has no shame about male intimacy.  This doesn’t mean he’s soft.  He knows, as Robert Bly (Iron John) said, when and how to “show the sword.”

   He has a gang of friends over and some are cutting up in the street, blocking cars.  I go talk to them, saying I don’t want this home to be known as a place where jerks hang and make trouble.  He takes me inside and says, you just called my friends jerks. He’s right. I was angry.  I apologize. He says, now go tell my friends you’re sorry too. His lip is trembling. He’s looking me right in the eye. He’s standing and delivering with truth and feelings. He won’t have to learn this in a men’s group. And he won’t save his heart just for the girls.   ~










Yummy Ribs with the Soccer Mom Cult

We descend into the darkest days of the year, with drizzly storms coming off the ocean from the southwest covering Mt. Ashland with snow, which excites the kids, who will cut school to board on the first day. 

   And, one of the soccer mom tribe gets depressed on this rainy day, compounded by relationship stuff and a period – and one of us phones the other, then another, no plan to this, mind you, it just happens, and soon she’s consoled by the sheer caring of people just wanting to check in with her, ask her to coffee or hike, ask how the kids are. 

   It’s also “just Ashland.”  People don’t come here to be anonymous, but to be connected.

   The soccer mom cult wanted to come together.  Our sons all connected first, then brought us in – and we found we had as much in common as they do.  It’s a pollination across the generations, a band that has developed a strategy of frequent partying, known as potlucks, looking for any birthday, holiday, presidential debate or other excuse to guzzle beer and tasty dishes while the kids run like banshees, paintballing, video-gaming and hooting through bedrooms, backyard and garage.

   On a recent, dark Friday night, one also felt compelled to go out to the lake and scream and dance naked and break something from the past that needed to be broken.  She found willing women from this group to go with her and, so schooled are they over the years in the ways of goddesses, elements, earth, sage, rattles and drums, that they didn’t need any instruction to help her out.

   In this spontaneously created soccer mom tribe of friends, we share that bond, the challenge of kids maturing into teen years and when you mention that to people, about having teens, they always raise their brows and say, wow, that must be tough, quite a challenge there, how are you handling it?

   I’m always taken aback by that.  I know the stereotypes: they’re supposed to be into drugs, drinking, sex and getting alienated from school, parents, society and acting out with a lot of disrespect and disappearing.  Are they?  Some.  But, basically, the kids are stable, grounded and we parents look at their happiness, humor, energy and sound instincts and are comforted.

   What have we done right?  Nothing.  I think that from the moment they were born, we just looked on them with awe and a sense that they already knew everything a person has to know in life, but of course needed instruction on skills, such as how to brush their teeth, operate a stove, read.  As for walking and talking, they didn’t yet know how to do these, but knew how to learn on their own.  And they did.  They also walk their talk.  They mastered this because they’ve been allowed to guide by their own instinct and think for themselves.

   I’m driving the kids to school and they turn up the radio, asking me to listen to this song, in which a guy, to a rock background, delivers a rap sermon on our society, starting out with our mad polarities around drugs, in which we jail people for using “a plant that grows in the dirt” but have multi-million dollar televised campaigns promoting all-night, drug-induced sexual arousal for 80-year old guys. Not to mention other legal, mind-altering meds helping you to “fit in” to society.

   “Didja get it?” they ask, after the song.  Of course I get it.  Being a parent in pretty good communication with my kids and their friends, I basically get that they are adults at about 15 and have formed philosophies and lifestyles to wisely handle all the things that make adult society shriek, pass laws and pound pulpits – and propound self-satisfying but futile polices of abstinence.  As if.

   The kids see through society’s – and this administration’s -- posturings on such things and learn they’re on their own as far as making life decisions and that they have the tools and inner wisdom to make those decisions.

   Driving to school, Colin asks me what are the politics around abortion and why do the anti’s hate it?  I say it’s not about pro or anti – it’s about power. 

   No one really wants to make a woman raise an unwanted child (usually alone) but it’s important for the anti’s to be able to legislate sex among consenting adults as much as possible, because the more fear and shame you can instill around natural functions, the more you disempower the individual and get her to doubt herself and bow to authority – and that’s the dominator model, the old patriarchal system that has steadily been in decline in the last half century and thrives on bogeymen like gay marriage, abortion, pot and terrorism.

   “Hm,” says Colin.  It was a long explanation, but I want him to know.  I’ve worked many years inside politics and seen how they will say just about anything and propose just about any law or program if it will energize and solidify their political base and it hardly matters if the politician or lobbyist really cares or believes in it, although sometimes they do. 

   As for abortion, I’ve seen enough from the inside to know that while the grass roots folk are impassioned, the real emotion is not for the fetus – it’s against the feminist movement, which is really women taking power back after 5,000 miserable, subjugated years of patriarchal domination.

   Still, I say to my kids, when you grow up, I’d like you to be president.  Don’t settle for something in between.  Only the president has the real power.  Get involved in city politics for a few years, run for the state legislature, get a base in a big city, get elected to Congress and bloody well go for the presidency.  You have the brains and charisma and you care what happens to the world.  You’ll need to care!  The world is in trouble and it needs caring people like you to get in there and hold to the passion and happy instincts you grew up with here in Ashland, Oregon – and do something good, rather like Bill Clinton did, wading into the filth and lies of politics, but keeping his humor, passion and, above all, his self.

   One of these kids will do it.  I can feel it.  They’re being raised here on the nectar of love, humor and higher consciousness, being exposed to hundreds of adults who want them to be the people to make a newer world.

   Colin has me type up his school paper using a parent’s biography and interview and here’s how it ends:

   “My dad learned about Vietnam one August morning at college and everyone was buzzing with talk about ‘the war.’  He said what war?  The students said President Johnson has started a war and my dad was so very happy he had got out of the Marines when he did, a few weeks earlier, because when he went in three years ago, he was more than willing to be in war and kill people or be killed but very early on in boot camp he realized it was all a bunch of crap to get young men to win their manhood by risking their lives, when in reality they of course were already men, whether they went in the military or not and he told me if I ever went in the military, he would be very disappointed in me.”

   I email his bio sketch to the soccer moms and, at the next gathering – at the Marty’s new Fast Break by the North interchange -- they share their enjoyment and laughs over it, while we devour some of his awesome ribs and beer.   ~













Those Dreaded Words
On the Phone, Late at Night

One of the awfullest things you ever hear is someone close to you on the phone saying, “Oh God, oh no, oh my God.” It’s Friday night.  We’re at a Valentine party.  Those are the words we’re listening to. The party stops cold.  We wait for Ann to get off the phone and tell us what the news is.  It’s going to be horrible, we know that.  We all have teens.  Please God, don’t let it be about them.

   But it is.  Out come the words: Kevan is in the hospital with severe brain damage.  A car crash in Medford.  Others have been killed.  Kevin is a junior at Ashland High.  Several of us have kids in that class.  Were they in the car?  Everyone gets on phones and starts telling everyone else and trying to find details.  I call my daughter.  She’s a friend of Kevan’s.  Her “hi” is the sweetest word I’ve ever heard.  I tell her what’s happened.  We soon learn it was just two boys, Kevan and Ian.  Twenty minutes later, after more calls around, I have to call her again to tell her Kevan is dead.  And so is a man in another car. 

   It’s midnight, hard to go to bed.  Details emerge that Kevan was going 80 or 100 in downtown Medford.  It shocks the gut and stupefies the mind.  To do that, one would have to suspend the very survival instinct, let alone any care for the lives of others.  It goes against every tenant of order and sanity.  Kids gather, talk, weep, hold each other, sleep together, probably will for weeks, months.

   Parents gather to talk, hour after hour, shaking their heads, trying to find one thread of sense in this, recalling how in every high school it happened – drinking, drugs, driving, daring the devil, death, the horror of death amid youth, the creation of a legend of the kids who will never grow old, who will only be recalled with the goofy, happy faces and personalities of teen years.

   Like the suicide only weeks earlier of another young, seemingly happy person among us, G., this tragedy cuts a gash through the community.  We’re not safe.  Anything can happen.  To anyone.  Again, the questions – was there anything one could have done to stop this?  Could I have?  The answer is always no.

   And the debate explodes out into the community – was there alcohol or drugs in this?  And did the kids do this tragedy to themselves, by honking, speeding off, baiting cops to chase them, knowing cops will be anguished either way – by ignoring a dangerous, speeding vehicle or being drawn into dangerous pursuit?  Most cops don’t chase anymore.  Too many deaths.  Did it happen here?  Cops say no.  Witnesses say otherwise.

   Like a big, black raven, blame circles our community, looking for a place to land.  How can this happen?  Who did this?  Cops?  Booze?  Inattentive parents?  Peers knowing the elements of tragedy are present but doing and saying nothing?  Lack of meaningful rites of passage beyond the ones -- alcohol, cars, speed – that we grown-ups also had? 

   Gradually, the kids talk more.  They say how healing the grief rooms are at the high school, with candles, pictures of Kevan, other kids to talk to, some of whom they rarely if ever talk to. New bonds form.

   Kevan, they say, was wild, had a lot of passion and daring, went often outside the envelope. He is eulogized by friends on the school PA system as someone who lived life to the fullest and modeled that for peers. Well, that brings it all up, doesn’t it?  Teens need ways to live life to the fullest and, if you take away the car keys and the other scary, fun stuff, you take away a big hunk of it.

   For thousands of years, adolescents have come into adulthood in glory, creating legends that could be told around the fire for generations after – going into that cave with a dagger and short spear to cut down the 12-foot cave bear, stealing horses from neighboring tribes, making love to those with the best genetic material (and fighting for that in dangerous single combat), ingesting the sacred substances of the region, late into the night, in search of the miraculous.  Some would die in rites of passage.  There has to be risk or there’s no glory.  The passage into adulthood has to be through the gates where death and life are considered equal worlds.  Well, guess what?  It’s still happening. 

   We adults have tried to arrange rites of passage for teens, with vision quests, long treks, peer camaraderie, immersion in nature, nights alone in the woods.  It’s great.  It works.  The more alienated, edgey ones are sent to do it for weeks in the desert.  It changes them.  Of course, there’s no risk, death or even injury.  Any risk would bring huge liability – and ruinous lawsuits in the millions. 

   The very risky rite of passage that we do have, of course, is war, left over from the dawn of civilization and now a coed game where large numbers of both genders can enter legend with injury and death. However, these risky rites of combat must have a noble, believable story, some function for the tribe that justifies it and engages the passions of the young people doing it.  We’ve lost that, so this once useful rite now only appeals to the poor and uneducated, who have no other paths to glory and who buy the shabby stories of last half century.

   Meanwhile, we parents try to put ourselves in the driver’s seat of that Cherokee flying down Riverside at 100 mph, where you have to know your chances of living through the evening are about 10 percent – and you think those are good odds, if you’re invincible and you’ve spent thousands of hours walking away from crashes in video games like Grand Theft Auto.

   It’s the way he would have wanted to go out, says one of his friends.  You realize that has to be true.  You hear he’s not the only kid who has done this road game.  You feel afraid, very afraid.  You implore your kids and their friends never to get in a car with someone who drives daringly or drinks.  They swear they won’t.  You take a breath.  You think you’re gotten to them.  You add a prayer – you know they won’t join the military.  Just let them get through high school alive.   ~






Attention Deficit: the Rebel’s Disease

It’s not easy to sit there with 150 people, saying good things about a friend who ended his own life, but A. had that right – and people had a lot of good things to say about him, like how, though he was a private and prickly fellow, he loved photography, nature and wildlife, studied the cosmos, played folk guitar and looked out for the old folks he saw in need at the Unitarian church.

   I didn’t know these things.  He could be prickly and that’s what he was the last time I saw him, at a yard sale last fall.  I kind of let him be in his own space, which is to say, I ignored him.  I had no idea that, months earlier, he’d started to make a tape about his life and why he decided to end it, which he did, the first week in January, in his RV in the driveway, with a bullet in the head. 

   A lot of people said he was their tax man – and the most honest one you could hope to find.  He had no use for the IRS, had resigned a job there in disgust (they read his resignation letter at the ceremony) and was always happy to help you find ways to give them less money.  He thought telemarketers a vile intrusion into one’s peace and he successfully – and gleefully -- sued the Tidings for failing to take him off their do-not-call list.

   He went to China last fall.  He’d made up his mind his life was ending, said Rev. Pat Herdklotz, and this was a farewell tour of a land he’d always wanted to see.  There was nothing anyone could have done to save him, she says.

   Al left this world about the same day G. did. Like her, he was bipolar, so said friends at the service.  I sit there wondering at this new term for manic-depressive. We’re always thinking up new words for uncomfortable things.  So, A. and G. had two poles, while normal folk function in some middle ground between the extremes? 

   It brings to mind another term, ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, suffered by millions of people, mostly those who happen to be young and spend all day in class.  Ah, but do they suffer this “disorder” while on summer vacation?  I have lots of teens around here and I haven’t noticed any lack of attention in their activities.  In fact, they’re pretty passionate about what they do – skateboarding, paintballing, hanging out, cracking jokes, listening to rap, being in love and, from what I can see, tremendously enjoying being young.

   All this begs the question – is school the cause of ADHD, and summer vacation the cure?  If so, then can we change the name to HKBS – Healthy Kids Bored with School?  I think we modern, civilized, technologized people forget that modern society – and fulltime school for kids -- are very recent and radical mutations in human evolution and if huge numbers of people aren’t adjusting to them, do they have a disorder?  Or are they in order, but under the old order? 

   After all, summer vacation seems to be something like a state of nature.  We adults feel compelled to come up with lots of camps, lessons and classes, but have you noticed, the kids are not all that excited about it?  We wish they would read all summer but they actually seem to perversely enjoy their hyperactivity and deficits of attention – at least about what we think they should pay attention to.

   What did kids do before universal, compulsory education?  I have no idea, but I think it was an instinctual, organic blend of running wild and helping their parents with survival tasks – and that this blurred the line between childhood and adulthood, so they understood and supported each other’s worlds in a unified whole.

   Extending ADHD into adulthood, think manic as hyperactive, attention deficit as depression.  Chastised as hyper-this, disorder-that, these people learn that different is not just wrong and shameful, but a syndrome, needing medication and treatment.  Wanting to belong, they stuff these different feelings and visions and try to cultivate a normal persona, which splits them into a false but acceptable outer self and a real, but unacceptable (and now hidden) inner self.

   The model for this is Vincent van Gogh, who offers the incandescent vision of paintings like Starry Night to an unseeing world, then, unmet, descends into isolation, depression, self-mutilation and self-destruction.  A century later, the artist safely in his grave, the growing edge of culture can take him in and put him on coffee mugs and screensavers – as it has with others who saw much, spoke it bravely and died young – Socrates, Christ, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, Lenny Bruce, Sylvia Plath, Martin Luther King, the Kennedys.

  Not meaning to compare A. to famed martyrs like Gandhi, but the pattern is there and it’s society, not Al (and not feisty kids) who could just as easily be branded with a syndrome.  Shall we call it RFVD – Resisting Feisty Visionaries Disorder?  Do you really believe Al and Joanie would be dead if our society celebrated its most different and deeply feeling people and, while they lived, demanded speeches of them and named streets after them?  But it doesn’t.  It tests them, instead.

   These two people and many others are seeds of change -- mutations, really, without which humanity cannot learn, grow, change and adapt. Yet humanity’s inherent need for stability, which is also a survival tool, calls on us to challenge any mutation.  Like it or not, the energies of the feisty visionary and the conformist center are forces of mutation and natural selection.   The new is challenged, not to adapt, but to adapt the larger organism to itself.  Did they survive the trial?

   I love and miss these crazy, happy, anguished friends and, if I’d been closer to them and knew they were going down, would have tried to save them.  I would have learned, as Rev. Pat said, that I couldn’t.  Nature has this awful, honest and implacable majesty – and it used it.  ~








Baby, You Gotta Shake That Thing

They say we gotta come to this Ecstatic Dance Sunday mornings at this modest Dance Space in a row of light industrial buildings off Hersey, so finally we show up and there’s incense and these low frequency gongey tones playing and people in long gowns greeting us and I say, now is this going to be ecstatic or do I have to bring my own?

   Well, hours later, I barely remember what happened, which is a good sign it was a good time and I do know it ended up fully debauched and exhausted on the floor in a pile and in between, with encouragement that you gotta dance with lots of people, even if only for a moment, I think it was stately and serene for a brief while, as we did feminine sounds – but then it got into the “other” feminine, the hot, sweaty Kali savage kind, then we did masculine, then chaotic, then staccato, then lyric. 

   Lemme say - chaotic was best.  We are much too serious and dance with much excess of conscious control.  But they jack up the levels in this shadowy space with a little Buddha altar against one wall and pretty soon the bad dancers forget they’re bad and the good dancers forget they’re good and you’re seeing this one woman grabbing your arms and pushing you rather violently back and forth and this nice looking man spinning my gf across his shoulders and people frantically playing with each other’s energy fields and experiencing intimate quasi-carnal knowledge and when it’s over, we say, hey, what the hell was that and thanks, Erin, for making us come play.

   I flash back on the Middle School Friday Fun Fest, which was in the first year of rock and roll – Elvis, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley – and we didn’t know what was hitting us, except the girls could rock a lot better than the guys and they still do.  Remember a girl waiting to be asked to dance?  That’s so gone.  Most kids go to the prom in mobs now and sorta dance with any number or gender of friends.  And in watching the people kick out the jams at Ecstatic Dance (and another such dance on Saturday nights, same place), I realize I am seeing and participating in something new upon the planet or rather re-newed on the planet for the first time since the rise of organized religion a couple millennia ago.  Religion is no friend of rock, is it? I mean if you can shake that thing, the preacher no way can own it, can he?

   This is, gad, what do I call it?  Ok, it’s frenzied pagan dance ritual, wild abandon, positive ego transcendence, shameless surrender to base instinct.  But I observe no sacrifices of goats or small children, no praise for the devil – and probably a small percent of dancers even go off to church.  It was fun, the kind of fun that makes you shake your head and mutter, ok, I could never leave this community, this boundary-breaking Ashland.  It’s too weird, too nuts, too daring, too fun.

   So, a couple days later, Ann comes over, having just beat up some pillows, angry and disgusted about the kids not doing chores, kids saying they will, blowing it off, saying the other kid isn’t doing work, so why should they, (which is pretty smart, actually), saying anything, as long as they don’t have to do it.  She’s considering what Dr. Laura advises – take away everything from their room and make them earn it back, one piece at a time.  I ask, what kind of people do you think that produces, I mean, if you’re looking at the spectrum of authoritarian to free will?  Are they going to be able to think for themselves?

   I don’t know why, but I tell her a story I read when the kids were babies – a story that guided my soul as a parent -- how the writer, a white man, visiting the Mohawks, sees a kid of about 12, screaming, savagely attack his father with a stick and the dad howls with delighted laughter, thanking the Great Spirit that, yes, yes, my son has great spirit and will not only survive, raise strong children and defend the tribe, but will fully live!

   The kid today, of course would be put on Ritalin and sent to anger management or a prison school in Idaho and have everything taken away from him, and have to earn it back, as parents did earlier this year to one fierce, beautiful, passionate junior at Ashland High – and I’ve often sent her golden light and prayed, hey, Great Spirit, let them take everything away from her, but may she hang onto the loud, audacious, untamed spirit I’ve seen in her since she was a young girl.

   We pour a glass of wine, watch the moon come up full behind the Grizzly hills and I say, hey, the kids are all right.  What have you taught them all their lives?  To live in an environment of love, freedom and communication, where people are allowed to keep their intuitions and instincts and live them as the very stuff and spirit of life.  They’re willful.  They’re strong.  They know what they want.  They’re passionate.  They look at the bs and walk.  They’re making their own choices.  I ask, who do they remind you of?  Tears come to her eyes.  She nods. “Me,” she says.

   We make stir fry and put on these Beatles CDs, so fine, that we scored at a yard sale Saturday and before the shallots and garlic are done, she’s dancing and air-singing the words, “…baby, you can drive my car, yes I’m going to be a star and baby I love you!”  She pulls me into the dance and we’re totally in role, acting out the words – “move over once, move over twice, c’mon baby, don’t be cold as ice, I said I’m traveling on the one after 909!” God, can anyone touch the Beatles – no, no one, never did, never will – and why?  Cuz they are that sheer, fun, crazy, hopeful, loving, pagan, untamed soul of rock ‘n roll and she looks at me and says, man, you’re a miracle and if you couldn’t rock ‘n roll with me, there’s no way you could be my man – and baby I love you!    ~








The Yule Wine Tasting:
It’s Two Stars to the Right

What is it about the Jefferson Public Radio wine tasting every December, seeing so many faces, changing through the years, sipping the delicious wine, unable to remember most of the vintages afterward, nipping the chocolates and croissants, dressing up, seeing old friends with old partners, some with new partners, dancing to the live music of the musicians we’ve known for decades – and the smiling faces of the young lads from Lithia offering free rides home for the tipsy.

   What is it – maybe the nearness to Christmas, the chill night, the cozy feeling of the servers giving precious things away, including smiles, the expectancy, that’s it, of turning each corner and knowing, almost for sure, you’ll be looking into the face of someone you know and love or maybe someone you met in the eighties and haven’t seen since – or even the seventies and the brain and cells register it, the spacing of the eyes, the look in them, the curve of the forehead, the way the face glances and hey, we were out at the Applegate swimming in ’71 or doing a pint at Cook’s Reception (we called it Cook’s Deception, for some reason, that cheesy bar where Kat Wok is now) or maybe dimers at Log Cabin Tuesday nights, speaking of cheesy. But fun.

   Always at the wine tasting, we’d run into Merrill and Ed and burst into song, the one with long Latin words for various dubious sex acts from “Hair,” you know, that tribal rock musical we were in back in ’76 at the Varsity Theater, omg, nigh three decades ago – and Merrill and Steve are laughing about how they play golf, spending most of the game talking, joking, giggling, taking way too many strokes, wondering if the people behind them are getting impatient with their bad playing, I mean they aren’t taking this seriously at all. And we run into our college prez Zinser, who had about her the delightful and delighted air of a teen girl, young with her decision to retire the college and maybe write a novel and do Scottish dance but not leave Ashland. This is the place you go to be happy.

   What this is, this wine tasting is a high school reunion, but with classmates of choice, not fate, and so many of us who came to Ashland for no good reason and stayed here all our lives for no good reason, did it because we didn’t want to take life too seriously, not all of it anyway, which pretty much defines high school, the time when you have all your brains and beauty and are in that Neverland where you are both child and adult, both nutty with laughter, nicknames, pranks and play yet get to drink and have sex, but please, not adulthood, that’s the real scarlet letter A, do I have to go there and be like my parents? And that’s the spirit in the undercurrent, always ‘round the corner.

   Even if unconsciously, everyone is in conspiracy with Ashland’s little secret that most of us have the Peter Pan Syndrome, averse to the toxicity of too much maturity and we talk about each other like we’re in high school, and did you hear she’s going steady now with that guy – THAT guy?!?! You’ve got to be kidding me, I mean she’s a cheerleader and he’s a dork -- and this is that place out the window, with Tinkerbelle showing you the way, two stars to the right, the place where you never have to really, not fully, grow up. This is the Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Puck said that famous line, carried many years atop the Sunday comics, “What fools we mortals be!” and let’s keep that in mind and remember what a short time, really, we have to enjoy that.

   “This day,” said Samuel Pepys in his diary, 1662, after seeing that play, “my oaths of drinking wine and going to plays are out and I do resolve to take liberty today and then to fall to them again…I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure.”

   We’re dancing to the rich tones of the Dunsavage trio and I say, a handsome woman dancing off in the corner by herself, with unmissable longing, really and wouldn’t it be nice if a man noticed and joined her and Ann says men, no matter how dorky they fear they might be, must let that seriousness go and bring that dance to the maiden, bring the fairy impishness and waken the right brain magic that makes no sense and, as Pepys noted, is all our pleasure.   ~













Riding the Whaaa-mbulance

Waiting outside Safeway for the kids, we “go round the mandala,” as we call it, which is reciting one’s fears and insecurities, starting out by complaining about everyone and everything we can think of – this, says teen son Colin, is called riding the “whaaah-mbulance” – then taking responsibility for how I’m creating these situations and how I can own, shift and re-create them in ways more interesting and exciting to me.

   It doesn’t work to just “be positive,” (or leave out the whining) we’ve decided over the years.  That makes you dishonest.  And nuts.  We talk about, hey, is there anyone who’s not nuts, really?  No.  We all have our mandala to go around and it’s so important to have a beloved friend who will let you go round it, without judging and wanting you to change, because if you have support and affection while you go round it, you will go round it and you will come out sane. 

   But the big fear in our culture is that if you’re feeling nuts (which really means scared and alone) and you go into it, it will get worse and you’ll never come out.  So keep your chin up and look on the “good” side.

   But it’s all the good side and we have to keep realizing that and man, when you see Superman, in his latest movie, dealing with having a kid while in crazy love with Lois Lane, then becoming a deadbeat dad and finally coming back to sort out his mess and disconnection from his son, you know he’s really starting to be super.  And normal. 

   So we play this game – what are your three favorite ways of being nuts? Once you accept the premise, it’s easy to fill in the blanks with “I pretend” statements, pioneered by Will Schutz, author of “Joy.” 

   I offer, “I pretend everyone is nuts but me” and “I pretend no one understands me because I’m more evolved than anyone” and “I pretend I live in some crazy end times where the enlightened sixties and seventies failed and fascists now dominate humanity and are raping the planet and there’s nothing I can do but whine with most satisfying self-righteousness and watch it all come down.”

   Well, she laughs, I’ll say this -- you really know yourself. I say isn’t that better than identifying with all I pretend?  Yes, she agrees, it probably acts like a homeopathic and the knowledge of it detoxifies and neutralizes it. 

   So, we ask, what does “nuts” really mean? Basically, it means taking yourself seriously, believing the propaganda generated by your own ego defense mechanisms – and this leads to the fear and isolation that makes us all nuts, which is what passes for normalcy in our society and if you don’t believe me, just watch tv for one evening. 

   Everyone’s watching this movie, “The Secret,” and implores us to rent it (it’s not at theaters). It’s kind of an infomercial, all mysterious, as if people were persecuted through history for having the Secret and passing it on, which they were – and the big Secret is the Law of Attraction, which means that, hey, what you carry around in that little head of yours is what you get. 

   Duh, I observe, everyone knows this.  But, when you get scared and isolated, it’s the first thing to go – and you start believing things are happening “to you.”  You are powerless, at effect, reactive, a sitting duck, a victim, a dope.  But, as the movie and many books and teachers point out, this is the Law of Attraction at work. When you are ego-bound, scared and nuts, s--- happens and this IS a manifestation of the law that “The universe always says yes.” 

   You are doing this.  To you.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe you don’t have anyone to sit with you in the Safeway parking lot while you ride the whaaah-mbulance, then move round the mandala till you get the amazing revelation that you are such a powerful magician, you have created the mind-blowing illusion that you are powerless, scared and alone, which means you are powerful enough, if you own your shit, to realize you can create anything.  Mandala completed.  Again.  Thank you, sweetie.   ~







An Epitaph in the Beach,
A Glass of Wine in the Desert

How fortunate it is to have a friend who will pick you up in his big pickup, drive you two hours over to Lava Beds and, after a vigorous workout spelunking the vast lava caverns and tubes, take you down to the campsites and lay out a spread of French bread, Humboldt Fog cheese and some expensive Merlot from upstate.

   “This is livin,” I say.

   We’ve explored Heppe Cave, where a friend of ours swears she saw someone looking back at her from the bottom of a pool in the depth of the cave – a spiritual experience for her. At the Visitors Center, we (jokingly) ask the ranger if there are any aliens or anything in the caves.  She lifts her eyebrows and smiles -- no, but there are ghosts in the caves.  Ah, well, there you go.

   “She was a program,” he says of the ranger, as we walk away. That’s a line from the movie, The Matrix.  We love to toss out lines like that.  All old friends have an invisible set of references – and shorthand lines they toss out, underlining the duration and understandings of the relationship.  We giggle like schoolboys.

   It’s fall and the tourists are mostly gone, so we get the best spot at the campsite, overlooking the vast lava flows, which got laid down when we were still living in caves in Europe, 35,000 years ago.

   My friend lets the suspense build about the picnic, pulling out lawn chairs and letting us drowse off in the waning September sun, then finally sets the picnic table, examining each delight, then finally pulling out the wine bottle.  We have a game, buying wine by the price (it’s not expensive for nothing) and letting fate guide us to the selection.  He knew it was the right one when the label said it was “a tuning fork of the soul.”

   And it is. Wouldn’t you rather spend $33 on a bottle, he asks, and do it only once a month?  Yes, of course, I reply.  And just drink black tea the rest of the month, which is equally clarifying and good for the soul.  The libation has indeed struck the tuning fork in the soul and we wander out among the sage and junipers, talking of life, love, the mystery and beauty of women. 

   We are attracted by the symmetry, strength and unashamed beauty of this one juniper, with lovely twisted bark.  How long do you think it’s been here, he asks.  I say 350 years.  He says twice that.  It’s dusk now and the tree is fairly pushing its energy out through its vibrant greenery and blue berries. Bite one of the berries, I say.  The essence bursts in the mouth.  They use these to make gin, I say.  You’re kidding!  No, really, I say.  He’s never had a martini.  You should have one about once a year, I tell him.

   We know we could get addicted, and at painful times have gone too far, so we treat our beloved wine with respect, as the divine gift it is, something meant to be a kiss, an embrace, a whisper of the divine in the ear, used to awaken, not deaden the senses and spirit.  I mean, hey, I was on a story at a mass recently and the priest says how Jesus was slandered as a drunk because he knew about wine – a lesson not to say things against people and find things wrong with them so you can keep your grudge.

   I tell my friend about how every few months now there’s an email saying someone died, the most recent one with the awful letters RIP in the subject line and the name of my best friend from grade school, Billy.  He graduated high school as a member of the student council, lettered in the big sports, tall, beautiful, smart – but spent the last many years drinking cheap, hi-octane malt liquor, starting at 10 in the morning and painting houses when he could.  You wouldn’t have recognized him, said a pal.

   At the coast with the teen boys, who are surfing, I stand there, facing out to sea and “talk” to Billy, recalling all the many little fun moments, like seeing who could pee the farthest. We were about 12 then.  I won.  He puzzled a long time over that.  I said it was mind power.  I had to laugh, recalling it.  I was carving his name in the sand with my toes.  I carved, we love you Billy.  Whatever was your demon, I hope it’s gone now.  Come back and be in my life again.  You were fun.   ~







Blinded by the Light

We go out for Father’s Day at Dutch Broz where I love to hang in the early morning parking lot as the dawning sun blasts over the flanks of Grizzly and don’t you have to love the patter of the wired espresso heads just making your day blasting their rock and remembering what you drink and Danielle hands me my mocha and says hey you coached me at Y soccer in second grade and it’s Father’s Day and you’re with your daughter so it’s free!

   And you just have to smile, I mean man I just love this city – and I realize even though it’s trying to become a hyper-spender geezerville, that’s not gonna happen.  It’s a city now, not a town, and that means it’s a mix and the people who happen to be young and poor and have kids will always find ways to live here and bring in those new streams of energy

   My kids give me music mixes and here’s Blinded By the Light and Gangsta Paradise, songs we played through the nineties when they were toddlers learning to run the radio and CD and climb the back of my chair while I was trying to write.  We grab root beer and boxes of the best food in town at the Co-op and go lay in the railroad park cracking jokes and playing that old game of making clouds disappear by using your mind. 

   It’s just been graduation and Hannah says it was the best night of her life, throwing that funny hat in the air and sitting between Elise, whom she met playing on the swings at Garfield Park at three, and Hana, whom she’s known since a great party where all us parents met when the girls were literally babes in arms.

   I’m walking behind the bandshell as the ceremony starts. They shout and wave at me.  I take their picture.  Then I stand there looking at these grown women, radiant.  It all flashes across the mind, all these years, the overnights, the pizza, the thousands of rides to DJ’s for videos, dropping them off at grade school in the rain, going out to the lake for the day, their struggles in their sophomore years, working their way into their adult skins.

   And those farewell speeches, hey, I’ve heard other graduation speeches but no one ascends to the heights and burns the envelope like these Ashland kids, like Dylan, who says hear me parents, family, friends, we’re off to adulthood now and we know it’s not about careers, college, mortgages and such serious stuff. It’s about love and no one’s ever going to tell us any different, cuz we’re standing on this mountain top tonight, free to do whatever we want with our lives, holding all the love you’ve given us, rich with all the memories of childhood in their fairyland town and we thank you mom, dad, teachers, friends, because we got it.

   This is one of those moments – blinded by the light. I look over the crowd and every face is lit up with smiles and the understanding and happiness of what this lad is saying and we all leap to our feet in applause. It worked. That’s what we parents are realizing.  We raised these kids, so many of us, with an over-application of love, hugs, praise, always saying, not just “bye” but “bye, love you.”  We did what our parents warned us against: we spoiled them.  We gave them everything they wanted.  Within reason.  We let them have all the pizza and videos and hugs they could stand.  We didn’t spank them.  We were there for them.  When they were born, we saw they were already who they are and didn’t need to become anyone else.  We held them -- and beheld them -- at every turn.  We probably changed history.   ~








Piggott’s Folly: Pearls at Random Strung

 As a longtime garage sale and thrift store freak, I have gotten so I can sense a “treasure moment,” when I will find something rare and valuable or, sometimes, just a simple, charming thing that will open a window in the mind – such as  Henry Sheldon’s “Northwest Corner,” a 1948 collection of black-and-white photos that surprises me with one shot going back to my first year in Oregon.

   It’s a shot of that white castle, with turret, that looks down on Portland. It’s clearly visible when you drive up Broadway. In that castle, in 1968, I was in love with a darling lass, who lived there with her father and who, like Eve, proffered an “apple,” a life-changing experience shared by millions in those epochal times.

   I’ve always wondered about that castle, whose basement walls we painted like a psychedelic poster, with faces, lips, slogans – and love. Here in Sheldon’s book is the answer: it’s Mount Gleall Castle or “Piggott’s Folly,” built by “a Portland eccentric who wore a flowing tie, believed every community should have a fool-killer and denounced the wearing of glasses.”

   He cites a book by this Charles Henry Piggott, written (in the top room of the tower) in 1908, exactly a century ago and called, “Pearls at Random Strung or Life’s Tragedy from Wedding to Tomb.” Although able to find the full text of a Harvard copy in Google Books, I had to have the actual book, which I found at Powell’s, signed by the author, for just a few bucks – and what glorious eccentricity, the sort that seems to have been a strong thread in the Oregon blanket from the start.

   Most of Piggott’s 111-page charmer details, as the subtitle says, “The Scientific Causes of All Diseases, Poverty, Premature Death and Longevity” and makes the case that bad diet and civilized living underlie all maladies – and we would live well past 100 if we were once again wild in nature, eating its unaltered bounty.

   The cure for getting fat, he says, is two bananas between meals and before bed – and also a little German White beer before sleep. And bathe only once a month, as you need all the oils oozing from the body. Change underwear once a week, two is better.

   But we must let this man, who pens abundant aphorisms, speak for himself:

   “Women should have equal rights with men in everything on the face of the earth. You can trust motherhood with making the laws…Women are slaves in this age and will remain so as long as there is so much orthodoxy.”

   “The more acquaintance I have with women, the more I love solitude. The more acquaintance I have with men, the better I like the four-footed animals and birds.”

   “The more acquaintance I have with the ‘inner’ workings of society, the better I like the society of Indians and the fishes that sport and swim below the blue waters of the sea.”

   “The purest part of society is the children and the old (young) maids.”

   “The more I learn of the inner workings of judges, lawyers, doctors and priests, the more I favor a national fool-killer.”

   “The only true, pure and unadulterated love on this earth is where the lovers never marry.”

   “What the world calls our faults are, when rightly understood, our virtues.”

   “Deliver us from our friends; we can watch our foes. The greater the man, the fewer his friends, because they do not understand him.”

   “The great man wants nothing but life and health; he possesses everything else.”

   “By evolving a religion from our inner consciousness we make one less imposter.”

   “A man who loses faith in humanity (unless he lose faith in himself) still has something to live for.”

   “In my creed is the motherhood of God.”

   Clearly, this gauzy, little known figure may be one of the near-greats in the first half-century of Oregon literature.

   An internet check shows (from Oregon Historical Society and Salem Library) that he arrived in Portland in 1877, sold produce, laid bricks and rails, then became a lawyer. He built the castle in 1892 and lost it in foreclosure. The name Mount Gleall is an anagram of his children, Gladys, Earl and Lloyd.

   Then there’s his portrait on the frontispiece – the flowing tie, longish hair, high collar and the wide, unblinking eyes of a “brickyard philosopher,” as he was called.

   His castle, now wedged in by the modernist planes of late 20th century homes, refuses, like its creator, to be moved or muted (can’t you see it with toney olives, mustards and reds?) How I was drawn to it in 1968 (was it reincarnation?) – and to the lovely maiden in the high tower.

   Every time I drive up Broadway, I crane my neck to look at it – and now, every time I see it, if traffic allows, I may perchance remember to recite one of his lines, maybe this one: “It is natural to be good; unnatural to be bad.”   ~






A Portable Blessing

“I have traveled a great deal in Concord.” 
                           --Thoreau

 This is my Concord, this Ashland and I have traveled a great deal in it and found it my balm, my guru, my god-infested Athens, my healer, my Renaissance painting (as good as any Botticelli) and though I’ve traveled the world, much of it hitchhiking or hopping trains, ever eager to see new vistas, it’s all toned down in past years and I find it all under my feet and I don’t want to leave, even for a day.

   I love the alleys here, drooping in the fall with plums and apples no one bothers to pick. The old Plaza at dawn, when no one’s up, the long park we forget to stroll, an open arboretum.  The constant glimpses of the Grizzly Range, sweeter and more interesting than the Alps.  The coffee shops, yard sales, sidewalk tables, Green Show.  The friend who says hi, no matter if the last time you talked was 20 years ago.  The welcoming intelligence and cheer of the university and Shakespeare.  The local bookstore and the many used bookstores, all clearly operated for love of books.

   And the college track I’ve come to love in past years.  Places have energy (or they don’t) and the track, open to sky and mountains, has energy.  It often gives it to you alone -- no one else around.  How sweet to breathe its wind-swept air, even if it’s raining.  It’s hard to keep from singing or at least praying, communing with the many energies of surrounding nature.

   Then one day, against all habit and preference, I go to Portland.  My friends and kids are amazed.  YOU went to Portland?  But you never leave the Rogue Valley!  The first thing that pops in my mind when I consider a drive over 50 miles is...car trouble.  Sitting in some gas station waiting for a verdict, then for parts to arrive, eating bad food in local restaurants.

   For the first day in (sunny) Portland, I’m sure I was a pathetic sight, hangdog, trying to be cheerful in conversations with my daughters, sister and their mateys.  They would put their hand on my shoulder and say, “sorry, dad, but you’ll be back home in no time; try to enjoy it. Here’s some wine.” Then come the inevitable stories of crime in the big city and how scary it can get on the Max.  We don’t have that in Ashland, I thought, and thank the gods!  We are civilized and not only that -- we are green-sustainable, culture-rich, neighbor-friendly, organic-local and we hug a lot!

   But then something starts to change (or as we call it in Ashland, “shift”).  Across the street from daughter Heather’s home in Northeast Pdx, a bunch of bicyclists are having a driveway party.  They wave cans of beer and beckon me over, showing off their fascinating ape hanger handlebars and banana seats from the 70s.  No lycra here.  These are alternative fun bikers called the Belligerantes and, as they slake my thirst, we rattle off hilarious stories for an hour and a half. 

   It’s Saturday night and daughter Hannah and her matey Galen take me out for Mexican on Mississippi Street -- thronged with milling, yakking, smiling revelers of every ethnicity and adornment, a veritable mardi gras, a writhing manswarm of happiness, an experience (not a concept) of diversity -- and suddenly, I am swept up into it, taking random pics every 10 seconds, studying the incomprehensible, unprovoked joy of it: people touching, laughing, bareshouldered lasses exposing themselves to the sun for the first time in 10 months, quaffing ale and wine, loving, just loving.

   And to my mind come these lines, from Yeats of almost a century ago:

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

   What’s wrong with you, dad?  So Hannah asks, adding that I should be looking at them and talking with them -- but I can’t.  It’s as if I’d never seen it before, humanity, the cause of all the problems in the world, the ones I escape from in my most un-diverse, unaffordable, sustainability-obsessed town of orthodox new thought.

   I see us on Mississippi Street as we really are and I want to shout, as Hamlet did, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals...”

   I am touched with the apprehension of a god and I bless them all and am blessed -- and realize that while we in Ashland often delude ourselves that we’ve created the most perfect of worlds and must hold it close to our breasts, that this blessing is portable, is not outside us and is ever present in our genes and cells and souls, ready to flow like heat lightning on a summer night.

   As with Yeats, it slips away after 20 minutes and I can’t catch my breath or hope to describe any of it -- wondered if I were perhaps having a manic episode but simply knew that “now I know.”  That’s how I sum it up to myself.  Now I know.  Again.  The center of the universe is the same as the center of the human soul.  It’s like a hologram, with each part containing the whole and available to pull back the curtain on it at any time and reveal, in both part and whole, particular and universal, that it’s all fine, if not perfect, just the way it is.    ~












The End