When We’ve Chased Ourselves from Our Home: Under Siege

Just yesterday, I was on my computer when I was tired. This is something I usually avoid. And there was an email labeled “scam alert.” My thought-brain screamed “fake.” Yet, as I said, I was tired. I opened it, regretted it immediately, deleted it, and became worried about possible malware. Then I was angry at myself for opening it and angry at the spam itself.

 

Every day, we all get so many scam emails, texts, or phone calls, or calls for donations or sales, things we just don’t want to interact with. And every year, it seems to get worse. We now need to erect a wall against our own phone, all communication devices, snail mail ⎼ so much wasted paper. Wasted time. So many businesses we interact with get hacked, so much of our information stolen. I won’t even go into social media. We need security on so many aspects of our lives, so many walls to put up and maintain, so much distancing.

 

And then there’s the news that can be so scary, of the climate emergency, of the threat to our right to vote, to job protections, to the right to control our own bodies and medical treatment. It can feel like we’re under siege. Being under siege, it’s difficult to feel comfortable, at home in ourselves, at home even in our home.

 

Yet earlier today, I remember watching one of my cats, Mikey, walking comfortably and with attention through the flower beds. I realized these beds, these flowers, and the trees around them, the stones and wind were his home. Not only our house, not even us, but all of it. Everything within his territory, at least, was home. Not just home but him. The borders of his territory were the borders of his skin.

 

We often suppress this border, this skin of place, by imagining our skin is our end⎼ and not a border that allows us to touch other borders and be embraced by other beings. We pay an enormous price for this suppression.

 

The American poet Robinson Jeffers wrote:

A severed hand

Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth

And stars and his history…

Often appears atrociously ugly.

 

Many humans have known the importance of place, indigenous cultures and others. I’ve been re-reading a book called Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, by the poet and translator of Chinese literature, David Hinton. Hinton says, “Things are themselves only as they belong to something more than themselves: I to we, we to earth, earth to planets and stars…” We recognize and become truly ourselves only with others, in whatever place, time, and universe we are in. We recognize the air we inhale is the air others exhale; we feel the streams of the earth as the veins of our bodies.

 

When I felt the fear from the possible malware embedded in the email, I at first didn’t want to deal with it. I knew intellectually that since I didn’t click on anything in the email itself⎼ and quickly turned off my computer, later changed my password and checked Malwarebytes⎼ there was little to fear. But still, some fear remained. And I wanted it gone. I wanted it out of my body and out of my mind….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

A Trip to Paradise: Where Do We Meet Ourselves?

What does paradise mean to us? Heaven? The garden of Eden? A place of perfection, or of beauty and wonder? The end of war? Safety and security? Justice? A political revolution? Or a moment of peace and quiet?

 

Maybe the yearning for paradise has accompanied humans ever since we came to exist? Or, more likely, since we first created art and language, and expanded our ability to think abstractly or to mentally journey into the future and past?

 

To enter some of the paleolithic art caves required crawling through tight passages or tunnels and leaving behind the sun-lit world. They were not dwelling places. In the famous cave at Lascaux, in the Dordogne area of southwestern France, there was evidence of oil lamps, rope, scaffolding, as well as sophisticated paintings. Were the ancient caves not just places to create art but temples meant to take people beyond time and into eternity? A place for performing hunting magic? An expression not only of a drive for artistic creation but for paradise?

 

One of my favorite books of the Bible, and best known generally, is Genesis, which begins, of course, with the beginning, with creation. And soon takes us to the garden of Eden.

 

Gardens have long been associated with, or used as living metaphors for, paradise. Journalist, author, and travel writer Pico Iyer’s book, The Half-Known Life: In Search of Paradise, begins with traveling to Iran, continues to North Korea, Kashmir, Ireland, Jerusalem, Ladakh, India, Japan, etc. and ends with realizing the most important journey is within himself. The New York Times comprehensively reviewed the book and recently listed it as one of the 100 notable of the year.

 

Modern Iran was once Persia, central to the Fertile Crescent where human farming and larger-scale societies might have begun, and where humans might have first left Eden. The word ‘paradise’ itself is from Persia, old Iranian, ‘paradaijah.’ The Farsi word for garden means paradise. Iran is a land of beautiful poetry and traditional architecture, as well as gardens of physical poetry pointing our eyes toward divinity. It is place of reverence for the “unseen life.”

 

Yet, today, Iyer shows us a place where the government tries to watch and record all that its people hide, think, and do, while the people try to find out what the government is hiding. One motif of the architecture is the inclusion of tiny mirrors, hints of an infinity of reflections and creations. But the mirrors, today, also might remind the people to keep a perpetual watch over their shoulders.

 

Maybe all nations have such contradictions. Iyer describes the “People’s Paradise” of North Korea as a place where people “seemed beside the point and perfection was the ruthless elimination of every imperfection.” Or I’m reminded that in the U. S., the “land of the free,” and leader of the democratic world, one of the two probable presidential candidates in the 2024 election promises to end democracy and rule as a dictator.

 

We must be careful with our yearning for paradise….

 

*To read the whole blog, please go to The Good Men Project.

I Was Going to Write an Email: To Converse with Truth, Let Silence Speak

I was going to send an email to The Good Men Project about not being able to write a blog this week. For several years, I’ve sent in a piece almost every week. If I couldn’t do so, I informed the editors in advance. This time, I tried several ideas, but none coalesced into a finished piece. And I kept imagining what I could say about why or asking myself if I needed to say anything at all.

 

I started to question any excuses that popped into my head or the need to have any excuses. I started questioning my explanations, my pattern of thinking, my distractions. And suddenly, a realization of what I could write came clear to me. What was going on inside me became clear.

 

Why am I writing blogs? Why do we ever feel a need to justify doing what we need to do, or what is right?

 

It can be so difficult to put life first. When we are not immediately and physically threatened, and I’m so thankful there are no bombs falling here instead of the rain, it can be difficult to put the reality that we can lose all we have first, that we might die.

 

Even now, with two major wars in the world, with a climate emergency ⎼ with the leader of one of the two major political parties threatening that if he becomes President again he will be a dictator. He will take away our constitutional rights, to vote, to the rule of law and to be considered innocent until proven guilty. Or to say anything in opposition to what he says, or get good healthcare or have choices about our healthcare ⎼ it’s so difficult for many of us to feel the reality of this. To believe we might die. To prioritize this. This, now.

 

We have all these things we do, layers upon layers of habits, of patterns of thinking, prioritizing, passing time. We have our normal concerns, communities of concerns. Obligations. We have all the pain, joys, and memories we live with.

 

Yet, this morning, fresh from a long sleep, I woke up questioning so much. And what before was hidden became clear. What do I really feel? What should I write? Why hadn’t I completed a blog? Do I need to explain anything to anyone about how I’ve lived life?

 

And the freshness of just waking up, and questioning, with a willingness to look, and the desire to see what’s real, all the clouds in my mind were pushed apart….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to this link to The Good Men Project.

What Might Being at Peace Mean? The Deep Joy Embedded in Presence that Inclines Us to Laughter

Each morning, before meditating, I follow a version of the Buddhist practice of dedicating the meditation to relieving the suffering of others. I wish that I, my wife, and anyone close to me who is suffering, or every being anywhere, be at peace. The practice calms me. But I must admit that it’s not always clear what being at peace would realistically be like in our world today or if my notion of peace is like anyone else’s.

 

It’s clear to me that saying it and meaning it, doing it with sincerity, is possibly a beginning of an answer in itself. Telling ourselves being at peace is possible is a door to being there. Or maybe it’s a door to persuading ourselves we deserve it.

 

So, what do I mean by being at peace? It can sound to many of us like contentment or being satisfied; and it does share something with those two states of heart and mind. Yet, it’s closer to calmness or happiness, both of which might be components of peace.

 

But contentment, satisfaction, and even happiness have a bad rep in many quarters today. There’s so much that is terrifying right now, so many threats, so much injustice, how can we want peace? How can we be content, happy, or satisfied? Don’t we want discontent, fury, and outrage? Don’t we want determination and commitment to change?

 

And so many of us, even critics in my own mind, seem to doubt we deserve it. It seems we’ve been educated in discontent with ourselves.

 

I think fostering discontent with political policies that harm people is simply responsible behavior. But discontent that arises from conducting a war with ourselves is an entirely different story. It assists those who would do us harm. It undermines our work to create a more compassionate and equitable country by undermining our ability to be compassionate with ourselves. Being at war with ourselves exhausts inner resources that could help us imagine positive actions to take, and then take them.

 

And maybe recognizing this is a key to feeling at peace ⎼ accepting and being able to live in our own minds and bodies. ‘Accepting’ not in the sense of being unaware of the reality of what we are and what we face, but instead very cognizant of it. It’s not easy to accept that we can’t always be strong or feel good or know the answer, or to not automatically attack whatever feels threatening. Being at peace begins with not being at war with ourselves.

 

Our thoughts often take the form of stories, or internally created and enacted stage-plays or scripts. “All the world is a stage,” said Shakespeare. These plays can be noticed through mindful observation and are described not only in meditation teachings but the psychological approaches of Transactional Analysis and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

 

Self-criticism can be helpful, if it motivates us to be aware of painful patterns of thought and behavior. But it can also separate our inner world into warring parties. The self-critic is one character or side in the drama. The criticized is another. Too often, we react to the critic as if it was a celestial judge. When we abstract ourselves from the moments of our lives and try to reduce our world to only an idea of it, we suffer. Our ideals can be impossible to live up to, yet we all have them. We are all imperfect, full of contradictions. To the degree we hold an ideal too tightly, to that same degree we can hurt ourselves for not meeting that ideal…

 

*To read the whole blog, please go to The Good Men Project.

When Our Borders Surge Outwards to Everything

Back in 1966, when I was 18, I flew to Europe for almost four months of hitch-hiking the continent. I landed in London, circled up to Stockholm. Then flew to Rome, spent a month in Italy. Then to Nice, Barcelona, north to Berlin, and finally Paris, where I flew back to the U. S. I stayed in hostels, slept sometimes on a beach, once in a doorway, a few nights in a guest house owned by someone who gave me a ride.

 

But after the last three years of the pandemic, or six years of threats to our lives, rights, and humanity, such a trip seems like an impossibility, more like a dream or a yearning than an actual memory of a time in my life. How many of us today have the freedom or might risk such a trip? The actual journey changed my life in so many ways, big and small. It revealed depths of history and possibilities of life I hadn’t known, depths in myself, an ability to love, an audacity and courage I hadn’t known before.

 

In the Hague, a woman I had met invited me to see an art exhibit in a gallery where she worked. The paintings were tiny. I don’t remember the exact size but maybe an inch or two square, and of incredible precision and beauty. We needed a magnifying glass to study the depth of detail. I loved it. This was one result of the trip, a love of art. I had expected to be awed by the art of Florence, Rome, and Paris, and was certainly not disappointed in what I saw. But the Hague was an unexpected gift.

 

Ever since then, if I happened to hear about any exhibits like it, I rushed to see them. This led me to discover Japanese netsuke, the 1 – 2 inch carved toggles used to fasten a pocket container to the sash of a kimono. They were made mostly of wood, ivory, or bone. Such art showed how a thing used daily for mundane tasks can be crafted with care and beauty.

 

Many of the etchings of Japanese artists like Norikane Hiroto and Tanaka Ryohei are small, approximately 3 by 4 inches, although they also created larger works. Their art brings us to beautiful rural Japanese landscapes with human dwellings, but no humans. A deep quiet fills everything. Many pieces by both artists are in black and white, while others include color.

 

Norikane doesn’t try to copy nature but lets the power of a place speak. Often in his art, one element stands out over the rest. In one famous piece a snow-capped Mt. Fuji stands powerfully above a village, stream, and bridge.

 

Tanaka’s etchings are so precise and clear, that a sense of great harmony fills the scene. Each detail, each place, awakens us to see how all details and all places fit together. His art reminds me of the line by English poet William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand…”

 

We don’t always know how much attention to give to details. We can easily overdo it, get hooked by one detail and miss the whole ⎼ lose the forest in the individual trees, for example. Or we do the opposite, focus on generalities, and miss out on how each act, in each instance, the details are what pulls the whole together. How the way we choose what to wear in the morning, for example, or brush our teeth, salt, and pepper our food, or take a breath influences our day. We can get lost in what we expect, or think is true, and miss what is staring us in the face….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

Becoming Warriors of Presence

William Butler Yeats wrote over a century ago, in the wake of the First World War,

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

 

We easily feel this today. One minute, I look outside my house and see an apple tree greening with spring and hear a raven’s raucous call. The next a car horn. Then, faintly, an NPR report of a bombed Mariupol, and of a GOP Congresswoman repeating Russian disinformation.

 

Which way does my mind turn? Do I relax into the calm beauty the tree and natural universe provides in this moment? Or do I get ready to battle those aiming to rip the constitutional rights and protections from my limbs and claim them all for themselves? Or who threaten to deny us the very air we need to breathe because we are not able or willing to pay their price?

 

How do we know what future will be revealed? We don’t. But we know the price we’ll pay for doing nothing is unpayable.

 

We all want an enjoyable life. One that satisfies. Maybe one with meaning. That makes the world a little better. But when the natural world itself or the sustainability of the climate is threatened⎼ and the human world is degrading so fast it’s impossible to have any idea what will happen tomorrow or if anything caring, humane, and democratic will be left for us⎼ how do we not burn out or give up? How do we live day to day without degenerating into a blubbering mass, knowing we must act but not knowing what it is we can do?

 

David Loy, Buddhist philosopher, eco-activist and author gave a talk on Friday, April 29th. He spoke about a fellow Buddhist, from Boulder, CO, Wynn Bruce, who had immolated himself on the Supreme Court steps on Earth Day, one week earlier. Wynn’s father said he did it out of concern for our world and the lack of determined action by our political system to save it.

 

Loy quoted philosopher Noam Chomsky saying, “the world is at the most dangerous moment in human history.” How do we face this? Wynn Bruce acted. But his act was so painful and terrifying. Not the most skillful of actions to take, said Loy. But Wynn’s concern, his fear is in all of us who look and see the climate emergency that is occurring.

 

Loy went on to share author, eco-activist Joanna Macy’s piece on the Tibetan legend of a Shambhala Warrior. “There comes a time,” she recounts, “when all lives on earth are in danger.” Barbarian powers use unfathomable technologies to lay waste the world. To remove these weapons, the warriors must show great moral and physical courage, and go forth to the very heart of barbarian power. (Putin? The GOP who plotted Jan 6?)

 

But since the weapons are made by mind, the way to fight them involves mind. Our strongest weapons, she says, are compassion and insight, heart, and knowledge.

 

It seems right now that we can’t look, and we can’t look away. But maybe we’ve got it wrong. Maybe we’re asking the wrong questions….

 

**To read the whole article, go to The Good Men Project.

 

The Mirror, and the Story We Tell About What We See in It

I didn’t want to write this blog, not at first. Writing would mean facing once again what is painful to face. But due to COVID and other factors, here I am.

 

Last week, I started reading Joanna Macy’s 30th Anniversary update of her book, World As Lover, World As Self that was published earlier this year. I think her book has been living inside me for years, but it is only now that I open it. I deeply appreciate the wisdom and practices shared in this book.

 

The book talks about the stories we tell ourselves about this moment we’re living. It reveals many aspects of our lives we might have ignored until COVID and a would-be dictator made them abundantly clear.

 

She uses the image of a mirror, the mirror wisdom of a Buddha which shows us everything just as it is, nothing added or subtracted. And this mirror teaches us how to, “…not look away. Do not avert your eyes. Do not turn aside.” By looking in this mirror we realize the anxiety and fear we feel is the surface layer of our grief for how much of the world is dying. By naming we heal. By looking away the world itself turns away.

 

By looking in the mirror, we tell and make real the story of how to survive and transform a great turning point in history. We discern the path to creating a life-sustaining society that understands in its marrow “we are all in this together.” By averting our eyes, we surrender; we tell and help create a story of unraveling and collapse.

 

We have been witnessing lately appalling contradictions. For example, nurses and other health care workers have been at the front lines of the fight against the COVID pandemic. They have been overworked, often under-equipped and under-paid, facing great stress and trauma. They also face an information or media environment filled with purposeful, politically motivated lies.

 

Many work in crowded nursing homes, or in hospitals where they see a disproportionate rate of suffering from the pandemic amongst Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Many are themselves people of color who have faced all their lives a system of racism.

 

So now many health care workers of whatever race do not want to take what could save their lives and protect their patients, because they believe or have been misled to believe they cannot trust it. So, when the state mandated that all health care workers be vaccinated, they declined, even as that led to them losing their jobs, and we losing their support.

 

Joanna Macy makes clear that we as a society have been ignoring or not seeing clearly how other, crowded work environments like meat-packing-plants are dangerous to workers, cruel to animals, and costly to the climate….

 

We have recognized but not faced directly enough the consequences of enormous, and growing, concentrations of wealth, made worse by the pandemic, and leading to the corporate undermining of democracy and the rule of law, undermining of public schooling, and the degradation of our natural world, the extinction of many species, and the warming of the planet…

 

**To read the whole article, please go to the Good Men Project.

We Are Always in Conversation with the Life that Surrounds and Sustains Us

The world is constantly in conversation, talking with itself, or maybe singing to itself.

 

As I stood in the front yard this morning, gypsy moths by the hundreds fluttered around our trees in the yard. Sunlight bounced off their brownish wings, a blue jay was flying between the moths, leaves dancing with wind, while a car crunched the gravel on the road and a crow cried out. I disliked what the moths represented, the oak, maple, and apple trees stripped bare of leaves. But at that moment, all was different. The air itself felt alive and was speaking.

 

Peter Doobinin, in his book, Skillful Pleasure: The Buddha’s Path for Developing Skillful Pleasure, describes how we can use thought to improve thinking. When we are working on a complex task, or we have an appointment later in the day, we talk ourselves through it or to it. We remind ourselves what we need to do or what time we need to leave our home in order to arrive on time. Likewise, when practicing mindfulness, or maybe anytime, we can remind ourselves to arrive right here, now, to be present, to fully focus on whatever task we undertake, or be aware of the quality of our breathing.

 

For example, before a meeting, or engaging in an important conversation, we might remind ourselves to first stop, take three conscious, deeper breaths. Notice how fast or slow, deep or shallow are our breaths, then our thoughts. Notice how we feel before engaging with others.

 

We use thought not only to arrive on time or complete a task but to construct an idea of ourselves, or an identity. We plan our future, select labels for our character, write mental reviews of past actions as if we were writing a review of a movie or play. Thoughts can pop up so easily.

 

In Buddhism, thought is considered the sixth primary form of consciousness, or sense consciousness, following sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch/feeling; it is closely tied to sense experience. So we need to remember that a thought has a different quality than direct perception. It can weigh a great deal emotionally. It can block or expand our viewpoint, aid or obscure the senses in discerning how completely tied we are to the universe. But when isolated from the senses, thought colors are less brilliant than that of bird wings, flowers, or a sunset.

 

Bruce Chatwin, in his book The Songlines, takes us to the Outback to learn about the First Nation People of Australia and the creator beings who sang the world into existence; song being the original language of people. The original songs are called songlines, or dreaming tracks, and mark the routes followed by creator-beings as they carved the earth during the Dreamtime, or time of creation.

 

But dreaming tracks are not solely about the past. They mark both a where and a when, a time and all time, or the continuous process linking the Aboriginal people to the land and heavens.

According to Wikipedia, a knowledgeable person even today can navigate vast distances, cross deserts and mountains, by singing and following the directions in the songline.

 

In this way, maybe we sing a songline to reach ourselves, or sing ourselves into existence through song.

 

Two metaphors, songs and conversations, or songs as conversations and vice versa. I don’t know which is more apt. We hear the universe singing; we hear the universe in conversation all the time but maybe don’t know exactly what we’re listening to….

 

*To read the whole post, please use this link to The Good Men Project, who published the piece.

 

 

A Traumatized Nation

Even before COVID-19, even before DT, a great number of us were carrying the pain of a trauma. But since the onset of this pandemic in February and March, the pain and suffering has become ubiquitous. Sure, many of us can be relatively safe in our homes, quite content and even happy, and we need such a refuge. But what does it do to us when we can’t stand to hear the news? Or fear leaving our homes? We often think of trauma in terms of individuals. But a whole nation can be traumatized, as we have been at different times in our history, including 9/11 and, for multiple reasons, now.

 

I’m reading a book that has been extremely helpful for me, called Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing by David A. Treleaven. The book has expanded my understanding of my own practice of mindfulness, how to help others, as well as how to better understand this time we are all experiencing.

 

A trauma is an incapacitating form of stress. Stress by itself can be helpful or harmful. But when it is deep and we can’t integrate or face it, it can become traumatic. The DSM-5, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a traumatic event as exposure to “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence.”

 

Treleaven makes clear that this exposure can come in many ways, from directly experiencing or witnessing a trauma or from learning about what happened to a relative, loved one or close friend. Children are especially vulnerable. One in four children in the U. S. have experienced physical abuse, one in five sexual. Then you add war and oppression, whether it be sexism or violence directed at one’s gender identity, race or religion, etc. and you have a huge number of people who have suffered from trauma.

 

There is a spectrum of trauma, of course, a difference in intensity and symptoms. We can feel stressed out or suffer from PTSD. Symptoms can vary from repeating thoughts and memories, to images flooding consciousness, to being cut off or alienated from our own feelings. We can have trouble sleeping or feel our own bodies are booby-trapped.

 

And what happens when we come to fear a person’s maskless face or touching a surface in a public place? Or we don’t know how we can feed our family or if we will be thrown out of our homes? What happens when our social-economic-political worlds are being destroyed, our rights ripped away, and people who look like us are killed by police without being held accountable? All while the water we drink and the air we breathe is poisoned?

 

Mindfulness Practice:

 

One way to begin is with mindfulness practice. Mindfulness is both a present centered awareness of whatever is going on with us as well as a practice that develops self-regulation. Traditional mindfulness and meditation is based on a deep understanding of the causes of, and ways to relieve, human suffering. It teaches us how to study our conditioned responses to stimuli as well as our own sensations, thoughts and feelings so we can interrupt ones that lead to suffering.

 

Mindfulness usually helps me with any problem I face, even when I am ill or frightened. In fact, for the first few years after I learned how to meditate, I would only do it when I had a headache or felt sick or stressed. I had headaches frequently. Then I realized if I did it every day, maybe the headaches would stop. And they did….

 

**To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Memories Are More Like Stories or Myths than Numbers or Files

It is easy to think our memories are simple and accurate representations of reality, that they are like files that we put away in our mind for times when we need them, or like a bank for safekeeping the past moments of our lives. If we want memories to be a resource to utilize, we have to trust them.

 

But in fact, memories can change. Research shows that every time we access them, they are influenced by or adapt to the situation in which they appear. They are somewhat fluid. So how do we trust them if they change?

 

As we age, it’s not just our memories that change, but everything else about us, our bodies, thoughts, emotions. Memory is complex and there are many different types, mostly depending on how we “store” and “retrieve” them.  I am thinking of long term, autobiographical or declarative (meaning facts or episodes of past events that can be ‘declared,’ spoken about or replayed) memory.

 

Maybe memories are more like myths or stories than numbers or files and they guide us in both obvious and more subtle ways.  One memory I have is from 1970, but I am not sure about anything from this time except the broad details.  I hitch-hiked from New York City to Berkeley, California, and  back. It was soon after I returned from the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and was trying to figure out what to do with my life.

 

Sometime early in the trip I met a yoga instructor in Berkeley. I thought of him as almost a mythical being who seemed to flow through life in tune with the world, and I started to pick this up from him. Synchronous events or meaningful coincidences happened frequently while I was there. By chance, I ran into someone from college, who had been in the theatre group I was once part of, and we spent a wonderful afternoon together. I met and stayed with one cousin and by chance ran into another. Whatever I needed, I found.

 

One day, I decided to hitch-hike to Mendocino to find a woman who I had grown up with. All I knew about where she lived was that she was living in a commune and that there were communes in Mendocino. I got a ride to a small town most of the way to my destination. But then nothing. No cars, no rides.

 

I was beginning to think my whole plan was crazy. How could I imagine I could just set off without knowing my destination and just arrive there? Then a car stopped on the opposite side of the road. A woman emerged from the car with a small backpack and soon put out her thumb. After maybe a half hour, we looked at and smiled to each other. I crossed the road and we started to chat.

 

She asked where I was going, and I told her I was looking for a friend named Susi (not her real name) who was living in a commune somewhere in or near Mendocino. She said she lived in a commune in the area. A housemate of hers, named Susi, had just left for New York to meet up with a friend who had just returned from the Peace Corps. Me.

 

Just then a car stopped for her. She told me the name and location of the commune and then left with her ride. I eventually got to the commune, stayed for a few days, and then returned to Berkeley. It took a few months before Susi and I got together….

 

To read the whole post, go to The Good Men Project.