Release, Receive, Renew

by Eric Alan
January 16th, 2011

For the first year in almost a decade, I didn’t spend this New Year’s Eve walking around in circles. And I missed it, for walking around in circles has been one of the most enlightening things I’ve ever done.

Perhaps I should clarify. First of all, I suppose it’s not technically correct to say that I was walking around in circles, for the nearly-circular patterns of a labyrinth in truth lead a clear path from edge to center, along nearly concentric lines. There is no way to get lost, or go wrong. There is only one step in front of the other, with great trust that the path will reveal itself. In that way, the labyrinth mirrors the daily path of life ahead of us and behind us—one of many ways in which that meditation offers insight into where we’ve been and where we’re going. Having discovered that power, I spent most of the past decade celebrating the turn of the year at Ashland’s annual Sacred Walk to the new year, a labyrinth meditation ceremony with considerable community power around it. Since I no longer live in Ashland, I didn’t attend this year, and found no similar ceremony elsewhere to immerse myself in.

That left me to recreate the ritual in private ways; to find a labyrinth within my home forests and the thickets of my imagination, in which to accomplish the three main aspects of the meditation associated with the labyrinth walk. The first aspect, done on the path inward along the labyrinth, is to release whatever may need release from the old year. The second, at the center, is simply to receive whatever communication of spirit may appear. And the third, along the walk back out of the labyrinth, is to renew whatever may need refreshing as one year passes and another begins. In participating in each year’s Sacred Walk, I generally found it wise to walk the labyrinth multiple times with those aspects in mind, waiting for the one profound walk to rise forth from among them. Inevitably, it did.

This year I walked the labyrinths of the woods and the living room, thinking of what there is to release, receive, renew.

To release, it always seems I need to release my expectations of what the year would be—good and bad. Every season is a surprise; nothing expected manifests in the same way as the dream. In some senses, that brings disappointment; but in others, relief or even elation. Disappointed expectations can be positive as much as negative, and if so, offer a great chance to see the ways in which we’re underestimating the world—not giving it enough credit for resilience, unexpected positive outcome, love hidden in corners that were invisible until the sudden moment of discovery.

The same goes with successes, not as narrowly and externally defined as they are in the worlds of career and finance, but including successes within the heart and its ability to give, as well. If I only achieved the successes I expected or intended each year, what a disappointment each year’s transitional meditation would be. Success is rarely where imagined; but the qualities within the desired success can usually be found in the unexpected events and shared moments within the year.

So it is that every year I find I must let go of expected forms of relationship as well. Again, I may need to let go of expected limitations that didn’t prove to exist, just as often as I need to let go of heightened hopes that didn’t prove to be realized. In the end, if one approaches relationship with integrity, compassion and respect—with the desire to give primary, as the path to receiving—more often than not, the forms will find their ever-shifting ways, and the heart will remain full.

In the center of the labyrinth this year, where the meditation is simply to wait to receive whatever message arrives, this year the message for me was simple: affirmation, for all the difficult changes I undertook in 2010. It was difficult to let go of all I spent seventeen years building in Ashland, with radio, my creative world, relationship, friendship, home. Yet every motion I’ve taken has been met with the assurance of support that I’m on the right path, to open new creative horizons, to be home by my aging mother, to begin new relationships in all shifting forms. It was a huge sigh of relief at the center of the labyrinth, in the new forest where I found it. I felt a similar sense of relief for the world at large, too, even as old forms crash hard around us. That is necessary to give the new room to grow.

And so I walk outward again, into the new year, into the meditation of renewal. I need to renew my energy for all the demands of another challenging year—as if there was ever any other kind. Each year gives the opportunity to renew the desire to live according to mindful principles, no matter how imperfectly I always do so. I have to renew the quest to keep healthy in body, mind and spirit; to risk another level of intimate growth. I look inward during the winter hibernation season to make sure that I’ve cared for myself enough to care for the others around me, whatever that may prove to mean—although if I do that renewal sustainably, and do the giving cleanly, it’s within the giving that the renewal actually comes. It’s good to remember that, one step at a time, out of the labyrinth.

It’s also good to remember that although it may not be visibly printed upon the soil, in a life lived consciously, the days do mimic the labyrinth, and there is one path forward to trust, already waiting to be discovered. The renewal of that vision is what January brings, and may we all trust it as 2011 reveals its path through our human wilderness.

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Salt and Pepper Teachers

by Eric Alan
December 29th, 2010

It’s easy to fall prey to the illusion that our most masterful teachers will be human, or perhaps divine. But when the entirety of the earth is suffused with wisdom, our teachers may be the animals beside us, the plants, the soil, or even what we term inanimate.

I was reminded of that last week when I was given a wise lesson by a pair of salt and pepper shakers.

The salt and pepper shakers I’d been using were perfectly functional, but aesthetically as miserable as an ‘80s hair band. (Don’t ask what made me choose such tragic ugliness as a reference point.) I’d been looking for months for just the right pair to replace them, without success. No problem: I was looking patiently.

Before Christmas, I wasn’t even consciously looking at all. In fact, we were driving north from Ashland after I returned there to emcee the annual Gypsy Soul holiday benefit concert for the WinterSpring Center for Transforming Grief and Loss. It was a fine show for a great cause, and for the past decade, one of the holiday traditions I cherish the most.

I don’t cherish driving in conditions of winter ice. The storms were setting in and the passes were looking risky—until they looked impassable due to some form of colossal accident. Interstate 5 was completely stopped for thirty miles south of the disaster, and we suddenly found ourselves sitting motionless in the “fast” lane, wondering what speed is slower than zero. It was a bit of a Zen koan. The offramp to Grants Pass was a mere hundred feet away, but how to get there? A line-up of semis sat motionless between us and it. We pondered our gathering need to go to the bathroom. We pondered our existence. We pondered the apparent impossibility of anything except sitting there until darkness fell.

Fortunately, several vehicles ahead, someone managed to squeeze their car between two of the trucks onto the shoulder of the highway, then another car followed, then another. Several of us were able to sequentially weave between the trucks onto the highway shoulder, and therefore onto the offramp and the relative freedom of Grants Pass. On a Sunday in Grants Pass most things remain closed, unlike in most cities, which have decided that commerce must never stop, like voices on a television set. Grants Pass remains wiser, though losing that wisdom slowly.

Looking merely for someplace to kill time—preferably one with a bathroom—we wandered into what appeared to be a wine shop, although the odd metal sculptures wrapped around some of the display-window wine bottles should have been an indication that it might not be an ordinary one. We wandered back farther in the store where the wine racks suddenly turned into a large selection of lamp parts. A catacomb of sorts appeared behind that, with an ancient intriguing sign pointing up the stairs to the mezzanine, warning that no one under the age of 18 would be allowed to go there unsupervised. X-rated lamp parts, perhaps? Things too frightening for impressionable minds, such as vintage pictures of Joseph McCarthy?

Actually, more vast catacombs of odd items. More rooms of lamp parts. Toys from eras before my lifetime. Assorted second-hand oddities defying description, most of it exceptionally well-organized, and unsold for at least a generation. It was a remarkable collection of… something. It was a delightful cross between a thrift store, a haunted house, a museum, and that random dream I had last Tuesday.

It included a very large collection of salt and pepper shakers. I immediately found the exact pair I’d been looking for, where they’d been resting for months, years, decades. Beautifully sculpted and polished wood, in perfect condition, a little dusty, but who isn’t? Six bucks. I took them down with us to the first floor, where the shop’s dog began to follow us around as if we knew something important. We begged use of the bathroom, after promising not to bother the cat sequestered there. We checked the road cameras, praising the wizardry of the iPhone and other modern gadgets, and saw traffic now moving enough to make a run home before the ice and darkness set in. We bid our adieus to the kind shop owners and dog, and went off into the journey.

It wasn’t until later, smiling at the beautiful salt and pepper shakers on my table—again remembering how one of my radio colleagues once accidentally called such things “salt and pecker shapers” on the air—that I realized what a great lesson the random experience and the salt and pepper shakers had given me. It’s a reminder of a lesson already known, in truth, for I’ve found it in many places across the bizarre path of my life and so-called “career.” It is this:

If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll most likely find it eventually—but not in the expected form or place. You have to have open eyes at all times, for the biggest challenge is in recognizing that what you seek is right in front of you when you least expect it. With relationships or career opportunities as much as with objects, it’s often harder to recognize open doors at hand than it is to create them. The obvious doors, which are most frequently knocked upon the hardest, are rarely the ones that open to you. It’s the unnoticed ones that are begging for you to knock them up, so to speak. The goal is to live a life of calm presence; the inner stillness then allows you enough attentiveness through open eyes to recognize what you seek, when it appears in unexpected form. Life gives you a daily test, with a bit of a smile and smirk: Are you paying attention? Life seems to think it’s funny to find out.

I’ll be reminded of that every time I grind pepper on the salad or salt the potatoes. I‘ll be taught by them as I am by fire hydrants, ever since I read of someone’s vision of a fire hydrant as a saint: just standing there with infinite patience, waiting to be of service.

We made it home safely. With that caveat, I recommend random experience.

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Divine Light

by Eric Alan
December 7th, 2010

Light has no mass, no home, no lover, no identity as distinct as our own names. Yet it’s one of the most fundamental forces in the universe, illuminating our entire perception of reality. It’s one of the most powerful creatures in the universe, as alive as anything, nearly omnipotent in how it sheds light on all, though it may not see what it illuminates. It’s as much a part of nature as a moose or a mosquito, and as divine as any spirit I’ve encountered.

Thus, when I took a few brief minutes to photograph my newly-installed Christmas lights last night, I felt I was photographing both nature and spirit. It was another realization of always being a part of nature, no matter how much illusion tempts me to believe in separateness.

This is what I saw in my living room, as sacred and wild as any mystic’s vision. It was totally beyond me—I just found it. It was also as psychedelic as any trip, reminding me of the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Who needs to travel beyond the front door to find the outer frontiers? It was evidence again that what we see is more limited by our imagination than by the supposed reality we face.

So come tripping with me, deep into the heart of nature and light. This is my Christmas prayer. Can you recognize oneness here? It’s all I see.

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White Thanksgiving, Clear Gratitude

by Eric Alan
November 24th, 2010

As soon as I cancelled all of my appointments today, I began to love the snow. Before that, it was menacing, as it had been transforming itself to roadway ice in places I was committed to crossing. I wondered at the incompleteness of our own inventions: creating transportation that only works when the weather is right, and then building our lives around it. What kind of wisdom is that? The car itself, marvel that it is, remains one of the most ill-advised ideas our species has had. A fully-packed day planner with a life scheduled down to the minute is right alongside it, as a clever idea that does huge accidental harm.

Little on the day planner is actually as vital as it seems, and once I let go of my compulsive need to follow through meticulously on every plan, I began to be grateful. I could stay home in the snow, write, and go inward as a form of early Thanksgiving. I’m deeply grateful to be living this far in the woods; happy to have begun to land on the other side of a steep canyon of life changes.

In the process, I’ve become newly grateful. Of course I’m grateful for a beautiful home, for the family within and around it, for love, for friends, for the green grace of the earth itself. The central gratitude list (upon which the previous sentence only touches) stays steady over time, as often as I remind myself to refresh it. With a huge set of life shifts accomplished in the recent past, though, I thought to myself as I walked, what am I newly grateful for? With new vistas come new visions, and I must have a few. I’ve found these inside, as a beginning:

I’m grateful for risk. The need to take risks challenges me inside, to make bold moves from a basis of well-considered faith. It makes me stop to consider what’s vital, and what I’m willing to let go of in order to stay true to that vitality.

I’m grateful for mystery. You never really want to know how the story turns out in advance. That would vaporize the intrigue of being alive. It would lead to complacency, thinking it’s pre-destined, how tomorrow’s going to turn out. And it would scare the hell out of us all, knowing the exact forms of our inevitable difficulties and demise. (I often wonder how I would’ve felt in my twenties, had I known I’d get cancer at thirty-two.)

I’m grateful for exertion. It’s been a hard year, at least in comparison to the comfort zone I had in my previous life phase. I’ve traded that ease for new challenges, and in doing so, am reminded how important hard work is in conditioning. Not just physical hard work, but also emotional, spiritual and intellectual. Exertion leads to the maintenance of good, sharp edges. It keeps you toned. It gives you the elation of the runner’s endorphin rush.

I’m grateful for inherent courage. Before cancer, I believed that courage was something only some people had. Then, when I saw first-hand that there was simply no choice about courage in illness—dying takes courage, and healing does too—I began to realize that all of us have it. It’s just a matter of tapping into it, and allowing ourselves to rely on what’s already there. That knowledge has served me well this year, launching off into new phases in a downtrodden age, with faith that I can scale the walls of tough economics, isolation and other challenges known and unknown. I didn’t need to find courage: I knew it was there when needed. It’s there for you too.

I’m grateful for opportunity’s camouflage. It’s tied in with mystery, how the subtlety of opportunity requires honing your vision. Often, the hard part is not getting doors to open, but recognizing the open doors that are already beckoning. They may not look anything like a door, or be in a direction opposite to where you thought you wanted to go. It takes the stealth of a native tracker to find opportunity in this wild civilization. And while you’re looking for it, your sharp vision allows you to see all sorts of other things for which you weren’t even looking.

It’s been one of those years: risky, mysterious, hard-working, at times courageous, and with opportunity lurking in the most unexpected places. I’ve seen many vivid, unexpected visions along the path. As I settle down into the clear gratitude of a white Thanksgiving—more snow falling even now—I’m truly grateful for gratitude itself. It was the first thought I put up on my Facebook page: “Gratitude is the shortest path to happiness.” And I’ve never yet been tempted to change it. That too, is part of gratitude’s central list—a list that spirals endlessly, beyond the bounds of these words. I’m grateful that you’re there to receive them.

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Dung Beetles and Voters

by Eric Alan
November 12th, 2010

Dead ballot pamphlet pages blow across the valley like more fallen leaves, and nature does not appear to care. At the grand level, nature had no partisan preference for Kitzhaber or Dudley in Oregon’s governor race, DeFazio or Robinson for Congress. It expressed no opinion on prison sentences or lottery funding for parks and beaches. Nature is not a registered voter, even in the Green Party. It doesn’t smoke its own medicinal weed. It doesn’t care if corporations are considered people, or if they were instead declared to be deer, with a hunting season open each October. (Ballot initiative, anyone?) Nature’s vastness stands impassively by as we hold our tiny elections. To nature, we’re the equivalent of a dung beetle struggling mightily to roll its little ball of dung to wherever it seems important to go.

This is not to say that nature doesn’t need dung beetles and voters. We’re all a small but integral element of the natural system, and this election was vital to us though lost in the grand scheme. This is our dung, and it matters here. So it’s still worth asking what nature’s great wisdom says about this election, even if the answers die beyond the thin protective shell of our atmosphere.

Nature mostly exhibits a grand curiosity and a desire for competitive experiment. Without prejudice, it pits species against species, individual against individual, Ducks against Beavers, Democrats against Republicans. Whichever is most successful persists. If one is too successful and trashes its own habitat via mindless rampage, soon it will suffer and die back of imbalance. Then greater balance will return. Beautiful, elegant, harsh system. Especially harsh if your own dung is what chokes you.

In this and other recent elections, I heard nature’s voice through the campaign mantras more clearly than through the results—for below the bitter surface partisanship, a grand unity has emerged. Every seemingly opposite side has screamed the same theme: Change! Take our country back! Get rid of the elected failures! The differences in the vague partisan strategies for fixing the pain pale against the agreement that something has gone fundamentally wrong in this country, this state, this beautiful little valley we call home.

Nature is perfectly willing to let us experiment if we collectively feel that the solution to our deep sense of loss is to imprison our sickest violent ones for longer. It’s willing to let us cling to haphazard prohibitions, even if they feed violent cartels. It permits us to pursue an addict’s strategies for easing our suffering, hooked on the same two parties, the same broken governance system. Nature even allows blind priorities that don’t value nature itself—for awhile. Economy, jobs, safety, health care, transportation: they’re all tied in to the fouled larger habitat, poisoned by the dung of humanity’s rampage. This may not be a recession. Our pain may instead be the beginning of nature’s next experiment with a different form of balance.

Author Thomas Berry once summarized it on the public radio program New Dimensions: “We lose our souls if we lose the experience of the forest, the butterflies, the song of the birds, if we can’t see the stars at night. It’s not just pollution of the air, or toxicity of the planet, or loss of jobs. It’s a loss of soul, of imagination, of the experience of what it is to be a human being.”

Maybe the preservation of soul is what nature is subtly offering us a chance to vote for, on the higher level—to prioritize the planet’s soul as a way of saving our own. Maybe it’s asking us to take a step back down in importance; to nurture the greater abundance so that we can return better to thriving within it, rather than increasingly picking scraps off of its dying carcass. But if we don’t? No worries. Nature has plenty of time, other planets, other experiments out there in the great yawning void. We can vote ourselves to death if we damn well please. That will just leave more room for the dung beetles to thrive.

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Stalking the Wild Candidate

by Eric Alan
October 12th, 2010

It’s hard to tell the difference between hunting season and the upcoming election. Both involve camouflage, ambush and the stalking of prey judged to be less intelligent. Tall tales abound, and there are far too many news items about people shooting themselves in the foot. Mixed messages abound.

One mixed message lodged in my mind’s eye is visual: as I’ve watched hunters rumble up our gravel road to the public forest beyond us, I’ve seen several dressed in conflicting layers of camouflage and anti-camouflage—military camo topped by bright orange vests intended to prevent other hunters from mistaking their friends for deer. One fashion seems to negate the other. They look like an argument.

With hunting and elections, it is indeed easy to mistake friends for prey and candidates for predators. It might be amusing if it wasn’t so lethal. May we all rest more easily when guns and ballots are again put down.

I’m grateful to live in a forest preserve where the deer can congregate without fear of becoming venison. (Certain candidates would be advised to hide in the trees as well.) We’ve had three fawns around lately, though they’ve been without their mother and we wonder of her whereabouts. Given the economy, she may have had to take a second job, and they’re latch-key fawns. It’s too sad to even consider that she may have been poached instead.

I feel a mixed message in my own emotions about hunting, even then—for I have no objections to it on some levels. Seeing the condition of many hunters’ cars and faces in these hard-knock places, I have to believe that subsistence hunting is a serious part of their game. This is sheer survival for some, largely in keeping with the natural order. Creatures gotta eat: a fundamental law of the universe.

I’d just like to see the survival struggles be fair. I don’t want to see hunters with night scopes and drones. I don’t want to see corporations considered people by law. Too many big guns, and the fight turns to slaughter—one that doesn’t cease until the ones who slaughter find their own food source depleted. If overwhelming force is used to stalk the wild candidates, they disappear, along with their significant voices.

Nature always returns things to balance eventually, so I don’t worry too much. No matter how many come up here hunting “damn deer and Democrats,” both have proliferated. They don’t even wear camouflage, and seem to do fine overall. Oregon’s mixed messages continue to breed quickly.

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Autumn’s Leading Edge

by Eric Alan
September 30th, 2010

Autumn’s sharp leading edge cuts into the soft greens of Oregon summer. The long light is fading, the crickets are slowing, and I hear wistful tones in others’ voices. The wistful tones would’ve once been my own, in younger days when seasonal sadness seemed endemic. I’ll miss the light and warmth too—not to mention baseball season—but in recent years, my wistfulness is fleeting to the point of subliminal. No longer do my moods fall and drift when the leaves do.

What seasons changed inside? From where did this equanimity come? It wasn’t in accomplishment, or any other form of external attainment. I didn’t find it on Craigslist, or in the pockets of a forgotten jacket. It was somewhere in the learning of a quiet embrace: I learned to hold the purpose of the seasons, as I feel them in my individual way. Summer’s time of outdoor exploration is brilliant and precious. It’s for celebration of that light; for activity and motion, wandering across the face of the wild earth. But the pace of that can’t be constant. Fall begins the slowing down, the letting go; and if there’s anything that lightens emotions, it’s letting go. Old wounds, unrealized expectations, the need to be in exploratory motion—these can fall away with the leaves. Who needs them? There is new life within the fall to find.

Come winter, there will be hibernation, reflection. It will be time to go inward and embrace the experience of the previous year, to rest by the fireside and wonder at the storms. I choose a creative project for each winter, and there will be many to select from this time, with abundance at hand. Then spring will bring its inevitable rejuvenation—a celebration of another form. I remember having a conversation with Canadian musician Harry Manx, who said to me (in a month I can’t remember): “This is one of my favorite seasons!” Then he looked at me and smiled further, adding, “I have four, you know.”

I have four as well. No need to hang onto a passing favorite when it’s equally replaced by another. No need for nostalgia or looking forward. Only a desire to look more deeply into the current day. This past Sunday, we looked into the day from along the trail to Parker Falls, a little-used trail not far from home. The leaf, the caterpillar you’ve already seen here were there.

The sky above us was painting its beautiful kinetic art.

The falls held rainbows, just as we held them in our vision.

The creek held the greens and the yellows of the deep, steep canyons.

The forest surrounded us with its gathering release, ready to let go, to slow down, to embrace the nourishing coolness and wetness surely on its way. Everywhere there is new life coming, so no need to restrictively grip the old. To embrace and to let go: paradoxically, they’re one and the same at times like these.

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F.W.A. (Flowaz With Attitude)

by Eric Alan
September 23rd, 2010

Despite that the natural green growing world is my refuge of spirit and tranquility, it’s a rough mean place—as rough as the ghetto streets. As I wrote in Wild Grace: “The myth of nature’s boundless benevolence can be shattered in three words: things eat you.” They also bite, sting or poison you, shoot you with acrid skunk juice, and (if you’re not careful) make your shoe soles smell like the local wildlife’s fecal remnants. Given that we’re a part of nature still, it’s no surprise that harsh defensive tactics translate to city streets and pacifist’s gardens.

Still, I never expected to be flipped off by a bunch of flowers.

I find myself wondering: is this the floral equivalent of gangsta rap? Surely neither nature nor gardener intended their beautiful blooms to remind anyone of rude and violent music. But everything is interconnected—that’s the familiar spiritual truth. There are few degrees of separation between this meditative arrangement and N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. There’s no true separation at all.

Personally, I’m at peace with that. I was never a fan of Niggaz With Attitude, given their misogyny and advocacy of violent mayhem—I preferred Public Enemy’s wildly creative and conscious raps—but I understood where N.W.A.’s attitude came from. My little high school trips into Compton for basketball and football playoffs were enough to convince me that living there could’ve made me violent too. As warped as it may be, violence is a defensive tactic in a harsh climate—a tragic survival adaptation. Alas, it’s still nature’s brutal way. So I get why N.W.A. shunned the “gangsta rap” label and insisted they made “reality rap,” because for them, it was reality.

That claim could easily lead me into another rap, about how much we create our own reality. (That’s a useful attitude, but incomplete in its truth. Ask genocide refugees in Rwandan camps if it’s only their viewpoint holding them back.) But I’d rather look at flowers than rap. This day, I thought about how this bunch of blooms—like N.W.A.—stood there blindly flipping off every passer-by, regardless of whether they deserved it. I wondered what insects might be brutally eating each other on and underneath the flowers, below my threshold of notice. I turned and left the Flowaz With Attitude to work on their new CD, Straight Outta Compost. It too will sell millions, if authorities say it shouldn’t.

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Evictions and Convictions

by Eric Alan
September 16th, 2010

I’ve never desired to be a landlord, but from time to time I’ve been one despite myself. One of my principles in that unfortunate situation is to avoid killing my tenants if at all possible. Unfortunately, though, that’s a brutal choice I’ve had to make sometimes. I can’t have mice eating the food in the kitchen—even if one did thoughtfully place a piece of chocolate in one of my boots—and there’s no peaceful way to deal with carpenter ants who’ve taken up residence in the log house walls.

When I do have to exterminate unwelcome tenants, I do my best to treat them as a native hunter would: I ask their forgiveness first, I honor the life that they give, and I thank them. Then I squash the bloody hell out of them or spray them with some evil manufactured venom. It’s just the way of the world. It’s a green jungle out here.

Other tenants are theoretically welcome, but must be evicted anyway. So it is with the bat family who just moved in under the upstairs window sill, a mere week or two before the window was scheduled to be replaced. They’ll have to leave when the old window’s ripped out, so better to gently urge them to move on now. We don’t appreciate the guano on the deck door mat, either. (Note to tenants: it’s not a good policy to crap on your landlord’s shoes.)

Thus we’ve learned about bat eviction. We’ve learned to place screens hanging down from the sill, which allow bats to leave but not return. We’ve sat on the deck at dusk, and watched with fascination as they’ve emerged from more house cracks than we knew existed. We’ve marveled at their ability to squeeze through small spaces. We’ve flinched as they’ve swooped within inches of our faces. We’ve helpfully pointed out to them which of the annoying bugs they should eat right now, thanks, without honoring those buggy lives.

We’ve also noticed that they’re ignoring the bat house we kindly bought for them before eviction, in keeping with our convictions. And now they’re crapping on one of the deck chairs instead of the doormat. I suspect it’s a message about who’s really in charge around here. So it goes in the life of an accidental landlord.

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Always Further (and Furthur)

by Eric Alan
September 4th, 2010

Some twenty-odd years ago when I lived in the Bay Area—and they were very odd years—Ken Kesey brought his magic bus to Berkeley as part of the mayoral campaign for ‘60s counterculture icon Wavy Gravy. (The estimable Mr. Gravy—who had discovered in the ‘60s protests that police didn’t hit people in clown costumes—was campaigning with the slogan “Put a REAL clown in office,” and questioned his opponent’s experience because “he’s never even been to jail.”) Anyway, after running into Kesey at another author’s reading at Black Oak Books, some sequence of events happened that I don’t recall, despite that I’ve never taken LSD. All I clearly remember is that I ended up on Kesey’s bus, taking pictures of the intricately decorated interior—only to discover later that, for the only time in my life, I had forgotten to actually load film in my camera.

I was mortified. It bothered me for years. An opportunity and a memory like that, and such a basic bonehead move cost me the photos? I couldn’t come to peace with it until one random day when I realized I had been pranked by the enduring Merry Pranksters spirit. I laughed out loud on the street. Apparently I was supposed to be experiencing that free moment, not capturing it to keep. That was the prank’s message. Either that, or my own projected madness had simply become consistent. Whichever. I reached tranquility with the memory either way, at last.

A recent weekend brought the memory flashing back. The Kesey family is still deeply involved in creating culture in Eugene—literally, since some of them are in the yogurt business—and Kesey’s bus was out for Eugene Celebration, the annual town party. (There have actually been two buses, and this is the second of the two. It’s the one named “Further” instead of “Furthur,” although it answers to either name. It’s the very same one I climbed on, decades previous.)

“Please don’t climb on the bus,” now says the polite label on the front bumper. And the explanation of the bus history encourages everyone to take pictures: “She likes that,” it concludes.

So Kesey’s bus rolls on without him. There’s no longer a decision to be made about being on or off the bus, because you can’t get on. And the pictures the pranksters denied me back then I now captured with my iPhone—no film needed at all. Everything seems turned a little upside down.

Or is it? Perhaps it’s just at an opposite point on the circular cycle, as the earth turns around the sun, which turns around in the galaxy, all of which turns along the same paths of spiritual quest as always. The acid tests may be history—and I still have no interest in taking any—but other paths of inquest are equally present and urgent for those seekers whose time is now. There are always new seekers, and in the seeking there is always Further (and Furthur) to go. It’s eternal. As long as we’re the ones alive, there’s another mile to be explored, another different bus to climb on, another new way to screw up the pictures and confuse the memories. It’s all rather funny, if you look at it right. If I close my eyes and forget the film, I can hear Kesey laughing at the grand cosmic prank. I can still see the radiant glow he had, the aliveness that was somehow just a touch wilder and brighter than most.

I should keep Kesey’s glow in the present tense, for I think he’s still pranking me from beyond the grave. When I went to look at my iPhone pictures of Further, one and only one was inexplicably upside down: the photo of the bumper sign asking us not to climb on the bus. What’s the prank this time, I wondered? I’m guessing Kesey is hinting at just what I’ve spoken: that it’s not his bus we should climb on now, but our own, with new wild colors and different laughs and quests, equally wild and free. There’s just as much to celebrate now, to protest, and to explore. Indeed, there is always Further and Furthur to travel, inside and beyond.

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