That part really hit me too. I've been playing with the idea of the pictures that we paint of ourselves for the world around us in a piece I am working on, and this was a very poetic was of addressing that concept.
Very nice, Erik. Kinda reminds me of Thoreau’s Walden, but I think his place was pretty close to a town, and I gather from what you have written here before that you are kinda removed from towns?
Did you ever read James Galvin’s The Meadow, in which he depicts the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border? If not, I think you might really like that book, which I read maybe in 1992, when I lived in Boulder, Colorado. The Meadow is set on a remote farm and iis about the different people who lived there and what they experienced.
I once had a trailer on a wooded lot on Little Torch Key, which, along with the key deer, raccoons, possums, feral cats, wild rats and scorpions, centipedes, and other bugs, and ground and mourning doves, and seagulls, and ospreys and bald eagles and buzzards and man o/ war birds, and fresh and saltwater mosquitoes, and various lizards and corn and indigo racer snakes, and the vegetables and fruits I and Mother Nature grew there, I viewed as my version of Walden.
But I had a car and did not stay home all the time, and in fact that car and my cable TV and the internet kept me well connected to a very busy world, with with I interacted daily in online forums and in restaurants, bars and city and county government meetings, and sometimes in churches and other people’s homes.
Living in the trailer with a half feral, half crazy, cross-eyed animal shelter rat cat got me used to living alone. No lady in my life, except one brief afternooner with a biker chick, and in that sense, the trailer was my monastery, where at night, when the wind was favorable, I could hear the passing road traffic on US 1 about a mile away, and music from a roadside honky tonk.
I think, at 81+, I’m probably too old now to try what you are doing, but I used to love to hunt and fish, and I lived many moons in tents, although not way out in the middle of nowhere, and I did spend a week on a lake in a tent with two friends, fishing in the Canadian wilderness boundary waters above Ely, Minnesota, and I know what truly wild nature looks like. I saw plenty of Her when I trekked two weeks around Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal, in 1995.
But, alas, I was born a city boy, and it looks like that’s how I’m going to live out my days.
Fortunately, the old 50s vintage apartment building where I have lived three times in Birmingham after I quit running away from home, has a lovely park across the street, which has very large old trees, and the city has let the shrubs grow wild and brambly, and the park as an energy vortex in it, and sometimes i sit there and let whatever lives there, which is not recognized by science, nor by religion, take me on rides that cause me to feel like I have entered another, lovely reality, which people walking by me sitting on a park bench cannot fathom, nor why I am sitting there with my baseball cap pulled down to shield my closed eyes, and I know they are walking by me and t am somewhere else entirely.
Two large owls live in the park, and they attract a lot of attention from passers by. Lots of chipmonks and squirrels in the park for the owls to eat. I saw a peregrine falcon swoop in toward the momma owl's baby and then see the momma owl and hightail it elsewhere.
If I did not have the internet and spectrum TV, and friends I play chess with and a duplicate bridge club where I play several days a week with some pretty interesting and fun people, and other kinds of people, I might spend more time in that park. Or, I might go batshit crazier than I already am.
But, it seems, my lot is to stay engaged with the world for a while longer, even as I go to bed most nights hoping the Lord or the Mother Ship with fetch me in my sleep, because I really do not cotton to the notion of living in an an old folks home, unable to get into my car and escape for a while:-)
Appreciate it Sloan. I actually live in a small town but I do make a lot journeys into the wild. I have solo trip coming up hiking all throughout the Smokies. It's in nature where I find the necessary solace to exist in this mad world.
Good for you. I get up each morning wondering why I’m still here, then I crawl out of bed and deal with what today brings until I turn in at night. I never did nature retreats, as such, but I loved being on a stream, pond or lake, or at the sea, fishing, it was my passion and solace for a very long time, and then it wasn’t there any more. I got the same relief working in my garden and paddling white water rivers, which held me together as I was moving away form practicing law. After the spirit stuff started happening, there was no where to go to get away from that :-), but I often did drive a little ways to some remote place and sit on a rock or under a tree until I fell asleep or went into an altered state and stayed there some more. For sensitive people, much of what goes on is rough, and the more empathic a person is, the rougher it is, as such a person absorbs the surrounding vibes, energies. I have a friend a generation below me, who can barely stand to be around people, because she picks up inside herself what is going on with them. My G.I. tract picks up what I'm engaging that isn’t lovely, and as I work through it, the sewage treatment plant surrenders and I start feeling better until the next time, which is soon. There is a guy on Substack named Radio Free Rulu, whom you might like, if you haven’t found him already. Truth, Beauty, Love breathe pretty good there, too.
Whoa. Your words washed over me with some powerfuk ancient ancestral familiarity. I am related to you somehow. Perhaps as a niece from another time or a daughter maybe. Definitely a like minded friend.
As we are clearly all running out of time in this incarnation, I have just asked to meet you on the other side- we have haunted the same places and likely engaged with six degree separation souls while here: Boulder. Ely, Nepal.
I live now on the side of the SangredeCristo mountains in southern CO in a tiny AFrame built in the 50's at 9000ft adjacent to a beautiful meadow and a mountain stream. Owls Bald Eagles, peregrins, hawks, Steller Jays, hummingbirds, cougars bobcats lynx black bears fox coyote deer. Rabbits and so many other creatures have been our company and our sanity as we also sought refuge from the world gone mad and have replaced most of the time spent in the past accessing virtual reality engagingi with our new neighbors: ponderosa and aspen and oak scrub. But also, chess.com is a regular contributor to maintaining our sanity.
I just have this overwhelming g feeling that I know you/knew you/will know you at some point in the future as every one of ypur words rang so true and familiar to me. Eerie but beautiful also.
Peace to your heart Sloan. I'm Kate-Lucy and Neo are my WONderful Doodles.
I lived in Santa Fe for over a year and a half, before moving to Boulder, Before it became clear I was headed to Boulder, I gave serious thought to moving to Crestone, Colorado, which I visited a couple of times. The Sangre de Cristo pears there vibrated.
I drove down to Crestone from Boulder for about a week, and stayed in a motel there and hung out in the Carmelite monastery’s chapel there, after being told in my sleep, “With respect to St. John of the Cross, you haven’t seen anything yet.” He was a Carmelite monk in the 1400s, in Spain. I ate lunch and dinner at The Road Kill Cafe, in Crestone.
I sometimes took my old whitewater canoe to the Arkansas River about 50 miles above Crestone, and tried to return to that sport, but I was headed into a very different kind of white water ;paddling.
I had a girlfriend for a while, when I lived in Santa Fe, who lived in Los Alamos. She worked at one of the labs there. Her lab, with her help, got grants to study how to use native vegetation to soak up the awful chemicals the rest of the labs were dumping into the round and the water table.
I skied a few times with her at the Los Alamos ski mountain, Himez, an ancient volcano, which before it blew off its top, was over 30,000 feet tall, I think I recall reading somewhere.
I was sleeping beside her one night in her bed, when I awoke in the wee hours and saw what I figured were two angels hovering above me in the darkness, and I heard, “This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give to you.” I saw a white flash and was jolted by something electrical, and which happened two more times, and they faced out. I called a desperate prayer I had mad maybe 10 days’ prior, “Dear God, I do not want to die like this, failed. I offer my life to human service.”
That’s when the changes began, slowly, inexorably. I was stood before many mirrors and turned upside down and every which way but loose, still in progress.
I few years after the spiritual lightning event, I met a massage therapist lady a spa in Himez Springs, about 15 miles westerly from Los Alamos. Those are hot springs. She and her fellow lived in a cabin in the woods, and did a whole lot of chop wood and carry water, literally and figuratively.
Later, I met her and her husband in Santa Fe, and they took me to see their Sufi teacher, who asked to see me first, and he started trying to recruit me to be his student to learn the way of the heart, and I had been bawling my eyes out that morning and the day before in the Cathedral of St. Francis in Santa Fe, he is the patron saint of New Mexico, and I asked the Sufi who was Francis's teacher and he said he didn’t know, and I said I knew people who had found their teacher, and they got goosebumps and cried, and then something was between me and the Sufi and I got goosebumps and cried, and I thanking him and left, and the lady and man from Himez Springs could not wrap their minds around it, when I had them take me back into town and bought their lunch at at the Guadalupe Cafe.
I experienced a great deal of phenomena at Boulder, and a dark night of the soul, and then things got a whole lot rougher for me, and that’s when I really started being changed by those two angels, and they recruited another angel to deal with me, and then they recruited Kali, now they all tag team me. :-)
Well, perhaps I shot off my mouth too much, but it all happened, and a whole lot more happened, and I would be nuts if I thought I could prove it to anyone else, but sometimes I meet people who don’t require proof, who take it in stride.
I envy people who are able to live in and very close to Nature, but it seems for some times that I’m to be in my hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, engaging what life brings my way here and in cyberspace.
Drinking all that in. Great respect and reverence for your honest and open sharing. Presently I am LITERALLY on the other side of the range directly in line with Crestone-staring at Horn Peak. Santa Fe, yes. Drawn to visit that same church. I understand what you are relaying, but not through words, and it requires a trust in a knowing I am not fully immersed in, yet. But feel it coming...
Have been "visited" many times in my life, worked in hospice and with the dying, including watching my mothers spirit leave her body, and having my two year old son eloquently and intentionally explain to me that the new red dot on his cheek that was not there when he went to be was the result of "they came for me mommy."
I believe we are in a geo location now where portals are present. Many phenomena have been experienced directly since loving here in 2021. But most "neighbors" are either old school ranchers or newbie extreme libs and not open to these conversations or considerations.
Thank you for reply. I don't need to know which bwe are connected, just that we are and velieve, in time, all is revealed.
Be well. Be safe. And stay in touch if you feel called to do so.
" having my two year old son eloquently and intentionally explain to me that the new red dot on his cheek that was not there when he went to be[d] was the result of "they came for me mommy.”
Is there more to that story?
It never occurred to me that people might live on the other side of the mountain from Crestone :-)
You are in the boonies.
Sure, we can keep chatting, but perhaps elsewhere?
I’m on Facebook, and via private messenger have been talking with an Australian woman for maybe 3 months, who read something I had posted at a friends of Drunvalo Melchizedek forum. She’s attracted the attention of something a whole like bigger and smarter than most people, including Drunvalo, based on what I have read of his writings, get to knowingly experience.
A man I knew well from Birmingham, who was a river rat and had worked at a river paddling company in Appalachia was running their outpost on the Arkansas River, and in 1987, I talked with him one day about working there and he said to come on, but I was headed into an entirely different kind of whitewater paddling, the details of which were totally beyond my wildest imaginings, and for that matter, still are :-)
I well remember Walden's Pond. Time away to ponder clears the mind. Even when the pond, once wilderness, is now surrounded by modern hustle and bustle. An oasis can be reached in New places with new things. Perhaps there is something to the weekly day of rest. My plants seem to grow the most during their evenings of rest from sunlight and breezes, out of sight.
“A dandelion, loafing about under the sun in a deserted pasture”. “To get away from this barbed wire civilization”.
His amalgam of words become a magnetic force that my eyes cannot possibly leave. A little like my first love over 55 years ago - whose memory has never left.
This poem hit the spot this morning, right from the beginning.
to be an absolute nobody
in a world gone mad
with everybody trying
to be a “somebody.”
I remember a dear friend of mine shouting “Why is there so much KNOWING in the world?!” He was lamenting the loss of the curious and open heart.
I feel the same way, sometimes, about everyone trying to be a “someone.”
Thank you for the poem today. 🙏
That part really hit me too. I've been playing with the idea of the pictures that we paint of ourselves for the world around us in a piece I am working on, and this was a very poetic was of addressing that concept.
As Muir sang: into the forest, I go to lose my mind and find my soul. Beautiful poem . In the trees, I feel my pulse.
Very nice, Erik. Kinda reminds me of Thoreau’s Walden, but I think his place was pretty close to a town, and I gather from what you have written here before that you are kinda removed from towns?
Did you ever read James Galvin’s The Meadow, in which he depicts the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border? If not, I think you might really like that book, which I read maybe in 1992, when I lived in Boulder, Colorado. The Meadow is set on a remote farm and iis about the different people who lived there and what they experienced.
I once had a trailer on a wooded lot on Little Torch Key, which, along with the key deer, raccoons, possums, feral cats, wild rats and scorpions, centipedes, and other bugs, and ground and mourning doves, and seagulls, and ospreys and bald eagles and buzzards and man o/ war birds, and fresh and saltwater mosquitoes, and various lizards and corn and indigo racer snakes, and the vegetables and fruits I and Mother Nature grew there, I viewed as my version of Walden.
But I had a car and did not stay home all the time, and in fact that car and my cable TV and the internet kept me well connected to a very busy world, with with I interacted daily in online forums and in restaurants, bars and city and county government meetings, and sometimes in churches and other people’s homes.
Living in the trailer with a half feral, half crazy, cross-eyed animal shelter rat cat got me used to living alone. No lady in my life, except one brief afternooner with a biker chick, and in that sense, the trailer was my monastery, where at night, when the wind was favorable, I could hear the passing road traffic on US 1 about a mile away, and music from a roadside honky tonk.
I think, at 81+, I’m probably too old now to try what you are doing, but I used to love to hunt and fish, and I lived many moons in tents, although not way out in the middle of nowhere, and I did spend a week on a lake in a tent with two friends, fishing in the Canadian wilderness boundary waters above Ely, Minnesota, and I know what truly wild nature looks like. I saw plenty of Her when I trekked two weeks around Annapurna Base Camp in Nepal, in 1995.
But, alas, I was born a city boy, and it looks like that’s how I’m going to live out my days.
Fortunately, the old 50s vintage apartment building where I have lived three times in Birmingham after I quit running away from home, has a lovely park across the street, which has very large old trees, and the city has let the shrubs grow wild and brambly, and the park as an energy vortex in it, and sometimes i sit there and let whatever lives there, which is not recognized by science, nor by religion, take me on rides that cause me to feel like I have entered another, lovely reality, which people walking by me sitting on a park bench cannot fathom, nor why I am sitting there with my baseball cap pulled down to shield my closed eyes, and I know they are walking by me and t am somewhere else entirely.
Two large owls live in the park, and they attract a lot of attention from passers by. Lots of chipmonks and squirrels in the park for the owls to eat. I saw a peregrine falcon swoop in toward the momma owl's baby and then see the momma owl and hightail it elsewhere.
If I did not have the internet and spectrum TV, and friends I play chess with and a duplicate bridge club where I play several days a week with some pretty interesting and fun people, and other kinds of people, I might spend more time in that park. Or, I might go batshit crazier than I already am.
But, it seems, my lot is to stay engaged with the world for a while longer, even as I go to bed most nights hoping the Lord or the Mother Ship with fetch me in my sleep, because I really do not cotton to the notion of living in an an old folks home, unable to get into my car and escape for a while:-)
Appreciate it Sloan. I actually live in a small town but I do make a lot journeys into the wild. I have solo trip coming up hiking all throughout the Smokies. It's in nature where I find the necessary solace to exist in this mad world.
Good for you. I get up each morning wondering why I’m still here, then I crawl out of bed and deal with what today brings until I turn in at night. I never did nature retreats, as such, but I loved being on a stream, pond or lake, or at the sea, fishing, it was my passion and solace for a very long time, and then it wasn’t there any more. I got the same relief working in my garden and paddling white water rivers, which held me together as I was moving away form practicing law. After the spirit stuff started happening, there was no where to go to get away from that :-), but I often did drive a little ways to some remote place and sit on a rock or under a tree until I fell asleep or went into an altered state and stayed there some more. For sensitive people, much of what goes on is rough, and the more empathic a person is, the rougher it is, as such a person absorbs the surrounding vibes, energies. I have a friend a generation below me, who can barely stand to be around people, because she picks up inside herself what is going on with them. My G.I. tract picks up what I'm engaging that isn’t lovely, and as I work through it, the sewage treatment plant surrenders and I start feeling better until the next time, which is soon. There is a guy on Substack named Radio Free Rulu, whom you might like, if you haven’t found him already. Truth, Beauty, Love breathe pretty good there, too.
https://freeradiorulo.substack.com/p/the-day-the-music-died?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2162994&post_id=142438563&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8wjd3&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Whoa. Your words washed over me with some powerfuk ancient ancestral familiarity. I am related to you somehow. Perhaps as a niece from another time or a daughter maybe. Definitely a like minded friend.
As we are clearly all running out of time in this incarnation, I have just asked to meet you on the other side- we have haunted the same places and likely engaged with six degree separation souls while here: Boulder. Ely, Nepal.
I live now on the side of the SangredeCristo mountains in southern CO in a tiny AFrame built in the 50's at 9000ft adjacent to a beautiful meadow and a mountain stream. Owls Bald Eagles, peregrins, hawks, Steller Jays, hummingbirds, cougars bobcats lynx black bears fox coyote deer. Rabbits and so many other creatures have been our company and our sanity as we also sought refuge from the world gone mad and have replaced most of the time spent in the past accessing virtual reality engagingi with our new neighbors: ponderosa and aspen and oak scrub. But also, chess.com is a regular contributor to maintaining our sanity.
I just have this overwhelming g feeling that I know you/knew you/will know you at some point in the future as every one of ypur words rang so true and familiar to me. Eerie but beautiful also.
Peace to your heart Sloan. I'm Kate-Lucy and Neo are my WONderful Doodles.
Wow, LucyNeo.
I lived in Santa Fe for over a year and a half, before moving to Boulder, Before it became clear I was headed to Boulder, I gave serious thought to moving to Crestone, Colorado, which I visited a couple of times. The Sangre de Cristo pears there vibrated.
I drove down to Crestone from Boulder for about a week, and stayed in a motel there and hung out in the Carmelite monastery’s chapel there, after being told in my sleep, “With respect to St. John of the Cross, you haven’t seen anything yet.” He was a Carmelite monk in the 1400s, in Spain. I ate lunch and dinner at The Road Kill Cafe, in Crestone.
I sometimes took my old whitewater canoe to the Arkansas River about 50 miles above Crestone, and tried to return to that sport, but I was headed into a very different kind of white water ;paddling.
I had a girlfriend for a while, when I lived in Santa Fe, who lived in Los Alamos. She worked at one of the labs there. Her lab, with her help, got grants to study how to use native vegetation to soak up the awful chemicals the rest of the labs were dumping into the round and the water table.
I skied a few times with her at the Los Alamos ski mountain, Himez, an ancient volcano, which before it blew off its top, was over 30,000 feet tall, I think I recall reading somewhere.
I was sleeping beside her one night in her bed, when I awoke in the wee hours and saw what I figured were two angels hovering above me in the darkness, and I heard, “This will push you to your limits, but you asked for it and we are going to give to you.” I saw a white flash and was jolted by something electrical, and which happened two more times, and they faced out. I called a desperate prayer I had mad maybe 10 days’ prior, “Dear God, I do not want to die like this, failed. I offer my life to human service.”
That’s when the changes began, slowly, inexorably. I was stood before many mirrors and turned upside down and every which way but loose, still in progress.
I few years after the spiritual lightning event, I met a massage therapist lady a spa in Himez Springs, about 15 miles westerly from Los Alamos. Those are hot springs. She and her fellow lived in a cabin in the woods, and did a whole lot of chop wood and carry water, literally and figuratively.
Later, I met her and her husband in Santa Fe, and they took me to see their Sufi teacher, who asked to see me first, and he started trying to recruit me to be his student to learn the way of the heart, and I had been bawling my eyes out that morning and the day before in the Cathedral of St. Francis in Santa Fe, he is the patron saint of New Mexico, and I asked the Sufi who was Francis's teacher and he said he didn’t know, and I said I knew people who had found their teacher, and they got goosebumps and cried, and then something was between me and the Sufi and I got goosebumps and cried, and I thanking him and left, and the lady and man from Himez Springs could not wrap their minds around it, when I had them take me back into town and bought their lunch at at the Guadalupe Cafe.
I experienced a great deal of phenomena at Boulder, and a dark night of the soul, and then things got a whole lot rougher for me, and that’s when I really started being changed by those two angels, and they recruited another angel to deal with me, and then they recruited Kali, now they all tag team me. :-)
Well, perhaps I shot off my mouth too much, but it all happened, and a whole lot more happened, and I would be nuts if I thought I could prove it to anyone else, but sometimes I meet people who don’t require proof, who take it in stride.
I envy people who are able to live in and very close to Nature, but it seems for some times that I’m to be in my hometown, Birmingham, Alabama, engaging what life brings my way here and in cyberspace.
Drinking all that in. Great respect and reverence for your honest and open sharing. Presently I am LITERALLY on the other side of the range directly in line with Crestone-staring at Horn Peak. Santa Fe, yes. Drawn to visit that same church. I understand what you are relaying, but not through words, and it requires a trust in a knowing I am not fully immersed in, yet. But feel it coming...
Have been "visited" many times in my life, worked in hospice and with the dying, including watching my mothers spirit leave her body, and having my two year old son eloquently and intentionally explain to me that the new red dot on his cheek that was not there when he went to be was the result of "they came for me mommy."
I believe we are in a geo location now where portals are present. Many phenomena have been experienced directly since loving here in 2021. But most "neighbors" are either old school ranchers or newbie extreme libs and not open to these conversations or considerations.
Thank you for reply. I don't need to know which bwe are connected, just that we are and velieve, in time, all is revealed.
Be well. Be safe. And stay in touch if you feel called to do so.
" having my two year old son eloquently and intentionally explain to me that the new red dot on his cheek that was not there when he went to be[d] was the result of "they came for me mommy.”
Is there more to that story?
It never occurred to me that people might live on the other side of the mountain from Crestone :-)
You are in the boonies.
Sure, we can keep chatting, but perhaps elsewhere?
I’m on Facebook, and via private messenger have been talking with an Australian woman for maybe 3 months, who read something I had posted at a friends of Drunvalo Melchizedek forum. She’s attracted the attention of something a whole like bigger and smarter than most people, including Drunvalo, based on what I have read of his writings, get to knowingly experience.
I’m easy to reach at sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
PS Oldest son is a river rafting guide (6 yes) on the Ark...its a special river.
A man I knew well from Birmingham, who was a river rat and had worked at a river paddling company in Appalachia was running their outpost on the Arkansas River, and in 1987, I talked with him one day about working there and he said to come on, but I was headed into an entirely different kind of whitewater paddling, the details of which were totally beyond my wildest imaginings, and for that matter, still are :-)
Love this one. In the muck of the meadows.
"To be unknown and unseen
like a distant star in an
undiscovered galaxy, a dandelion
loafing beneath the sun
in some deserted pasture,
to be an anonymous
breeze that rustles the
ferns of an ancient
forest at the edge
of the world."
"to unite the conscious
with the shadow and allow
grace to devour what’s left
of my iridescent heart"
Very, very nice. You do fine work.
Oh, also, you might really like the poem "Woods" by Noelle Oxenhandler. Here it is.
https://grateful.org/resource/woods/
I wish to grow dumber,
to slip deep into woods that grow blinder
with each step I take,
until the fingers let go of their numbers
and the hands are finally ignorant as paws.
Unable to count the petals,
I will not know who loves me,
who loves me not.
Nothing to remember,
nothing to forgive,
I will stumble into the juice of the berry, the shag of bark,
I will be dense and happy as fur.
🙏🏽✨️⭕️
Well this is just bloody lovely to put it simply. A softening, ease and understanding.
I like that you’re humble enough to use a quote by a master nonetheless to end this masterclass poem. Bravo. I like it a lot.
Beautiful poem… as if John Muir and Henry David Thoreau had a conversation.
I well remember Walden's Pond. Time away to ponder clears the mind. Even when the pond, once wilderness, is now surrounded by modern hustle and bustle. An oasis can be reached in New places with new things. Perhaps there is something to the weekly day of rest. My plants seem to grow the most during their evenings of rest from sunlight and breezes, out of sight.
Such sacred and sentient wisdom incarnate.
“A dandelion, loafing about under the sun in a deserted pasture”. “To get away from this barbed wire civilization”.
His amalgam of words become a magnetic force that my eyes cannot possibly leave. A little like my first love over 55 years ago - whose memory has never left.
Simply, because it cannot.
Gonna find me a cabin in the woods right away and do just that.
"I go to the woods to dance barefoot
like a demented shaman in the muck
of the meadows."
Wow! Loved it
Is poem sounds like a good plan. Who’s ready to go?
Count me in! But if we all go then it won't be solitary!
Just needs a good dentist and emergency room within walking distance.
How about we bring on some dentists and people who can set bones? Then we should be set.