Today, August 9, on this 81st anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, I share the following, which is a picture postcard message I wrote a couple of years ago for a writing class lesson. It features the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which I visited in 2007; the message applies to both bombings as well as, sadly, the horrors still being perpetrated today.

♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

Dear Fellow Human,

I send this postcard to you from Hiroshima, home of the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors), who won the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. I came here expecting to visit a war memorial but find only a monument to peace, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Its main building, as pictured on this card, perch atop gleaming white pillars on a glorious sunny day. It’s Fountain of Prayer’s watery arms stretching from pools to heavens, pleading for peace. Visiting yesterday, I glanced back with a sigh at a sparkling sky, perhaps not unlike the sky that bore the plane Enola Gay on that frightful day, before turning to descend the circular ramp down, down, down to the depths of a dark day in human history. Every photo, every piece of tattered ashy clothing, every scrap of ragged rubble laid out on display tells a story that screams “never forget!” As I wound my way, I suddenly stopped, stared, stood agape. There before me lay a relic that, in my imagination, told a story of a carefree child at play, a story that rent my heart and wrung my soul: a tricycle twisted, torn, and charred. What more is there to say?

I penned these thoughts thirty years ago, inspired by an article in the 5/19/96 San Jose Mercury News (by Rob Kyff).

Sunday we found in the paper
word of a singular caper.
According to Mercury News,
we now have the freedom to choose
to make one out of many,
a unit of plenty,
when it comes to the data we use.

The issue is not a mere trivium
but spreads like a speeding bacterium. 
When setting the writer's agendum,
we can follow the modernist trendum: 
data’s a single elective
when data are datums collective --
with nary a dread corrigendum.

For us old folks set and persistent, 
it's hopeless remaining resistant,
but on one thing we must be insistent, 
for readers both nearby and distant,
when data are easy to find
and data is hard on the mind,
we always must write it consistent.

In a recent story in the San Mateo Daily Journal about a hotel development in nearby Half Moon Bay, a member of the California Coastal Commission referred to the parcel as a “developable piece of empty land”.

I am always struck when a parcel to be built on is described as “empty” or “undeveloped”. Better would be to say “empty of human development.” If you’d look closely, you’d see plenty of life and activity filling up that “empty” space: birds, beetles, butterflies, bees; grasses, bushes, perhaps some trees. No weeds, though, for weeds are only what we humans hubristically call living plants that, in our opinion, don’t belong there. Come to think of it, it is they who may consider us weeds.

An earlier version of this post appeared in the paper today as a Letter to the Editor. I took the above photo a couple of years ago of an “empty” plot of land in downtown San Mateo. A former gas station awaiting human redevelopment. Meanwhile, non-humans are filling it with thriving life.

À propos of my Fourth of July post, friend Jacquie today sent a poem written in 1935 by Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”. Here are a few opening lines. I encourage you to click the link and read all of it.

Let America Be America Again
 By Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
 
(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Sadly, it’s message still rings loud and clear today, 90 years later. It brings to mind a song written by Pete Seeger in 1955, where he asks, “When will we ever learn?” And another by Bob Dylan from 1962, which asks questions like:

Yes, and how many years must a mountain exist
Before it is washed to the sea?
Yes, and how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?

Indeed, when will we ever learn? Maybe the answer’s already here and has been all along, all around, blowing in the wind. If we would but open our hearts and listen for it. And then, in this action year of the Fire Horse, get moving to make it happen!

Click to see Pete Seeger singing “Where have all the flowers gone” and Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ in the Wind”.

(Today is July 5. I wanted to get the original version of this post out on the Fourth itself, so hurried it a bit. This revision is, hopefully, a little more polished.)

July 4, 2026, marks 250 years since signing of the Declaration of Independence. Of the liberty in which our nation was conceived. A nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Also that all have rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Rights that cannot be taken away. That proposition has since been extended to all women as well as to men and women of all colors of the rainbow.

That’s the proposition, anyway.

July 4, 1776, was thus the moment of conception, which launched our nation on its gestational journey in the womb of becoming. That journey has seen times of peace and growth as well as times of turbulence and tumult. More than once the fetal nation, so pregnant with promise, faced miscarriage and the boding of abortion. Nevertheless, the pregnancy prevailed until now, 3000 months later, we find ourselves at the moment of birth.

The birth is not at all an easy one, however. Seemingly unbridgeable breaches of national unity threaten a still birth. Those of us who have chosen to be here at this time have the opportunity and solemn responsibility to midwife the process, to breathe life into the newborn, and to nurture it so that it grows into a healthy expression of the promise and ideals bound into its DNA.

We have much work to do – an instance of which I witnessed earlier on this day of celebration.

~~~~

I am sitting at a street table by a downtown San Mateo café, sipping cappuccino while sussing out sudoku. I glance up and see two worlds side by side on the sidewalk before me. Each world oblivious to the other, unseen, nonexistent.

Less than 10 feet away, an elderly man is harvesting discarded cans and bottles from a blue recycling bin parked at the curb. Presumably, his aim is to trade them for five cents each from California’s Beverage Recycling Program.

His clothes are dirty and tattered. His face, unshaven, sun-darkened, weather-wrinkled. He walks slowly, methodically, step by step, back bent by the burdens of his years. He’s transporting his bounty from the bin back to his workstation next to a wall across the sidewalk. The workstation consists of three large, white plastic trash bags and one brown paper bag with handles. He stoops and sorts the cans and bottles into the various bags. From time to time – in order, I imagine, to make room in the bags – he removes a few cans and stomps on them with a loud, flattening crunch before replacing them. Always slowly, methodically, with focused purpose.

At last, sorting and packing done, he pulls and ties the draw strings on the plastic bags, picks them up, along with the paper bag, and walks – slowly, methodically, bent – back to the blue recycling bin where he’s parked his black mini-bike. He then begins to heft his haul onto the handlebars. Suddenly, his slow, methodical intention is interrupted by the clatter of bottles falling from the paper bag, wet, weakened, rent by the leakage of its contents. Fortunately, none breaks.

The man witnesses the calamity calmly; nary a curse nor gasp crosses his lips. He just stands there as the bottles bounce and roll around the sidewalk. Slowly and methodically, he gathers the bottles one by one and places them in other bags and the bike’s basket. He crumples the broken paper bag and pushes it into the blue bin. No room now for him on the bike, so he simply walks the bike away from me to the corner and crosses the street. My eyes follow him as he continues into the distance – slowly, methodically, step by step along the street not the sidewalk, a line of parked cars on his right, traffic passing from behind on his left. A couple of blocks later, he vanishes from view.

All the while, through this whole scenario, another world unfolds. People pass on the sidewalk, peering into cell phones. Young lovers hold lattes with one hand and each other with the other. Parents parade along, their children skipping ahead. All skirt the man sorting cans and picking up bottles. None pays him any mind. Nor he them. Both unaware of the presence, even the existence, of the other. Invisible. Two distinct worlds.

~~~~

On this day, the Fourth of July, we clearly have our work cut out for us to help this newborn nation fulfill the noble proposition in which it was conceived.

Each day of an Earth Year dawns, rises, casts light on previous day’s retreating dark. And so it is with each age of a celestial Great Year.

The 1960s rock musical “Hair” was an apocalyptic proclamation, indeed a revolutionary revelation, of a new age now taking the stage. It’s an era of human consciousness that is to last 2160 years or so (and then what??) and that will usher in such values (for humans, anyway – other species may be ahead of us in that regard) as those described in the show’s theme song, “Age of Aquarius” (by Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado):

          When the moon is in the Seventh House
          And Jupiter aligns with Mars
          Then peace will guide the planets
          And love will steer the stars
          This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
          …
          Sympathy and trust abounding
          No more falsehoods or derisions
          Golden living dreams of visions
          Mystic crystal revelation
          And the mind's true liberation, Aquarius

And then the song’s call to “let the sun shine in,” shining light on the darkness, revealing the heretofore hidden. That light will nourish the blades of grass already rising out of rubble left by the collapse of the values, mindsets, and consequent institutions of the passing Piscean Age. For those of us who happen (or, as some would say, chosen) to be alive at this moment, our role is one of both exciting opportunity and solemn responsibility. And it is three-fold.

First is to accept, without resistance, that this is much more than a time of momentary transformation but of inevitable, irreversible, and lasting metamorphosis. Such acceptance is a process of surrender – not in the sense of waving the white flag, giving up in resignation, and withdrawing from the game, but rather of giving over to and joining the flow.

Think of the Piscean caterpillar voraciously eating everything within reach, without regard to planetary limits. It can’t be a pleasant process for that creature to enter the chrysalis and dissolve into goo, resisting all the way, hanging on with white knuckles (if it had any) to the tried and true. But there is no going back, and resistance only serves to increase suffering. If it only knew that it would ultimately emerge as an Aquarian butterfly, both beautiful and unbound.

(As an aside, we often cite metaphorically the metamorphosis of the caterpillar becoming the butterfly. To our human eyes, the butterfly is beautiful and, as a pollinator, contributes to planetary abundance. We do not, on the other hand, look with similar admiration upon the maggot-turning-into-fly process, which is identical.)

With acceptance, then, we can move on to our next role, which is to participate in co-creating the new world emerging. Buckminster Fuller advises we not waste time trying to salvage and patch up the Piscean old, rebuild from the rubble what was there before. Rather, he urges we work to build the Aquarian new. (See the reference to Donella Meadows’ leverage points in another The Green Pen post.)

So, how do we do that?

Albert Einstein notes that we can’t solve problems from the same way of thinking that created them in the first place. Rather, we have to think outside the box, from a different mindset. This takes imagination. Going back to the butterfly analogy, we can serve as the imago cells that drive the process of turning caterpillar into goo and goo into butterfly.

Finally, as the fresh, re-imagined mindsets and institutions emerge from the rubble, we can come together to focus the rays of the Aquarian dawn on those blades of grass for all to see, to midwife their birth, and to nourish their growth into the Aquarian garden described in the song.

As I say, this is a time of both exciting opportunity and solemn responsibility. This is our time.

I heard a riddle once. What percent of the U.S. population is aging? The answer: 100%. The following scenario occurred nearly 45 years ago – and I’m still aging!

*********************

“You have cancer. Surgery will be on Thursday.”

The doctor, after one glance and a gentle squeeze, as if testing the ripeness of an overgrown plum, issues his diagnostic directive.

Taken by surprise, in disbelief and denial, I blurt, “But I feel perfectly fine! What’re you talking about?” My wife draws a deep breath, exhales slowly, and looks at me with eyes that telegraph at once love, terror, and desperate determination about what has to be done. For my part, I try a delaying tactic. “Well,” I open the negotiation, “I’m pretty busy at work right now. Tomorrow, I’ll check my calendar and see what I can do.”

The doctor reiterates with firm resolution, “Surgery will be on Thursday!” To soften the blow, he shares that this sort of seminoma has a high recovery rate of 80%. Not too bad as odds go, but still… I shiver with foreboding that my life is about to take a new, possibly terrifying tack.

On Thursday, laid out on a gurney, prepped and naked but for a hospital gown, I am wheeled by an orderly to the spotlit center stage of an OR reeking of hospital sterility. While wife and daughter sit scared and worried in the waiting room, I feel no fear or existential threat. Though blinded and blinking in the blaze of lights, engineer that I am, I am instead drawn to observe, with curiosity, the band of white-clad bodies bustling about, busying themselves to relieve me of my larger-than-it-should-have-been “plum”.

As the anesthetist slowly seeps sleep to my veins, a specter suddenly loomed over me. It’s the surgeon, asking how I am feeling. “Pretty good, actually,” I manage to mutter. The specter raises his scalpel-grasping rubber-clad hand and reassures me, with a twinkle and an impishly menacing grin as my eyes flutter closed, “Well, we’ll take care of that.” The next thing I know, my eyes are fluttering open, and I realize he’s been true to his word. I am in agony and feel awful!

In the ensuing weeks of nauseating radiation and endless what’s-it grams and who’s-it scans, I learn from one doctor’s notes that I am a “white, middle-aged male.” “What??”, I exclaim in shock and disbelief. “Is that what I am?” OK, white, I have to admit. And “male”? Well, despite the plum plucking, I guess I still sorta qualify. But “middle aged”?? I am only newly 38! Is this an alarm clock waking my awareness of time advancing me inevitably along the road to, dare I say it, old age?

And then another tidbit of troubling news. The plum biopsy comes back showing a form of seminoma with survivability odds of only 50-50. Well, that certainly doesn’t sit well with the family! For a moment, even the normally placable I shiver with foreboding, wondering where this trauma drama is headed. Especially with all that work waiting for me at the office!

Well, where it’s headed is home – and a new beginning. With my mother’s insistence to leave Michigan and get back to California, I give notice at work, and, following Horace Greeley’s dictum to “go West, young – er, middle-aged – man”, we chart a new route in our lives, toward the steadily, and suddenly clearly, setting sun.

According to Concern Worldwide, “The world produces enough food to feed all of its inhabitants. Yet an estimated 673 million people went without food for part (or all) of last year. Hunger is an issue in every country…” Even in the United States, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, Feeding America reports that “48 million people face food insecurity—experiencing daily challenges with hunger and its health and social impacts.”

Almost 30 years ago I penned this poem. Sadly, it’s timely still. The news of famine has spread to other venues, now with daily reports on children dying of starvation, combatants blockading relief supplies, desperate people scrambling for the scraps that make it through. Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, the Congo. The list goes on.

As we sang in the sixties, “When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?” And, now, sixty years later, when indeed?

             Hunger on April 2, 1997

My breakfast by habit is grapefruit juice.
This morning, however, I hunger for more,
so divert my commute to the donut shop:
apple fritter to go.

Dipping my hand in the crinkly white bag,
ripping pieces of crusty soft dough,
I drive freeways and byways ’cross Silicon Valley
to another day’s work.

But this Morning’s Edition on NPR News
says starvation is rampant ’cross North Korea, 
whose people are desperate, whose families are split
by another day’s war.

While some dip their rice bowls in near empty bags,
and others rip bark and leaves from the trees,
I maneuver my car and weave through the rush
to another day’s work.

Nearing my office, I munch the last morsel
as NPR News talks of baseball’s first day.
The white bag now crumpled, I hunger no longer --
sated and empty.

I attended a talk the other day by astrophysicist Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and member of the National Academy of Sciences. He spoke on many topics, ranging from the complementarity of the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, to the nature of black holes and what we still don’t know about them, to the function of dark matter and dark energy and how much we don’t know about them – and a lot more in between.

I was struck by the number of “don’t-knows” that he referred to and remarked that it’s clear he’ll have great job security helping convert those “don’t-knows” to “knows”. Actually, I’m convinced that we can’t ever really know anything. We only think we know, until some new scientific revelation or other sort of aha moment elicits an uh-oh moment and a new “knowing”. So, we just keep searching for the truth. For some thoughts on “truth”, see my recent Green Pen post.

Anyway, I asked Filippenko which of all those “don’t-knows” is the one he would most like to delve into. His answer surprised me with respect both to the topic as well as to the passion with which he expressed his fascination about it: the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the Universe and, relatedly, the prospects of humans traveling to far-off stars and galaxies.

With respect to the former, he acknowledged that we have indeed detected distant exoplanets that show signs of some of the necessities for life as we know it. Like water, oxygen, and carbon. Though there is no confirmation yet of actual living beings out there, and while the probabilities are small, there could very well be at least a few.

But what about life as we don’t know it, I wondered? Well, he said, such may exist, but, from a scientific point of view, we wouldn’t know what to look for.

Which led to the latter: humans adventuring out to see for themselves. Highly unlikely, he said, if not impossible, for our carbon-based bodies to endure such a voyage. More likely would be super-advanced silicon-chipped AI robots making the journey for us. They would be capable of reproducing and otherwise supporting themselves. One could even speculate on such beings establishing and populating robotic colonies on suitable exoplanets – though, from the perspective of those planets, I suppose Earth would be “exo”.

Filippenko acknowledged that people these days look upon the rapid expansion of AI and robotic powers with reactions ranging from rosy optimism to existential fear that they could bring about the demise of humanity. Which leads me to wonder…

Could it be that evolutionary life forces in the Universe – call them God or whatever – see that humanity is on the verge of wiping ourselves out (via climate collapse, nuclear holocaust, etc.) and even bringing about the demise of life on this planet? If so, could it be that those forces are thus giving up on us and leading us to develop this silicon-based life form to which we could pass the evolutionary torch for exploring the vastness of the Cosmos as we take our carbon-based bows and exit the stage?

Bottom line, it wouldn’t be AI bringing about our doom. Rather, it is us bringing about our own doom and, though not aware of it, creating AI and silicon-chipped robots specifically to take over from us.

The new year’s here, ancient prophesies coming due, breaking down all we’ve held true. Our world’s a-rumble, all in a-jumble, and we stumble to discern what is fake, what is real, groping in the dark for a clue. Confused, distraught, afraid, in these topsy-turvy times we are lost. Up is Down; East, North, South, West, no telling which way’s best. The world’s a-swirl and, like Dorothy and Toto, where we’ll land a mystery. Cultural cues called into question, trusted guidelines gone into history, we ask what to do? Where to go?

The real question, though, is, what shall we be in the new world emerging? The answer lies not in outward directions but Inward, drawing, perhaps, upon ancient meanings of the moons and of the fundamental elements of nature:

• Earth – balance, embodiment, and physical connection.

• Water – fluidity, cohesion, emotion, and understanding.

• Fire – heat, energy, and transformation – both internal and external.

• Air – movement, mind, and intellect; birth and new beginnings; spiritual awakening and inspiration.

• Space – emptiness and openness; the blank canvas upon which we paint our reality.

• Consciousness – awareness and the field from which thoughts, feelings, intuition, and creativity arise.

You can see and, if you wish, share the full calendar in the attached PDF.

Note: I neglected to include South in the calendar! Perhaps you can discern where it best fits, and, while you are at it, reassign elements and directions as well. All’s a puzzle, anyway!

Mike'scalendar2026

1.02MB ∙ PDF file

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Back in May 2025, I posted about reality and truth, how we view them, and how we war over dogma differences about those views. Here, let’s dig deeper and play some more with those concepts.

So, what is “truth”? Or, rather, what’s “The Truth”? That’s the beauty of it (or “Beauty”): no one knows or even can know. And thus our human quest to discover, or uncover, the mystery (or “Mystery”) of The Truth. As far as I know, which admittedly may not be too far, humans are the only Earthly creatures to have such a quest. Notice “Earthly”. That’s hubris enough to ascribe such a mission to us mere humans, without presuming it applies to all creatures of the entire Universe (thus granting the possibility that there are others).

Actually, the quest (or “Quest”) is two-fold. Maybe there are more folds, but let’s go with two for now. So, Fold #1 is to dis- or uncover The Mystery of The Truth. No matter how impossible a task that may be (and it is), we must still chip away at it. So Fold #2, then, is to be OK with that. To acknowledge and accept that we are embarked on an impossible Quest and to pursue it anyway. To learn to live in the Not Knowing and with the humility that even what we think we do know, pieces of The Truth that we think we’ve so far uncovered by chipping away at its shroud of Mystery – like Michelangelo revealing the godlike David hidden in a block of stone – may actually not be so after all. That it’s all merely a mirage just waiting to dissolve in the light released by new chips – be they from science or epiphanous revelation.

So, why the upper case Truth, Beauty, Mystery, Earth, Universe, Not Knowing? It’s hard to say. It’s just that writing the lower case didn’t seem to feel right. I think it’s a matter of distinguishing each of those things in their physical or even conceptual incarnations (lower case) from their core, abstract essence.

And the task may be even more impossible than we can imagine. Maybe there is no absolute, objective Truth to be un- or discovered! What if the ultimate nature of Nature, the fundamental essence of Reality, does not exist to be un- or discovered but rather only comes into existence as we relate to it? This seems to be where quantum physics is pointing. That is, we can sort of understand and accept that matter as substance may be an illusion of highly dense clusters or concentrations of energy, and thus that energy is more basic than the matter that arises from it. But even energy itself may be an illusion of an even more basic fundament of Nature, namely, Relationship and consequent patterns of Possibility and Potential.

That is, The Truth may be “nothing” more than upper cases – that is, abstract essences in the form of patterns that, like Schrodinger’s capriciously quantum cat, swim and swirl in an endless pool of potential waiting for a relationship in order to be resolved into a specific lower-case instantiation. But a relationship with what? Another swimming, swirling upper-case pattern? Or, in a chain of relationship-induced pattern resolutions, some other lower-case instantiation? And does the resolution depend on what kind of relationship it is that induces it? What kinds of such essential relationships are there? I don’t know! It’s a Mystery. And that’s the truth!

Following is an updated version of two posts to The Green Pen of April 2012. Even more relevant now thus well worth repeating!

People in the United States and around the world are experiencing a period of change of historic magnitude. It is an epochal moment, as worldviews shift from separateness, fear, and security through competitive dominance and win-lose violence to oneness, hope, and security through cooperative interdependence and win-win peace.

It is a time of breakdown and breakthrough. It is a time in which economic, social, political and other human systems created out of a culture of violence are, at last, increasingly being recognized as just not working any more. It is a time in which those systems are necessarily giving way to new systems based on a very different view of reality, a culture of peace. It is a time in which the eagle and the condor are learning to fly together once again.

Prophecy of Eagle and Condor

In his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins writes (p. 209 in the first edition; the link is to the third edition):

“Nearly every culture I know prophesies that in the late 1990’s we entered a period of remarkable transition. At monasteries in the Himalayas, ceremonial sites in Indonesia, and indigenous reservations in North America, from the depths of the Amazon to the peaks of the Andes, and into the ancient Mayan cities of Central America, I have heard that ours is a special moment in human history, and that each of us was born at this time because we have a mission to accomplish.

“The titles and the words of the prophecies differ slightly. They tell variously of a New Age, the Third Millennium, the Age of Aquarius, the Beginning of the Fifth Sun, or the end of old calendars and the commencement of new ones. Despite the varying terminologies, however, they have a great deal in common, and “The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle” is typical. It states that back in the mists of history, human societies divided and took different paths: that of the condor (representing the heart, intuitive and mystical) and that of the eagle (representing the brain, rational and material). In the 1490’s, the prophecy said, the two paths would converge and the eagle would drive the condor to the verge of extinction. Then, five hundred years later, in the 1990’s, a new epoch would begin, one in which the condor and the eagle will have the opportunity to reunite and fly together in the same sky, along the same path. If the condor and eagle accept this opportunity, they will create a most remarkable offspring, unlike any seen before.

“‘The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle’ can be taken at many levels — the standard interpretation is that it foretells the sharing of indigenous knowledge with the technologies of science, the balancing of yin and yang, and the bridging of northern and southern cultures. However, most powerful is the message it offers about consciousness; it says that we have entered a time when we can benefit from the many diverse ways of seeing ourselves and the world, and that we can use these as a springboard to higher levels of awareness. As human beings we can truly wake up and evolve into a more conscious species.”

You can also watch a YouTube video of Perkins speaking about the prophecy. If you google on “eagle and condor prophecy”, you’ll find many more sites describing and discussing it, for example, this one and this one.

Personal Eagle-Condor Insights from Wisdomkeepers

The prophecy is a very personal story as well as a cultural one. The eagle is the head of each of us. The condor is the heart. Flying together, they will spawn in each of us – indeed, are spawning – a new culture, a culture of peace. It is a culture that synthesizes the knowledge and wisdom of both birds – of both West and East, North and South, Modern and Indigenous, Rational and Intuitive, Analytic and Holistic– and thus synergistically transcends both.

Steve Wall and Harvey Arden, in Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders, chronicle in text and beautiful photographs their journey to “the land of the Wisdomkeepers, which lies “[j]ust off the map, beyond the Interstates, out past the power lines and the shopping malls, up that little side road without a sign on it … .”

Here are a few insightful nuggets sifted from the mother lode contained in this book that have fed the Condor in my heart learning to fly with the Eagle in my head:

“The Grandfathers and Grandmothers of tomorrow are in the children. If we educate them right, our children tomorrow will be wiser than we are today. They’re the Grandfathers and Grandmothers of tomorrow.” Eddie Benton-Banai (Ojibway)

“When we walk upon Mother Earth we always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground.” Oren Lyons (Onandaga)

“I myself have no power. It’s the people behind me who have the power. Real power comes only from the Creator. It’s in His hands. But if you’re asking about strength, not power, then I can say that the greatest strength is in gentleness.” Chief Leon Shenandoah (Onandaga, Tadodaho of the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy)

“The founder of Haudenosaunee government [the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy], whom we call the Peacemaker, intended that there be social justice in the world. No man was to be more privileged than any other man. All were to be accorded respect.” Clan Mother Audrey Shenandoah (Onandaga), from her keynote address at the January 1990 Global Forum on Environment and Development for Survival

“There is no word for ‘nature’ in my language. Nature, in English, seems to refer to that which is separate from human beings. It is a distinction we don’t recognize.” Clan Mother Audrey Shenandoah (Onandaga), from her keynote address at the January 1990 Global Forum on Environment and Development for Survival

“He finally learned that wisdom comes only when you stop looking for it and start truly living the life the Creator intended for you.” Leila Fisher (Hoh)

“These are our times and our responsibilities. Every human being has a sacred duty to protect the welfare of our Mother Earth, from whom all life comes. In order to do this we must recognize the enemy – the one within us. We must begin with ourselves.” Chief Leon Shenandoah (Onandaga, Tadodaho of the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy)

“Throughout our travels in search of the Wisdomkeepers we kept seeing aspects of that same sacred circle or sacred hoop – one of the fundamental symbols of the Native American culture. There’s the cycle or circle of the seasons, the circle of the ceremonies, the family circle, the circle of the community, the circle of Elders, the cycle of the generations, and the circle of all life, of which mankind is only one aspect – all things one.” Harvey Arden and Steve Wall (Journalists), in Epilogue to Wisdomkeepers

Concluding Query

To the Eagle, time is linear. To the Condor, time is cyclical. With the two flying together, time becomes a spiral, the cycles advancing inexorably toward … what? The Omega Point? God? The Tao?

You had never been in my dreams. For decades after we parted, though, I dreamt of you often.

In my dream, I am frantically from afar trying to find you, get back to you. Yet I can never quite reach you. Or so it seems. Familiar landmarks – gone from where they used to be. The boulevard – blocked. The streets do not cross as I remember. I don’t know which way to turn. “Why can’t I find you?” I cry out. Where are you? Were you ever really there? Or maybe a mere mirage of my own making?

Even after many decades wandering the world, I still remember how you sheltered me those first years of my life. A warm winter refuge – at Dad’s 40^th birthday party when I ran inside to escape an evening snowball pelt during a heretofore unheard of (to then-seven me, anyway) Burbank icy snowfall. A sunny summer playground – where I thumb-launched aggies and steelies pursuing those of Alan and Dick across your fragrant freshly mown front lawn. The radiant red and white snapdragons draping your side fence, grape-staked shortly after we’d moved it by Uncle “Mr. Fix-It” George. You saw me off to school each morning, my tummy filled with warm Wheatena; welcomed me home each afternoon with anticipatory aromas of Mom’s evening meal. Your Spanish Colonial, cocoa-colored frame hosting cozy successions of birthday parties, Thanksgiving feasts, springtime seders, Chanukkah giftwrapping, Easter egg dying.

Until that final day, my eleventh birthday.

On that day, as planned, when Sis, Gary, and I arrived from school, you stood empty, cold, closed. No longer home; just a house. Locked out, we waited out front for Mom to pick us up. As we drove away, though excited and curious about what lay ahead, I also felt a wistful longing for the only home I’d ever known. Would I ever see you again?

Over the years, my recurring dream of you grew gradually faint, less frequent, even occasional drive-by visits losing any pang of longing. Now, new colors, new flowers, a new home to new families.

More recently, in my dreams I am always away, anywhere but home, no longer desperate to get back to you. Perhaps it’s that now you are every­where…and nowhere. And that perhaps Thomas Wolfe got it right.

I’ve been sitting here 90 years – y je m’ennui! Boring!!

In all that time, absolutely contrary to my life purpose, no one has sat on me. But what am I to do, stuck here as I am in this pedestrian museum? What’s it called again? Ah, oui. Le Petit Palais de Paris. Some palace this is! I haven’t supported any royal rears since Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were dragged from Versailles and I was sentenced to life sitting servitude to one bulbous bourgeois bottom after another. Finally, Monsieur Charles gave me away to this place. Though the surroundings are somewhat sort of regal, there are no soirées, no chamber trios, no diplomatic dinners.

So I repeat: boring!

Oh, wait! I almost forgot. There was that one time, maybe half a century ago, when un petit gamin jumped the rope and climbed onto my lap! He must have been five or six years old. Mmmm. It felt so good after so long to have a soft, young rear wriggling into me. But, alas, it was only a few moments before…

“ Jean-Pierre, don’t go there!” his mother hushed sternly, trying with only moderate success to keep her voice down. “We’re not supposed to touch the pieces. Come back here!”

“But, Maman, it’s so comfy!” Jean-Pierre whined. “Can’t I just stay a few minutes? I’m tired. Can’t we go home yet? This place is so boring.”

See, what did I tell you? Boring!

“I don’t care. Get off that chair this instant!” she insisted, and added enticingly, “We’re almost through; then we’ll go for a crêpe, with jam in it, if you like.”

“Really, Maman? A crêpe? Yummm!”, the boy squealed excitedly as he hopped off me and back over the rope. Clearly, Jean-Pierre liked crêpes.

And so he left, leaving me empty once again. And no one else has dared jump the rope since.

Ah, but before! All those bodies, from Marie Antoinette’s derriere all the way to M. Charles’, taking their ease on me. From royal and noble silk and satin to bourgeois wool and cotton, each skirt, each pant, each gown, each petticoat, each smock, though subtracting a bit of clarity, a soupçon of color, from my fading tapestry, all warm and all helping me fulfill my raison d’être.

But all that was before this palais of today. And since? Boring!

It doesn’t seem fair. I was made to be of service helping people rest their weary bones. It was Claude who dreamt me up. Louis XVI had asked Claude to craft a chair for his new, beloved Austrian wife. Actually, though I’m Claude’s design, it was his son Jean-Marc who did the most to put me together.

The chaise longue being assembled next to me in the atelier told me the story as I, a few months her junior, was taking form.

“Claude is getting older,” she observed. “Over 60, I’ve heard.”

“Yes, I can see it,” I answered. “I can feel his hands shake when he tries to sculpt the fine filigrees of my arms. I’m often afraid he’ll gouge me so much I’d be discarded so they could start over on someone else!”

“Also, look there,” my neighbor pointed out to me. “How tightly he squints his eyes in order to see what he is doing.”

“You’re right!” I said. “I guess that’s why Jean-Marc is in training, to take over the family’s royal furniture-making business.”

“Exactly!” my fine friend affirmed.

And Jean-Marc did indeed prove to be a fine craftsman. Under his father’s tutelage, he commissioned, for the queen’s sensory pleasure, the finest woven tapestries from the most talented tapissiers in Beauvais to cover my seat and back, and hardy beechwood from nearby forests to fill my frame, which he then ever so gracefully gilded.

I was so proud! And Marie Antoinette loved me so. But it was only a few years later that the monarchs were forced from Versailles, the furnishings (including me!) sold off, and the palace opened to the public. Then, over a hundred years passing from one bourgeois behind to another, mostly left to sit on the side for show and only occasionally sat in by someone sitting, again, just for show.

Until M. Charles bought me at auction. Though a wealthy businessman, he was of noble stock and actually used me in his sitting room. Oh, the soirées he hosted and the fesses I enfolded! But then…the Great Depression. Thank God, though, that, as much as M. Charles could have used the money, he couldn’t bear to sell me at auction. He instead donated me to this presumptuous palace of a museum.

So, now, I spend my days on display, stared at instead of sat in, and longing for the day another little scamp tires of the museum tour and jumps the rope to squirm in my lap.

In the meantime, boring!

I don’t know what to say. Feel like crying. Tears well as I write. And I didn’t even ask his name.

It’s October 29. The year is 2012. It is said that there are no coincidences, and I believe it. It is said that we can never know the chain of cause-and-effect consequences of any action we take or fail to take, big or small. And I believe it. It is even said that there is no such thing as cause and effect, anyway, for that would imply time, and time is but an illusion, that there is only relationship. And I can believe that, too.

It is also said that we encounter angels in our lives every day if we would but pay attention and notice them. And I for sure believe that, as well. For today I met one.

I’m sitting at a table on the patio outside Starbucks in Big Bear Lake, California. I nurse a vente medium roast coffee while reading friend Sharon’s just published book. A couple of young men sit nearby, chatting. A homeless man walks up and stands to the side, muttering like he wants to start a conversation. And most likely panhandle, I figure. The other two young men, eying him, get up and drift away. My first reaction is to focus on my book and pretend I don’t hear or see him, hoping he’ll give up and wander off, as well, to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Then I remember a book, a novel, recently published by another friend, Ken. One of its main characters, Linda, has tumbled from a successful nursing career to surviving, homeless, panhandling on the streets of San Francisco, and grabbing bites when she can at the local Carl’s Jr.

So, I look up into the eyes of a fellow human being and ask him how he came to be homeless. He’s in his late 30s or early 40s, slender, about 5’9” or 5’10”. His face is unshaven, his hair close-cropped and thinning, his complexion ruddy. He’s clearly been in the sun. He lost his job in Indio, doing something with cinder blocks, he says. Then he lost his home. Then wandered, on foot, west and north, up into the mountains, landing in Big Bear Lake. Sleeps in a sleeping bag somewhere “over there,” he points vaguely in the direction of the lake.

“What do you do with the money people give you?” I ask.

“I buy foot-longs at Subway,” he explains hesitantly. “One of those can last me several meals.”

Since he’s smoking a cigarette, I observe that it must be a pretty expensive habit, what with how heavily they’re taxed nowadays. He admits that he’s bummed this one off of someone, that there’s no way he could afford to buy them.

“It gets so cold at night,” he mutters, eyes downcast. A hint of shiver shakes his body at the very thought of it. “Smoking helps me get to sleep.”

Has he spent a winter in the mountains yet? No, not yet.

“You’d best get back down to the valley,” I advise. “Snows will be coming down up here in a few weeks.”

I am really touched by him and his story and offer to give him a couple of dollars towards a sandwich. In my wallet, though, there are no singles; nothing less than a ten. So, I give a what-the-hell shrug, mutter something about not having change, and, not wanting to ask him if he does, hand him the ten.

Wishing him well on his journey, I turn attention back to my book. He asks what it’s about. Not wanting to engage in a much longer conversation, I describe briefly what it’s about. He glances quickly at the book, I return to reading, he turns and shuffles into Starbucks.

A few minutes later, he’s back! Oh, no, I shudder. What now? He holds out to me his baseball cap, white with a blue and red corporate insignia. I did something for him, he says, and it’s only right for him to do something for me. And offering me his cap is all he can do. He apologizes that there are some smudges of dirt on it.

“No,” I protest, “I can’t take it! You’re going to need to keep your head warm on these cold nights!”

“It’s really OK,” he insists quietly. “I have my beanie, see?”, which he proceeds to pull out of his pocket to show me.

I see that this act of gratitude on his part means a lot to him, to offer something in exchange, so I hold the cap over my heart and thank him softly, feeling deeply grateful myself for the blessings and meaning this gift carries with it.

“Go with God,” I whisper, as he wanders off again. Then I notice that the brim and one side of the cap are damp and smell of Starbucks restroom soap.

I wipe a tear, put down the book, and pick up my pen.