How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Dog Poet transmitting.......

I’ve been getting some interesting emails. You might call them strange even. Mostly it has to do with people’s perception of me from a distance and my perception of me up close (grin). Over the last year, I have occasionally hung my life on a clothesline so that people could get some idea of the things I sometimes go through on my way out of here. I do it intentionally and maybe I shouldn’t. I’m aware that a certain segment of the people who read here get put off by some of the comments directed at me and I sympathize with that. I really do. As a result I’ve tried to illustrate flaws in my nature with the idea of humanizing a personality that is only experienced at a distance except for the random visits I get from readers.

I find these times through which we are passing to be difficult to navigate here and there. Most people have natural defenses in their psyche which protect them from invasion. I blew the doors off early on and it gave me access to many things on the other side. It also made it imperative that I guard the borders because all kinds of things can go in and out otherwise. Taking risks can pay off in a big way and it can also get you into trouble. I don’t want to feel like I didn’t make every effort to comprehend and understand as much as it is possible for me to and... I find myself thinking often these days that maybe I should have gone the recommended route; don’t take chemicals, follow certain disciplines, be moderate in all things and whatever it says on the blackboard for the course on Correct Spiritual Procedures 101. It didn’t work out that way.

This is a time of intense materialism. That means that the amount of dust that collects on the mirror is much greater than at other times. The physical pollution is matched by mental and emotional pollutions, compounded by all kinds of waves and pulses moving through the atmosphere. Right or wrong, I have felt it desirable to burn the carbon off of my jets on occasion. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. My perception is that the divine favors any effort to reach it. If you are just flat out intending to scratch and claw your way up the mountain, you are going to get points for effort, even if you land on your ass a lot of the time. Those who love much are forgiven much.

So I will find myself having a week of continuous chanting and visualizing along with whatever else I am doing. I get into a fine rhythm and find myself chugging along like a freight train across big open spaces toward a destination which I can’t see but can sometimes vividly imagine. There are periods in this process where I think it’s just what I should be doing and everything is orderly and slow moving. It reminds me of the times I would be heading up the Haleakala Highway toward one of the towns on the volcano. This is on the island of Maui. It’s such a gradual rise in the beginning that you might not even realize you are going uphill but when you look in the rear view mirror you can see the landscape receding far below. Deliberate spiritual practice results in something like this and it’s worked fine for all manner of seekers over the centuries.

Some of us are in a little more of a hurry. I know that doesn’t make any sense, speed-balling into a place of eternal rest, or whatever it results in. The idea is really to slow down I suspect but... sincerely looking for the divine means that you will go mad at some point. I don’t think there’s any way around that. Actually seeking to engage the divine... not just Sunday morning hymns and prayers but a dedicated all out endeavor is going to make you insane as far as the world is concerned because the world is insane and when you get really sane then you appear to be nuts.

So I get thrown from the horse now and again and I put it up here for wider viewing. I really do it so that the people who get put off by the kinds of comments I get will feel a little better for having seen it. I know that sounds odd or stupid but it’s what I do. You please one side and you offend the other. I’m thinking about learning to play both sides against the middle but I don’t even know what that means exactly and that might be a good thing. One reader (of whom I am quite fond) went off on me recently and accused me of playing to the crowd and compromising my message in order to be better liked. I didn’t know what he was talking about because I couldn’t see any difference in what I do. I hoped I might be improving but... whatever.

Being me, I have some idea of what I think when I am composing these things and my take on it is that I don’t think about it at all. I don’t think period. I sit down and start writing and then it ends. I check the text for errors, always missing at least one, which a certain reader is kind enough to point out to me pretty soon after I post it. I’ve acquired some helpful elves on the way through this period. We’re coming up on a thousand blog entries. That’s over a million and a half words; almost a Minchner novel. I guess I could go on doing this for decades, as long as I’m here. There are the radio shows now and there’s going to be video whenever I decide to plug in the camera that reader donations bought and start doing it. The musical recording end has suffered as has the novel writing end. I don’t know what to do about that. It seems like I should focus on increasing my income but it just doesn’t seem to motivate me, it’s not rational I know.

I try to provide a service here and I hope I’m doing that. Because I really do believe in the divine, I think it only fair to trust it to provide for all of my needs and... miraculously it does all of that and I have no complaints. I believe that you can do things for free, just give yourself away, as long as there is any kind of demand for that sort of thing and the rest of it will take care of itself. I tried to have a musical career and Bernard Stollman of ESP and his mad hatter of a wife screwed, blued and tattooed me and continue to. I tried to publish a novel and Mogg Morgan of Mandrake of Oxford Press released the book with the name misspelled on the spine and every header on every page. He also ignored the final draft and printed a rough copy. This ruined it for me and it took a year for him to put out the better version. I never got a dime. He told me he only sold so many books and I can find more than that amount for sale, used, on the internet.

The stories are more complicated and much more devious and dirty than I have the time or inclination to get into here. My disappointments were huge. I’ve stopped trying after that. It seemed like I wasn’t supposed to. I figure if anything is going to happen for me, that is in the hands of the divine as well and I am more and more disposed to trust that with every single detail in my life. I put so much work into my songs and my novel and they were both deliberately trashed and I can’t understand why and perhaps I never will. Now I’ve got half a dozen novels in various stages of completion and no enthusiasm to finish them. What I do is just sit down and write these things without knowing why and run them up the flagpole. I’ve met a lot of fantastic people this way and I consider that an honor and payment in full. In the end, it’s the enduring relationships that you made and enjoyed and not much of anything else. I feel like I’ve made some real friends here, though I may never meet most of them and that’s something that Bernard, Flavia and Moog can’t ruin for me.

There aren’t many other people who can be fully employed (and I am fully employed) at their occupation without any of the things that usually go with it. I suppose that’s an accomplishment of some sort. I wish I was recording all of these new songs I’ve written but it just doesn’t seem to happen. I’ve got tangerines all over my desk here, along with the can of American Spirit and a cup of green tea with Tamari. Poncho’s out in the yard guarding the car which is the great love of his life. The computer is humming and it’s getting dark now. I’ll probably go get Poncho shortly and watch a movie or something.

I’ve had some really good moments here and I’ve got you to thank for that. You’ve made this worthwhile for me. It wouldn’t have meant very much otherwise and I want to sincrely thank you. I don’t thank you often enough for having given me this opportunity to talk about the things I love and which maybe some of you have grown fond of too. We’re sailing on a big ship somewhere on the heart’s ocean or maybe the tossing waves of the mind or maybe both. I don’t know if we will get where we are headed or exactly where that is but it has been a fine ride because of the quality of the company. Thank you one and all.

Visible sings: ♫ Miracle of Love ♫
'Miracle of Love' is track no. 11 of 13 on Visible's 2007 album 'The Sacred and The Profane'
Lyrics (pops up)



The New Shangri-La.