Date of occurrance:

18 Aout 2026 (Mardi)

Provence had been under what they call a Heat Dome most of the Summer. I have been cycling most days since arriving, starting early when the temperature is in the mid to high 70’s. For a cyclist of any persuasion this is mecca. The roads, the vignobles ( vineyards ) olive and lavender fields engulf your field of vision wherever you are. The elder cyclists fully kitted out in their vintage steel framed 1980’s bikes and old allegiances to sponsors emblazoned on their jerseys and cycling caps. It is their way of life on a track to notions of being “bon vivant.” The villages are numerous and can always be counted on for filling up water bottles with source d’eau at the fountains and a boulangerie and bar-tabac for coffee and pastry.

It was beautiful morning rise up over the Col de Pas de la Couelle or aka petit Col du Galibier.

This day I was riding a clockwise route to another pass that got me to the foot of Grotte de Marie Madeleine’s (cave) where she spent the last 30 years of her life in contemplation. Once you arrive at the sommet on that side at the T intersection it stands midway up the limestone mountain. A well tended hiking pathway leads you to it steps.

I had stopped for coffee and OJ in Nans Les Pins, the nearest village to the Grotte and then headed back down the mountain and back to the farm. On the way I stopped in St Zacharie to pick up a sandwich for lunch, stuffed it and a coca cola in my jersey pocket and headed to the last climb up and over.

Half way up on a switchabck I noticed tension in my mid back, left. I stopped and rested and it went away. I immediately thought it might be a referral for my heart or just a mechanical issue: muscle or tight vertebrae. I got back on and shortly after another cyclist pushed ahead of me and so I decided to stay with him. I could not. I had no force and the tension in my back increased. I stopped at the sommet and sent a message to my wife and snapped a selfie I was going to send to her. I went to peer over my saddle to look at my right pedal and that was the last thing I remember.

My strave app was still running through it all. The line that leads to Trets and bends left is the ambulance ( SAMU) ride to Aix en Provence. From the sommet ( summit) I imagine the drive was at least 45 minutes with lights and sirens.

The Reanimation Department

In the next instant (26 hours later) I was awakened. I could not see. Everything was blurry; and dark they had put ointment in my eyes. I heard beeping. I saw only shadows of movement.

Zabeth began whispering into my left ear. It’s okay. Don’t fight. Don’t bite the tube. Don’t pull. They are helping you. It’s okay. You are in the hospital.

In my coma she used her healing touch with Craniosacral, read Rumi to me, played my songs, had the girls talk to me. She stayed beyond hours, beyond measure.

They had brought me out of an induced coma. I was shivering uncontrollably. Later I learned they had cooled my body to preserve my heart and brain.

Being extubated was like death in reverse: no breath, unable to take one, the feeling that there was none — until the tube was pulled out of me, and then I could breathe. That was vivid.

I remember the doctor saying, M. Kim, we are taking good care of you. I am going to put my thumb on your artery in your leg to stop the bleeding. I reached, grabbed his smock, wound it into my fist, and held on. Pressure. No pain. Then I was gone again.

The next thing I remember is my Zabeth sitting next to me, and I could see the room.

What I was told.

“You had a heart attack at the top of the mountain.” Zabeth said, “You had three angels, divine, intervene and they saved your life. They came upon you shortly after you had passed out.”

The first was a writer from Paris, in the south visiting his mother. I was told he never takes that pass. It is long. That day he decided to. He was the one who got me off the road to safety and started to assess my condition.

The second was a cyclist. He saw the California jersey I was wearing and told Zabeth he had ridden in the Bay Area, specifically Marin and enjoyed it immensely.

The third was a nurse with her two children. She had her ACLS kit.

They kept me perfusing for thirty minutes until the paramedics arrived. They cardioverted me twice on the road.

Then the pompiers ( firefighters) took over. On the way to Aix I went into Vfib again. They shocked me with adrenaline. (V fib is when the left ventricle is left quivering and not contracting, so no blood being pumped to the body.)

In the hospital record it says they cardioverted once more from Vfib, with .5cc’s of lidocaine, before the angio.

Zabeth mentioned that after talking to the author by phone who had returned to Paris by this time that he had been changed somehow by this experience and it was profound.

Two days later

Two days later the pompier came to the room in uniform. He apologized for fracturing my ribs ( 3 in total and a severely bruised sternum).

The nurse was with him. They wanted to see how I was doing and were happy to see me.

I do not remember the sommet of the mountain that day. They had done everything to hold those moments for themselves in keeping me alive, out from the bardo unknown to me successfully so.

I cried and thanked them, held their hands, and then we said goodbye.

Healing Circle

Zabeth gathered them: the immediate family, friends, the tea and healing community, her teachers to support healing my heart, the bay area women healers. A prayer cycle’s -circle. She asked them to pray for me, for the health of the heart, for a swift return. The outpouring immeasurable, pure, gentle, emotion-ful and deeply loving.

This is where I locate the depth of healing — in the quantum nature of this reality, where energy, vibration, intention, and one consciousness move what looks immovable, hearts mend. Mine is mending into its future healed self as you read this. I know it would not be in the realm of possibility without this gathering. without this thoughtful knowing.

The cardiologist told me I might not have been able to avoid it. She spoke of a pattern she sees in asiatique men: the blood does not break down what should be broken down as readily — fibrin, certain fatty deposits, cells that clump and stay. She said it was hereditary.

My harabeoji. ( grandfather )

My father.

My uncles Earl and Roy.

My brother, Kevin.

Now me.

The first four died of this. My elder brother drove himself to the hospital. I came back by the width of a whisker. Three lives of the nine utilized!

What I know more clearly now than at any other point in my life is this: the contracted, blocked state of the widow-maker — the left anterior descending artery, where two stents opened ninety-percent occlusions — was not only vessel and gene. It was also character. Shame, Anger. Resentment. Righteousness, sometimes with indignation.

It is the han of the Korean side: that deep, intergenerational weather of feeling, carried through centuries of being pressed down, that does not easily let heart-energy move as love, compassion, gratitude, joy.

I have known this.

POW. Right in the kisser. It got my attention.

I am learning to let go and move on, more than before. As Rilke came to me from my brother Jonathan:

Yesterday my beloved asked how it felt to have everyone loving me.

Uncomfortable and wonderful at the same time, I said.

I would rather be the one giving than the one receiving.

Today I am in full receipt and in deep gratitude for the love I am receiving in prayers, flowers and kind words of expression.

Blessings and Namaste, to everyone.

Lead with Love and see Love in everyone you meet, always.

t.

The French love their cycling—from cradle to grave, literally. It is a pure form of freedom, liberae. The roads, the bike paths, mountains, valleys, village to village boulangeries, rond-points and traffic furniture all give cycling here a particular character, especially in Provence. Vineyards (vignobles), olive trees, lavender, honey, tournesol (sunflowers), and the fierce intensity of the cigales on these hot summer days… that sense of freedom and conversation with nature lives in every pedal stroke for every cyclist.

I found this video in my YouTube queue on the fourth day of being in Provence—just a few days after I put the Parlee bike back together from its travels and rode the day after landing to shake off the jet lag, what the French call décalage horaire. In the past seven days I’ve ridden four times, plus one full day of intervals 20 to 60 second full gaz climbing on both sides of the beautiful mountain I am living at the foot of with my partner..

I was deeply and emotionally touched by this documentary about then 90 year old cyclist Benjamin Piovesan, artfully made by his grandson Florent Piovesan. It fits the time I am living in the philosophy to know who holds the best light in you always.

Inspiring.

take a moment.

….and on to whats up now.

France is on fire, and we’re right on the edge of it—on the border of the Var. Zabeth just arrived back this evening from working a truffle fields for her friend near Barjol which was nearing the danger zone of evacuation. She showed me photos of the plumes over the ridge not far away. She wondered if the field she worked would survive.

Its Hot! Really Hot. Endurance Hot. Deathly Hot.

I’ve been riding early, before the heat becomes impossible, before the embers break into smoke particles casting hues of grey and ashen orange.

It is hot.

No air conditioning here just two fans, a rotating standup and little golf-cart fan with the water mister I used for playing golf in the desert heat at 6 am when it is 92 degrees.

The other morning I climbed out to a cobblestone 5th-century bell tower high on a mountaintop, riding my road bike on a trail I probably shouldn’t have been on. It was a Red Zone—heat and wildfire hazard, accèss interdit. I was the only one up there. Three kilometers of brutal climbing. I did it anyway. On the way down I blew both tires… but not before I rang the cloche in the tower.

Note to the critical: ride a gravel bike.

The actual chapelle Saint-Jean du Puy was locked. They still hold mass here on holidays. It’s a bit of trek to reach it.

The following morning after cleaning the drivetrain and wheels of this two wheeled chariot I did a 25-mile loop across the l’arc valley and came upon a climb that rises from the village of Rousset to the foot of Sainte-Victoire—that huge limestone mass jutting out overseeing the famous vignobles, the land of Rosé that Cézanne painted again and again.

At the top of that climb you arrive here, where you can access Chapelle Saint Ser halfway up the mountain in the middle there. I know you can’t see it, but it is there tucked away in a cave. Chapelle Saint-Ser—a first-century hermitage founded by a hermit-healer of hearing. He would finish each treatment by saying, “Can you hear me now?” The healed thought God himself was speaking.

The king, jealous that the hermit was more beloved and possessed greater powers of healing than he did, had the man’s ears cut off, then his head.

Humans are barbarians.

Zabeth and I have been there…30 minute hike up from the trailhead. She has spent many days hiking St. Victoire with her pops who loved this mountain.

As you can see it is a chapelle carved into a cave in the mountainside.

Riding at au pieds de la St Victoire toward Puyloubier and down into the vignobles feels much like Napa Valley just more condensed and more approachable. They are everywhere, like the tea fields in the mountains of Anhui in China, they run right up to the road. You can touch them here and this makes for part of the grandeur of cycling in Provence.

More to come. Plan is to ride Mount Ventoux. Taking the easiest of the three ways up.

Blessings and Namaste,

t.

By Looking at This Photo

By looking at this photo, one might imagine a well-formed family of six—four siblings and their parents—gathered in a sunlit backyard after a holiday celebration on Robinhood Drive in San Francisco.

Yet the eye lingers, and the questions arise on their own:

Who are these people?
From which Asian shores did their stories begin?
What are their names, and what quiet chapters do they carry?
When was this moment captured—sometime in the eighties, or the nineties?

What did the parents do for a living, and how did they hold the weight of two continents on their shoulders?
Is there a next generation? Are any of them still alive?

And the siblings—who were the three boys and the one sister?
What was the shape of their love for their father, for their mother, and for one another?
Who stood as the eldest, who as the youngest?
Did they truly love each other? Did they stay close

You notice how this storytelling is really about the wonder of connection and belonging.
The questions we pose and project onto the canvases of others’ lives reveal a deeper truth: life is ultimately an abstraction—one that too often lacks the concrete foundations required to keep families whole.

My grandmother embodied this pride. During the Great Depression, when neighbors brought food and clothing to help, she insisted they deliver the items to the back alley so no one would witness her family receiving handouts. “Hom,” as she was known, stood only four feet ten. A proud Korean woman with a privileged upbringing, she hopped a steamer and picture-brided herself to San Francisco City Hall in 1913 at the age of eighteen. Her husband, a widower, ten years her senior, was among the first Koreans to immigrate to the West. She became the present matriarch of the San Francisco Kims. She had five in succession and her husband promptly landed face down at the age of 35 just 7 years into their marriage. They were my father’s parents. When she died in the 80’s, our Korean traditions and gatherings ceased altogether. She was the proverbial glue.

Grandmothers are that for families.

My father, who appears in the family photographs, was born in Sacramento in April 1917. On the Korean side, pride often bordered on insularity—a determination to keep the outside world at a distance as assimilation grabbed both ends of belonging-ness..

In contrast, my mother’s mother who came from Hoy Ping in Southern China faced a far different fate. She was committed to an insane asylum at age thirty-three, shortly after giving birth to her eighth child. That infant was taken from her and placed in a Chinese orphanage on Sacramento Street in San Francisco in 1932. Seven years later my baby auntie found herself in the care of her eldest brother, who brought her home to Colusa and back into her family for the very first time.

From the photo, is it possible to see any of this? To know or feel the tragedy and trauma?
Most of what I observe in life are the quick reads of today. The jacket-cover of these photos gives only a sliver. A scintilla and far be it from anyone to ever assume they know anything at all without inquiry. Judgement can be an insidious mental dys-regulation of one’s own un-metabolized familial trauma..

And,

there is the existence of this family. By all appearances, healthful.

Most of life, however, is marked by separation with all efforts to live in harmony. This was especially true for those of us who grew up in America through the 1960s and 1970s and into the banner years of the 1980s—an era of feathered hair, mullets, tight angel-flight pants, elephant-bell bottoms, and pastel hip-hugging Ditto pants paired with terrycloth tube tops that accentuated the stirrings of male puberty.

Music formed the soundtrack: themes of war, peace, love, and devotion. We witnessed the criminal behavior of government institutions alongside the simple joys of skateboarding and ten-speed bicycles—particularly the heavy green Schwinn Varsity that weighed nearly forty pounds. Even with narrow-trucked banana boards and ball-bearing wheels we pushed ourselves to the limits, often earning excessive elbow and knee road rash. When not on skateboards we rode nascent Dan Gurney-framed bikes down dirt hillocks near Penitencia Creek and over makeshift jumps, frequently “endo-ing” over the handlebars and landing on our heads. No matter the pain or stunned disorientation, we rose again, encouraged by the laughter and camaraderie of friends who accepted such mishaps in stride.

As children we did not yet know separation by technology. We memorized phone numbers and addresses as readily as our own. We called friends or simply appeared at their doors to ask whether they could come out to play—often until dusk. Summer days stretched endlessly; we wandered to the city’s outskirts on twenty-five-cent bus rides with ten-cent transfers valid all day.

We hosted garage parties adorned with makeshift mirror balls—squarish shards of glass glued onto foam spheres, suspended by nylon string from the rafters—flashlight beams rising from the corners. Boys and girls dressed with care, seeking the first tentative tastes of touching, inhaling the scents of the opposite sex in both lustful and loving ways. Slow dances to “Reasons,” “Float On,” “Stairway to Heaven,” or the extended “Freebird” allowed prolonged embraces, arms wrapped around necks and waists in moments of budding affection.

Our innocence coexisted with an undercurrent of terror and sadness. The Zodiac Killer haunted the region. The murder of John Lennon left one high-school girl, Susan Shin, so devastated she withdrew from existence for nearly a year, only to return and graduate with our class. During our senior class photo on the lawn at Piedmont Hills High School in San Jose she held an 11×14 framed photograph of him in memorial—a snapshot frozen in our teenaged early-eighties lives.

The Vietnam War lingered in memory with the migration of the derisive “FOB”1 monikers of the Vietnamese diaspora to San Jose and the Eastside, alongside energy crises, the Iran hostage crisis, and later Iran-Contra. Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan. Three Mile Island raised fears of catastrophe. The Iran-Iraq War erupted. Mount St. Helens threw its magma violently. In 1980 the United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics. There were assassination attempts on President Reagan and Pope John Paul II. In 1982 Marines were deployed to Beirut after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon—an attempt that fails to this present day as the illusion of democracy craters so abjectly.

In 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated high above us in mere seconds.

Amid all these global upheavals our daily concerns remained remarkably local: who was riding with whom on Saturday-night cruises along El Camino in Santa Clara; how to secure tickets for the next Star Wars installment at the Century Theatre on Stevens Creek Boulevard, admission $2.25. Our first concerts at the Coliseum, Circle Star, and the outdoor Day on the Green multiband shows. Getting high on Colombian Gold—a “lid” (ounce) cost fifty bucks in those days and was significantly less potent than today’s hybridized breeds.
Who had the first CD player or LP from the Commodores, Earth Wind & Fire, Heatwave, or the Isley Brothers? What about Rush, Boston, Zeppelin, the Who, Oingo Boingo, Smashing Pumpkins, and those southern-rock boys from Alabama? Night Moves to Working for the Weekend to Funkadelic’s Flashlight and Rapper’s Delight paved the way into a nation so unique that others wanted to imitate its ways. Loving our love affairs and the many homages to “She’s Got a Way” that Billy Joel would croon.
Not so much these days.

And what of the Story and King neighborhoods on the East Side—areas legendary for instilling fear in us youthful adventurers through stories of knifings and rumbles, often simply because one was not Chicano. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red communities often bonded tightly then. We remember our Pinoy friend Nestor Campuued grinning ear to ear while being chased by four white football players, easily jumping the seven-foot wooden school gate to run to freedom until the next day. We all knew the playful antics he frequently got into. Nestor.

There were the pretty song-and-pom-pom girls cheering from the sidelines at our basketball games. We experienced the loss of innocence both in communion and in isolation. A friend’s suicide who had taken on the persona of Alfred Fonzarelli (Fonzie); his girlfriend dressed as Pinky Tuscadero from Happy Days. Our first understanding of transsexual in Rich, who drove a hopped-up, beautifully painted red two-door Mazda Sundowner pickup and came out in his senior year as Laurel.

The struggle to fit in and belong began in the haze of middle school as we navigated new feelings of excitement, arousal, and tenderness—feelings that could be shattered by a single word, a glance, or collective rejection. Acceptance was fleeting; exclusion often felt eternal. Social hierarchies were determined by appearance, speech, and manner of relating—what was “in” one day could render one “out” the next.

Such experiences accumulate weight, like a stone carried in a backpack for decades. They shape the spine of who we become—whether upright or scoliotic—resulting in a functional halving of the self that rarely feels whole. Covert depression, masked as control and righteous indignation, or its flip side: make-nice and hide the truth to get along.

This photo of family was not whole. For most of my life—but for six years—I was the youngest, in many ways shielded by my sister and brothers whom I love dearly to this day, whom we all look on and after still.
A broken family? …of deep tumultuous offerings, the baggage of ancestry brought to my parents from Korea and Southern China, the trauma of belonging in the everyday life of their youth carried swiftly into their children and their children’s children of today.

I reflect on this now as my life partner’s son has just had his first son—another generation stepping into the line of fathers.

I see the legacy of hardened ways passed down through generations of struggle: the deep, unconscious patterns we inherit, the guarded allowances we make for genuine regard. These patterns remain buried until life upends us, drops us to our knees, and cracks us open so completely that something in us dies and returns, newly awake.

Only then does the desire for change arise—not hurried in our feet, but urgent in our hearts. The pain of this return to self is real. We know, somewhere inside, that love and understanding are only a single turn away, yet we often choose the familiar torment instead. We turn away even when our hearts say no.

It is like pulling a scab off a still-living wound. The tearing hurts, but it is in that raw moment that life finally comes into focus. Softness arrives slowly, along the long runway of a new beginning. We cross the threshold, and the soul—ever patient, ever ready—welcomes us home.

I cherish this lead photo because it reveals what can still be, decades after a family fractures—when one leaves and the four who remain learn to stand together. It holds the quiet possibility that lives beneath trauma’s scorched insistence to rule the unconscious, beneath the unmetabolized weight of our deepest wounds.

Letting go of the past is not always necessary. Instead, we learn to hold the full arc of our lives—its pain, its unchosen burdens, and all the raw imperfections thrust upon us—as an essential part of who we are today. We do not forget. We allow these experiences to become quiet transformative agents, softening at the edges as we live more fully and wholly, day by day.

Letting it in, rather than letting it go.

These wounds need not be neglected or erased; they simply ask for deeper understanding, free from the grip of unhealthy attachment. In that gentle integration, the sharpest edges lose their power to wound, and what once divided us begins, quietly, to heal. Life heals and relationships become re-ordered and new family finds their way to the doorstep, convincing us that inspiration, wanting and seeing the best in us always may exist from this day forward.

This process—acknowledging the full arc of our personal and familial histories, embracing forgiveness where possible, and integrating past pain without clinging—represents the true healing of the everyday trauma woven into the families we are born into and the families we create.

In many Asian and immigrant households, including my own, such trauma often remains unnamed and unvoiced, perpetuated by cultural values of pride, stoicism, and the imperative to present a composed face to the world. Generational burdens—shaped by immigration struggles, economic hardship, institutionalization, abandonment, and the silent weight of unspoken sorrow—are transmitted not through deliberate harm but through the very mechanisms intended to preserve dignity and survival. Yet true healing emerges not from erasure or forced forgetting, but from a compassionate understanding that reframes these experiences as integral threads in the tapestry of who we are.

By holding space for both the pride of my Korean grandmother, who shielded her family’s vulnerabilities during the Depression, and the profound rupture in my mother’s early life, we break the insulating silence that once kept the world at bay. This integration allows us to release the emotional grip of the past while honoring its lessons. It fosters healthier boundaries, deeper empathy across generations, and the freedom to parent or relate without unconsciously repeating cycles of rejection or disconnection.

Ultimately this healing is quiet, ongoing, and profoundly human. It transforms inherited ghosts into ancestors—sources of wisdom rather than burdens—and offers the next generation a legacy defined less by unbroken silence and more by resilience, connection, and the courageous capacity to see family not as a flawless portrait, but as a living story capable of redemption and wholeness.

Blessings and Namaste.

t

My eldest brother asked me on our monthly Sunday siblings zoom call what my wish would be for our sister Patricia, the eldest.

My brothers inquiry had me pause and reflect. In that moment, I mentioned that I wish for her genuine happiness in her life and offerings of my support whenever she asked or needed it. To avail myself in whatever capacity in the moment.

Nothing more. It sufficed at the time.

That night I had a dream in which I was swimming alongside my brother in an ocean without goggles or fins or breathing apparatus. The experience was one of profound weightlessness and tranquility. I motioned for him to turn around and observe our surroundings. As I said this the clarity of the ocean emerged with extraordinary precision and brilliance as though my vision had become akin to binoculars, revealing an expanse of 10,000 miles. In that moment gave great clarity to my near death experience in April of 2021.

I was enveloped by weightlessness. Bliss, Awe, Peace, and Joy became one sensation. A singular moment of living through the eyes of un adorned beauty at ease in this one existence. There were no external structures or scaffolds compelling the forfeiture of one’s authentic self amidst the restraint of social acceptance. This need to be acceptable. What of this meaning came rushing into the light

and

I thought about my brothers question again this morning.

I wished for my sister to do what is not socially acceptable. Not restrain herself.

Move in ways when it rings the bell of her heart.

Choosing life in spite of the consequences and say to herself:

And,

whatever comes is welcomed without regret or expectation for outcome.

There is no need for repentance because, for such actions flow in harmony with one’s true self.

Blessings and Namaste,

lead with love

t

During my recent travels through the tea landscapes of Anhui Province in China—particularly in the Lu’an Tea Valley with its provincial tea fields and the ancient geomancy of Chengkan Village, the Bagua (Eight Trigrams) village shaped by I Ching principles—I found myself reflecting on how these enduring traditions speak to the art of friendship. The interplay of yin/yang in the I Ching, the Daoist spirit of wu wei and natural presence, and the Confucian emphasis on benevolence (ren) and sincere companionship all resonated as quiet guides for tending relationships with greater harmony and mutual elevation.

Back at the Tea shop in Oakland our respected understudy leader has spoken plainly about these letters, L C S:

This principle extends beyond commerce into the broader circles of family and personal relationships. Our tea family is founded upon deep and loving abiding built into the foundation of “village as family” rooted in the beauty of these fine teas. This is not to say that we have LCS’s in our closest relationships, I am not intending this, though the same sensibilities around deception in friendships may have influences in the how we align ourselves and attach to friendships, how we give allowances over time, a contract of sorts in these relationships.

In my circle, I am drawn to those who genuinely amplify the “Best” for the best within each other.

Such individuals listen with presence, offering undivided witnessing without redirecting attention to their own experiences. They refrain from interrupting a vulnerable moment by co-opting the conversation and shifting focus to a parallel story from their lives. Many will recognize these patterns—well-intentioned actions that, nonetheless, can undermine the opportunity to be truly seen and heard. We may feel cut off, our moment of offerings truncated for anothers story.

There is a level of interoception to the self in reflection, inward bound first and foremost, followed by an attunement in the exteriority of life, a manner of parity or resonance for what is most important in the care of another’s soul.

Though some of these overt responses may arise from an unconscious difficulty in discerning the tenderness required in delicate situations. Over time, if not understood these small erosions may fracture relationships. They neither support nor inspire one’s path of personal growth and limitless life-hood.

I acknowledge my own past participation in this behavior. It originated in childhood wounding—the deep need to be seen, validated, and lauded in ways once withheld. This pattern took root early when my mother left four young children, I being five or six at the time, and her words reminding me that she did not love me as my mother. From this foundation of rejection, abandonment, and a sense of injustice arose misapplied behaviors that have, at times, offended and hurt others.

Today I am deeply aware that these scars remain elemental to my fabric, yet they no longer expand into the shell of ego. Instead, they are gently eroding it. In this process, my circle has shrunk considerably—often not understood by those who thought they knew me, or who wished to hold me to an earlier version of myself. What once felt like decades of entanglement offered little true growth, only a sameness that limited the richer weaving of life’s tapestry.

This self-awareness now renders such dynamics untenable in my life. In receiving them, I find myself gently releasing relationships that no longer inspire, trust, or support a continual, genuine falling in love with the relationship itself.

Our perceptions are rarely direct; they are filtered through accumulated layers of others’ projections, shaping a behavioral matrix built around the longing to feel “enough.”

I have come to regard these missteps—both in myself and in others—with compassion. More importantly, bringing these unconscious, automatic personality traits—patterns we all carry to varying degrees—into conscious awareness creates the possibility of forming new neural pathways and genuine change, should we choose to pursue it.

This choice is often profoundly difficult, for it requires confronting deeply rooted patterns of self-governance that revolve around the need to feel important, seen, and heard. It demands that we engage a part of our being held in a deathly spiral, a descent not unlike Dante’s Inferno, Homer’s Odyssey, or Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey—journeys that call us to face inner darkness, navigate trials, and ultimately emerge transformed through courage and surrender.

My understanding of friendship with integrity is based on this simple yet profound practice:

• Grounding self in Genuine Presence

• Attend to your capacity to listen without the want to respond, fix or debate

• Inquire: ask questions for greater understanding

• Remind them, amplify their inherent brilliance.

• Offer your own perspective or experience only when invited. Nothing from your own narrative is required unless it is requested.

Tending the Garden of Friendship: Knowing the terroir

We nurture our most meaningful relationships through gentle inquiry—posing open and respectful questions that foster deeper understanding and allow the other to feel truly seen and known.

In this spirit of introspection and growth, particularly during times of separation or uncertainty, there remains ample space and time for reflection, repair, and the renewal of connection—provided these are approached with openness, presence, and sincere care.

Such friendships are tended with the same attentive devotion we bring to a well-cultivated tea field: patient, discerning, and deeply rooted in genuine regard. Just as the gardener honors the rhythms of the seasons, the quality of the soil, and the unique needs of each plant, so too do we cultivate these bonds with consistent presence, allowing them to flourish across time and distance.

Blessings and Namaste,

t

May 21 2026

1:30am

Dream and Night Terror

I awoke from a distressing, vivid dream. In it, I stood frozen at the top of a 125-foot mast at sea, the structure swaying precariously back and forth. Having long harbored a strong aversion to heights, airplanes, and swift-moving spiders, I felt utterly paralyzed, unable to move even a single muscle fiber. The deck below was invisible from such an elevation, amplifying my sense of complete incompetence and terror. Death!

The scene then shifted to one of profound rejection: an entire community of colleagues and close friends shunning me, calling me names I had never before associated with myself, before turning away and departing. I was labeled as “the man who breaks people apart.”

I awakened with a sharp gasp, tears streaming down my face. As my head returned to the pillow, my wife inquired what was wrong. I had disturbed her sleep, yet I replied that it was nothing.

The childhood adage “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” has lingered in my mind since my youth. It served as a necessary shield through the turbulent years of unkind, ignorant kids.

Today, however, I find myself unable to suppress the sadness and grief that have arisen. Many of those who appeared in my nightmare have indeed become absent without leave—nearly all, save for a steadfast few. Since 2021, my social sphere has contracted dramatically; by 2026, it has diminished by 95 percent. It resembles a Great Depression of both outer and inner circles of friendship, mentors, colleagues, without sparing.

Nevertheless, I am moving forward, cultivating new relationships with brothers and sisters who inspire, uplift, inquire and engage in genuine introspection, embrace vulnerability with authenticity—qualities I have spent many years to embody more fully.

I have a dear friend, a gentle and sensitive brother with whom I once rode motorcycles along the Pacific coast of California.

Years ago, when I confided in my friend Joe about feeling diminished by criticism and doubting my own strength, he offered profound insight:

“Terry, it is quite the opposite. You have never developed a thick skin because you are sensitive, good, honest, and genuine. Why would you wish to conceal that? Such a covering is suited only for knuckleheads. Never lose your sensitive nature.”

hmmm, I had never thought to consider this side of the coin. I had been taught to not let your feelings be known especially the “vulnerable ones.” Clamp it down, suck it up. Hide it away. Bury it under aggression. Strong and stoic. Poker face. No tells in the arena of getting your feelings hurt. Confusion and…….

I feel the need to speak with him again, that he might remind me I am not the person described by those names or narratives that replay in my mind.

Today, I am unmistakably affected by the words and statements directed against my very being. It hurts, I am human and I have a sometimes frail nature.

Now fully awake, and sitting in the quiet of the dining room, having some Lu cha ( green tea) I just brought back from China I turned to a few messages and discovered one from my found sister, Soo Young who I met at a rest stop on the I-5 a few years ago. Meant to be, serendipity and the quantum entangled parallax at work. I wished her a belated birthday. Hers was on the 12th of this month.

A Taurean like me.

Korean like me.

She graciously thanked me for my birthday wishes and calmly informed me of her impending surgery in San Francisco. Her writing carries a supple grace, presenting even significant matters with the texture of what would seem like pedestrian days. She had published a Substack essay titled “Reflections on Brain Surgery,” which is framed by a quotation from Rumi, my beloved Sufi poet and master of inner healing:

I have recently embarked upon a journey through Rumi’s Mathnawi, a work comprising more than 25,600 rhyming couplets. It serves as an inexhaustible source of comfort, allowing me to imagine his voice speaking directly to me—a manifestation of the Divine as I presently understand it.

I have devoted considerable effort to honoring others’ feelings. In professional-clinical contexts, detachment comes more readily, as those relationships lack intimacy. Yet when closer relations depart without honest and sincere inquiry, or when the wider circle ceases to reach out, the heart struggles to reconcile the loss.

I am reflecting on loss of self in relationship to others, supporting others in genuineness of Love to see them succeed, forgetting my needs to be uplifted inspired, forgetful that a nod and a kind word or two would just suffice. Recognition. Being seen. Not the opposite.

Soo Young’s graceful reflections remind us that true vitality arises not in the absence of wounds, but through them. As Rumi teaches, the wound is precisely the place where the light enters. Where upon light touching healing ensues will we turn with it on its path. In her closing words, she gently urges us all:

Today, I carry this shared wisdom forward—choosing to honor sensitivity over armor, to lead with love rather than retreat into old defenses, and to recognize that every ending creates space for new, authentic connections.

Lastly, suffering is largely derived in misunderstanding. Inquiring is key to resolving misunderstanding, thus suffering.

May we all, together, cultivate lives of courage, presence, and inspiration and start doing for others more than ourselves for the moment.

Here is her post:

The Creative Leap: Antidotes for Regret

Reflections Before Brain Surgery

*In a couple of days, I will have surgery to remove a pituitary cyst. I have simplified so many aspects of my life the last few months. What remains is my ongoing love for writing and reflections. I wanted to share some below…

Read more

3 months ago · Creative Leaper

Lead with Love, see Love in everyone you meet today.

Blessings and Namaste.

t

Kibara, Sanmu, Chiba. Japan

He was born on May 5, 1948.

A 3rd degree Black Belt in Judo at 22. Eventually rising to 5th degree.

It took two years to save up when the exchange rate was 350 yen to 1 dollar. As of this writing it is 158 :$1. Two years working for a newspaper delivery to make his way to Arizona and then gain a stipend from the Arizona State Judo Federation.

He jokes that he came with one Gi and one Black Belt.

He landed in Los Angeles before making his way to Arizona.

He met Keiko-san while she was working at a Housing expedition convention. He told her what he was planning on doing.

Go to America and teach students in a college about Judo.

He spoke “sukoshi eigo” ( a little english). She was completely surprised at his ambition and enamored at the same time.

Owashi-san transitioned to the craft of Bizen pottery after retiring from the real estate and construction industry in 1987, at the age of 39, much to the surprise of his wife.

His son, Takaaki-san, followed in his footsteps and became a Bizen potter.

Takaaki-san served as our instructor for a day, providing expert guidance on the finer techniques involved in creating these timeless Bizen pieces, whose origins trace back to the Heian period in the 12th century.

Bizen-yaki (備前焼), also known as Imbe or Inbe ware, originates from the Imbe area in present-day Okayama Prefecture, Bizen. Renowned for its high iron content and distinctive unglazed surfaces, it displays rich, earthy brown and reddish tones that lend it a natural warmth and durability ideally suited to everyday functional ware. The Inbe tradition stands as one of Japan’s longest continuous pottery lineages, spanning over a millennium.

Its singular character emerges through a demanding firing process conducted in traditional climbing tunnel kilns (noborigama). Over ten days, the temperature is gradually raised to 1,200–1,300°C, allowing natural wood ash and the kiln’s atmosphere to interact intimately with the clay. This alchemical fusion produces the pottery’s hallmark sesame-seed-like speckles (goma) and striking flame markings (hidasuki), each piece bearing the unique imprint of fire and time.

Takaaki continues to uphold this living tradition, maintaining its artistic vitality through contemporary expression. Two active climbing kilns are located on the property.

Conversation over Cha and Sweets

Owashi and Keiko are seated across from my wife Zabeth and me after dinner. We are enjoying a pot of lu cha that I brought back from China, accompanied by dorayaki purchased at Takamatsu’s JR station as a token of appreciation for their hospitality.

They construct their beginnings together.

His trip to America and their eventual marriage in a “church” in Las Vegas. ”It was cheap and fast and we did not have a lot of money.” Their families agreed and when they returned to Japan they had gatherings in Kyushu and Kansai area for the celebrations.

Owashi-san and Keiko-san eventually settled in Kojima, where they built their Wasyugama life. With their own hands, they carved into the hillside, sawed timber, planed wood, lifted stone, and constructed the house, pottery studio and kilns.

Restaurant Hütte

Their property also includes a small, charming restaurant known as the “Hütte.” This intimate, reservation-only venue is consistently fully booked. It is run by Yoshiko, Keiko’s longtime school friend, together with her daughter Yuki and Yuki’s husband Don, a former resident of San Diego. All three maintain their artistry—potter, painter, chef—who live unconventional, distinctive lives with a sense of freedom and fewer constraints unique to Japanese culture.

Built by Don, the Hütte evokes the atmosphere of retro 60’s hippy-ish enclave on the Big Sur coast. It serves as a gallery for their pottery and a place for individuals who come together to celebrate the art of simple and yet elegant japanese cuisine created by Yoshiko and Yuki.

On the day of our departure Yoshiko is walking up from the garden where many of her fresh items make their way to the plate and says, “ Smell this leaf.” Fragrant, peppery. This is on the menu.

The restaurant welcomes 20 guests for a single afternoon meal, operating twenty days each month. All tableware is handcrafted by Don and Yuki, and diners frequently purchase the very pieces from which they have just eaten off of to take home—a practice that delights Don immensely.

Our conversation ends with a few selfie photos for memory-sake. Owashi notes that he has no hair and begins to cover it up in a playful manner.

Although Kouho Owashi-san has not been designated a Living National Treasure, unlike renowned masters such as Jun Isezaki and Toyo Kaneshige, his legacy lies in his contemporary approach to Bizen pottery. Operating a family-made and family-run studio, he has successfully preserved this important Japanese ceramic heritage and carried it forward into modern times.

Through educational workshops and hands-on experiential teaching—now led principally by his son, Takaaki-san—he has made the ancient craft accessible to both beginners and experienced practitioners alike, thereby opening the tradition to a much wider audience and carrying on a family legacy.

Lastly, “Wasyugama”a short film by Hiroko Yano has been made as a fictional tale about a daughter coming home as the father is about to close his chapter on pottery making. The film will be released this year sometime. Here is a link to see a trailer of Owashi and his family acting in the film!!

https://www.instagram.com/wasyugama_film/reel/DXXQvNjCN2G/

AND,

Takaaki-san’s youtube short on his art-craft here:

AND

The link for the pottery experience at Wasyugama

https://wasyugama.com/hutte

https://www.kurashiki-tabi.jp/rm_experience/rm-experience246/

“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

-General Wesley Clark

10 days post 9/11/2001

Pentagon memo

“The goals of this mission is clear… by the greatest Military in the world” secretary m. rubio

1. Neutralizing perceived threats from Iran’s nuclear program,

2. Destroy their missiles, launchers and factories capabilities,

3. Destroy their Navy

4. Control of regional proxy networks called the Axis of Resistance:

   1. Iranian militia,

   2. Palestine (Islamic Jihad and Hamas),

   3. Lebanons (Hezbollah),

   4. Syria ( Shia Militia),

   5. Yemen ( Houthis),

   6. Iraq (PMF or Popular Mobilization Forces)

5. Regime change essentially

and……

The ongoing un-provoked-pre-emptive war taken to Iran with coordinated U.S.-Israeli airstrikes targeting key leadership assassinations (decapitation), has unleashed a cascade of devastation that extends far beyond military objectives.

And it is War.

Predicted.

Known.

Today, unlike many wars in the past, the international crimes against humanity unfolding in the Middle East are being witnessed in real time by global audiences. The scale of destruction — including attacks on civilian infrastructure, cultural heritage sites, schools/universities, hospitals, and residential areas — is documented through citizen journalism, satellite imagery, and independent reporting, making comprehensive censorship far more difficult than in previous conflicts.

This stands in sharp contrast to earlier wars, where governments could more effectively control the narrative by restricting journalistic access, imposing blackouts, or shaping media coverage through embedded reporting and official channels. In the current Iran conflict, as well as in Gaza, the Israeli government has attempted to limit independent journalistic access by denying entry to many international news organizations and imposing strict controls on reporting. Despite these efforts, the proliferation of smartphones, social media, and alternative information networks has allowed visual evidence and eyewitness accounts to reach the world almost immediately.

The result is an unprecedented level of transparency — and accountability — that previous generations of wartime leaders did not face. Images of damaged mosques, universities, and civilian neighborhoods, along with reports of cultural erasure and humanitarian suffering, are circulating globally in real time. This visibility has intensified international criticism, legal scrutiny at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and public debate about potential war crimes and crimes against humanity.

While some narratives are still shaped by state-aligned media and lobbying efforts, the sheer volume of unfiltered information makes it significantly harder to conceal the human and cultural cost of the conflict. This new reality of “war in the age of the smartphone” represents a fundamental shift: no longer can the full extent of destruction be easily hidden from the world. The question now is whether this visibility will translate into meaningful political pressure, legal consequences, or a genuine push toward de-escalation and accountability.

What do you think?

As a kid the vietnam war was in my sights. We would receive nightly news from Walter Cronkite (“and that’s the way it is…”). Decades after WW II and the Korean War we now understand the atrocities of American military. Who are the Good Guys in a War? Who is pointing fingers and at the same time moving chessmen in positions to be placed for the good of the West. Who sends “them” suitcases of money and arms em up for one objective until empty and then regime change them into being decapitated, hung, shot and eviscerated from the lower end of the bowels?

I said War! Good God y’all, What is it Good For?

The Intelligence-Blackmail Nexus and the Road to Iran

Whitney Webb has documented how intelligence agencies, organized crime, and financial power intersect to create leverage networks that influence U.S. foreign policy, particularly toward Israel and Iran. In her series One Nation Under Blackmail and work at Unlimited Hangout, she traces Cold War arms networks, Iran-Contra scandals, and figures like Jeffrey Epstein as nodes in a system of compromise and control. She highlights how Israeli intelligence (Mossad) and U.S. agencies have used blackmail and espionage to influence American elites, including politicians, technology executives, and financiers. This apparatus ensures consistent U.S. support for Israeli objectives, even when those objectives conflict with American interests.

In interviews conducted in 2025 and 2026, Webb has warned that allegations of Iranian sabotage—frequently promoted by individuals with Israeli affiliations and access to U.S. infrastructure—are being used to generate public consent for war. She links these accusations to the same networks that protected Epstein and earlier scandals, indicating that the current escalation with Iran extends a long-standing strategy to eliminate regional rivals and consolidate Israeli dominance.

Webb’s analysis stands apart from mainstream commentary because it follows financial and power connections, revealing how concentrated ownership and interlocking interests sustain narrative dominance while advancing geopolitical objectives.

The Scholars vs. the Propagandists

Independent scholars—many of them Israeli Jews who have distanced themselves from Zionist orthodoxy—have offered the most rigorous examinations:

• Norman Finkelstein has documented deliberate patterns of collective punishment in Gaza, including the use of starvation and infrastructure destruction as instruments of policy.

• Ilan Pappé has traced the ethnic-cleansing logic embedded in Zionist settlement ideology from 1948 onward.

• Benny Morris, a self-identified Zionist historian, has confirmed through archival research the forced expulsions and massacres that accompanied the founding of the state.

• Gabor Maté has examined the psychological mechanisms—trauma, dehumanization, and projection—that enable otherwise rational individuals to accept genocidal policies.

• Ian Black, former Middle East editor for The Guardian, has chronicled the repeated pattern of Israeli escalation followed by U.S. diplomatic protection.

• Edward Said, exposed the Orientalist framework that renders Palestinian and Iranian suffering invisible or justified in Western discourse.

• Professor Jiang Xueqin applies game theory and historical pattern recognition to predict this exact sequence: Trump’s return, war with Iran, strategic defeat, and accelerated multipolar reordering.

These individuals are not supported by defense contractors, AIPAC, or evangelical donors. They are excluded from major U.S. media platforms because their work dismantles the approved narrative.

They begrudge at all cost to their being the Borg nature of the world today. You will be assimilated into the collective.

The $1+ Billion a day warring US bleed and $18 Billion a year subsidy to Israel, Purse Strings and the Propaganda Apparatus

The concentration of media and technology power is not coincidental. Larry Ellison’s reported interest in TikTok ownership, through Oracle’s role as U.S. data steward, represents the latest effort to control narrative flows on platforms where alternative voices remain active. Hollywood studios, news conglomerates, and social-media gatekeepers operate within interlocking directorates and investment networks that lean toward pro-Israel and Zionist-aligned capital.

American media—CNN, MSNBC, Fox, The New York Times, The Washington Post—function as amplifiers for the war narrative. Their ownership and major advertisers are intertwined with the same financial and ideological networks that profit from sustained Middle East conflict. International outlets—France 24, Al Jazeera, DW, TRT, and Sky News Australia—while imperfect, continue to offer broader framing and sourcing.

The ICJ Record and Francesca Albanese’s Mandate

The International Court of Justice is currently adjudicating the case Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), initiated by South Africa on December 29, 2023. Approximately 14–15 nations have joined or sought to intervene, including Nicaragua, Colombia, Libya, Palestine, Mexico, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Türkiye, Egypt, Maldives, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, and Cuba.

The ICJ has issued three provisional measures orders in 2024 (January 26, March 28, and May 24), requiring Israel to prevent genocidal acts, ensure humanitarian aid reaches Gaza, and preserve evidence. No final ruling on the merits has been issued, with judgment expected years later. Multiple UN General Assembly resolutions and repeated statements from the Secretary-General, Human Rights Council, and numerous member states have called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza since late 2023.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, appointed in May 2022, has concluded in her March 2024 report “Anatomy of a Genocide” that there are reasonable grounds to believe Israel has committed acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, including starvation as a method of warfare and collective punishment. She has urged all states to comply with ICJ provisional measures, halt arms transfers to Israel, and pursue accountability for alleged crimes in Gaza. Her mandate was renewed in 2025 despite efforts by several Western governments to have her removed.

The Role of AIPAC

The names to know: Elliott Brandt CEO of AIPAC and Dana Stroul fmr asst Sec Defense Middle East.

Evidence of AIPAC’s deep reach into executive branch decision-making and maintenance of strong US-Israeli ties by controlling congress this

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the most influential pro-Israel lobbying organization in the United States. It is not required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) because it is legally classified as a domestic lobbying group representing American citizens who support Israel, rather than an agent directed or controlled by a foreign principal (the Israeli government).

This status originated with AIPAC’s establishment as a 501(c) nonprofit in the 1950s and 1960s. The U.S. Department of Justice FARA Unit has consistently determined that AIPAC does not meet the statutory criteria for foreign-agent registration, as it is funded and directed by U.S. citizens without direct instructions or funding from the Israeli government. Critics, including John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), contend that this classification enables AIPAC to exert disproportionate influence on U.S. Middle East policy without the transparency required of other foreign lobbies.

AIPAC’s annual lobbying expenditures range from $3.5 million to $4 million in recent years, and it channels additional 10 of millions through affiliated political action committees to support pro-Israel candidates. This financial and organizational reach has made AIPAC a central factor in securing congressional approval for military aid and diplomatic backing during escalations such as the current Iran conflict.

The Line in the Sand

For many Americans, the moral threshold was crossed long ago. Including myself.

The bombing of civilian infrastructure, the deliberate starvation tactics, the repeated double-tap strikes on rescue workers, and the leveling of entire neighborhoods in Gaza are not collateral damage. They are policy.

It was stated through US and Israel media that over 45,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023. Other postings in the independent circles of journalism estimate’s approaching beyond the reach of 100,000 when indirect deaths are included. The International Court of Justice has found plausible evidence of genocide. Yet the U.S. Congress continues to approve substantial aid packages to Israel while domestic infrastructure deteriorates.

Many expert- scholars and insiders who are now outside the political-military appartus say this is not about defending an ally.

It is about enforcing a regional order in which one ethno-religious state maintains nuclear and military supremacy, backed unconditionally by the United States—while the rest of the Middle East is expected to accept permanent subordination or displacement.

Final Thought

The war with Iran is not a defensive necessity. It is the next step in a project long discussed in Israeli-Zionist and Christian Zionist circles: the growing of Greater Israel doctrine ( from the Euphrates to the Nile) the weakening of regional rivals, and the alignment of U.S. foreign policy with a messianic timetable ( one citation: Genesis 15:18). Claiming Land as in Gaza and the West Bank and now Southern Lebanon razing is an old age war theme.

The razing of the Al-Aqsa Mosque ( and Dome of the Rock) and rebuilding the Third Temple is imminent in the minds of leaders to pave the way for the Second Coming as mentioned by the Israel PM and the US Secretary of War Hegseth.

Those who speak plainly about this—Finkelstein, Pappé, Maté, Jiang, Webb, Albanese, and others—are not conspiracy theorists. They are scholars who refuse to sanitize state violence with euphemism. The rest is theater.

The question is not whether the American people have been deceived. It is how much longer they will accept the deception.

If you found this post useful, please consider sharing it or subscribing.

Thank you for reading.

References
References / Bibliography

1. Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

2. Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: The New Press, 2013).

3. Ian Black, Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917–2017 (New York: Grove Press, 2017).

4. Derrick Broze, The Rothschilds & The Creation of Israel (documentary, 2022). Available at:

1. .

2. Whitney Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Organized Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, Volumes 1 & 2 (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2022).

3. Unlimited Hangout, “Epstein, Mossad, and the Iran War Narrative” series, March 2026.

4. Redacted and Breaking Points interviews with Whitney Webb, 2025–2026.

5. Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); public statements and critiques, 2024.

6. Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006); The Idea of Israel (London: Verso, 2014).

7. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

8. Gabor Maté, lectures and interviews on trauma and dehumanization, 2023–2025.

9. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979).

10. Professor Jiang Xueqin, “Game Theory #9: The US-Iran War,” Predictive History YouTube channel, March 3, 2026.

11. Various reports on Oracle/TikTok data stewardship arrangements, 2024–2026.

12. ICJ docket, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), intervening declarations 2024–2025.

13. ICJ Provisional Measures Orders, January 26, March 28, and May 24, 2024.

14. UN General Assembly resolutions ES-10/21 (December 2023), ES-10/22 (March 2024), and subsequent resolutions.

15. Francesca Albanese, “Anatomy of a Genocide,” UN Special Rapporteur report, March 2024; “Genocide as Colonial Erasure,” October 2024; statements on U.S.-Israel strikes, March 1–3, 2026.

16. UN Human Rights Council mandate renewal and related reports, 2025.

17. U.S. Department of Justice FARA Unit opinions; AIPAC 501(c)(4) status documentation.

18. John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Grant F. Smith, Big Israel (Washington, DC: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2016); OpenSecrets.org AIPAC lobbying data, 2020–2025.

19. Roy Casagranda, lecture notes and recordings, 2020–2025.

20. Wesley Clark, interview on Democracy Now!, March 2, 2007 (revisited in multiple interviews, 2011–2025).

21. Democracy Now! coverage of U.S. Middle East policy and Iran conflict, various segments, 2023–2026.

22. American Society of Civil Engineers, “2021 Infrastructure Report Card” (2025 updated assessment).

23. U.S. Department of Defense, “Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request Overview,” February 2025.

24. Congressional Budget Office, “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036,” January 2026.

25. Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “Restraint: A New U.S. Foreign Policy,” 2024.

26. RAND Corporation, “Military and Veteran Families: Challenges and Opportunities,” 2025 update.

27. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “National Health Expenditure Projections, 2025–2033,” December 2025.

28. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, “SNAP National Level Annual Summary,” FY 2025–2026 estimates.

29. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Housing Choice Voucher Program Budget Justification, Fiscal Year 2026,” February 2025.

30. U.S. Department of Education, “Budget Summary and Background Information, Fiscal Year 2026,” February 2025.

31. Department of Veterans Affairs, “2024 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report,” September 2025.

32. Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, trans. Dick Davis (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006).

The Call: Love Fulfills the Law

The Response: From Fear to the Great Love

The world today feels like a tumultuous maelstrom, churning in the lower frequencies of fear, anger, resentment, jealousy, bitterness, and dread. Much of this is a human creation — a man-made endeavor to commodify existence, to tokenize even God Himself. We are told we must “pay to play,” or else remain sinners destined for dark and fiery places “below.” Why “below”? Because this is the story we are meant to believe.

Belief, however, is built on the shaky foundation of self-doubt. It whispers: “Doubt your divinity. Doubt your purpose. Doubt your life path.” And so we cry out, “Help me, oh godly one,” while the real bridge to freedom — understanding, self-awareness, and introspective honesty — remains largely uncrossed.

This bridge leads to an unshakeable knowing: your sovereignty is already laid bare in your bones. It belongs to no one else.

Can we finally stop the doom-scrolling? Can we turn off the 300-dollar, 81-inch monstrosity mounted on the wall like a false idol — higher than any holy scripture or ancient sage? The scripting coming out of Hollywood, with its well-documented ties to intelligence operations, is indoctrinating us with plasticized versions of humanity. It is psychological misattunement on a mass scale.

This is part of the evil that lives in our feeds: anything that steals your divinity, your creativity, your independence, and your freedom to move about the world without being harmed in word or deed.

Kindness has become rare — like the last jar of honey in the neighborhood. Once found, the secret is shared: the path to more kindness lies in kind presence with others. Finally aligned. Without the drama, without the fanatical gossip that judges and separates.

This separation is a form of cultivation — instead of love.

Know this: the person you have been taught to despise often shares more in common with you than the covert puppeteers who have shaped this society. They, too, want an honest, reasonable life. They, too, have been echo-chambered and isolated into chambers of deceit.

Step out and talk to those you were told to fear.

You may discover kind souls behind the hats, shirts, and bumper stickers. Where is your pride — the quiet pride of being human?

There is an empathy wall to climb. Don’t you think?

Blessings and Namaste,

t

Iran’s modern political history has been shaped by three starkly different systems of governance:

the brief democratic experiment under:

Mohammad Mossadegh (1951–1953),

the autocratic monarchy of:

Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1953-1979)

in which the US government was responsible for his installation, (why? US received 40% percent of Iran’s oil shares)

and

the Theocratic Islamic Republic established by:

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979.

Each regime offered its own mix of abundance and deprivation, while interacting in complex ways with Iran’s 10,000-year Persian civilizational heritage —

a legacy of extraordinary intellectual, poetic, and spiritual achievement.

I study the poetics of Sufi mysticism and the tradition of the whirling dervishes, who through song, dance, poetry and discourse celebrated the presence of Divine Love and God’s majesty within every human being. For some time, I have maintained a deep fascination with Persia, and the current catastrophe unfolding before the world has drawn me ever more profoundly into its rich history.

In today’s world, to what extent have we advanced in recognizing and nurturing the inherent divinity within a people, rather than allowing it to be undermined by human hubris?

Are we still constrained by the narrow vision born of intergenerational trauma, inherited and unexamined from previous generations?

Is it the unprocessed, unseen, and unheard dimensions of our collective experience that ultimately obscure and diminish the radiant brilliance of Divine Love?

this from Rumi:

What Did They Offer?

Democracy: In his short leadership of 2 years Mossadegh offered political liberty and national dignity through oil nationalization, but economic chaos and foreign intervention cut the experiment short.

Monarchy: The Shah delivered rapid industrialization, rising literacy, and cosmopolitan urban life, yet at the cost of political repression, cultural alienation, and widening inequality. He reconnected the 2500 yr rule of his family lineage in the Kingdom.

Theocracy: The Islamic Republic restored a sense of sovereignty and expanded basic social welfare to the poor and rural populations, but imposed severe restrictions on personal freedom and intellectual expression based on the muslim faith and following the edicts of the Qur’an.

What Lies Underneath Persian Culture.

Beneath these surface regimes, however, runs a much deeper and older current — Iran’s 10,000-year Persian civilizational soul. This soul has expressed itself through an extraordinary tradition of mathematics (al-Khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam), epic poetry (Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh), and above all, the mystical wisdom of Sufism. Rumi, Hafiz, and Ibn ʿArabī stand as its greatest voices. Their teachings on the nafs (the ego-self), its stages of purification, and the path of the “Great Love” (ʿishq) have survived every political upheaval because they speak to something more fundamental than any system of rule.

The Silk Road meeting Persia

This deeper Persian heritage also absorbed and transformed influences from distant civilizations. Along the Silk Road, Persian scholars, Sufis, and merchants engaged in sustained conversation with Chinese Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese by Parthian and Persian monks. Taoist ideas of effortless action (wu wei) and harmony with the Tao found echoes in Sufi concepts of tawakkul (trust in God) and the dissolution of the ego. Confucian emphasis on moral order and benevolent rule resonated with Persian ideals of the just king. These exchanges were not superficial; they enriched a shared human intuition about reality, the self, and our ultimate destiny.

The result is a living, invisible “human canon” — not a single manifesto, but a perennial wisdom that points toward the same truth: the ego must be seen through, love must become the governing law, and humanity’s destiny is to return to its divine source.

Hafiz captures this beautifully when he writes:

Rumi and Ibn ʿArabī echo the same invitation: the Beloved is already here. The path is not conquest or domination, but surrender, purification, and ecstatic union.

Blessings and Namaste,

t

I have arrived at the profound realization that a single word captures what humanity across time has ascribed to the divine. During my liminal passage in the journey we call life—glimpsing what lies beyond for a brief and yet undetermined time—I encountered an experience that language can only approximate, yet never fully contain.

This word dissolves every negative thought, every self-serving narrative born of ego, and every misdeed harbored within the mind. It is invoked repeatedly in the scriptures and most eloquent poetry, yet we often suffer a collective amnesia, or perhaps a persistent conditioning that diminishes its transformative power and relegates it to the periphery of the human heart.

I recall from my biological lab studies that the octopus possesses nine brains and three hearts, while certain crustaceans, such as lobsters, maintain a chain of five nervous centers functioning as hearts—distinct from the chambered organ we carry. These observations underscore the multiplicity of life’s vital rhythms.

In my more than six decades here, the present moment demands greater dedication than ever: each morning, midday, and evening, I cultivate a mantra to counteract the relentless barrage of fear propagated, perpetuate by opposing forces. I use flower medicine to re state the conditions of unconditional antidotes to injury.

There is no legitimate place for evil, harm, assault, or any form of unkindness inflicted upon another being. I invite every reader who engages with these words to pause, turn inward with earnest sincerity, and draw upon the inexhaustible reserves of golden energy within the heart. May this energy preserve and infuse every soul you encounter—your own included—with joy, peace, and the promise of an eternal present.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in his teachings on mindful love, offers understanding as the very substance and other name of LOVE. Here are three resonant passages that illuminate this truth:1

From the Torah

The Torah presents this word as a romantic devotion and as an ethical imperative toward others. A foundational verse on interpersonal LOVE appears in Leviticus 19:18:

“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall LOVE your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

LOVE as a principle of justice, extended in related passages in the poetic form attributed to King Solomon. Romantic and spiritual LOVE is celebrated, as in Song of Songs 2:16, 1:2

“I am my beloved’s and my be-LOVED is mine.”

“Kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.”

These expressions portray love as transformative and enduring.

From the Qur’an

The Qur’an frequently describes LOVE in relation to Allah’s attributes and human relationships, often using terms such as ḥubb (love) and mawadda (affection). A central verse on marital love and mercy is in Surah Ar-Rum 30:21:

“And of His signs is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquility in them; and He placed between you affection and mercy. Indeed in that are signs for a people who give thought.”

On LOVE, hubb, mawadda & rahma

This highlights love (hubb), affection (mawadda) and compassion (rahma) as divine gifts fostering peace in partnership. Allah’s love for humanity is conditional upon virtuous action, as in Surah Al-Baqarah 2:195:

“And do good; indeed, Allah LOVES the doers of good.”

From the Dhammapada

The Dhammapada, a collection of the Buddha’s sayings in the Pali Canon, addresses love (piya or affection) primarily in the context of attachment and its consequences, while promoting loving-kindness (metta) as a liberating practice. A key verse from Chapter 16 (Piyavagga, “Affection”) states:

“From affection comes grief, from affection comes fear; for one who is free from affection there is no grief—whence then fear?” (Dhammapada 212–213, approximate translation).

This reflects the teaching that clinging to loved ones or objects leads to suffering, whereas detachment brings freedom. A renowned verse on overcoming hatred through love appears in Chapter 1 (Yamaka Vagga):

“Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world; it is appeased by LOVE alone. This is an eternal law.” (Dhammapada 5).

This principle underscores non-hatred and compassion as the path to harmony.

…And lastly to a dear friend of mine of many years to better understand in poetic form all that is LOVE.

On Hafiz,

In this light, love—inseparable from deep understanding—serves as the antidote to fear, the deprogrammer of division, and the unifying force that honors the divine in every heart.

Blessings and Namaste.

I remember watching 60 minutes when the Shah of Iran Mohammad Rezi Pahlavi sat down with Mike Wallace of 60 minutes 3 years before his exile from Iran. I remember the hostage crisis that then President Jimmy Carter endured and the economic woes post Nixon era and what as I learned moved us off the gold standard. Then came the Petro Dollar (oil exchanged for US Dollars) which then became the Worlds monetary exchange that was born out from the Yom Kippur War of 1973. I remember sitting in the gas lines in the years afterwards in the aftermath of all these political affairs for an hour or more. I did not have my drivers license but when I stayed with my cousin she would have me drive her olive green Mercury Capri and we would sit at a gas station near Stonestown mall in San Francisco not far from her apartment. She sat in the passenger seat doing her bills while we waited.

There were odd and even days, your license plate last digit determined if you could go. There were Red and green flags to the let us know if there was gas in the underground tanks of the stations.

My dad had a heart attack seeing this at the pumps as the Kim Ford country squire station wagon with the faux side wood panelling that was a beast with a thirst. This car ferried us to practice and back across the South Bay and he to work at San Jose State University in those days.

My siblings bought 4 bangers, 4 on the floors, Pinto, Datsun and my elder brother broke ranks and got an orange 6 cylinder 5 speed Capri that wound out a spinning sound so unique everybody’s head would turn when he took 3rd gear to redline.

Those were the days!!

For me to better understand the current war with Iran—and the broader pattern of U.S. involvement in the Middle East—it is essential that I returned to the historical record without relying on sixty-second sound bites, legacy-media framing, or ideologically captured narratives.

The goal is to escape indoctrination by examining primary sources, declassified documents, and the words of the actors themselves.

Lets continue this conversation for discovery

The Shah’s 1976 Warning and Nixon’s Moral Imperative: Echoes in Today’s War with Iran

In October 1976, CBS’s 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace interviewed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, in Tehran. Conducted at the peak of the Shah’s power and Iran’s oil-fueled prosperity, the conversation is remembered today not for its discussion of modernization or military buildup, but for one brief, explosive exchange.

Wallace was a hard hitter and masterful at inquiry.

In this exchange he pressed the Shah on persistent rumors of excessive foreign influence in American politics. The Shah replied:

“You will see that in the United States, the Jewish lobby ( zionists) is very powerful… They control the banks, the media, many things.”

Wallace immediately countered:

“With all due respect, Your Majesty, that sounds like an antisemitic trope. I don’t believe Jews control the United States.”

The Shah did not retreat. He insisted that organized Jewish influence shaped U.S. Middle East policy in ways that frequently ran counter to broader American interests. Wallace, visibly unsettled, moved on.

That moment has taken on renewed significance in 2026 amid the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran. The Shah’s observation, however bluntly expressed, pointed to a structural dynamic that scholars Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein have since documented with precision.

Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), demonstrates that Zionist settlement ideology from 1948 onward was never merely defensive; it rested on demographic transformation and territorial maximization. Finkelstein, in Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (2018) and subsequent lectures, shows how Israeli military doctrine—particularly after the 2005 disengagement—has systematically employed disproportionate force and collective punishment to maintain control over Gaza, with consistent U.S. diplomatic and military backing at every stage.

Both scholars argue that the pattern is structural rather than episodic: a lobby capable of securing unconditional U.S. support—billions in annual aid, UN Security Council vetoes, advanced weaponry, and now direct participation in strikes on Iran—despite mounting evidence of war crimes and breaches of international humanitarian law.

The Shah’s 1976 remark was not an isolated comment. It reflected his mounting frustration with Washington’s reluctance to pressure Israel on settlement expansion and Palestinian rights, even as Iran was positioned as America’s principal Gulf policeman. Within three years, the same U.S. administration that had armed the Shah to the teeth would abandon him as revolutionary forces coalesced around Ayatollah Khomeini. The irony is stark: the lobby the Shah accused of undue influence helped ensure that no meaningful U.S. effort was made to preserve his throne once the crisis became irreversible.

This dynamic finds a parallel in the views of President Richard Nixon, expressed in two recorded interviews years after he left office. In a 1985 conversation with journalist Frank Gannon, Nixon stated:

“Israel has no strategic value to the United States in the conventional sense… but there is a moral imperative to do what it takes to keep Israel in place as the only democracy in the Middle East.”

In another interview with Ted Koppel on Nightline in 1992 Nixon reiterated that support for Israel was not driven by geopolitical necessity but by a moral obligation rooted in shared democratic values and historical sympathy to the holocaust. He acknowledged the absence of tangible strategic benefit—Israel offered no bases, no oil, no critical minerals—yet insisted the commitment was non-negotiable.

These statements are striking in their candor. Nixon, the architect of détente with China and détente with the Soviet Union, openly separated strategic calculation from moral-ideological commitment. The same logic persists in 2026: U.S. policy toward Israel, and by extension toward Iran, is framed as a moral duty to defend “the only democracy in the Middle East,” even when the costs—financial, military, diplomatic, and human—mount and the strategic rationale weakens. Today this government along with Israel has called it a Holy War to end all wars.

What the Shah glimpsed in 1976, and what Nixon later admitted, is that U.S. Middle East policy is not driven primarily by national-security calculations. It is shaped by a coalition of ideological, financial, and lobbying forces that can override strategic reason, domestic priorities, and international law. The result is a recurring pattern: escalation sold as necessity, dissent branded as disloyalty, and consequences—human, financial, geopolitical—externalized onto populations that never asked to be part of the equation.

The war with Iran is not an aberration. It is the predictable outcome of a system that has learned nothing from the Shah’s fall, from Iraq, from Libya, or from Gaze and the West Bank. The seven wars started are now in full view orders complete from the 1990s edicts from Netanyahu himself, the last being the one everyone is watching in real time unabated and unrelenting in Iran their most hated enemy, this PM has posited.

The Shah’s warning was not heeded in 1976. Nixon’s moral framing has become the default justification in 2026. Both are being ignored again today and US memory may have faltered in forgetting that we helped to build the military infrastructure that is so well entrenched and developed in its arsenal that indeed the US-Israel alliance may have totally miscalculated their ability and nations resolve.

References

• Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, interview with Mike Wallace, 60 Minutes, CBS, October 1976.

• Richard Nixon, interview with Frank Gannon, 1985 (excerpts widely circulated; full transcript available in Nixon Presidential Library archives).

• Richard Nixon, interview with David Frost, 1977 (revisited in subsequent discussions).

• Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld, 2006).

• Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (University of California Press, 2018).

• IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, introductory statement to the Board of Governors, March 2, 2026.

• Yom Kippur War (October 6–25, 1973)
  Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East (Schocken Books, 2004; revised edition 2017).

Before the seventh dawn, they say, the Messiah shall rise.
Yes, you have heard it truly: this is no mere border skirmish,
but a sacred fire kindled in the cradle of three faiths,
now leaping across oceans to burn in Western halls.

Remember the wall we built between altar and throne—
separation of church and state, etched into parchment,
meant also for the generals who command steel and flame.
Yet now eschatology whispers through corridors of power,
slips into war rooms where maps bleed red,
where high command speaks of final days as though they held the scroll.

This is the dream the Israeli prime minister has tended since the early nineties—
a patient husbandry of end-time embers,
coaxing them toward the great conflagration.
We stand at the threshold of Armageddon’s shadow-play,
yet I still hold fast to a quieter certainty:
no human hand can anoint the true worth of Earth.
Wind will not kneel, water will not forget its song,
fire will not accept our charters,
metal will not bow to our decrees.
We ruin ourselves in vain,
trying to remake the world in the narrow gaze of the few,
while the whole remains unseen,
unseparated,
whole.

The great deception is this:
a simulation that has stolen the breath of one world
and shattered it into billions of solitary shards—
human forms adrift, believing themselves islands.
How shall we gather the fragments again?
How mend the chronic fracture,
the long ache of disharmony?

It begins in stolen silences,
in single-pointed stillness carved from the rush of hours,
in the refusal to let the mind be colonized by the hive.
Technocrats and medico-crats,
with their oligarchic hunger,
seek to commodify even the cells of the nervous system,
to script autonomy, decision, conscience itself—
a programming that commences before speech,
before memory.

This morning my wife telephoned.
She spoke—not with words, but with the older tongue—
to Sebastian, the child still nested within her son Remi and his beloved Ashleigh.
“Are you ready, little one?
Your mother’s body trembles with weariness.
Shall we invite you now,
rather than wait for the calendar’s cold command?”
A week more of imposed suffering hung in the balance.
Zabeth, who hears the speechless language of infants,
listened.
And the waters broke.
Relief poured into the room like first light.

That small miracle returned me to myself—
to all the ways I have been,
she has been,
they have been—
and whispered: Stay in love.
Stay in love with the slow unlearning,
the patient dismantling of stories recycled in merciless loops,
stories that breed unconscious strife,
attachment,
suffering.

Yesterday, crossing from desert to coast,
my oldest friend Scott spoke across three hours of highway.
“Let it go,” he said.
“The past is sealed.
You cannot rewrite what was,
but you can change the story you carry,
the feeling that rides with it.
Move on.”

We were boys together at Noble Elementary,
San Jose, second and third grade.
We shared the long golden afternoons of the seventies and eighties—
those decades we still call the best of times.
Freedom tasted of sun on skin,
of bicycle tires singing on asphalt,
of music carried on cassette,
of girls in pastel tube tops and tight jeans,
of concerts where the air itself smelled of possibility.
Colombian gold, Thai stick, the rare Maui-Wowie—
prized sacraments of discovery.
No screens dictated posture or speech or thought.
We learned the world with scraped knees and quick feet,
running from trouble we had only just invented.

And yet these memories circle back to Iran,
to the war now unfolding.
My mind braids strange threads,
troubling those around me,
yet this is how I see:
every child extinguished,
every woman torn from breath,
every innocent soul erased
is a piece of my own soul crying out—
We are not separate.
We are whole.
We hunger for the same sunlight,
the same kindness,
the same chance at forgiveness.

War alone forbids these mercies.
Especially when men who orchestrate it
believe themselves God’s deputies,
citing ancient ink on ancient skin
to claim the land as theirs alone.
We are the people of this Earth,
and every choice for death—
made in Jerusalem, Washington, Tehran—
springs from the same fevered dream:
that survival demands slaughter,
because history has always said so.

We recite the lesson—learn from the past, amend the errors—
yet the simulation persists,
a millennia-long experiment in guided thought,
in the quiet subversion of consciousness.

Do you see it?
Then you have stepped through Truman’s door,
felt the painted sky give way,
stood at the edge of the set and known:
this world is staged.
Find the exit.
Life begins on the other side—
in freer motion,
clearer sight,
truer feeling,
in the ordering of days with those already near
and those yet to arrive.

For Sebastian, arriving beneath the Fire Horse sky
in March of this year,
may his beholders guard his sight with clarity.
May they never permit the theft of his sovereignty,
never allow the simulation to claim him.
May he walk his own way,
unscripted,
awake.

War is madness.
From it, for people like you and me,
nothing good can come.
Nothing.
That is its only honest yield.
Absolutely nothing.

Say it again.

Listen in!

Preface:

Born in Shiraz, Hafiz or Shams ud-din Muhammaad Hafiz (1320-1389) is the most celebrated Sufi Poet of the Persian world. He encourages our hearts to sing and dance and consider “the God with 1 Billion IQ for one who would never cripple us with guilt or control us with fear.” “If God wanted, He could give himself entirely to someone without ever diminishing His own state. And if you were the recipient of that Divine Gift-what would you then know?”

His words are instructions on Being Divine and seeing the Divine in everyone.

There are translations though only one interpretation of his works: to speak Love and only Love in Gods eyes.

-jzh

“WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?”

The ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, now in its second week as of March 8, 2026, illustrates how contemporary conflicts are shaped and sustained through powerful mythic narratives. The operation commenced on February 28, 2026, with coordinated airstrikes targeting Iranian military installations, nuclear facilities, leadership compounds, and command structures across cities including Tehran, Isfahan, and Kermanshah. These strikes resulted in the confirmed death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with numerous senior officials, prompting President Donald Trump to demand Iran’s “unconditional surrender” and to frame the campaign as a pathway to regime transformation and regional stability. Official communications present the actions as decisive and progressive, with assertions of degraded Iranian capabilities and imminent capitulation. Yet persistent strikes, reported explosions in Tehran, retaliatory responses, civilian casualties—including incidents involving non-military sites—and defiant statements from Iranian authorities indicate a more protracted and multifaceted situation.

Such declarations frequently arrive in pre-concluded dramatic form: the regime stands “decapitated,” surrender appears imminent, and success is portrayed as assured. These narratives operate less as neutral accounts and more as archetypal storytelling designed to evoke collective resolve and legitimize escalation. It is a complete package of understanding from beginning to end without a need to discern the in betweens or plausible deception.

Archetypes of Mythic Proportion

Carl Jung identified archetypes as innate, universal patterns in the collective unconscious that influence perception, emotion, and action across cultures. In this conflict, the Hero archetype prevails prominently: the United States and Israel position themselves as guardians of order and security, confronting an archetypal evil that threatens existential stability.

Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the hero’s journey, structures this narrative framework—the initial call to confront threats (nuclear ambitions and regional aggression), the trials of engagement, and the envisioned boon of renewal (a reoriented or supplanted regime). The adversary is cast as the Shadow: the Iranian leadership embodies suppressed chaos, tyranny, and destructive potential that must be faced and subdued for psychological and societal integration—or elimination.

( Listen along here to brother Josh McClain Cellist extraordinaire who composed his own mythic heroes accompanying pieces of the awakening, dissolution, struggle and re-emerging/awakening on the other side)

Michael Meade, drawing on mytho-poetic traditions, underscores how such stories activate profound imaginative and soul-level forces. Mythic prowess emerges in the capacity to recognize these patterns as living dynamics that confer meaning amid uncertainty, rather than as literal prescriptions. Here, leadership invokes mythic authority: strikes become acts of heroic restoration, demands for surrender calls to rebirth. This framing, however, often reduces complexity to binary oppositions—virtue vs vice, victory vs defeat—while marginalizing historical context, civilian impacts, geopolitical entanglements, and potential long-term ramifications.

In the relatively brief historical span of several centuries that defines the modern Western world, one may observe a persistent pattern: a childlike form of bullying, akin to the impulsive confrontations and power displays characteristic of playground disputes, serves as a microcosm of the broader principle of “might makes right” that has often informed Western geopolitical conduct. This juvenile dynamic—manifested in the assertion of dominance through force, intimidation, or exclusion—appears to persist in mature form among those who hold decision-making authority at the national level, shaping policies and international relations with an underlying assumption that superior power legitimizes action, irrespective of moral nuance or reciprocal consideration.

“…ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! SAY IT AGAIN!!”

Wars, as programs enacted through narratives of mythic heroes and good-versus-evil dichotomies, leave limited space for the Gestalt principle of “both-and,” which accommodates simultaneity and paradox. Archetypal roles, instilled through upbringing and culture, frequently override factual nuance, enforcing rigid categories: alignment or opposition, conformity or exclusion.

Since the onset of the COVID era, nuance has receded even further, supplanted by an enforced simplicity. Explanations once calibrated to basic comprehension—serving as deliberate entry points to foster deeper inquiry—have increasingly been repurposed to limit exploration. This shift is reinforced through mechanisms of fear and the performative deployment of moral signatures, wherein displays of righteousness supplant the grounded substance of authentic virtue.

Apathy, dysthimia (emotional numbness), the inclination to disengage (often described as “burying one’s head in the sand”), or the adoption of the adage “ignorance is bliss” ought not to be regarded as intrinsic deficiencies or moral failings.

Rather, these responses constitute protective adaptations of a psyche that may already be under strain or has not been adequately equipped—through education, nurturing environments, or sustained lived practice—to meet the cognitive and emotional demands of nuanced reflection. Chronic stressors, including imposed conditions of accelerated pace and relentless pressure to succeed, frequently diminish the temporal and psychological resources necessary for such cultivation.

In the presence of overwhelming complexity, these adaptive mechanisms serve a rational purpose: they maintain internal equilibrium and support continued functional engagement with daily life. Simplicity, in this context, functions as a safeguard against cognitive or emotional overload when the capacity for layered, sustained thinking has not been sufficiently developed or resourced. Far from indicating weakness, such responses reflect a pragmatic calibration to preserve stability amid conditions that constrain the development of greater interpretive depth.

Discernment and Discovery of Mythic Layers

By discerning these mythic layers, one moves from passive absorption of narratives toward deliberate awareness. This discernment empowers a cessation of reactive participation—as though reciting lines from a preordained script—and dissolves the confusion of symbols with substantive reality that sustains imposed narratives.

The need to convince others,

to prove one’s worth,

to explain exhaustively,

or to combat the theater of the absurd diminishes markedly.

Manipulation loses its efficacy.

Through sustained inward reflection, one establishes an internal beacon for navigating existence, which may entail a gradual dissolution of the former self and the patient reconstruction of an inner temple radiant with self-discovery—transcending words, symbols, and any external system intent on appropriating one’s essential being.

This unfolding deviates from previously prescribed sequences; as intentional living intensifies, the obsolete recedes, giving way to fresh, authentic feelings and relationships that emerge in genuine and serendipitous forms, far from mere coincidence.

Awakening to the Simulation of Thee Mother of all Psy-Ops

This path demands courage, as opposition—manifest through various cultural, social, or engineered pressures—will arise from familiar quarters. In time, mutual departure occurs, clearing space for connection with those who recognize and honor one’s inherent brilliance.

This principle finds profound resonance across contemplative traditions. In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Gnostic teachings emphasize salvation through inner spiritual knowledge (gnosis), the cultivation of peace within the self, and the transcendence of material attachments to rest in undivided goodness and compassionate presence.

Tao wisdom, through concepts such as wu wei, 無為 (effortless action in harmony with the natural flow), zi ran, 自然(spontaneity and naturalness), and simplicity, invites alignment with the Tao—releasing forced striving to allow inner tranquility, humility, and compassion to arise organically.

Buddhic teachings complement this with mindfulness, non-duality (the recognition of interconnectedness beyond self-other divisions), and karuṇā (compassion arising from insight into suffering and emptiness), fostering an open heart that embraces all without attachment or aversion.

The Qur’an adds a resonant simile in Surah Al-Baqarah (2:74), where hardened hearts are likened to stones—or even harder—contrasting sharply with the ideal of a softened, receptive heart that remains open to guidance, mercy, and remembrance of the Divine, as echoed in verses affirming that hearts find tranquility in the remembrance of Allah (13:28).

Together, these streams—Gnostic inward awakening, Taoist effortless harmony, Buddhist compassionate non-duality, and the Qur’anic call to a heart softened from stony rigidity toward gentle receptivity—converge in a unified invitation: to abide in simplicity, turn toward the heart’s inherent clarity and kindness, and live authentically beyond binary conflict or external coercion.

In a period of unprecedented in my life of heightened global tension, this integration of mythic insight with nuanced observation and heart-centered simplicity offers a pathway to more authentic engagement with external events and the internal shifts they provoke.

If it were for the faint of heart then the world would truly exist in peace not war.

Blessings and Namaste,

t

next up: working thesis. Money as motive forces for Evil: The Scholars, the Purse Strings, the Moral Threshold, the ICJ Record and invaginated narcissism.

References

Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (3rd ed.). Joseph Campbell Foundation; New World Library. (Original work published 1949)

Jenkins, S. L. (1999). The circle of compassion: An interpretive study of karuṇā in Indian Buddhist literature [Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University].

Jung, C. G. (1991). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Routledge. (Original work published 1959)

Lao Tzu. (1988). Tao Te Ching (S. Mitchell, Trans.). Harper Perennial. (Original text ca. 6th–4th century BCE)

Leloup, J.-Y. (2002). The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (J. Rowe, Trans.). Inner Traditions. (Original Coptic text ca. 2nd century CE)

Magdelana, Flo Aeveia. (1992). I Remember Union: The Story of Mary Magdalena

Meade, M. (1993). Men and the water of life: Initiation and the tempering of men. HarperSanFrancisco.

Meade, M. (2012). Fate and Destiny: The two agreements of the soul. Mosaic Multicultural Foundation.

Meade, M. (2016). The Genius Myth. GreenFire Press.

The Holy Qur’an (M. Khattab, Trans.). (n.d.). The Clear Quran. Furqaan Foundation.

https://www.theclearquran.org/

Wu, C. Q. (2016). Thus spoke Laozi: A new translation with commentaries of Daodejing. University of Hawai’i Press. (Original text ca. 6th–4th century BCE)

Photos are mine, give thanks to Sifu Huang for his elegant calligraphy presented during time in dance with his tai ji circles

Manufactured Crisis & the Collapse of the Official Narrative

Is the American public being lied to?

Have they been lied to for decades since assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK and Malcom X? To those who brokered for Peace (see JFK’s American University Speech months prior to his death ( click here)

Has this been done systematically, relentlessly, and at scale? Sold as securing a Peaceful Nation? Pulled by our nose to today about the war now unfolding in Iran. Is the US playing in a sandbox literally too large for them to understand, this sitting president more so.

80% of Americans are against this War, but this fact does nothing to deter madness and tyranny in the States

What is being sold as a necessary, limited, defensive operation in support of an ally is in reality the latest chapter in a decades-long project of regime-change engineering, regional domination, and eschatological1 fantasy dressed up as foreign policy.

The official narrative is collapsing under its own contradictions, and the voices exposing it are no longer fringe in independent media—they are the only ones still tethered to this sense of what is current reality.

The Official Story Has Already Failed

We were told the February 28, 2026 strikes (codenamed Operation Epic Fury) were a preemptive act of self-defense to stop an imminent Iranian nuclear breakout and neutralize long-range missile threats to the American homeland.

Within 48 hours, that story had fractured.

• No credible intelligence has surfaced showing Iran was days or weeks from a deliverable nuclear weapon. IAEA2 reports and even internal U.S. assessments placed enrichment activity at concerning but not weaponizable levels.

• Iran possesses no ICBMs capable of reaching the continental United States. The longest-range systems (Khorramshahr-4 variants) top out at roughly 3,000–4,000 km—nowhere near intercontinental.

• The strikes were not reactive; they were the culmination of months of planning, Israeli pressure, and domestic political choreography.

Why?

Possibly and plausibly because the real objective has never been narrowly defensive. Lets not forget the 12 day war where US-Israel military bunker busted their nuclear capabilities June 13-24 2024 and October 23, 2024 (bombing missile silos) and April 19 2024 ( bombing of an airbase) Post-strike remarks focus on the permanent subordination of the Persian Gulf to a U.S.–Israel condominium for the second coming, a messianic fervor for End of Days. These words are being spoken in the military ranks to subordinates as The War to end all Wars.

The Herzl-Zionist–Christian Zionist Axis

At the heart of this war is not “American national security” but a theological-political project made in the late 19th century with the birth of Zionism.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson reportedly told Benjamin Netanyahu in the early 1990s that he would one day become Israel’s prime minister and play a pivotal role in hastening messianic redemption. Whether or not the conversation occurred exactly as described, the ideological current it represents is undeniable. A significant faction of American evangelical Christianity—especially those aligned with dis-pensation-alist eschatology—views support for Greater Israel as a precondition for the Second Coming, the Rapture, and the battle of Armageddon described in the Book of Revelation.

This is not fringe theology.

make this quotabel: Desire and Lust for absolute Power and this absolutely corrupts the minds of well intended people.

Oil-Oil-Oil

In March of 1951 Iran nationalized its Oil Industry taking control over the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which is now BP) in which the UK held a 51% stake.

Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a widely popular secular leader was reclaiming sovereignty over Iran’s natural wealth. PM Winston Churchill at the time saw this as deleterious to British economic and imperialist influence. A coup d’état led by joint forces of MI-6 (Operation Boot) and CIA (Operation Ajax) removing Mossadegh from power and placing him under arrest for the duration of his life. Mohammad Rezla Pahlavi was installed as the Shah of Iran3 and symbolically reclaimed a 2500 year monarchical rule that dated back to the Achaemenid Empire4.

This restored autocratic monarchy endured until January 1979, when widespread popular uprisings forced the Shah to flee the country. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi died of cancer (non-hodgskins lymphoma) in Egypt on July 27, 1980. Shortly after his departure, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France on February 1, 1979, and assumed leadership of the revolutionary government.

In April 1979, a national referendum approved the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a theocratic state governed under the doctrine of “velayat-e faqih” (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist). Khomeini became the first Supreme Leader.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei succeeded Khomeini as Supreme Leader in June 1989 and held the position until his assassination on February 28, 2026. He was the second individual to occupy the office of Supreme Leader under the Islamic Republic.

Antisemitism as a Weapon of Narrative Control

One of the most effective mechanisms for silencing criticism of Israeli state policy and U.S. support is the deliberate conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Speaking out against the systematic destruction of Gaza, the double-tap strikes, directed killing of civilian rescue workers, journalists, the Hannibal Directive5, “Mowing the Lawn” 6initiative tied to settler colonialist assaults7 on indigenous Palestinans, deliberate starvation tactics, and the broader policy of territorial expansion and demographic engineering is routinely framed as hatred of Jews.

This framing is not accidental.

It is a strategic deployment by both Israeli Zionist advocacy organizations and their Christian Zionist allies in the United States. The tactic serves two purposes:

1. It delegitimizes legitimate political critique by equating opposition to a nationalist political ideology (Zionism) with racial or religious hatred.

2. It shields the Israeli state from accountability under international law by presenting any scrutiny of its actions as inherently antisemitic.

The Distinction Between Judaism and Zionism

Judaism is an ancient religious and cultural tradition encompassing diverse streams—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Re-constructionist, secular-cultural, and others.

Zionism, founded by Thomas Herzl is a 19th-century European political ideology that emerged in response to antisemitism and sought the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine.

These are not synonymous:

• Many observant Jews (e.g., Neturei Karta, Satmar Hasidim) reject Zionism on theological grounds, viewing the establishment of a secular Jewish state before the arrival of the Messiah as heretical.

• Prominent Jewish intellectuals—Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappé, Gabor Maté, Noam Chomsky, Gideon Levy, Amira Haas, Judith Butler PhD, and numerous others—have consistently distinguished their Jewish identity from support for Zionist state policies.

• Israeli Jews such as Benny Morris (who has documented 1948 expulsions while defending aspects of Zionist actions) and the late Edward Said (Palestinian-American, but whose critique of Orientalism resonates with many Jewish anti-Zionists) demonstrate that opposition to Zionism’s nationalistic platform is not incompatible with Jewishness.

Criticism of Israeli state actions—genocide allegations now under review by the International Court of Justice, systematic displacement, collective punishment, and territorial annexation—is a matter of human rights and international law. It has no bearing whatsoever on Jewish identity or religious practice.

Next up: The Scholars on Right of Return, the Purse Strings, the Moral Threshold, the ICJ Record, and the Role of AIPAC

If you found this post useful, please consider sharing it or subscribing for more analysis outside the legacy-media filter.

Thank you for listening-reading.

Blessings and Namaste,

t

References

1. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi, press conference remarks, Geneva, March 1, 2026.

2. U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency unclassified assessment (leaked portions reported by Reuters), March 2, 2026.

3. Missile Threat Project, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), updated 2025.

4. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) press release and White House statement, February 28, 2026.

5. President Trump post-strike remarks, Mar-a-Lago, March 1, 2026.

6. Reported Schneerson–Netanyahu interaction, Yedioth Ahronoth (1990s archival reports) and Schneerson biographical sources.

7. Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (1970); John Hagee, In Defense of Israel (2007).

8. Congressional Record, Speaker Mike Johnson floor speech, October 2023 and February 2026.

9. Neturei Karta official theological statements and public declarations (ongoing).

10. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah (2005); Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006); Gabor Maté public lectures, 2023–2025.

11. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004).

12. Edward Said, Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979).

13. Official ICJ document link: https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203877

    ---

Footnotes

“I have a profound regard for your existence

My deepest desire is to honor and celebrate your life!”

Above: This quote of principled matter has become the cornerstone of my life in present form.

It has required many years of deep immersion, reflection, and articulation to have reached this point. With much pain, error and success as well, it is the narrative of the insistence that Love will prevail regardless in any relationship if there is willingness. If not and with great thought then, choice be made with a blessing.

These past six years has constituted a trial of endurance. I have been subjected to derogatory labels, ostracized, shunned, struggled with reputational harm stemming from ideological rigidity and the dissemination of unfortunate falsehoods within a professional sphere I had navigated successfully as a leader for nearly three decades.

The prevailing narrative around COVID and the calculating controls of authoritarian rules abruptly wiped out all the communities in which myself and my beloved had spent much of our life learning, teaching and supporting in. Those decades long networks vanished both professionally and personally.

Depression and tremendous grief beset us both and in this the macrocosm of the world strife fell into our world like salted wounds of unceasing pain.

It nearly broke us…

…name-calling, avoidant behaviours, abrupt disengagement, and emotional condemnation of sincerest intentions.

My partner1 and I have spent considerable time apart over the last four years. No deeply loving relationship can sustain its growth or deepen its resources amid such persistent strain and discord. Out of this came great learning.

It comes to this:

These experiences have clarified an essential need in my own truth: to do as I say and say as I do in affirming life—one rooted in genuine validation from others, given to others.

It remains non-negotiable at its core.

I seek only those individuals who embody ownership of their actions, who engage in mature dialogue characterized by genuine questions aimed at discovery, and who cultivate a strong capacity for self-inquiry.

These qualities form the foundation for loving intentions grounded in a sincere desire to understand another soul.

It constitutes an invitation extended specifically to those who possess a clear awareness of their own ego shell—individuals capable of recognizing and transcending the defensive layers that obscure authentic connection.

Such persons hold you in their sustained consideration and initiate contact through deliberate, even modest gestures, such as inquiring sincerely after your well-being. The essential elements of this outreach include temperance in expression, the willingness to make amends where warranted, the practice of genuine forgiveness, and a deeply ingrained commitment to honoring relationship itself as the paramount focus of profound affection toward another.

Blessings and Namaste,

t

John’s presence is just as unmistakable in conversation. His voice carries the distinctive, wind-swept cadence of a born storyteller—seasoned with the patina of years, rich in lived experience, and infused with effortless oratorical grace. He approaches every exchange with genuine enthusiasm and poise, effortlessly weaving vivid, sonnet-like details into the flow of dialogue. Unabashedly frank when the moment calls for it, yet always clear and intentional, he is, above all, a conversationalist.

If you’re a Bay Area local, you might pass by a Malick & Associates-inspired building and homes without even realizing it. From the elegant grounds of the Claremont and Sequoyah Country Clubs, to campuses like Head-Royce or College Prep, and across Piedmont, Wine Country estates, and beyond—the firm’s portfolio spans French cottages, English Country, Tudor, Tyrolean chalets, Craftsman, Shingle-style, Mediterranean, Spanish Colonial, Caribbean, Victorian, and farmhouse designs. This remarkable breadth of completed works stands as a testament to John and his associates’ profound mastery of period architecture and timeless craftsmanship.

As principal of John Malick & Associates, his practice centers on high-end, historically inspired residential design. Rooted in classical principles, it revives the lost arts of traditional handcraft, often celebrated within the “New Classicism” movement—creating homes that are timeless, deeply emotive, harmoniously sited, and imbued with a sense of noble place.

He is the guiding voice and central figure in the monograph A Lyric Architecture: Selected Works of John Malick & Associates a beautifully crafted volume that showcases his firm’s evocative projects through hundreds of photographs and thoughtful reflections on architecture as a poetic, narrative art.

Creativity came to him early and naturally. Raised amid his grandfather’s barn-turned-workshop—a treasure trove of tools for shaping wood, metal, and bold ideas—he tinkered endlessly, dreaming up worlds of limitless possibility. It felt innate. He roamed local junkyards, transforming discarded finds like dilapidated mailboxes into ingenious laundry hampers and baskets—early glimpses of the resourceful, inventive spirit that would later shape his design philosophy.

John’s life threads these elements together: a devotion to rare teas, the joy of storytelling, classical architecture, and a lifelong impulse to elevate the ordinary into something enduring and beautiful.

“The risk of failing is easier when you have more money,” he once observed. “The rich worry less about failing than those who have less, because financial resources may only allow for one shot.” Industrious by nature, he inherited a bloodline of invention from both parents. His father was an inventor; his mother, Maude H. Malick, an occupational therapist who, turned away from medicine because of her gender, forged her own path. She authored simplified anatomy manuals and seminal books on hand splinting techniques—texts still used in classrooms today—and pioneered the use of low-temperature thermoplastic materials for custom splints, revolutionizing rehabilitation for hand injuries and burns.

As someone who stepped into hand therapy early in my practice, I know her influence firsthand—molding those static splints for work injuries using the very materials she helped bring to the forefront.

That inventive spark showed itself vividly when, as a 13-year-old, John built his Soap Box Derby car. Staying within the rules while boldly pushing boundaries—no rules existed for some of his innovations—he thought outside the box with unabashed creativity. When disputes arose, word reached Chevrolet executives, who were intrigued by his efficiency-enhancing design. They couldn’t disqualify him; instead, they celebrated it. His car featured a unique braking system: at the finish line—when brakes engage only once in derby racing—it dropped to the ground, allowing modified rubber surfaces to contact the track and slow the vehicle in a remarkably efficient way.

Impressed, Chevrolet offered him a job and sent him on a national tour. The company’s president declared,

From junkyard repurposing to derby ingenuity, from his mother’s pioneering manuals to his own lyric architecture—John Malick’s story is one of continuous transformation, curiosity, and creation.

By the time he was 8 years old he was running the lathes, drill presses in his grandfathers shop.

This space was a creative cauldron where mystery and exploration were transmuted into living spirit. A journey of self-discovery, stirred by conspiratorial forces that ignited inspirational vitality—revealing themselves in the elegant interplay of structure, beauty, and function that defined every creation he touched.

Witness the evidence of his work here:

https://www.jmalick.com/

“Live in the Presence of Now. Live in the Understanding of Love”

-j. zhong hua

Eye don’t prescribe to the notion of resolutions. Instead, eye choose a word eye want to either amplify or dismiss out of my own lexicon 4 as long as needed.

The last two years of my life eye have been working three words, three of which eye changed (changing really) the use and tense of.

Should to Shall

Would to Will

Could to Can

My dear sister in Jill Dipiazza would say in her upbeat whimsy voice:

“Terry, Shoulda-Woulda-Coulda!”

We were brought up in language of our country of origin, of our family, of the playgrounds and places we frequented. Really our world was pre ordained once the language through symbology was constructed millenia’s ago, found and codified by the ancients.

“In the beginning was the Word.”

Symbolism began and Language with the Word, a direct injection into Christ, with God, the origin from the Omniscient species unknown to us all.

Consider “The Artist Formerly Known As” his iconic glyph is simply known as the “Love Symbol.” Did he know something about Symbolism? The power? The photo above is one eye shot off the large monitors hanging above him in the Oracle arena. Eye missed out on his more intimate settings the week prior where he did two stints there at the Paramount Theatre, an old art deco ornamentation. Eye saw Gregory Hines there on his one man tour years ago before his transition.

We were told prior to the beginning of the concert no photos or taping. NO phones. Security was roaming up and down the aisle to police it.

Eye missed those days, where we had these bic lighters, hands in the air, swaying, grabbing our girl or boyfriend, passing a columbia gold rolled doobie around, but something in me said eye needed to do this.

Eye did some quick shots and then turned my iphone audio recorder to “on” and placed on my lap under my jacket when he came on stage. Eye collected 90 minutes of the show including his third encore. (recorded on my Eyephone 6: You can scrub to 6 minutes to singing “Thieves in the temple”< “Wanna b your Lover” and “Do me baby”otherwise it is sheer screaming prior!!) Can U hear in my podcast background the concert.

A few minutes into his first set eye leaned over to Zabeth ( ma femme) and said he did not look well. He was pale and thin, yet he performed flawlessly, beautifully. He came out for four encores.

Each time the stage rotated 90 deg with the lone white grand piano shell holding his synthesizer inside. He would walk off and come back in new digs and the crowd would go nuts. Balls Nuts.

By the fourth, half the arena had left. We stayed thankfully, so as he re-minded the rest how connected he was to the Bay Area and the Love of us that brought him back time and time again.

His first record when he was just a teen ( 18-19) was cut up at the Record Plant in Sausalito CA, in 1977 under the Warner label. He was arranger, composer, lyricist, one man band playing 27 instruments including all vocals. Genius.

That show at the Oracle arena on a Friday night in Oakland was the best show I had ever seen from him. It was a solo affair, just him, keys and a mic, and he was ill.

A Month later he died.

Eye met Prince in 1985. Eye was a reluctant.

A friend had an extra ticket to his Purple Rain tour. I said “I am not into him and his persona. eye will pass.” He said, “You know Sheila E is opening for him.” “Ooh”, I said, “Okay eye will definitely go for her.” She was this beautiful large hair, Latina with that white one legless spandex design and a bad ass percussionist/drummer. Timbales!

Long Beach Arena and that was all eye needed to fall in Love with this man. I was already crushing on Sheila, like everyone else. When the lights dropped minutes went by and one spot came onto Sheila who had gotten behind this arcing drum kit then one stroke of the guitar a long held note and the second Spot hit him standing on top of a speaker cabinet maybe five feet high. He jumped off and did the side splits twirled and sprung up like James Brown, in High Heels no less. He catapulted me into orbit. Acid enhanced the experience.

He was owned by no one.

If you want something, give it

His generosity is legend in the deeper depths of his world that most know nothing about, especially to the causes for the under-advantaged children, education for artistic support in the schools and communities. These were his causes. His philanthropy was as important as the wealth of genius in his musical vault. He would come into the Bay Area, a favorite haunting space and do the Fillmore, the Paramount, Great American Music Hall to name a few and smaller audience after hour parties sometimes taking all proceeds and donating them to these causes.

He is number one in my book.

A well of Love and boundaried, clarified compassionate instructionals on how to live Free and abundantly by the source of Giving. The return is immeasureable in incomprehensible ways.

A genius musicologist of our times, his time of influence. The tributes poured from every single musical platform from Rock to Opera to musical shows to classical quartets and orchestras all of whom stopped in their acts to add him in, Purple Rain was their go to homage.

The Day He LEFT

The day he died (April 21 2016) eye was treating a patient in the gym. Eye walked away as the patient was doing his exercises and went back to the office, Eye noted some texts from friends. Did you hear? CALL ME NOW!

Time stopped in a split and sat down and began to reveal the unreal. Eye was called back to my senses 20 min later a colleague saying that the patient is asking where you are. Twenty minutes gone by in an instant.

Nothing else mattered. There was no time, no where else to be but in that space undifferentiated. There was no sense of existing.

I have reflected on this many times in wonder how the effects of Love can so stop the world when the world stops for the one you Love. The grief in its many colors shows unexpectedly and overwhelmingly that eye was no longer conscious of my busy day because it did not matter.

What’s the Good Word?

My word for this year is DISTORTION. As in TOTAL HARMONIC DISTORTION. An audiophilic word to get the purest sound with least amount of incoherent wave patterns. .01% THD printed on the back of the audio receivers of our days.

Prince was an absolute language decipher-er. His greatest symbol in the Love glyph as a FUCK YOU to the professional slave mentality in the Music business. He took back his power when the Warner contract ended and he signed with Arista and Clive Davis on his terms and then took his name back and control of his music.

His named-Love symbol remained as his concert platform until his death.

The “illegal” bootleg eye recorded makes him timeless and re-minds me of my 21st year of life, when eye met him for the first time in Long Beach, CA.

He was a total and consummate man in high heels.

Blessings and Namaste,

t