When I was young, I climbed

With my brother, the cherry tree in our small

Back yard. In our care-less years

Muscle memory put every limb in easy reach,

Every neuronal branch safely there, without thought

Or thanks.

Each limb seemed strong, vibrant,

Supportive of our casual reach and touch.

In my memory the sweet fruits were bundled

Such that our red-stained lips and

Cherried cheeks marked

The easy, the given strength of mindless youth.

He is still with me some days, often not, tainted,

Branches broken and not to be trusted.

Red cherries fall untasted: His random reach

Unmapped, unsure, unkept. His fallen

Mindless bundles litter pitted ground.

Now, in my weary years I still reach

For limb and branch, longing, not so much for

Lost and vibrant reach

Of youth, but for the mindful joy

Of tasting sweet memory.

We almost made it, you and I,

The nearly-perfect-pair, no net below, in mostly

Trusted air, halfway up while

Halfway down, conveniently timid in our

In between, the safety zone we thought was

Ever there until, our cover blown.

We almost caught it, elusive love that

Shimmered somewhat less

The more we glowed. We scorned

The fearful, the sheltered ones who prize and

Strive for far; disdain the near.

We had it in our grasp: its lightning words a

Thund’rous clap that pealed and tolled, while

We hid from living’s storm. Thus…To my mere friend

Now fully lost: If life has one sad word,

Ours came close enough to sear:

Almost…

At close of days I hope to be

Restored to quiet mundanity.

To be immersed in simple fare:

In raven’s waxen wing, in saline sting

Of ocean’s briny bed, in

Desert Rose’s arid charm, of

Spider’s spindly web.

I pray for taste of simple joy:

Alarm of infant’s wail, cry of hunger’s moan,

Suckled consolation simply there in

Mother’s soothing tone.

In grace well spent, in

Stranger’s gratis nod, a luxury

Defining fulsome life, the unseen,

Unrequested wealth of God.

I long for awe in nature’s call: Of

Thunder’s thrum, of rumbling rain, of

Lightning’s flash, of wooing owl’s refrain, in

Glisten-distant stars so far away that lovers

Craft whole futures there, each tender night

Each loving, languid day.

I pray for starkly simple things: Of

Gifted grants, meek might of grace, sacred

Day & hush-ed downy night. Slow

Artistry of ant, tap-tat of kneading lace.

Sweet business of bee, sly lurk of wasp, a

Monarch’s angling flight imperiled path to cross.

I hope for gentleness of touch:

A babe’s first laugh, a tear’s last sting,

Night breath cradling birds aloft on

Lift of feathered wing. Streams’ laughing

Lilt hummed at rocks’ enduring dam its

Kissing mist that blesses everything.

I hope for quiet & silent time to

Cede complex, chaotic ways,

Sure in simple sense that boast and busy

Whet fears that dry my grasping days.

Can simple usher us at end to halls

Both calm and still? To know

We’ll never know that nothing lasts? That

Nothing will? That solid

Secrets longer hide in

Lives of loud despair? That

Strident perfect never comes; that

Simple is our home to share.

What can one say of a system

That cites not old,

But cold men

As metrics of success?

Stay a tour

In that fetid place

Where war and rice

Thrived side by side, and

See, hear, feel

What brought the

Asian focus to cycles:

Of wind, weather…and war

As it turned out.

Predictably — yearly —

Monsoons halted

Offensive ops:

Hueys grounded;

Grunts disgruntled;

Armor rusted its

Ton-weight mass idled

By weightless wet.

Rising rain cycled with

Falling counts:

Flights;

Arty;

Contact;

Morale.

Biblical rains’ end recycled

Boots on sodden ground;

Re-loaded tubes;

Rotored sky;

Chart of dry success in

Cold bodies graphing

‘US’ with good,

‘THEM’ to chill and die.

War Recycled on,

Not in the Greenwood*

But in the dry.

*Luke: 23:31

It was not the ‘Good’ kind, nor

The ‘Civil’ kind, as oxymoronic

As that is.

It was not ‘To End All of them.’

No Grand Armies marched, no D-Day.

Only D-EROS Day, when we boarded

The Freedom Bird

Back to the world, those of us

Upright.

No beaches bloodied,

No jagged lines inked on secret maps

In hushed and smoky rooms.

That tiny coastal country

Where we loitered for a time

Is once again a country.

My long-explored, mystifying

Musing on its basis,

Its whys, & wherefores

Has led me hence: Sobering as it

Sounds, my war was not to be

Studied but for lessons,

To be ignored.

Take Note:

At a much later date, today’s caution

Will be cited and appreciated. Avoidance of

Red meat, cigarettes, coffee, daily alcohol,

Seatbelt delinquency, blinker use, persisting

In daily 26 pushups…10 thousand steps…

Numerous downward dog, countless upward attitude…

All these routine, beneficent behaviors,

It’s alleged, mutate, adjusting the

Very DNA you, dear donor, gift your progeny.

Quite odd, and sad, that the mutagen

Not yet proven viable in a collection of

Peer-reviewed, amply-funded, widely endorsed

Studies across disciplines blue and red alike, our

Social shamans having ready reason to

Amplify and transmit them: Kindness, and

The simple preference for joy.

Icarus Starts with I

I, as no one noticed,

Unrehearsed, premature, tumbled to

Oblivion. Delicate ships sailed toward

Distant harbors ignoring the falling body.

Plowmen leisurely lifted loam acre by acre

Focused on fecundity and funding. Indifferent

Sun lit happy and sad alike. Even

Imperiled others aloft plied a shared

If fateful journey toward

Watery deeps and took no note.

I, watching in a human position,

Plunged to that grasping green expanse searching out a

Single pointed finger, alarming shout, a

Gathering hush to cushion my fall…but

A world moved on, timeless trivia the

Engine and oxygen of Heaven and Earth.

I, meeting that long-waited encounter with

Altitude’s end — a sudden final page — I

Hoped against hope to garner, if only a

Small token, the chute of

Another’s astonished glance. Leisured totality

Turned away told me all.

I…with unrehearsed and startled

Falling, despite hard ground’s alarm

Like paneled lights that once

Grabbed attention, I reacted as trained: I

Focused on the fall, not my role in it.

Thanks to David Keplinger for the inspiration, and to WH Auden as well.

It was so good to be

So good at it. Sky

Offers no regret,

Nor judgment well or ill

From denting hail,

From raucous rain,

From withering wind.

Nothing marks its yawning blue so much as

Epic indifference. Sky cares not a gust

for status, cash balance, posts, clicks,

Friends real or imagined, nor

Enemies loathed.

Why,

Groundlings may ask? Why such deep

Dedication? Why undying devotion to

Sky’s indifference, horizoned yawn, bare

Tolerance of our Icarian rise?

It’s in the knowing:

Wind blows…

Storms gather…

Ice is…

Headwinds are…

Tailwinds, too…

Fog forms…

Hard truth is in etheric cloud.

Then this:

Pay well and wisely tribute owed the god

Of lift, drag, yaw, thrust that

Despot birds knew of long past,

Or pay in less than healthy ways.

Sky notes not our well-

Finessed finals,

Kissed-on landings,

Taxi skill,

Radio rasp. Sky

Cares not for strip-ed sleeves,

Epaulets of gold, the

True and real Rolex.

Sky cares not a jot for

Seat backs up and stowed,

Belts secure,

Weathered pilot nod to

Old and bold. Sky notes not

Our lengthy logs, high numbered,

pages, sacred vow to keep

Takeoffs and landings equal.

Sky heeds not regret, nor

Sorrow, nor mewling, nor

Pathetic, dirt-bound elegy. Save it

For one’s looming — long horizontal, the farm’s

Purchase and its

Long-fueled duration. For

Timeless time spent

Looking up at roots, sooner

If sky above’s not heeded and obeyed.

*The Sky Behind me, a Memoir of Flying and life ©2012 Byron Edgington

Not much to look at,

It once turned a head.

Fixer-upper on a street

Gone quiet, bypassed, relevant

No more as four-lane’s

Hiss pumps proud

Efficiency.

Attic crammed to hoarding: Once

Crucial files, photos captured

Now ceding to history’s haze.

Walls and ceilings wrinkled,

Dermal peeling, shedding,

And shed again. Acned in youth, now

Rutted, weathered by wisdom

And life’s bronzing.

Rafters once strewn with

Dross of youth now reek

Of teachings,

Most unheard, shaken,

Dismissed as old and worn:

Regret the cobwebs

And price of pain.

Fixtures creak…Rust.

Replaced as needed, insured,

Co-pays met, systems

Await a next failed

If vital truss or timber.

Plumbing leaks: Nightly

Tending needed. Once

Lustful sluice shunted long since, now

Leaden pipes drip untapped,

Duplicative duty

Done.

Frosted windows

Warp my view: Shades

Slid shut shield

Harsh light once blind

To curb or limit.

Furnace, once fired by

Gaseous flame, if

Ruled by rash, unruly

Temps grows old,

Cold, embers left unstirred

New winter come too soon.

Yard silent, but for

Rumblings hushed with

Daily meds, dosage writ

In dusty corners of idled

Bookends.

Painted once, now dressed in

Chips and peels no

Salve or fashion’s styptic longer

Hide.

Roof sags,

Long-worn slate of

Stiffened tiles sport

Brushed if ragged snow

Thick and dark in warmer years.

In haunted bath and bedroom:

Mirrors gone grey, reflections

Ghost, shimmering if

Ready for an ancient glance.

Floors slump and

Sag, purpled, bruised

By leaps of joy, anger,

Dance and drag

Of untold passage,

A lifetime’s come

And gone. Chapters

Parsed of what is read

As history, a lived and loving tome,

Witness to images stowed in

Attic boxes,

Parched paper, as faded ink reclines

In a silent home.

I is not your friend,

Nor is I keen to be.

I steers you toward

Egocentricity.

I is not your pal when

Mind comes out to play.

I just holds mind’s hand and

Leads you far astray.

I is never right, if truth

Or fact is sought.

I just holds your past, the rented,

Borrowed, bought.

I reveals your wants, the

Useless malleable stuff.

I’s the one convinced there

Can never be enough.

I whispers, whistles, doing

What I is wont to do:

I-gnore incoming truth to

Protect the false of you.

I is not the judge when you

Scan a higher shelf.

I is best ignored. Get free,

Un-I yourself.

Leave a comment

Praise for sacred place of prayer —

For wooden walls, roof like

Cradling hands:

Upbuilt, uplift sight.

Foreign chant unknown yet felt,

For sharing song to One,

With dim-dark nave of constant now

Of silence deep, in candle wisp alight.

Praise for sharer’s all, circled

Commune common, pillowed, Asana-ed all,

Asway as metronomes, filing in

Aligned in magnetic rows.

For all of old, of new, of tried, of true,

Whoever comes, stays, (who knows why?)

Praise this house to god of One,

Singers all of songs of stars,

Inspiring, trusting, doubting too.

Praise this temple’s upbuilt walls that

Lift us up in tribute proud. To higher minds

And ego’s quit, to simple self in Eden’s fold

Oneness’ ever more increase,

Chant, share, sing, be

What all are destined for:

Praise be twice a day, at every dawn, in full, in fact,

Without surcease.

Prompt courtesy of David Keplinger, A poem is a scaffolding.

Beating toward more beauty, full of bloody joy,

Its dangered draining wrings visions: care-free ground

Below and rushing up, my craft and pax imperiled.

Behind me, six hearts in rhythm on our journey’s latter half.

Then:

Near syncope dims all beauty, gravity’s silent sound

Folding fan of focus brings dark evening to midday.

Vision closing quickly, all faculties ease and rest.

The goal becomes not beauty, nor shearing cliffs of awe.

Six hearts stay unaware, on their blissful ride:

Vacations from the real, a care-free groundless flight,

Promised tales to share with envious

Home-bound others, to embellish with each light.

I wrestle the demon’s effort to end my flight, then

To fill the heart anew with beauty, replace the draining

With blooded warmth and focus, to feel it rushing back.

How quick is the turn from beauty, to its lack?

For three years I flew helicopter tours on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai. During my final flight, on December 5th 2005, I experienced an episode of near syncope: I nearly passed out in the cockpit.

Landing a bit later I felt fine, as if nothing had happened. But I wasn’t about to jeopardize 43 years of safe flying until and unless I knew why I’d experienced the near syncope. The physician I saw that afternoon had bad news. My aviation career was over.

The poem conveys ( I hope) the emotions and vision that passed through my mind during the 30 seconds the event unfolded. Had I passed out that day I would have crashed, likely killing myself and six other people. My passengers were tourists taking pictures, gathering stories to tell envious friends back home in Pittsburgh, Portland, and Pasadena. They never knew what I knew in the cockpit.

Kauai is a place made to be photographed, enjoyed, absorbed for its beauty its lush, tropical views, and its frequent postcard-perfect rainbows. Kauai is also a place of contrasts: Stark beauty and present peril; carefree living, and exorbitant prices; serene location thick with people, vehicles, noise, and viewpoints.

With its contrasts it was perhaps the best place to finish my flying career. I was 56, intending to fly for several more years. It was not to be. I’d flown all over the world, seen all manner of exotic locations, doing flying assignments I’d never imagined. It was time.

I closed my logbook, left Kauai, and now write about the proximity of beauty and blight in a world replete with both. A world where those two seeming opposites often exist together can open our eyes to a more expansive vision. A world where it takes almost passing out to wake us up.

Again, many thanks to David Keplinger for the prompt, I hope it’s at least close to the mark.

I see the room’s serene, once holy calm,

Its medical mien, empty beds but for

One chosen for me. Its

Serenity soon replaced

By storming sin within

My alarming naked soul.

In dark woods of puberty,

My body a sinful, sordid thing,

A rapid rise brings fevered thoughts

Of confession, hopeful absolution.

Hands:

Callused with callous intent,

Their rough wandering down

To where I’d been warned sin lay in wait.

My confusion at the careless

Rugged stroke.

Hands dry, untended,

Grope my virgin body in places

I’d been warned on pain of hell and fire

Not to.

Silence broken by a

Gasped and muted simper, a

Whispered ‘no’ unheeded,

I study the ceiling, mottled and white,

Burning like god’s own light.

The chest that once held the lotion,

Towel placed for a

Sudden wet.

I look away:

Drapery dances.

Window thrums in gust.

Door clicks shut in nearby hall.

Release:

Hands quickly leave, other tasks,

Other covert chores to handle.

Drapes fall still.

Pane goes silent, wind’s

Pressure, like my own,

Come and gone.

Nearby chest stares

Like judging witness.

The silent room stares

With guilt. A shiver of shame drapes me,

the change I’d not known could come

So rough; so soon.

To all survivors, I hear you. I am you.

To my friend David Keplinger, thanks for the timely prompt. Poems can be secrets. Of course they can.

It’s good time I recognize my fading recognition:

Why did five objects and their placement not awaken my dull and timeless self? Within my dimming sight, near my too-busy desk, five fabric fossils fix the time:

Kept cap once worn in sun-drenched Hawaiian swells,

Sea-themed blanket loved alive by a quilting friend,

Shawl crafted with Andean care,

Welcome card of dos amigas we sweetly love,

Dream catcher drooping with its prey.

Why did I not note the ticking of these fabrics, the

remnants of my left behind?

How did I miss these symbols, the fixing fabrics of my having been? Five frills, the durable ephemera seen, yet not seen, reminders of my passage: Dust— as I soon must be — collectives of my too desked day?

Thanks to my friend David Keplinger.

I flew an air medical helicopter like the one shown above for twenty years. In that time, I carried 3,200 patients. Those patients suffered from acute medical emergencies, trauma, drug ODs, farm accidents, hunting accidents, and the inevitable first-day-of-spring motorcycle crackup. Oh, the tales I could tell. If the HIPAA restrictions allowed it, I could regale readers with all the gory, excruciating, fascinating details.

Bypassing the propriety guardrails by protecting patient identities and locations, I will share a few Air Med flying stories. They’re all accompanied by a comment on human nature from yours truly, the pilot who proves in certain of these narratives that he, too, is/was entirely human. Here are a few of those stories:

The call came in to dispatch at 11:30 on a warm-ish September evening. A driver had lost control of his pickup on the freeway, entered the median at speed, flipped the truck over and over ejecting his young son, and badly injuring himself. I landed at the scene at midnight, with local EMTs already there. My flight nurse crew ran to the median to help, and I scanned the area as they worked. Several yards from the battered truck was a white sheet covering what I came to find out was the driver’s young son, who’d been killed instantly.

Share

The flight nurses helped EMTs toward the helicopter with our patient. The man was conscious, but critically injured, with a broken leg, several lacerations, and potential internal injuries. We loaded him aboard the aircraft, and I was soon airborne. Lifting off, I once again took note of the small white sheet ruffling in the median, its hidden contents a tragic result of the wreck.

On the flight to the hospital the man moaned, repeatedly asking about his truck. “Is my truck totaled?” he asked. “Did I destroy it. How’s my truck?” He seemed desperate to know his pickup was okay. The EMTs had told him his child was dead, and still he asked about his stupid pickup truck? Landing at the hospital I was, for perhaps the first time, angry at one of my patients. WTF, your truck? Who cares about a damn pickup truck? Flight nurses took the man to the ER, and I never saw him again.

Too often we react badly at what we think we see directly in front of us. It’s human nature, I suppose. Months later it dawned on me what the real story was, and why the man continued asking about his truck. His young son was dead in the freeway median, and he’d been responsible for the child’s death. His mind simply couldn’t process that tragic information, so he occupied himself with his wrecked pickup. The lesson I learned was to not occupy myself with the immediate and apparent story.

Subscribe now

This story has a happy ending, I’ll report that up front. I flew to tiny rural hospital one bitter cold February night where a youngster waited for our help. The child had fallen into farm machinery, and was terribly injured. They’d lost a lot of blood, had many bone-deep cuts, and internal injuries. The doctor in that ER had asked the child’s parents about organ donation, a measure restricted only to hopeless cases. None of us expected a good result, but that’s why we flew, to give that outside chance a way to work.

Landing at home base around 1 am, I shut the aircraft down, and our young trauma patient was rushed directly to an operating suite. I went to bed, certain that the child would never make it. Dear reader, I’m happy to report that they did. Six weeks later I watched the child leave the hospital with its parents, heading back to their farm. Seeing the three of them enter the family car as if heading home from the grocery made up for all the challenges I’d faced in twenty years of hospital flying.

I loved the position. Flying Air Med was the perfect career. It allowed me to use skills I’d acquired flying combat missions in Vietnam, to help ill and injured casualties at home. But there were challenges and frustrations unique to the job as well. The post-midnight launches in sub-zero weather, the back to back to back flights that left my bed untouched all night, frustrating marginal weather that demanded a highly stressful go—no go decision. Often the most difficult flights were those I couldn’t take, missions for patients who most needed the helicopter and crew’s resources, but poor visibility, storms, snow and ice, or a nagging mechanical issue kept us on the ground.

Speaking of human nature, after twenty years of flying an Air Medical helicopter I saw a lot of its manifestations. One conclusion I have is that were it not for cigarettes, alcohol, unsafe gun use, disregarded seat belts, high doses of testosterone, and certain other purely human behaviors, I would have flown far fewer patients.

The patient flight I best recall is for a young person shot in the head by a visiting young friend who found an unsecured gun, and playing with it shot the other child. This patient was not expected to survive either, but they did. The underlying story turned out to be one of hope and inspiration. The child’s parent worked over years and years to force a change in gun laws in their jurisdiction. They successfully lobbied for more security, and better oversight of weapons in homes. But the real success story is that the child recovered from a life-threatening gunshot wound to the head, and had gone to college, earning a reputable, marketable degree.

If celebrating that kind of recovery and triumphant outcome is human nature, I guess I’m as human as the next person. Having a small part to play in that drama, and the many other success stories put together, gave me the best years of my working life. Those years also kept me human, often in spite of the ego-driven temptation to parade through the hospital in my flight suit, accompanied by flight nurses, an ideal recipe for the other all-too human tendency to elevate myself above the throng. Thanks for reading. Comments welcome.

It came to a head during the recent pandemic. FOMO: The Fear Of Missing Out. It caught us in its fevered web partly because we had little outside that we could do. So we parked on Social Media Beach for days at a time, wondering what everyone else was doing to pass the time, fearing they were ahead of us in some way, hearing the latest, gaining advantage, given the secret handshake.

Now that COVID is just a lingering presence, it appears FOMO disease is still prevalent. A lot of us are still running to stay in one place. It also seems, therefore, as if many are looking for an alternative to FOMO’s grasping, enervating symptoms, and the lingering anxiety they cause. Medical science has yet to discover an effective cure for FOMO. But allow me to describe a method of recuperation that works, even if applied in small doses over many days or weeks.

Subscribe now

The person above is enjoying this recommended cure for FOMO. Ensconced on a deserted beach, she appears to be entirely resigned to the ravages and ruin of an alternate illness called JOMO, the Joy Of Missing Out. What I’m discovering as I sit at SM Beach writing this, is that JOMO is more than a companion illness for FOMO, it’s a mentality that has applications far beyond the suffering of FOMO, and a cure for several other ailments as well.

JOMO can be ‘contracted’, for example, shortly before the wedding of a relative who happens to be a serial marry-er, someone who demates and then remates with abandon, sometimes before the gifts are unwrapped. JOMO can be cited when a friend demands your presence at a show of their Grand Canyon vacation slides. It can be an out when your attendance and attention are requested for political fundraisers, Tupperware parties, seances, book signings of self-published writer friends certain of their Pulitzer nomination, recipe sharing get togethers, and many other gatherings you’d rather have a root canal done in lieu of.

Share

In short, what JOMO can cure is our often obsequious deference to the requests of others to help them deal with their raging FOMO! So…does this mean FOMO is contagious? Boy howdy! Worse than any pandemic, I believe. All the more reason to inoculate ourselves with a dose or three of JOMO. Here’s hoping we have no need of a booster.

My LinkedIn account and presence on that site have vanished. Poof! Gone! All my followers, all data I’d meticulously added, all my posts for the past five years…all gone.

Here’s the thing. For a long while I’ve shared with others my favorite quote, which is this: “The things that are hardest to let go are the ones that are already gone.” We humans are very good, exceptional even, at fooling ourselves about certain things. The necessity and compulsion social media engender are two of those things.

Subscribe now

Did I enjoy knowing I had a few thousand followers on LinkedIn? Yes. Did I hit the view profile feature every day to see the numbers rising? Yes. Did I faithfully respond to those who had read, and halleluja actually wrote about those posts? Yes. Did it enrich my life, my outlook, and my engagement with the world? No. What all that frantic activity did was satisfy, for a blip in time, my fear of missing out.

It’s all gone. The upshot of this situation, I’m coming to discover, is that FOMO is one of the more pernicious diseases of modern life. The acronym sums up quite well our chronic and potentially debilitating ‘never enough-ness’. Our addiction to social media drains our time. It gives us a false sense of our own impact on the world. And it leads to more FOMO along the way. This electronic carrot on a stick is, I’m now learning, something never to be caught, just chased till we drop. It’s an aspirational pursuit that can only lead to disappointment and more frantic striving.

Share

So what to do now? What do we do when one of our social media sites spits up and goes bye-bye? I guess we write about it at Substack, which practice seems a bit disingenuous, but hey… I know this: The erasure contains a germ of what I can only describe as calmness. There’s a serenity to it. The hamster wheel is stopped, the treadmill is still. What to do? Punch the activate button? Call the helpline? Swab my sweaty brow, convinced I’ve somehow disappeared? None of the above.

I intend to steel myself and resist the urge to hit the help button, to refuse to reach back and try to recover what has allegedly been lost. Maybe. Wish me luck. Just don’t do it on LinkedIn. I’m not at that post anymore. Guess I’m now at LinkedOut.

In this final lesson, The Official delivers powerful teachings on the mind to the Soul Traveler about to go to Earth and put the seven lessons into practice. This final lesson reminds the ST that without understanding the mind and its tendencies, they may find themselves living, as many do, in a cage of their own making. Here’s lesson seven. As you read the piece, try to solve the puzzles, and be open to the idea that you, too, may be living in a cage, when you could be exploring the cosmos as the high being you truly are.

Subscribe now

TO: This last lesson is on the personal Vs the intellectual mind. I start with this because if it’s given free rein, your personal mind will run your life, and lower your aspirations. That’s a shame because the intellectual mind is a dazzling, brilliant creation that lifted humans from the muck, and revealed to us the god-like creatures we are. Here’s a puzzle for you. I propose that the Amazon, the Ganges, the Nile, all the world’s great rivers are formed by habit.

ST: How can rivers be formed by habit?

TO: If you carve a path through the land, then open up a dam, where will the water flow?

ST: It will find its way to the carved path, and flow down it.

TO: That’s right, and diverting the water will take a great deal of energy and change. Might it be better to not carve the path to begin with?

ST: Water seeks its own level.

Share

TO: Exactly, so instead of watching the water take its well-established path, why not keep your mind open to whatever your higher mind perceives as truth? Here are a few puzzles for you: Nothing is happening, because everything is happening. To become someone you must become no one. Falling leaves take the perfect path to the ground. The ratio of what you experience to what’s happening is incomprehensible. Colors don’t exist. Finally, to be enlightened you must be out of your mind!

ST: That’s a lot to unpack. Nothing is happening?

TO: Every event is like every other. In order to be enlightened, you have to observe them without emotion, judgment, or criticism. Your mind will steer you toward all those things, like water finding its own path. Remember, you are not your mind. You are the consciousness watching your mind.

ST: I must become no one?

TO: You must become that person who understands how miniscule and how magnificent you are in equal measure. As soon as you hold onto a thought, emotion, or judgment you take sides. You dismiss something. You must have what Keats referred to as negative capability, entertaining two opposing ideas with no difficulty.

ST: Tell me about falling leaves.

TO: The universe is perfect. As difficult as it is to consider, especially for the Western mind, there are no mistakes. The leaves fall when, where, and how they will. They don’t decide to fall on someone else’s lawn. They don’t go sideways. There are laws in the universe, and even falling leaves obey them.

ST: The ratio of what’s happening?

TO: How many things are you experiencing right now? Let’s be generous and say ten, twenty, maybe twenty-five. How many things are happening in the universe! The number has more zeros than anyone can comprehend. Here’s why this is important: People get angry when the driver in front of them is going too slow. They curse and scream when they miss a red light, or when a kid squawks in the grocery. That same person is smaller than a dust mote, living on a tiny speck of dirt, water, and vegetation in the empty, black vastness of space. There are 3 billion stars in Earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way. And there are three trillion galaxies! Humans live seventy, eighty, maybe ninety years max. The Earth has been around for four billion years. Tell me again how important that slow driver is?

ST: I get it, I get it. We really are pretty small, aren’t we?

TO: But we’re not small; we’re a divine presence capable of magnificent things. We are star stuff! But we allow our minds to make us angry at drivers in front of us, at gas prices, at crying babies in the grocery! Doing those worthless, useless things is an insult to the human mind which may be the most extraordinary mechanism ever conceived. We allow our tiny, stupid personal minds to run our lives. It’s phenomenally sad and tragic.

ST: Colors don’t exist? What about the red paint on my vehicle?

TO: The only thing that has color is lightwaves. Your eyes take them in, transmit the data to your brain, which interprets those data as a color. You detect only light waves that are not absorbed by what the light hits. Tell me what ‘color’ is not absorbed by leaves on trees?

ST: I have no idea.

TO: Green. The light not absorbed by the leaves is reflected back to your eyes. Red, blue, yellow, those wavelengths pass right through leaves. This is your mind at work.

ST: I must be out of my mind to think life on Earth is simple.

TO: You don’t have to be out of your mind to live on Earth, but it helps. That isn’t an irony. Being out of your mind means you understand this: You are not your mind. You’re not your emotions, fears, perspectives, and not even your body. You’re a consciousness watching all those things, and staying above them. Speaking of which, especially in western society, your personal mind tries to convince you that you're a separate, autonomous individual. That everyone is a solitary soul. A line in the Bhagavad Gita in Eastern culture states ‘The feeling of ‘I’ as a separate self must be given up if you wish to know truth.’ What it’s saying is we’re all one consciousness, one energy source.

ST: I never did understand that. It sounds like we believe we’re all on our own, when we’re part of the whole. Did I get that right?

TO: That’s the simplified version of it. Here’s the part that Westerners, especially those in certain religious groups can’t seem to understand, and don’t want to believe. We are all God. Western minds imagine an all powerful, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent god ‘up there’ somewhere. An anthropomorphized being that sees all, hears all, senses all, and judges all. Eastern philosophy says we’re all part of the one energy source, all one being, one elevated mind. When we see someone else, we see ourselves. If you elaborate on that, embrace all of humanity as one, then war, hatred, hunger, murder, deprivation, and most human ills are simply inconceivable.

ST: Then why has humanity been so attracted to the other mentality?

TO: Because human minds never tell the truth. They lie about the needs, and feeling of separation that’s so common in the west, and the mind creates its narrative of what you need to be okay. Even surrounded by abundance, the personal mind sees lack, and the need to match the ambitions of all other separate beings.

ST: Will we ever bridge that divide?

TO: A writer named Rudyard Kipling once wrote ‘east is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet.’ But there’s more convergence all the time as younger people in the west see the value in getting off the hamster wheel of possessions, money, position, and prestige to live their lives with meaning. Here’s a last bit of advice before you go. Earth is a place where souls are sent to evolve. It’s a wonderful, glorious, magical place that will tempt you and try you. Earth is god’s idea of Disney World! Life on Earth will anger and enchant you. It will frustrate and confound you with lessons you never knew you’d love so deeply. Earth will demand much, and give back yet more. For every loss on Earth, the universe provides recompense, if you know where and how to look for it. Keep in mind the incalculable power and majesty of your higher mind. Remember, you’re not a citizen of Earth; you’re a citizen of the universe. You don’t have to aspire to higher consciousness, or work to raise yourself to a higher plane. The moment you’re born you’re already there. Don’t leave. Don’t descend! Stay in that conscious self, the ecstatic, powerful, abundant, star-touched self that was created to be there, and deserves to be there.

ST: I look forward to it. When do I go down there?

TO: You don’t. You go up there!

The entire seven-part series has been published at BizCatalyst360.

(Warning) This essay may be difficult to read for anyone who has experienced sexual exploitation.

We live in a country that will not protect its children. In the past, and again in the present those children are still not being protected. Not from evil, venal, sex and power-driven men who pursue their salacious appetites freely and with abandon. They escape without charge because they’ve helped with their money, connections, and venality to build a firewall for themselves against accountability, attack, or adjudication. Those sworn to protect children are too busy protecting themselves and their powerful colleagues to allow morality or ethics to slow them down.

Their busyness at present is marked by scrambling, armtwisting, subtle and likely not so subtle threatening. These men with more power than decency are frantic in their effort to bribe or blackmail their way out of the exposure of their heretofore unchallenged behavior, to assure themselves and similarly implicated colleagues’ names on a list are never to see the light of day. As the latest scandal oozes from under the slime-coated rocks and reeking mud of shameful human behavior, the depravity of these men using young girls as status symbols of their sexual safari tag them like merit badges in the elite club that owns the world as we know it, and doesn’t give a damn if we know it or not. Now that a whiff of their amoral rot has seeped into the public arena, we’re witnessing the usual stonewalling, delay, legal lockstep maneuvering we’ve come to consider as commonplace. And we see the complaisant response from fellow members of the elite who consider these mens’ despicable behavior to be the simple droit de signeur of royal corruption from times past, times we’d hoped were dead and long buried.

But we all know, or should know, that in a decent society sexual predation against children must never be tolerated regardless of the predator’s position, political affiliation, bank balance, or level of fame. It matters not what the politics, social standing, or stated values of these men may be. It matters not what initiatives we hold in common, what legislative and rights-based efforts we each pursue. Should it come to light that men we’ve revered, men of high office and legislative gravitas, men who value what we do, and vote the way we’ve done, none of that matters, nor should it to anyone. This is not about politics; this is about the safety and security of children. Those children and their lost futures must be the center of this story, the main focus, not a mere footnote to it.

It’s far too easy in our hyper-distracted society to dismiss these recent charges, to relegate them as the latest volley, one group’s effort to discredit the other, a response so predictable as to be banal. Too easy to miss the fact that children’s lives have been and are being destroyed, their futures ripped from them by encounters with these vile men and their feckless dereliction. Here’s the hard truth. Children’s lives are — or by everything that is holy should be — sacred and unblemished. In a decent society the behavior of such men would be unthinkable. In addition, as much as we like to believe our society has the most robust economy, the biggest GDP, the strongest military in history, the true measure of our strength is in none of those metrics; it is in the way we fiercely and always protect the innocent, the smallest, and the most vulnerable among us. In a very real sense, predation on young children by these amoral men undermines not only the futures and happiness of the victims, it corrodes the girders and steel of society itself as we strive to build a nation where even the most vulnerable can thrive and do so in safety.

It is time for the truth to be told, all of it, without fear or favor. It is time these wanton men who decided their comfort outweighs a child’s future be held to account. No more legal footdragging. No more redacted files. No more deference to the ease, position, wealth, and collegial protection of men who prey on the young. These men are pedophiles, let’s call them what they are. No more looking the other way allowing cynicism to trump decency. No more equivocation: Do we wish to protect children from sex predators, or do we not?

Why does this issue concern me? And why does it arrive to haunt me at the present moment? Because I was one of those children. When I was 14 years old I was used by a powerful man for his depraved sexual exploits. In a catholic seminary this man dismissed my safety, my privacy, my agency, my age, knowing he would never be called to account, much less called to explain himself. All this in a place where Christ said, “Better a man have a millstone hung round his neck and be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.”* It meant nothing then; it apparently has not changed in two thousand years.

I know the pain abuse engenders, because six decades later I still feel it. It still boils up from time to time, as I sense that room, those episodes, my humiliation that man ignored while he did those things to me. I scour my past and see how that abuse informed my life, my interaction with others, and my often awkward, even childlike efforts to regain a semblance of authority over my own sexual efforts. Counseling eventually allowed me to heal, and to understand behaviors that were otherwise inexplicable.

Do I want these pedophiles prosecuted? Do I want them to appear in the docket to be charged and to face the full measure of legal heft? Do I want the dismissal, denial, and shield of protection they enjoy dismantled? Do I fervently wish these pedophiles and the craven cabal that enables them might abandon their constant efforts to hide, and their too predictable default to insulting our intelligence exposed? I want those things more than I can say in this missive, and I want it with all deliberate speed. I don’t want vengeance; I don’t want revenge; I want that part of my childhood back.

Thank you for reading. Don’t pity me — demand that these predators, these pedophiles, whoever they are, face their own miserable truth. Demand justice for the children who should have been protected but were not.

*Luke: 17.2