✈️🏄‍♀️🏖️ So...After weeks of sunny weather, the Kauai gods decided to rain during the week of the conference🌨️☔️

The better to focus on writing?🖌️📖🎬

John

I’m off this Sunday to my second Kauai Writers Conference (KWC). I’ll take master classes from A-list authors & publishers and meet literary agents for my memoir: Satsang Junkie. David Katz, our warmly supportive friend, is KWC cofounder and Director.

“In thirty seconds,” the writing teacher said,
“write seven words
in an ascending sequence
that come to mind
when you think of romantic love.”

Mine were:

Where I can relax,
floating just as I am,

up airy hills,
down crystalline streams,
over soft waterfalls.

All the thunder between nations
of words and proclamations
has not a fraction of the power
of a real friendship.

 This world may be real.
Or it may be unreal.
Or maybe both.

What if, when I wake up,
I’m in this body for the very first time:
life is new as light
for a baby at birth.

The memory threads of this body’s story
are woven, tangled, gnarled.
And now I’m tethered, like roots to a tree,
to every spent leaf and past-colored blossom.

Years ago, as a new meditator on a course at Humboldt, California, I had a chat with Brahmachari Satyanand. He studied with Maharishi in the late 1940s and early 1950s under the guidance of their teacher, Guru-Dev. Satyanand was everyone’s favorite: a tiny, kindly, helpful uncle.

“Satyanand-ji,” I asked, “What is it about food?

In the 1970s, when we were in college in Victoria, we decided we needed a better diet. But we had friends who were into various diets, including the Zen Macrobiotic Diet, the Mucusless Diet, the Paul Bragg Diet, the Atkins low-carb high-protein diet, and the vegetarian diet, among others. Each diet specified foods you should eat and foods you should avoid.

(Continued from last post)

The door swung open. Light poured into the room. The silhouette of a tall man stood there. Blood rushed to my head. I jumped two feet, a trapped thief. But it was one of the farmers, so I covered myself by saying, "Oh, hi Mr. Jenklin, what kind of rifle is this?"

In the summer of 1958, I joined the 4-H club, the agriculturally-oriented youth club similar to Scouts. 4-H has an inspired guiding principle: Learn by Doing, which often means giving a young boy or girl the bonding, real-life experience of raising an animal. So, this helpful Dutch farmer who’d showed me how to milk cows gave me a week-old, black & white Holstein bull-calf to care for. I christened him Bobby.  

My tres cool great-nephew, Stephen, grandson of my sister, Gemma. Stephen is a Pilot with the Canadian Air Force, with which he completed a degree in Aeronautical Engineering.

Three years ago, I revisited an old health practice: cold baths. When we lived in Switzerland in the mid-1970s, young men like me, who fancied ourselves brahmacharies (wannabe celibates), treated icy baths as a badge of honor. And in the old, mountainside hotels we lived in, cold meant glacial: could freeze a polar bear.

On Michael Oliver’s runabout, with Neil Paterson and Keith Wallace, heading from Salt Spring Island to Montague Harbor on Galliano Island. So much fun on these islands this time of year!

Sailing from Salt Spring Island on Vince Argiro’s grand sailing boat, Avvento, with my sister Margaret and Nancy Walker. 

The San Juan and Gulf Islands off the pacific coast— over 200 of them—make for the best sailing in the world. 

Another 55th reunion for the Rishikesh TTC, class of 1970: 
Al Bruns, Prudence Bruns, Olga Campbell, Gordie Hamilton and me.  In the Karma restaurant, Vancouver, celebrating our special bond.

We may live in different parts of the world, but we will always be together.

Me with Vince Argiro on car-ferry from Vancouver to Victoria. The ship slowed down so everyone could watch the Orcas sport in the ocean: magnificent animals, family oriented like Elephants.

~ John

On Ganges Harbour, Salt Spring Island, with Michael McBurnie’s beautiful sailing catamaran. 

See group picture inside cabin from left to right: Gregg Wilson, Garrison Smith, Berenice Nelson, Deborah Rubin, me, Michael, Ruth Smith.

Strike flint against stone: ignite fire.
Marry melody to poem: give birth to a song.
Blend thinking with feeling: mother emotions—
Those cyclones
that
corkscrew
me
rapture
or
gloom.

Flint or stone alone? Sometimes useful;

Long-term, primordial stresses (from my last post) are harmful party crashers, and often they don’t want to leave.  

Maharishi shared an example (not his exact words): say a dirty, torn, worn-out couch is in the middle of our clean and beautiful living room. It doesn’t belong there; it restricts what we can do in the room. But…if it’s been there a long, long time we might have become attached to it. We know it’s not good, but it’s become a part of the room’s identity.

I'm interested in traumas: how they got into me and how I can get them out. In the next few posts, I'll tell you what I’ve learned about those semi-sentient entities that get inside us and shut down our natural, happy song.