Embedded Files
Website for Morning Star and Wheeler's Ranches
by Sophie Strand:
Here is the Fool. Joyful. Gem-eyed. Striding forth. Young. In the original Italian decks, he was most often called Le Mat/Il Matto which means the Madman, indicating that his enthusiasm exists outside patriarchy. It is the wild laughter of the Green Man whose home is in the woods, whose feral presence calls our own hygienic, house-bounded ruts into question. He is typically illustrated as a minstrel or vagabond, and is barefoot in some of the earliest versions of the card. Animals follow after him, nipping at his legs. And he is in the process of leaping from solid ground. The Fool is always on the precipice. His most dominant trait to me is kineticism. His head is raised, his arm outstretched. And he is stepping into the void, straddling air and land, the solidity of the known and the unknown. Will his secret parachute bloom? Will he grow wings? Or is the drop below into soft moss? Where will he land? Into the Tarot itself, into the shape and pace of a fresh journey. As theTarot Zero, the first and unnumbered card of the , the Fool stands outside of linear time. Some have posited that the Fool is the whole deck, an image of pleroma, the zero acting less as a nullity and more as an embrace for the other 77 cards. In my attempt to “root” the Tarot in ecology, I always think of the Fool as a spore. Mushrooms reproduce through the release of spores, scintillas of dust mostly invisible to the human eye. When the right alchemical blend of temperature, water, and nutritional matrix is available, the spores germinate and begin to probe outwards with hyphae, inquisitive single-celled threads. Mycologist David Arora estimates that some fungi can liberate up to 30 billion spores a day, amounting to an output of over 5 trillion a year. Mushrooms can release spores with enough force that they can land many inches away from their origin. It has been estimated that the force with which mushrooms eject spores is 25,000 g’s, or 10,000 times the force undergone by astronauts as they exit the gravitational pull of Earth’s orbit. Spores also float on the air currents, sometimes, inconceivably, traveling hundreds of miles to other ecosystems. They hitch a ride in the fur of animals and the hair of human beings. They nestle into the guts of owls, the feathers of birds, that fly from forest to forest, scattering these genetic kernels into the moist undergrowth. Insects carry spore covered material back to their hives and colonies. These germinating spores fuse hyphae to form an initial “dikaryon”, vibrating with multiple outcomes: mycelial mats form dense interconnected hyphae, mycorrhizal fungi can spread across a forest, acting like a nourishing lace of starlight between plants and trees. Saprophytic fungi lands in refuse and begins to liberate minerals and nutrients, creating a layer of fertile soil. And of course, invisible spores can perform that magic trick of matter, producing something huge and obvious out of an “empty hat”: obvious, often edible, mushrooms. The spore is a zero of possibility, a pleroma of genetic ingenuity and life force, something Robin Wall Kimmerer explains is called Puhpowee by the Potawatomi nation to describe the energy with which mushrooms emerge overnight and the unseen energies that animate everything. If the Fool represents anything to me it is Puhpowee. Happiness is an act of bravery. To tell a new story, we must jump off the cliff of an old one. The Fool shows me that I’m not wedded to one option. I can practice multiplicity, and ride each of the 30 billion spores to a different narrative, a different possible future. The Fool is the glitter bomb of spores from a mushroom that is wildly, devotedly, betting on the world’s ability to provide a womb, a home, an embrace for fungal offspring. Further References: Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, In Search of Mycotopia by Doug Bierend.
Zero Crowned King of Fools
Zero Crowned King of Fools
I'm A Voluntary Simpleton
I'm A Voluntary Simpleton
I'm A Voluntary Simpleton!
A Little Nothing
by Zero
1977
updated February, 2006
I am a fool. A voluntary simpleton. By sheer perseverance and some good luck, I stumbled upon my true identity in 1966 at the age of 32. To be honest, it didn't involve any great effort. All I had to do was clear out my head of accumulated cross talk and listen to what my inner voice -- God -- my higher self -- was saying.
What it said was, "You're a fool, but I love you."
What wonderful news! For years I had been trying to act like everyone else, earn love amd respect from others, to say the right words at the right times, to impress my friends and relatives with my intellectual prowess. What a waste of energy and time! At last I could be just my normal, natural, simple old self and the rest would be given unto me!
Where had those inner words come from? Was it God or the silent right half of my brain talking? But like an idiot I didn't concern myself with digging into the source of the remark but believed what it said. I dropped my job and city life and wandered off into the northern California countryside to talk to the trees and squirrels, like any simpleton would do. And I knew I was on the right path because it was the most impractical and senseless thing I could do.
Money had always been a nagging worry that had tied me to the city, wasting my life on meaningless jobs. I had recently received a small inheritance that brought in about a thousand dollars a year. That should be enough for a simpleton, I thought. And if I made the grade and became truly foolish I could just rely on Mama Earth to provide what I needed. Just like the blue jays and raccoons. So read on for an idiot's guide to life and the pursuit of happiness. This way, please, for the real thing and not what they demonstrate on TV.
I hiked up to Mount Tamalpais across the Golden Gate Bridge and found an isolated grove where I could take off all my clothes and laugh and sing. Oops! A forest ranger. Back on go the pants. Yessir? Funny me? Trespassing? Here? Hm, that's odd, I thought I was on friendly territory named Planet Earth. Wrong planet, Bub? See you later!
Lesson Number One: public property is guarded by people who are convinced they know what is best for it. Until I had perfected my invisibility, I had better practice on some friendly person's land. I hiked back down the mountain and called up a friend who had an empty ranch up north. "Sure, why not?" he said. "Be my guest! Maybe I'll join you in a week or two!"
From the moment I walked up the front driveway I knew I had found paradise. Redwood groves beckoned as their branches stirred in the breeze. The apple orchard was in full bloom. Singing and laughing, I rolled in the grass with the one-year-old terrier who had accompanied me. I tried to decipher the ancient messages inscribed on the rocks by the brook. They seemed to be in some sort of elfin script and the general tenor seemed friendly.
I moved into the old farmhouse and settled down to absorbing nature's lessons- As a student I was way below average. I had been in the city so long that I was hooked on houses and toilets and telephones and gas stoves. And each of these amenities locked me back in to the society-at-large. That couldn't be right, I thought. Raccoons don't make long distance calls. Rabbits don't need credit ratings. But I was still too dumb to see the solution, even though I was plonked right in the middle of it.
Finally the guardian angel of simpletons took pity on me and sent me teachers. Some friends of mine arrived and set up a camp in the apple orchard. Of course! I saw my first mistake at once! The house had been empty so I had moved in. That night I dragged my blankets under an overhanging oak downhill from my bedroom where the morning sun would awaken me first thing as it cleared the eastern hills.
Another friend showed up. He had an advanced degree in hobo-ing, having slept along country roads for years. One evening I found him cooking supper in an old coffee can over a fire so small I could cover it with one hand. Fire! That's what I needed. It would cook my food and keep me warm. Another friend moved in and taught me the equation for making friends with everything expressed by the equation = = = . Equal equals equal. As long as you approach another being on the same level as his own, friendly communication is almost sure to follow. But the moment you rank yourself higher or lower than be-she, the 'pecking order' reflex comes into play. Before you know it, he's equalizing you by biting out the seat of your pants and any chance for conversation is lost. I immediately went out to practice and made lots of new friends. Three redwoods, a bay laurel, a lizard, two flies and some blue jays who were interested but were reserving judgment until they saw more of me.
By now there were five of us humans at the ranch, me and my four teachers. They taught me to bathe in the brook and collect my water there. Together we built an Indian-style steam bath and sat in the darkness beside a pile of hot rocks sweating the impurities out of our bodies and minds as we chanted the sun over the horizon. What luck, I thought. A whole college is growing up around me just because I'm such a simpleton!
I discovered my body once I got rid of my clothes. The air caressed my skin as I ran naked along the paths. The friendly soil massaged my bare feet and I could feel things inside I had never felt before. All those years I had been stuffed up into my head! How ridiculous! I was not just my head! I was this heart that I now could feel beating in my chest, and the owner of numerous orifices each of which could do the most amazing things.
Songs would come to me as I lay in the dappled light of the redwood grove and I sang them with relish, simple songs that only a simpleton would sing:
Just where you are
Is the nicest place to be.
Just where you are
Earth touches eternity.
Just where you are
The sun shines on the tree.
And where you are
Is never far
From me.
By the following spring there were about thirty of us at the ranch. I welcomed everyone as another faculty member. This was the beginning of the summer of 1967, and word soon spread around the Haight-Ashbury that we were an open-door commune. As the place filled up with wall-to-wall hippies, I built myself a little platform under the oak tree. Sure were a lot of teachers showing up, I thought, and some of them seemed almost as simple as I was. But by then I was very involved in a sun-gazing seminar being held in the redwood grove, an advanced course under the tutelage of two golden beings, solar angels who were initiating me into the marvels of a long-forgotten technique for surviving on sunshine alone. I had to learn to balance the inner and outer lights until they merged into one and "I" disappeared. Whenever I was successful, it seemed I no longer even needed to breathe! One of my teachers, the owner of the ranch who by now was also living there, found me sort of breathless one day and offered to do the Hindu breathing exercises called Pranayama with me. So every noontime we gathered outside his renovated chicken shed to inhale through one nostril at a time.
Later that year I discovered that I could stand naked in the foggy dawn and heat myself up by slowing down my breathing. My breathing reflex fought back and it took a concentrated effort not to gasp for air. The friction created by the struggle warmed me to the point that sweat would begin to drip from my armpits. Is this how bears stay warm? I wondered. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could learn to do what bears did! Of course only a simpleton like myself would consider animals his teachers. I watched my dog bark. It seemed a way to massage into nothingness the empty feeling that fear created in her stomach. One sleepless night, a cat taught me how to purr. By morning I was able to purr both in and out, vibrating my chest with low rumbles, but I had to smile to make it work. It made my arms and legs tingle, and I adopted it as a way to relax tensions whenever they accumulated.
As winter returned, I moved from the platform into a wooden tipi behind the barn. It had been built by a young man from Germany who later chanted himself into Krishna Consciousness. We lost a number of teachers from the Chanting Department to Krishna that year. It was the only organized Hindu religious trip around at that time. The tipi leaked during the rains so I hung a tarpaulin over the bed. A large plastic window allowed the sun to warm the inside, a cozy place to spend afternoons.
But it was the Sheriff's Department I had to thank for graduating me from living 'visibly'. There had already been a number of arrests for violations of an injunction that a local judge had placed on the ranch to keep people from living there. The cops began inspecting almost daily the following April, and we had to stay out of sight or face arrest for Contempt Of Court. One neighbor, who considered himself an expert on how to adjust young people to society, had convinced the authorities we were a public nuisance. Oh, the merry chases through the early morning mists in the orchard, rotten apples squishing under bare feet! At night, I curled up in a baby aspen grove on a pile of leaves and awakened to the sunlight dripping gold through the branches while the birds sang overhead. It was the best bed yet! And I was disappearing more and more!
As the county continued its early morning forays against the ranch faculty, a sympathetic neighbor offered his three-hundred-acre ranch as a refuge ten miles to the west. It was hard for me to move. I felt like civilization was running me off my native habitat, but after a few warnings from the cops and having the injunction read to me as I lay half-awake in my bower, I decided the time had come to try out our new sanctuary. I had learned so much from those first two years! My body had lost its city flab. I was tan and healthy, slim and strong.
At my new home, I found an untenanted hillside with a tiny earthen-floor burrow under a blackberry bush. Almost at once I began learning many more important lessons. First and foremost, I learned how flush toilets had messed up my eliminative system for years without my realizing it. They were the cause of the hemorrhoids that had plagued me ever since childhood. They disappeared over the next months as I started squatting to relieve myself and, in the process, I also discovered my true simpletonish purpose for my life. I was a portable fertilizer factory designed by trees for their own benefit! With a posthole digger I would dig a hole next to the selected recipient of my bounty and offer the glorious waste products of my body to its roots. A few shovelfuls of dirt and I would replace the turf the way I found it.
By then I had become adept at the Yoga of Invisibility, again thanks to my teachers, the cops and the county health and building inspectors. I made sure the path to my hobbit-hole dead-ended a hundred or so feet up the hillside at a deserted campsite. I walked logs for the last leg of my journey home and kept my living area looking as uninhabited as possible. My hovel's canvas roof I piled high with brush and branches so county snoopers wouldn't spot it on their frequent fly-overs.
When a dear friend arrived to live on the next hillside, we went out together to scrounge lumber to build him a house. For about fifty dollars, we scored two two-ton truckloads from which we pulled the nails carefully, straightening them for re-use. What a pleasure to recycle throwaways into an attractive bungalow! He was a musician and brought me an old autoharp one day. I found if I only tuned one chord on it, I could play a drone that set all the neighborhood birds singing, especially if I tuned it to the wind in the treetops. Another autoharp came by and then another until I had four all tuned to the same chord. Anyone two years old and up could easily play them, because there wasn't a wrong note anywhere in sight. We had many jam sessions out in the woods. There just weren't any wrong notes available anywhere!
I began to keep chickens for their eggs as well as their company. I built a homemade bench beside their pen where I could watch my 'country TV' as I called them. I sure learned a lot about pecking orders! With milk from the community cows, seasonal wild berries and nuts and the bounty of the community garden, there was little I needed to buy except grain. As more and more people arrived at the ranch, we began to pool our food orders into bulk amounts for our own Food Conspiracy. For five dollars a week I had everything I needed -- and I was too much of a simpleton to need more than the simplest things.
For those of us living there, we were experiencing a gradual process of retribalization. If it hadn't been disturbed and finally destroyed by outside social pressures out of our control, we would have recreated a tribal lifestyle similar to that of the original inhabitants of the coastal ridges, the Miwok and Pomo Indians. But those were the years of the Vietnam War, of drugs and runaway children. And some neighbors were truly terrified of what we were doing. Again the county closed in with inspectors and police. The first big raid left the community numb with disbelief. Our tranquil paradise had been overrun by dozens of armed men! We felt like a Vietnam village that had just been raped by soldiers, although of course our hardships were mild echoes of the intense sufferings and body counts in Southeast Asia. Our only casualty had been the ranch owner who had been hit over the head with a pair of handcuffs by an MP when he got between the officers and a sixteen-year-old runaway girl to advise her of her right to remain silent. He spit a mouthful of his own blood over the soldier and then lit out across the meadow with eight cops after him. In the ensuing pile-up, his brother-in-law tried to pull a few deputies off him. They both had been busted on felonious assault charges. After months of court appearances, the charges were dropped to a misdemeanor.
By now, even a simpleton like myself had to realize that destructive forces in our nation classified us as outlaws. They wanted to close us down and drag us back into the status quo, just like they had done with the Native American tribes. Why did they fear the tribal lifestyle? It was at this point I decided I would have to learn how to write. Somebody had to tell the story of what was happening to us in the hope that out there, somewhere, people would rally to our aid. Our way of life was so simple and therapeutic, so healing to those homeless wanderers who made it down the two-mile dirt road to our open front gate. Scowling newcomers would experience a rebirth in just a few days of quiet living with us. No one told them what to do. Our only rules were
1) no dogs - we were in sheep country
2) harmlessness towards all life
3) no outdoor fires during fire season
4) bury your shit.
Otherwise the place made no demands and allowed a natural process of decompression to take place. Just the walking necessary to fetch food, water and firewood was a renewal for bodies grown stiff from lack of exercise.
Couldn't the county officials see we were performing a public service? Surely they must understand the axioms that underlay our life together. Even the most hard-nosed city folk went away into the wilderness for a couple of weeks of vacation every year, just to recharge their spirits. But even a simpleton like me had to realize that no, that wasn't so. We were being classified as transients and undesirables who somehow had escaped the confines of our urban zoos. Just our smelly presence brought down the market value of the surrounding properties. Here are a few sentences from the pamphlet I wrote at that time, with the help of some other folks:
'The more complex a society becomes, the more important it is to allow people to return to ancestral ways whenever the stresses and strains of modern living begin to drive them crazy. Conditioned by their fast, competitive culture to unnatural living rhythms, Americans find themselves falling sick and dying from a dis-eased society. Voluntary Primitivism is the natural way to ease off. Our parents called it 'getting away from it all' but they usually got back one month later to the serious business of breathing poisoned air, eating synthetic foods and raising troubled children, acts which, if they were conscious, could only be called acts of self-destroying despair.
'Instead, why not explore out common heritage, a simple shelter, a garden, some goats or a cow? Also some chickens and plenty of fresh air and sunshine. You don't need more than that to be happy and if you have more, it'll probably make you sick.
'Have you ever breathed into your lungs the early dawn air of a garden or grove? You can feel the oxygen tingling through every cell. Your pores seems to breathe in energies so fine, so pure, that they penetrate to the very source of your being. Listen to your body. It tells you how it likes to live. And mine tells me that to be happy and healthy, I must have around me the sun, pure air, growing things and silence. How quickly I take these for granted when I have them, and yet with what relief I return to them again! Silence. Peace.'
Instead of peace, we got war. The county continued its depredations against us until a few years and many court cases later, the bulldozers arrived and sixty homes were destroyed. But times change, although sometimes so painfully slow! The Vietnam War ended and a war-weary nation threw a corrupt President out of office. In California, we elected a new governor willing to listen to what the younger generation was saying and he pushed through a 'cabin class' listing in the building code that could legalize some of our hobbity homes. As the 'seventies ripened into the Bicentennial Year, the nation's polarization softened and a flame of hope was rekindled. Maybe things really were getting bette! Maybe we could still avoid the various environmental catastrophes that threatened us. For us ranch refugees, there seemed a certain poetic irony in the events of those years. The gasoline shortage and then the California drought suddenly awakened everyone to the need of finding a low-consuming lifestyle. It seemed as if inch by painful inch, the whole of American society was being forced to adopt a way of life similar to the one we had practiced together -- or at least look at it more closely.
In the process of trying to defend myself and my tribe, I had once more become a complex and less natural creature. Just the demands of learning how to write forced me out of the groves and gardens, back inside behind a typewriter. But I was determined to do whatever was necessary to get the message across. As it turned out, the time wasn't quite that ripe. As a nation we still remained in shock from the bitter encounters of the Sixties. The Back-To-The-Land Movement, once labeled and pigeonholed, could be sneered at as 'mere escapism' and its adherents accused of turning their backs on the problems of urban blight. Through the eighties-nineties it remained out of fashion, along with communes and tribes. Perhaps it was just as well, because the media's interest in them had created most of their problems.
As for myself, I first found a few quiet acres where I hoped to spend my days. I dove back into the economic flow and tried to create a living writing novels and articles -- and also sidewalk-clowning in the city. I belatedly had recalled the voice that had told me I was a fool -- but how far I had wandered from that original insight! I decided to chant the first five digits of my Social Security number to discover my true clown name: "Zero Three One Two Eight-Zero Three One Two Eight-Zero Three One Two Eight-Zero Three One Two Eight" -- Zero The Wunderweight! or perhaps "Zero The One To Wait?" I sure had been waiting long enough it seemed, but I guess I had to wait some more.
As an accordion-playing clown, I was somewhat more in demand than on Publishers Row, but I could and did write some novels, and this essay. Just a renegade raccoon turned human turned clown turned author, not out of choice but out of several necessities. But in all of my writing, the same message kept coming through. Some day I hope to write it well enough so that what I've been trying to say for so long will be heard.
Today (even in the 1970s -- how much more so in 2006!) we live in a No-Exit culture in which the options for the poor majority are more severely limited than in the good old 1850 days of cheap land and an open frontier. Without some sort of frontier, some sort of escape valve when Consensus Reality doesn't work for you and the cops are on your tail, there is no hope. They are gonna getcha! Without hope, people are condemned to lives of treadmill dreariness and despair. We have to turn inwards to discover new frontiers of the spirit rather than heading out for the uncharted badlands. Somehow we have to build that frontier option back into our lives. Maybe it won't happen until we migrate into space. But maybe, through what is now called Voluntary Simplicity, we'll find a way to allow each other to become simpletons whenever necessary. I hope so, as I would like to live on a planet that's been listed as safe, even for loonies like myself!
Novelist's Logbook
Novelist's Logbook
Novelist's Logbook
1980
by Ramón Sender Barayón
This is a time line for how my hippie novel, ZERO WEATHER, came into being. Keep in mind that I’m seated on a barstool, writing on an Olympia Electric. I can’t abide a short page, so I always retype the whole chapter.
February 1977: Two years full time behind the typewriter, two novels completed and nothing but a drawerful of rejections slip. What am I doing wrong? I join a Sonoma County writers' workshop at the Junior College. The first meeting convinces me I have a captive audience of thirty. Hungry for feedback, I hurry home to begin ZERO WEATHER, a future fantasy about psychic terrorists and the upcoming 1980's Ice Age. The initial idea grew out of an evening playing the add-a-sentence game with friends: 'The President of The United States stood in the Oval Office transformed into a giraffe.' Not bad for a first sentence!
March 1977: Everything's going great! One hundred pages finished and the rest outlined. The garden is overrun with weeds, my roof leaks, but so what? Magically, whatever I read or hear feeds the book.
April 1977: I have a one-hundred-thousand-word first draft, a sore rear end and no friends. The teacher
Geetz permits me to Xerox four free copies. They are read by my classmates and returned with written comments. They like it!
May, 1977: I just finished six weeks on a second draft incorporating readers' suggestions and send a copy to a Harper & Row editor I know in New York. It comes rebounding back to my mailbox as if attached to by a bungee band.
June 1977: I have a 450-page third draft incorporating all my recent insights into the arcane art of storytelling, which I aim at Doubleday's man in the Bay Area, Luther Nichols. He launched Another Roadside Attraction, to which I feel kindred. Imagine my heart palpitations when I receive the following reply: 'I've read the first hundred pages and love it. Don't sell it to anyone else until I get back to you.' His letter excites me so much that I begin a sequel with the working title NOTHING IN PARTICULAR. Today his second letter came: 'Well, there are problems in the second half but they're not insurmountable.' He continues for three more pages outlining suggested changes. I tool up for draft number four but, to keep him hot, send him the first draft of NOTHING IN PARTICULAR, which comes back with a long critique, perhaps summed up by his comment on the title: 'Change it. It's too apt.'
July, 1977: ZERO WEATHER number four has been in my editor's hands for two weeks and today I receive another lengthy response: 'Good, you've improved some of the rambling episodes but still...' A long list of new suggestions follow and they are good ones. This is my man! Behind every great writer must stand en editor of his stature!
August 1977: In rewrite number five, my laid-back hero finds a job and I trim out a main character in my cast of fifty. I hand-deliver it to my counselor because I want to see his face. It's everything I have imagined, compassionate, creased by his concern for his authors. I drive back to my cabin with his invitation to a future editorial lunch tinkling in my ears. I send another copy to a New York agent and follow it up with an office visit during an East Coast family trip. Yes, he will try to sell it for me! And I hear from my Doubleday editor. He will take ZERO WEATHER to New York himself! I have done all I can, he tells me. The rest is up to the publisher.
September 1977: Damn if he isn't turned down! Somebody in Doubleday's upper echelons hates my hero. Maybe I will add an old school tie child molester with whom Madison Avenue publishers can identify... No. I'll wait on my agent.
October 1977: Bantam likes it, but -'no.' Avon nibbles hard but my agent can't set the hook and they drift off with a few compliments to the author. St. Martin's Press thinks it's too flakey for consideration. This is getting serious. The hell with New York mega-conglomerates! I'll find a local California publisher and allow The Biggies to drown in their own bile.
February 1978: Five more East Coast rejections and my agent returns his copy with a snippy quote from Random House: 'Maybe best as it stands in a small local edition.'
Una and Delia down the road are starting their own company to launch Una's book about living with a cow entitled SO FINE BOVINE. Delia's hair springs out in all directions and her sapphire eyes see — zim-zam! — right through me. Sort of a California Katharine Hepburn. Una is elegant, even in blue jeans. Her dark, limpid eyes dart about missing nothing and her tapered fingernails are always painted a wonderful color. She just finished reading ZERO WEATHER and loves it. Not only would they be glad to publish it, but are honored to do so! "It's super!" she raves. "We'll sell a million copies!" Ah, such bag balm to the author's wounded udder!
May 1978: Shall we do a pre-publication edition of three hundred just as it stands or an editorially trimmed 2500 first printing? I'll go for the three hundred as is and oversee the whole job myself. Sweet Velveeta, our local diamond-fingered typist and a sultry Latin beauty, is on vacation but her roommate starts hammering away at a sixth draft, one-and-a-half spaced, that will reduce to book size on a Xerox. I draw pictures on every chapter head and design a front cover with all the main characters in a hot tub.
July 1978: Suddenly there's a money bind. After paying the typist, Delia has only two hundred dollars left for the project. The local Copymat will allow me 49 copies for that price if I do everything myself. Their monster 9300 copier-collator has the chew-ups so I have to hand-feed each page and check the collating by eye. One week later I have 49 spiral-bound books and a nervous tic in one eyelid.
Winter, 1978: Reader feedback is encouraging. People mention it to me in town and the copies remain in circulation. In fact, only five come back. Good!
Spring, 1979: What's going on? Nothing's moving on ZERO WEATHER. I keep myself occupied writing a series of novellas for young adults.
Summer, 1979: Absolute doldrums.
August 1979: I sit down with Delia for a sentence-by-sentence edit. Over the next three months, we do the whole book. I accept about eighty percent of her suggestions, mainly involving sentence structure and general flow.
"Would a dummy understand this?" she often asks.
More often than not, I have to agree that no, a dummy would have nodded off just at that point. A cram course in crispness is what I need and what I get.
November 1979: I give ZERO WEATHER its seventh retype and it drops close to fifty pages. Scenes I once considered essential drift to the studio floor. Anything, anything to get the blessed thing out of the birth canal. Even radical surgery!
December 1979: "Congratulations!" Delia says on the day we finish proofing the new draft. "See, it didn't hurt a bit!" She hugs me. "Now Una will read it and then off to Velveeta for camera-ready copy."
But Rose is unavailable. She is caught up in an emotional badminton game with two lovers — both named Charlie — and is incommunicado on the beaches of Maui. When she does return, tan and relaxed, I hand over my one copy of the final draft.
"I'm reading excerpts at Garbo's bar at our local writers' Open Mike evenings," I tell her. "Don't keep it long."
"I'm a quick read," Una assures me. "Don't worry."
January 1980: I have to ask for the manuscript back. I'm scheduled for a full-length reading and my listeners are clamoring for more ZERO WEATHER. Bright and early one morning, Una comes into my cabin — I am still in bed. She drops the manuscript on the table and races out.
"It's great — wonderful — terrific!" she shouts from the driveway. I decide the time has come to shell out another thirty dollars on a copy for Velveeta. I deliver it to her and confer on format, typeface and size.
"Good," she says. "I'll get to it right away."
Two days later I phone Velveeta to discover that her expensive IBM was stolen the previous night during supper. Just like that! Oh Lord! I pray for guidance and The Great Storyteller In The Sky hears me. The IBM reappears at the foot of her driveway but its delicate innards have sustained seven hundred dollars' worth of damage. Plans are made for a benefit to raise the sum. Mainland Charlie, a metalworker, welds a burglar-proof cage to secure the IBM to the desk in Velveeta's studio, a refurbished toolshed whose door is unlockable.
I will take up a more rewarding art form, I decide. Perhaps I'll paint watermelon slices on Masonite and antique them in my oven.
One day later, Delia phones to explain that Una has not read our final draft after all. She was sidetracked when Maui Charlie arrived unexpectedly while she was entertaining Mainland Charlie’s parents. He hangs around for the rest of the winter. I go over a number of times to the ranch where Una and Delia and Cow live to find Una in bed with Maui Charlie while Mainland Charlie sits slumped on the Main House porch with a sour expression. I try to find something cheery to say. He might be growing horns, but I'm walking around duck-fashion with a half-born novel hanging out of me.
February 1980: I convince an artist friend to work on a color cover, which turns out just right. Also, I plunge into writing another novel with total determination. The hell with all editors and romantic triangles!
April 1980: Una phoned to say that Maui Charlie has returned to paradise and she is editing the manuscript. Could I come over? We have a number of sessions and make some small but vital improvements. When we finish, the manuscript has been so marked up that I spend a few days shriveling my nose hairs with correction fluid flumes to neaten it. At last! Ready for Velveeta! I drive over only to find she is on the verge of the fifth of a series of foot operations. At least it isn't her hands, I tell her. Okay. Another few days won't kill me.
One week later, Velveeta returns from the hospital with her foot in a cast. She attends a now-legendary publishing party at Basso's eatery in Freestone arranged by Delia who has been swept away by Basso's lasagna and has invited everyone to a feed. Finding the room a trifle warm, Delia strips to the waist, throwing her jersey casually over her shoulders and blithely ignoring the pop-eyed stares of two fishermen at the bar.
"We're all family in here, aren't we?" she inquires. "More champagne for everyone!"
Una and Mainland Charlie leave in a huff without saying anything. Two male friends help decant Delia into her buggy before taking Velveeta home where, for some reason Velveeta can't remember, they all end up in bed together. The spectacle they present Velveeta's steady when he appears sends him away out of sorts and, later, in an ensuing discussion of the event, Velveeta's roundhouse swing connects not with her sweetie's chin but with the doorjamb. Now her hand is in a cast. Well, maybe she can type one-handed.
May 1980: Delia, Una and I get a look at the typed first chapter. We all agree it doesn't track. Una wants a slick-slick edition that will scintillate on supermarket shelves. We need a typesetter. A series of phone calls to the city turns up Clarinda who drives to the editorial ranch, gingerly skirting cowpies, and show us type styles and a sample page.
June 1980: Clarinda delivers the galleys. Wow! They look terrific! I sit down that evening for a quick run-through. The typos average three a page. Awkward sentences semaphore and I find myself making a few — just a few — author's corrections. Around midnight, panic strikes. Too many 'then's!' They have to go, even if I pay for the changes myself!
Three days later I read the book aloud to a writer friend, commas, hyphens, the works. It takes twenty hours but it's worth it for the mistakes we find.
July 1980: Back to the typesetter's, then back to us. More problems, including a lengthy argument with Clarinda about how to divide words at the end of lines. Clarinda quotes Webster's to me, I quote Strunk, page 31, to her. By paste-up time, the bill is way over three thousand dollars and ZERO WEATHER's budget has been blown.
"Never mind," Una say, patting my arm. "I've got a shitload of Mendocino’s finest ready for market that'll put us over the top."
"I think I'm moving to the city," I reply. "I can't bootstrap a literary career from the backwoods. What with OPEC's driving up gas prices, I can't even afford to drive to my writers' workshop anymore. Also, my woman friend's tired of living with a creature that goes 'clack-clack-clack, bzzzz-ding!' all day long. She wants to be single again and enter roller-skating marathons."
September 15, 1980: My share-rental at the top of the hill in Daly City, made famous by Matthews' TV ads, is a lucky find. It's a peaceful pocket inside a snarl of freeways and arterials. My housemate has dropped out of a local yoga commune. He collects old editions of H. Rider Haggard – and cats. We're compatible. One week ago I boxed up the book, cover and all, and shipped it Blue Label Express to Menasha, Wisconsin. It will run on a huge Web press that prints, binds and packs without the intervention of human hands. A month from now ZERO WEATHER will emerge shrink-wrapped in units of four, forty to a box, to stun the literary world.
December 15, 1980: Somewhere in the Christmas-stuffed U.S. postal system there are two advance copies of my book, mailed a week ago. I consider hunting down my postman on the streets but instead I drive north to check on my cabin and see friends. Delia phones me at my old studio from her new typesetter's in Santa Rosa. "We got six copies in the mail today!" she shouts. "It looks wonderful!"
We arrange to meet at Steve and Rene's who have invited me to supper. The first real winter storm is tearing through the treetops and dumping rain by the bucketload. My old hermitage looks forlorn and dusty. The roof leaks. Memories of my five years there and of the woman who shared them with me tangle in my thoughts like cobwebs.
At Steve and Rene's, the phone rings. It's Delia.
"We're running late," she says. "Can you meet us at Basso's Eatery?"
I slosh through the downpour to my truck. Water is seeping in my windows and the city shoes I'm wearing leak. Funny how quickly I've forgotten how to drive these country roads. Once I knew every pothole and curve by heart. At Basso's I park by the gas pump and run for cover.
Delia is standing by the counter beside her two older children. Her husband Moses is playing the pinball machine.
"Look, look!" she shouts and pulls out a copy of ZERO WEATHER, shiny and crisp.
I try to concentrate on the book in my hands but she's hugging and kissing me, her arms around my neck.
"Everybody loves it," she says. "The cover didn't turn out as we thought it would, but we've decided we like it."
"It's beautiful," I murmur, riffling the pages. I heft it. "My God, it's our baby!"
"Champagne!" Lela orders. She presses the book into the startled grip of the grizzled dairyman seated beside her. "It's our new book," she tells him. "Doesn't it look great?"
He smiles and nods, pleased to be included.
Moses, grey hair and beard framing his smile in a fuzzy aureole, comes over to hug me. He accepts a glass of bubbly and we toast the event. "We've got to go, Delia," he says. "We're hours late to pick up Mandy."
"Let's talk soon," I say to Delia. "We've got to plan the distribution."
"And a book party," she adds, pouring more champagne in my glass. Lightheaded from the momentousness of it all, I drive back to the city. I realize it's only the beginning of a new adventure. Within two weeks there will be cartons and cartons of ZERO WEATHERs to be sold, review copies to be mailed and distributors to be convinced.
"I'm ready," I mutter. After all, there are now six more novels in my filing cabinet.
NOTE: Within the month -- in fact almost to the day that the books are delivered -- Una and Delia split their publishing venture in two halves because of irreconcilable differences. Delia has my book half, but shortly tells me that she knows nothing about marketing and distribution. “Take them all!” she says with a grand sweep of her hand. “They’re all yours!”
What teensy distribution my book receives is all due to my roaming the Bay Area dropping copies on consignment into bookstores. I immediately lose track of who has how many, and never go back to check. A year later, Una encounters some serious problems with some vegetable-matter-growing agency. She and Mainland Charlie go underground to avoid the contract placed on her sweet self, and Delia decides to think more seriously about a Master's Degree in Counseling. Thus I am permanently elevated, reluctantly, to new and challenging roles as sole proprietor, promoter, distributor and accounting department for my novel. As the years progress, I modulate to non-fiction via a family memoir about my Spanish mother ("A Death In Zamora", University of New Mexico Press). My heart is still in book-length fiction, but I may have to wait as long as my father did (age 74 — the censorship on his books was lifted in Spain when Franco died) to have the file drawers emptied. Is this called a living? No, not at all, but what a life!
NOTE: ZERO WEATHER continues to be available on my author's page on amazon.com
Novelist's Logbook
1980
by Ramón Sender Barayón
This is a time line for how my hippie novel, ZERO WEATHER, came into being. Keep in mind that I’m seated on a barstool, writing on an Olympia Electric. I can’t abide a short page, so I always retype the whole chapter.
February 1977: Two years full time behind the typewriter, two novels completed and nothing but a drawerful of rejections slip. What am I doing wrong? I join a Sonoma County writers' workshop at the Junior College. The first meeting convinces me I have a captive audience of thirty. Hungry for feedback, I hurry home to begin ZERO WEATHER, a future fantasy about psychic terrorists and the upcoming 1980's Ice Age. The initial idea grew out of an evening playing the add-a-sentence game with friends: 'The President of The United States stood in the Oval Office transformed into a giraffe.' Not bad for a first sentence!
March 1977: Everything's going great! One hundred pages finished and the rest outlined. The garden is overrun with weeds, my roof leaks, but so what? Magically, whatever I read or hear feeds the book.
April 1977: I have a one-hundred-thousand-word first draft, a sore rear end and no friends. The teacher
Geetz permits me to Xerox four free copies. They are read by my classmates and returned with written comments. They like it!
May, 1977: I just finished six weeks on a second draft incorporating readers' suggestions and send a copy to a Harper & Row editor I know in New York. It comes rebounding back to my mailbox as if attached to by a bungee band.
June 1977: I have a 450-page third draft incorporating all my recent insights into the arcane art of storytelling, which I aim at Doubleday's man in the Bay Area, Luther Nichols. He launched Another Roadside Attraction, to which I feel kindred. Imagine my heart palpitations when I receive the following reply: 'I've read the first hundred pages and love it. Don't sell it to anyone else until I get back to you.' His letter excites me so much that I begin a sequel with the working title NOTHING IN PARTICULAR. Today his second letter came: 'Well, there are problems in the second half but they're not insurmountable.' He continues for three more pages outlining suggested changes. I tool up for draft number four but, to keep him hot, send him the first draft of NOTHING IN PARTICULAR, which comes back with a long critique, perhaps summed up by his comment on the title: 'Change it. It's too apt.'
July, 1977: ZERO WEATHER number four has been in my editor's hands for two weeks and today I receive another lengthy response: 'Good, you've improved some of the rambling episodes but still...' A long list of new suggestions follow and they are good ones. This is my man! Behind every great writer must stand en editor of his stature!
August 1977: In rewrite number five, my laid-back hero finds a job and I trim out a main character in my cast of fifty. I hand-deliver it to my counselor because I want to see his face. It's everything I have imagined, compassionate, creased by his concern for his authors. I drive back to my cabin with his invitation to a future editorial lunch tinkling in my ears. I send another copy to a New York agent and follow it up with an office visit during an East Coast family trip. Yes, he will try to sell it for me! And I hear from my Doubleday editor. He will take ZERO WEATHER to New York himself! I have done all I can, he tells me. The rest is up to the publisher.
September 1977: Damn if he isn't turned down! Somebody in Doubleday's upper echelons hates my hero. Maybe I will add an old school tie child molester with whom Madison Avenue publishers can identify... No. I'll wait on my agent.
October 1977: Bantam likes it, but -'no.' Avon nibbles hard but my agent can't set the hook and they drift off with a few compliments to the author. St. Martin's Press thinks it's too flakey for consideration. This is getting serious. The hell with New York mega-conglomerates! I'll find a local California publisher and allow The Biggies to drown in their own bile.
February 1978: Five more East Coast rejections and my agent returns his copy with a snippy quote from Random House: 'Maybe best as it stands in a small local edition.'
Una and Delia down the road are starting their own company to launch Una's book about living with a cow entitled SO FINE BOVINE. Delia's hair springs out in all directions and her sapphire eyes see — zim-zam! — right through me. Sort of a California Katharine Hepburn. Una is elegant, even in blue jeans. Her dark, limpid eyes dart about missing nothing and her tapered fingernails are always painted a wonderful color. She just finished reading ZERO WEATHER and loves it. Not only would they be glad to publish it, but are honored to do so! "It's super!" she raves. "We'll sell a million copies!" Ah, such bag balm to the author's wounded udder!
May 1978: Shall we do a pre-publication edition of three hundred just as it stands or an editorially trimmed 2500 first printing? I'll go for the three hundred as is and oversee the whole job myself. Sweet Velveeta, our local diamond-fingered typist and a sultry Latin beauty, is on vacation but her roommate starts hammering away at a sixth draft, one-and-a-half spaced, that will reduce to book size on a Xerox. I draw pictures on every chapter head and design a front cover with all the main characters in a hot tub.
July 1978: Suddenly there's a money bind. After paying the typist, Delia has only two hundred dollars left for the project. The local Copymat will allow me 49 copies for that price if I do everything myself. Their monster 9300 copier-collator has the chew-ups so I have to hand-feed each page and check the collating by eye. One week later I have 49 spiral-bound books and a nervous tic in one eyelid.
Winter, 1978: Reader feedback is encouraging. People mention it to me in town and the copies remain in circulation. In fact, only five come back. Good!
Spring, 1979: What's going on? Nothing's moving on ZERO WEATHER. I keep myself occupied writing a series of novellas for young adults.
Summer, 1979: Absolute doldrums.
August 1979: I sit down with Delia for a sentence-by-sentence edit. Over the next three months, we do the whole book. I accept about eighty percent of her suggestions, mainly involving sentence structure and general flow.
"Would a dummy understand this?" she often asks.
More often than not, I have to agree that no, a dummy would have nodded off just at that point. A cram course in crispness is what I need and what I get.
November 1979: I give ZERO WEATHER its seventh retype and it drops close to fifty pages. Scenes I once considered essential drift to the studio floor. Anything, anything to get the blessed thing out of the birth canal. Even radical surgery!
December 1979: "Congratulations!" Delia says on the day we finish proofing the new draft. "See, it didn't hurt a bit!" She hugs me. "Now Una will read it and then off to Velveeta for camera-ready copy."
But Rose is unavailable. She is caught up in an emotional badminton game with two lovers — both named Charlie — and is incommunicado on the beaches of Maui. When she does return, tan and relaxed, I hand over my one copy of the final draft.
"I'm reading excerpts at Garbo's bar at our local writers' Open Mike evenings," I tell her. "Don't keep it long."
"I'm a quick read," Una assures me. "Don't worry."
January 1980: I have to ask for the manuscript back. I'm scheduled for a full-length reading and my listeners are clamoring for more ZERO WEATHER. Bright and early one morning, Una comes into my cabin — I am still in bed. She drops the manuscript on the table and races out.
"It's great — wonderful — terrific!" she shouts from the driveway. I decide the time has come to shell out another thirty dollars on a copy for Velveeta. I deliver it to her and confer on format, typeface and size.
"Good," she says. "I'll get to it right away."
Two days later I phone Velveeta to discover that her expensive IBM was stolen the previous night during supper. Just like that! Oh Lord! I pray for guidance and The Great Storyteller In The Sky hears me. The IBM reappears at the foot of her driveway but its delicate innards have sustained seven hundred dollars' worth of damage. Plans are made for a benefit to raise the sum. Mainland Charlie, a metalworker, welds a burglar-proof cage to secure the IBM to the desk in Velveeta's studio, a refurbished toolshed whose door is unlockable.
I will take up a more rewarding art form, I decide. Perhaps I'll paint watermelon slices on Masonite and antique them in my oven.
One day later, Delia phones to explain that Una has not read our final draft after all. She was sidetracked when Maui Charlie arrived unexpectedly while she was entertaining Mainland Charlie’s parents. He hangs around for the rest of the winter. I go over a number of times to the ranch where Una and Delia and Cow live to find Una in bed with Maui Charlie while Mainland Charlie sits slumped on the Main House porch with a sour expression. I try to find something cheery to say. He might be growing horns, but I'm walking around duck-fashion with a half-born novel hanging out of me.
February 1980: I convince an artist friend to work on a color cover, which turns out just right. Also, I plunge into writing another novel with total determination. The hell with all editors and romantic triangles!
April 1980: Una phoned to say that Maui Charlie has returned to paradise and she is editing the manuscript. Could I come over? We have a number of sessions and make some small but vital improvements. When we finish, the manuscript has been so marked up that I spend a few days shriveling my nose hairs with correction fluid flumes to neaten it. At last! Ready for Velveeta! I drive over only to find she is on the verge of the fifth of a series of foot operations. At least it isn't her hands, I tell her. Okay. Another few days won't kill me.
One week later, Velveeta returns from the hospital with her foot in a cast. She attends a now-legendary publishing party at Basso's eatery in Freestone arranged by Delia who has been swept away by Basso's lasagna and has invited everyone to a feed. Finding the room a trifle warm, Delia strips to the waist, throwing her jersey casually over her shoulders and blithely ignoring the pop-eyed stares of two fishermen at the bar.
"We're all family in here, aren't we?" she inquires. "More champagne for everyone!"
Una and Mainland Charlie leave in a huff without saying anything. Two male friends help decant Delia into her buggy before taking Velveeta home where, for some reason Velveeta can't remember, they all end up in bed together. The spectacle they present Velveeta's steady when he appears sends him away out of sorts and, later, in an ensuing discussion of the event, Velveeta's roundhouse swing connects not with her sweetie's chin but with the doorjamb. Now her hand is in a cast. Well, maybe she can type one-handed.
May 1980: Delia, Una and I get a look at the typed first chapter. We all agree it doesn't track. Una wants a slick-slick edition that will scintillate on supermarket shelves. We need a typesetter. A series of phone calls to the city turns up Clarinda who drives to the editorial ranch, gingerly skirting cowpies, and show us type styles and a sample page.
June 1980: Clarinda delivers the galleys. Wow! They look terrific! I sit down that evening for a quick run-through. The typos average three a page. Awkward sentences semaphore and I find myself making a few — just a few — author's corrections. Around midnight, panic strikes. Too many 'then's!' They have to go, even if I pay for the changes myself!
Three days later I read the book aloud to a writer friend, commas, hyphens, the works. It takes twenty hours but it's worth it for the mistakes we find.
July 1980: Back to the typesetter's, then back to us. More problems, including a lengthy argument with Clarinda about how to divide words at the end of lines. Clarinda quotes Webster's to me, I quote Strunk, page 31, to her. By paste-up time, the bill is way over three thousand dollars and ZERO WEATHER's budget has been blown.
"Never mind," Una say, patting my arm. "I've got a shitload of Mendocino’s finest ready for market that'll put us over the top."
"I think I'm moving to the city," I reply. "I can't bootstrap a literary career from the backwoods. What with OPEC's driving up gas prices, I can't even afford to drive to my writers' workshop anymore. Also, my woman friend's tired of living with a creature that goes 'clack-clack-clack, bzzzz-ding!' all day long. She wants to be single again and enter roller-skating marathons."
September 15, 1980: My share-rental at the top of the hill in Daly City, made famous by Matthews' TV ads, is a lucky find. It's a peaceful pocket inside a snarl of freeways and arterials. My housemate has dropped out of a local yoga commune. He collects old editions of H. Rider Haggard – and cats. We're compatible. One week ago I boxed up the book, cover and all, and shipped it Blue Label Express to Menasha, Wisconsin. It will run on a huge Web press that prints, binds and packs without the intervention of human hands. A month from now ZERO WEATHER will emerge shrink-wrapped in units of four, forty to a box, to stun the literary world.
December 15, 1980: Somewhere in the Christmas-stuffed U.S. postal system there are two advance copies of my book, mailed a week ago. I consider hunting down my postman on the streets but instead I drive north to check on my cabin and see friends. Delia phones me at my old studio from her new typesetter's in Santa Rosa. "We got six copies in the mail today!" she shouts. "It looks wonderful!"
We arrange to meet at Steve and Rene's who have invited me to supper. The first real winter storm is tearing through the treetops and dumping rain by the bucketload. My old hermitage looks forlorn and dusty. The roof leaks. Memories of my five years there and of the woman who shared them with me tangle in my thoughts like cobwebs.
At Steve and Rene's, the phone rings. It's Delia.
"We're running late," she says. "Can you meet us at Basso's Eatery?"
I slosh through the downpour to my truck. Water is seeping in my windows and the city shoes I'm wearing leak. Funny how quickly I've forgotten how to drive these country roads. Once I knew every pothole and curve by heart. At Basso's I park by the gas pump and run for cover.
Delia is standing by the counter beside her two older children. Her husband Moses is playing the pinball machine.
"Look, look!" she shouts and pulls out a copy of ZERO WEATHER, shiny and crisp.
I try to concentrate on the book in my hands but she's hugging and kissing me, her arms around my neck.
"Everybody loves it," she says. "The cover didn't turn out as we thought it would, but we've decided we like it."
"It's beautiful," I murmur, riffling the pages. I heft it. "My God, it's our baby!"
"Champagne!" Lela orders. She presses the book into the startled grip of the grizzled dairyman seated beside her. "It's our new book," she tells him. "Doesn't it look great?"
He smiles and nods, pleased to be included.
Moses, grey hair and beard framing his smile in a fuzzy aureole, comes over to hug me. He accepts a glass of bubbly and we toast the event. "We've got to go, Delia," he says. "We're hours late to pick up Mandy."
"Let's talk soon," I say to Delia. "We've got to plan the distribution."
"And a book party," she adds, pouring more champagne in my glass. Lightheaded from the momentousness of it all, I drive back to the city. I realize it's only the beginning of a new adventure. Within two weeks there will be cartons and cartons of ZERO WEATHERs to be sold, review copies to be mailed and distributors to be convinced.
"I'm ready," I mutter. After all, there are now six more novels in my filing cabinet.
NOTE: Within the month -- in fact almost to the day that the books are delivered -- Una and Delia split their publishing venture in two halves because of irreconcilable differences. Delia has my book half, but shortly tells me that she knows nothing about marketing and distribution. “Take them all!” she says with a grand sweep of her hand. “They’re all yours!”
What teensy distribution my book receives is all due to my roaming the Bay Area dropping copies on consignment into bookstores. I immediately lose track of who has how many, and never go back to check. A year later, Una encounters some serious problems with some vegetable-matter-growing agency. She and Mainland Charlie go underground to avoid the contract placed on her sweet self, and Delia decides to think more seriously about a Master's Degree in Counseling. Thus I am permanently elevated, reluctantly, to new and challenging roles as sole proprietor, promoter, distributor and accounting department for my novel. As the years progress, I modulate to non-fiction via a family memoir about my Spanish mother ("A Death In Zamora", University of New Mexico Press). My heart is still in book-length fiction, but I may have to wait as long as my father did (age 74 — the censorship on his books was lifted in Spain when Franco died) to have the file drawers emptied. Is this called a living? No, not at all, but what a life!
NOTE: ZERO WEATHER continues to be available from the author, Ramón Sender Barayón on Amazon.com
The Shepherdess and the Clown
The Shepherdess and the Clown
The Shepherdess and the Clown
by Old Leafy-Tooth
Originally published in Salvia Magazine, Summer, 2003 issue
The Shepherdess and the Clown
by Old Leafy-Tooth
edited and updated from the Salvia Magazine, Summer 2003 issue
Slava, our editor, asked me to offer something for this issue of Salvia Magazine, although in terms of Salvia experience, I'm a relative newcomer. La Pastora only introduced herself to me early this current year after a 22-year fast from all consciousness-enhancing substances. As a spiritual enthusiast attending a self-taught seminar in comparative mysticism, I remained a dedicated pot and entheo head for more than fifteen years in the Sixties-Seventies, and definitely consumed more than my share. For one brief summer I studied with a teacher - Ouspensky's gardener, Robert de Ropp (author of "Drugs and the Mind," which I think he wished he had never written because it brought an endless stream of hippies to his Tibetan teahouse - including me). At that time I was living in an open-door commune, Morningstar Ranch, which gained a certain notoriety as 'the Digger farm' until Sonoma County bulldozed it and its sister community, Ahimsa Ranch, out of existence in the early Seventies (the full story can be accessed at http://www.diggers.org/home_free.htm).
By the late Seventies, I wasn't receiving any new information unless I truly blasted myself off-planet with substances I wouldn't offer a rabid walrus, so when I returned to urban living in 1980 and re-met the woman who would become my wonderful true life-partner, I decided to clean up my act. I dropped all my previous usages and addicted myself to her instead. Also it seemed time to treat this aging physical form more kindly and devote myself to whatever awakened states my body could provide naturally - as long as it did not require vigorous exercise with barbells or riding unicycles. I was not to be disappointed, although it took twenty years.
During frequent garden meditations, I tried to surrender to the "divine descent" described in Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, and continued my own home-grown variety of Mother Sun adoration-yoga, which at some point deserves its own essay. By late 2001, I began to experience moments of what can only be described as 'amazing grace,' subtle energy flows that came out of the blue during my work day. I called it 'the one o'clock high' because it seemed to descend from that quarter of the heavens.
I embarked on a study of Shakyamuni's facial expressions as depicted in various paintings and sculptures, and began to formulate a theory that the Buddha was creating a slight vacuum between his upper tongue and his soft palate. Various traditions confirmed that tongue placement is crucial if what Taoism calls 'the Microcosmic Orbit' of chi energies is to come full circle. Placing the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth allows the energy surging up the spine to close the circuit and flow down the front of the body. A short phrase in the Bhairava Tantra ("suck and become the sucking") also encouraged me to continue gently clucking on my soft palate and uvula in time with my heartbeat.
Then in late 2002, I found my spiritual teacher, David Spero, who sits on the Divine Mother's lap in effortless 24-hour sahaj samadhi and emanates great waves of her oceanic love (http://www.davidspero.org). Merging heartbeats with David in a darshan hug boosted me towards a deeper dissolution into Source. I also had found two other teachers extremely helpful: Master Aziz Kristof of the non-dual, advaita tradition (http://www.azizkristof.org) and the Zen Buddhist teacher Adyashanti (http://www.zen-satsang.org/. God, how I love the Internet!
Although I now felt endowed by David to melt away layer-by-layer into Her radiance, I was not quite ready to lay down my research into Eudaemony - a Greek word meaning "the philosophy that views the goal of human happiness and prosperity as the highest virtue," now revived in the new psychological field of Hedonics. I've always had the feeling that an easy and natural portal exists into what I call 'Mother's Ocean,' Her Pool of All Possibilities. When I hesitated at the edge, dabbling a toe in the waves, I told myself it was because I wanted to bring everyone else along. Is that the ultimate grandiose delusion, or just the Bodhisattva's vow not to enter nirvana alone? I continued my mouth-position yoga and wrote a second essay that introduced a meditation-assistance device that I named 'the Donkey Gruntler.' It's sort of a one-note harmonica that loosens up lateral chest tensions of the type that Wilhelm Reich, the discoverer of orgones (another name for 'chi' in my opinion), called 'armoring.' (Note: the Gruntler is currently out of production because my parts manufacturer is moving their factory).
Also, I realized how very easy it is, once these energy experiences fill me to my bliss-tolerance level, for that stubborn old mule, Ego, to latch onto and claim these awakened states as his own. "Down, boy, down!" I kept saying. "You're just the wrapping paper around Her presence in your heart of hearts." Of all the various ego-inflations and circus-horse 'glamours,'("Ah! They're playing my entrance music!") the beatific pomps and circumstances of spiritual pride are the hardest to unseat. I felt that I needed to check my cosmic coordinates from the oh-so-democratic, entheogenic point of view of my hippie experiences. After all, how could my ego stake a claim to an enlightenment that anyone else taking the same substance could access? I wanted something organic like Father Peyote, always kind to me in previous decades, although Mescalito tended to take me on male rainbow warrior quests. The ayahuasca vine reportedly required projectile vomiting, not my favorite pyloric reflex, although the visions and intensely altered states sounded intriguing. So when I learned of Salvia and the plant's gentle Shepherdess ally, I felt Mother calling to me through her.
La Pastora proved a true blessing, and each of the times I've contacted her reassured me more. It's almost as if I've had a 'Salvia deficiency' all these years and didn't know it. As a long-time worshipper of the Divine Mother, I found her presence in Salvia both extremely welcoming and totally overwhelming. She affectionately plastered me, more than symbolically, to the woodwork in an all-encompassing embrace. It reminded me of my effusive Auntie Jane who, when I was five years old, used to sweep me off the floor into her enveloping arms and smother me with kisses.
For the first session, I took two eyedropperfuls of tincture and, ten minutes later, experienced the 'descent' of a very beneficent, divine female presence. She promised me that if I could prepare 'the seat' more adequately, perhaps an even more fulfilling 'descent' would follow. I had experienced descents on LSD that resembled the fluttering of dovelike wings. As they come closer and closer, they matched my heartbeats with a certain enstatic (Mircea Eliade's word) breathless nearness. Hard to describe, but again with Salvia I felt certain that the Great Spirit Self was drawing near. The name of this entity seemed related to the heartbeat mantram "THA-THA" gradually changing on my tongue to "THOU, THOU..."(in the 1960s I received a chant, "Only Thou," that I am told is still sung in Native American Church ceremonies - and I'd be glad to share here.).
A second encounter with Ska Maria Pastora - 2 eyedroppers followed by a third an hour later - was equally marvelous. I spent the whole three hours listening to the ocean surf and seagulls on earphones (Mind Food 'Surf' with Hemisync, Interstate Industries, Inc.). I took some notes and offer here a deciphered version because my scrawls resemble the trail of a lop-sided spider crawling through a puddle of ink.
Great Divine Mother name: (exhale) "Thaw-wa-wooosh-nee" (inhale): "Hahhhhh..." The Goddess arrives with such great love and nobility - and an amazing retinue of attendants. I found myself begging her PLEASE never to leave me again! NEVER! She smiled lovingly and benignly, and again repeated her previous offer to remain if a proper 'seat' was prepared for her - or perhaps 'caballo' would be a better term. Or 'burro?' (Back to the donkey essay I've been polishing!)
The third session again was like a glorious death, with breath and heartbeats merging into a panting: "tha tha tha tha tha - thou thou thou thou thou." My notes read: "Peu - eeeeeace.... An Absolute Mother Descent - Touchdown. Don't grab for it. That helps. Great Aunt Emma's hiccup cure: 'Walk around the house not thinking of a fox.' No grabs - no fox - SURRENDER - You do hold on during the 'rush,' Ramon. Let goooooo. Total relaxation IS buddhahood! Just SURRENDER to total relaxation..."
Out of these sessions evolved a "Peace Thou Now" meditation exercise that places 'The Eight Auspicious Symbols of the Buddha' on the face with my own interpretations in parentheses: the vase (chin/hara), the lotus (mouth/heart), the endless knot (breath), the blue ribbon curls of the Sage Smile (upper lip flattening on teeth), The Red Victory Banner of Ringing Silence (for me the pitch is g-a 3 octaves above middle C), The Wheel of Absolute Stillness - relaxation, The Morning Star, The Two Golden Fish of chi/prana moving up the flared nostrils to the Third Eye. (Eye muscles crinkle in a complete smile, forehead muscles slightly raised). The White Conch of the Ajna chakra ("mind 'blows' here," my note reads), The Seven Rays (horses) of Her Radiant Retinue, and finally the overarching umbrella of Her protective love and absolutely awesome presence. THANK YOU, MA! (No fox, no grabbing), At Your Lotus Feet we place the 'mule' on the inhale (mule-ah-bandha) the Kegel clench plus tightening the buttocks. Thumb-to-index fingertip gesture, raise it like a conductor on the inhale. When you reach your bliss tolerance, you 'drift,' lose awareness - 'fall asleep'.
OKAY, conduct ten inhales and then up the Symbols we go, saying "Peace": pursed lips say "Peu", slowing widening the mouth isometrically tensing against the 'kiss muscles' to verrry slowly say "ehhh," widening to "eeee." Lost it again! I just drift away! Once more: (just inhale from soles of the feet, up through legs, the 'mule' inhale, the "Peu," the two-fish smile widening to Peuu-ehhh-eeee- (balancing isometrically the "peu' muscles with the "smile" muscles). Very hard to keep awareness going...
Summing up, I think the 'balance point' for which I'm searching may be one foot in the traditional meditation community and the other in the Archaic Revival culture. Each cancels out the possible self-donkey-fi-cation of the other. Salvia melts the hubris of what a dear new friend and Salvia co-devotee calls "the Spiritualentsia, those Oh-So-Holies" - the guru-shop and experience-hop crowd. At the same time, meditation and yoga practices help evaporate the serious delusion that may accompany the ingestion of any entheogen - that its use is necessary for a permanent awakening. For an 'additive' not to become 'addictive' one needs to remove the letter 'c' and 'see' that Salvia just gives a taste and, if you're lucky, a lingering roadmap when you're back, to Clear See-ing.
One example: During my third besagement, while listening to surf and seagulls, I truly 'disappeared' for a few precious moments into the sound and just became ocean and sky. It seemed to occur when the stereo balanced perfectly in the center of my head, perhaps assisted by the Hemisync technology on the tape. For those who habitually listen on earphones, this may be a common occurrence, but for me it was awe-inspiring. My sense of any "I" truly dissolved into the sound and vision of a vast ocean. This was accompanied by a total liberation from the small self and a freedom that I had never experienced before. What relief! What bliss! I was the boundless Self that inhabits all and everything! I could have shouted the joy-filled words of the Ashtavakra Samhita, "How wonderful! In me the shoreless ocean, the waves of individual selves arise, strike each other, play and disappear, each according to its nature."
Of course the moment passed, and despite efforts to re-invoke it - always a mistake because the donkey begins to bray - I could not return. But now that I know how it feels, perhaps I can focus on that same space in the center of my head and perhaps the ocean will dissolve me again.
I don't know how often I'm going to need to invoke La Pastora via Salvia, but I'm very grateful to have found her. Sometimes it feels to me as if we need some sort of ceremony to wrap around this experience similar to the Native American Church or the Ayahuasca folks. But then, there's something truly wonderful about just letting it be. I'm also determined to find a way to evoke her presence within daily Consensus Reality while I continue my cross-country sprint into the embrace of She Who Always Manifests First From The Unmanifest - and cleans up last.
May we all be forever so blessed,
Old Leafy-Tooth
Postscript: Having now read about the six levels of the S-A-L-V-I-A Experiential Rating Scale, I must in all honesty admit that I find it difficult to map my experiences to it. I always have been a hard head regarding halluncinatory-vision states, mostly involving myself over the years with solar light energies. But I welcome the nighttime as sacred to La Pastora, and with Salvia I have experienced the beginning outlines of a face of the Goddess emerging out of the deepest purples and dancing brilliance. Others speak of the common oddly twisting body motions and pushing-pulling through a membrane of sorts, which I too have felt. These could be regressive memories of the birth experience, or some sort of re-birth pulling-through into a new vibrational dimension. Perhaps I have only accessed the first three levels and, if so, I anticipate learning much more. Thank you, Mother!
A final quote from the amazing American Zen master Adyashanti,
"In order to be truly free, you must desire to know the truth more than you want to feel good. Because, if feeling good is your goal, then as soon as you feel better you will lose interest in what is true. This does not mean that feeling good or experiencing love and bliss is a bad thing. Given the choice, anyone would choose to feel bliss rather than sorrow. It simply means that if this desire to feel good is stronger than the yearning to see, know, and experience Truth, then this desire will always be distorting the perception of what is Real, while corrupting one's deepest integrity.
"Enlightenment means the end of all division. It is not simply having an occasional experience of unity beyond all division, it is actually being undivided. This is what nonduality truly means. It means there is just One Self, without a difference or gap between the profound revelation of Oneness and the way it is perceived and lived every moment of life. Nonduality means that the inner revelation and the outer expression of the personality are one and the same."
And a final-final quote from my spiritual teacher, David Spero (hhtp://www.davidspero.org):
"Through innocence, the mind is led down into the interior of its being and merges into an ocean of Divine Silence. This silence is not an experience. It is what you are. When this experience becomes complete, you have a profound peace that permeates event he cells of your body.
"This silence is love. As you learn to feel yourself as that, you become empty. In that emptiness you become nothing. Your identity merges into that silence.
"There is also an energy that comes out of this nothingness. This energy is not in space or time. It's the energy of Life. The whole creation comes out of this energy. Therefore, the whole creation is empty. Life is moving in this emptiness just the way a fish moves in water, with no conflict."
Miscellaneous Clown and Parade photos (click below)
Miscellaneous Clown and Parade photos (click below)
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