The few of you who followed my “40 Days In The Desert” writing project are aware that while I was in Florida recently, my dog Kody became very ill suffering a near kidney failure and had to receive i.v. treatments at the vet for two days. It turns out the cause of his kidney failure was a large, fast growing tumor pushing up on his kidneys which kept them from filtering properly. Since Florida he had been in good health again and was back to his chipper self, but then two nights ago he was suddenly in great pain, yelping upon moving, and moving very slowly and delirously. Today we took him to the vet and at first they though he had a small tumor on his spleen and decided to operate. Once inside his belly, the doctor discovered he was full of internal bleeding, and that there was a massive tumor all along his backside pressing up on his kidneys. It was inoperable, and the doctor doubted he would even survive the night. Euthenasia was the only reasonable option. They did sew him back up and woke him from anesthesia so that I had an opportunity to be with him before they put him to sleep. He tried to lick me but didn’t have the strength. They administered the euthenasia drug as I laid my head on his, caressing him.
Kody was an incredibly handsome, sensitive, smart, and loving dog. Every morning that we woke up together he would plop into me and we would snuggle and kiss for at least ten minutes before getting out of bed. He was originally a rescue that had been abandoned on the side of the road by a divorcing couple. We’ve been through a lot together. He’s been to many music festivals, onstage with me for some. He has swam in both oceans and the gulf of Mexico as well. He has seen a wolf and nearly caught a coyote. He has also seen buffalo, elk, moose, antelop and deer. He traveled with me on two trips out west, including this last van journey where we saw most of the country. I’m happy that we were able to return to what Kody considered home a few weeks before he passed, where he was able to play with his canine buddy Reno and be spoiled by my parents. His last days were happy and light. I was so proud of Kody for enduring his early life trama yet still remaining the most loving and gentle of creatures. Kody was a saint and his passing leaves a giant hole in my heart. My whole family loved him and feels the great and sudden loss.
God bless you, Kody. You were a good boy. I’m so proud of you. I love you forever. I will always hold you in my heart.
This is a raw and nascent rough draft to be refined, honed, and eventually recorded. Since this arose on Christmas by it’s own volition, I figured I’d put out the raw rendition to not impede the flow of Spirit. Merry Christmas.
This was a longer video I wasn’t able to upload until now. I had found a nice, natural, overhang shieled from the wind (mostly) and with good acoustics along an ancient path to a natural spring. Animals and humans have used the path for thousands of years to access precious water in an otherwise arid environment. I commonly ran into herds of mule deer along the way while exploring this area.
I saw the most beautiful, thougtful, humble, and sincere expression of faith, hope, and love while driving down the highway today through the Navajo nation: eight signs (below) in sequence. I was not only deeply touched by the message, but by the genuine effort involved. Not only did this blessed soul feel these things in their heart, but they so earnestly wanted to express this message to the world that they bought sixteen posts, eight sheets of plywood, fastened them all together, dug sixteen post holes, and handpainted each sign with care and creativity. Seeing this actually brought me to tears, truly touching my heart, and causing me to slam on the breaks, make two u-turns to read them all again and photograph them. As I continued down the road with still wet eyes, I looked back in my rearview mirror and saw the most magnifcent rainbow painting the otherwise bright, blue sky. I am a spiritual person and I have the greatest love and admiration for such sincere expressions of faith, hope, and love. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit. God bless this humble loving soul with all the happiness and wellbeing in the world.
On my way to Sedona I decided to go out of my way to explore Lake Havisu. I only stayed long enough to u-turn on the main drag, so I can’t really say I got a true sense of the place, only enough to know it wasn’t for me, at least not now. It was flat, hot, developed, and uninspiring. I’m sure there are some good deals, good people, and pleasant beaches, I just didn’t have the will or patience to find out.
Sedona is kind of ridiculous to me. It is so congested and touristy, and oppressively hot. Sure the backdrop is beautiful, but even the trails are crowded and one is never out of reach from the drone of traffic noise, the glint fabricated structures, nor the neon glow of commerce. I like crystals and chakras and vortexes and all that, but I don’t need the commerical entity of Sedona, Arizona to enjoy those things. Sure, the land is awe-inpsiring and sacred, but so is the entire American West. I think the only thing Sedona has an edge on is business savvy and spiritual tourism. Everything Sedona has to offer can be found in a much purer form if one just drives to the empty spaces on any map of the southwest. I had a dear friend in Sedona though. I was kind of conflicted between my desire to spend time with her, and my instinct to flee the area. I was there for about a week. I managed to score a spot at a sought after campground. It was along a beautiful stream with a healthy trout population and secret meditation nooks. I abided.
From Sedona I headed northwest to Vegas, only to refill my stash of cannabis edibles. I only stayed so long as to refill my fridge and do my laundry, spending the night in a Walmart parking lot in Mesquite NV along the Nevada/Utah border. I’ve become fond of Mesquite. It’s everything you’d expect it to be: “Hi! Welcome to Nevada! Wanna gamble? Want a hooker? Want some weed? Need a place to stay? We’re here for you!” Don’t get me wrong. Mesquite isn’t seedy feeling at all. It just feels… practical.
The next day was an adventure. I saw a place on the map in the middle of nowhere called Wolf’s Hole. I had to go. I drove sixty mile into the northern Arizona desert, missed the sign for Wolf’s Hole, and ended up with a flat tire, without a spare tire or cell service, in the middle of nowhere. Luckily I had my motorcycle on the back of my van with a full tank of gas. I did what I had to do. I found a flat, safe place to pull over next to a historic schoolhouse. I got out my jack, pulled off the offending tire, mounted it on the back of my motorcycle, closed all the blinds in my van and turned on the fans for Kody, and drove sixty long miles through the desert dust and gravel to St. George Utah where I got my tire promptly fixed. Before heading back I stopped at a gas station to refill my motorcycle tank and to slam a couple of White Claws to make the ride back a little more tolerable. Even though it at first seemed like an ordeal, I managed to resolve the problem quite smoothly in just a few hours. I decided to just camp right there that night since it was so barren and quite, just as I prefer. I checked out the schoolhouse and was pleasantly surprised. The door was open and it had been restored in recent years, boasting a nice wood floor, a few wooden benches, and plenty of pics and memorobilia regarding the former school and it’s students. Since there was no one around for miles, I made that little schoolhouse my temple for the night. I did yoga and meditated in this quiet sanctuary and played my flute all night, taking advantage of the interesting acoustics of the buildling.
The next day I moved on to the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. I had never been to the North Rim before but was pleasantly surprised to find very little crowd, hardly any presence of park rangers or law enforcement, and beautiful vistas and enchanting trails. I stayed up there for a whole week, never once paying for camping, just sleeping at the vista pulloffs which was technically against regulations. While there a friend of mine from the East Coast came through for a few nights on his way out to the West Coast to do some surfing. We had a good time exploring around and making music. The Grand Canyon treated me well, and I’m sure I’ll be back. I found it very cleasning to the mind and soul to contemplate such vast and beautiful vistas for a whole week.
From the Grand Canyon I proceeded west along the Arizona/Utah border to the Glenn Canyon Recreation Area where I am now. I spent 5 days at Lees Ferry fishing, hiking, and practicing my spiritual disciplines. Lees Ferry suited me very well, but there was no place to camp there except for the $20/night campground. I forked over the fee to have access to the place at night, staying out well past dark each evening. Now I am nearby at Lone Rock campground along Lake Powell, just over the Utah Border. This area is super mellow and has everything I need. It is where I will hunker down for the next few weeks while America weathers the almost assuredly pending chaos following today’s election. It’s all beach camping here along the shore of Lake Powell, very spread out with no numbered or definable sites. There’s a dump station and fresh water, and the town of Page only 20 minutes away where I can go for supplies. I want to spend several weeks here living quite and simply, working on a writing project, playing lots of music, doing some fishing, paddleboarding, offroad dirtbiking, and plenty of long walks.
After taking my pistol course in Reno, accidentally driving down the main drag of a motorcycle rally on my little green Japanese 250cc bike, and taking advantage of Nevada’s legal weed status, I made my way up Grant’s Pass Oregon to visit an old and dear friend of mine who has done fairly well for himself in the cannabis industry. Although on the surface we got along well most of the time, I could tell that time had changed us, and that he was still seeing the old me, not quite seeing or accepting the reality of the man now before him. We had some laughs, did some stuff, took some drugs, then parted ways, both feeling a little awkward for our inability to articulate or address the new distance between us. Nevertheless, I’m happy he is doing well for himself, and I hope he hangs onto that woman.
After Grant’s Pass, I decided to do a run of the entire west coast from the Portland area down. I avoided Portland itself like the plague in the light of all the “peaceful protests” in the area lately. The Oregon coast was as I remembered it: enchanting and magical. However, it was smothered with smoke from the intense spell of wildfires this late summer. I had this naive beliefe that the coasts would be safe from the wildfire smoke, being west of the eastward flowing air currents. I was wrong. Wind currents pulled the smoke through fingerlike channels out to sea, and from there the smoke drifted southward along the coast. Unlike my usual self, I was in no mood for gloom and fog. I was unwilling to accept the natural balance of things. Having much of my summer wasted in Covid lockdowns and busywork selling my house, I felt greedily entitled to a few weeks of sun, sand, and stoney leisure. If I found myself in smoke and fog, I made it my policy to keep driving until I hit a belt of sunshine again. The smoke did indeed stream out to sea in a veiny, fingerlike fashion; every twenty miles I drove alternated between a glistening and blissful coastal paradise, and a smothering, gloomy atmosphere of cough-inducing, dense, grey air, and hard-to-navigate, hairpin turns along coastal cliffs. The smoke persisted in a belligerant fashion all the way down to LA. Before I knew it I was in the misty redwoods, and soon after, the busy beaches of southern California. I didn’t stay too long. Along the coast, in the few patches of uncrowded sunshine I found myself in, I was in utter bliss. But once you hit LA, the coast becomes a crowded circus, beautiful as it remains to be. It wasn’t a horrible circus though. The people were fine: mostly non-political, just happy southern Californians who wanted to enjoy the very things they moved there for: the perfect weather, easy living, and beautiful coastal vistas. But there were too many of them, and I didn’t want to be another statistic. It’s my nature to be content in the most sparse and solitary of places. I didn’t need California. I needed the barren solitude of the desert. And so I preceded onward to Arizona.
This quote was a chapter in East Of Eden which I recently read. I feel it is very relevant to modern times, and well articulates the values of freedom and individuality which mean so much to me. If you won’t take it from me, take it from this incredibly gifted and insightful author who wrote this during the Great Depression:
“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then—the glory—so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man’s importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.
This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused. At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against? Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for this is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate itand I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.”
Mateo Monk | Howl Of The White Wolf 