Nha Be

I’ve done this before. A very long time ago I wrote a story about Nha Be and my year in Vietnam, but I burned it up in my fireplace. I’d spent a year banging out each letter on an old Underwood until I had typed out over a hundred pages of my story.  Years earlier I had filed the whole thing away somewhere in my brain and let it ferment, not knowing what else to do with it, and then one day I got the crazy idea that I too could be a writer.  I thought I understood things. I thought I was ready to write, but then, I went to the movies and saw the meaning of my words gobbled up in a movie about Vietnam and I was done. I went home and started a fire in my fireplace and burned up the whole book, page by page. I sat there on the hearth smoking a cigarette and burned up my book about Nha Be and my year in Vietnam. There was no copy, no backup. It was a fitting sacrifice for not getting it right, for not being first to show. It probably wasn’t that good anyway. Thirty years ago I thought I was a writer. I thought I had lived enough to be a writer. I hadn’t! It took another thirty years of life to grind me down to a complete nothing and then, only then, could I write. I had gotten to that point in life where I had to write to breath.

It doesn’t matter so much if anyone ever reads what I write. It’s only important to me that I write it all down. Why do I write? The question haunts me. I don’t have an answer other than because I need to write. So nobody will ever read it? It doesn’t matter except to me. For some reason I have to write it down. Maybe I’m insane. Maybe I’ve slipped into the page and become a fictional character that types out words composing a story someone might read someday. Maybe I’m a writer, writing about myself writing about myself. It seemed strange at first, a little weird really, but then, self-examination comes in many forms. It’s not more unusual than looking at oneself in a mirror and wondering who is looking back at you!

After almost forty years, I still remember my year in Vietnam. It’s crystal clear etched into interior walls or ancient art gallery in my brain. I am no longer a Vietnam Vet. I gave that up decades ago. That experience does not define me anymore. The whole episode is only a single chapter in a much larger story; a story I could never have dreamed up or imagined, or even planned! Life happens!  Can anyone ever envision their future or script out their life story before it happens? It’s more likely we end up old and infirm staring in the rearview mirror and finally realizing ‘that was my life.’ The story of my life unfolded day by day, year by year, without a single thought for a plan or a goal. When the sun comes up I know it’s time for a new one-act play. It lasts only as long as the sun shines and then for a little while longer.  Now I’m a writer…an almost unpublished writer. They’re the best kind. But I distinctly remember my year in Nha Be….

Flying in from the Pacific we were all electrified to see the coastline of Vietnam looming on the horizon at the last light of the day. There it was right in front of us! The land we had seen on TV for so many years and now we were here. It was February 6, 1970. After twenty four hours on the jet, our journey was coming to an end. The adventure was upon us. By the time we landed at Tan Son Khut airbase in Saigon it was about 9PM. My first whiff of Saigon was a blast of hot wet air that swallowed me whole and choked the air out of my lungs. I inhaled water air mixed with diesel and something else. It’s the distinct smell of Saigon and there is no other smell on earth like it. It is Saigon! The bus driver told us to remove our white hats because they made good targets. That was good advice. The hotel they took us to in the middle of the night was really a bunker. The rows of fifty five gallon drums covered with about eight layers of sandbags and topped off by a chain-link fence that went up to the third floor tipped us all of that this wasn’t really a hotel. Lovely!  There was no doorman; only two G.I.s with M16s and flak jackets, unlocking the chain link gate to let us in. The first steps inside were down a stairway and as we walked down we could look up and see the drums and sandbags and chain link fence above us, protecting us from Charlie. The interior of the building was covered with a photographic montage of the 1968 Tet Offensive, offering graphic evidence of what happens when we get caught with our pants down.  The place was all bombed out with rubble everywhere. There was a sign over the photos that read, “Annapolis Hotel TET 1968.” I was looking around for the broken neon sign that read, “Magic Theater entrance. Not for everybody. For madmen only”, but I didn’t see one. It didn’t look nearly as nice and safe as it does now. We all remembered we weren’t on vacation or a school field trip.

During our check-in process, all of us began to realize this place was not a hotel. There was no bar, no restaurant, no consigliore. It was a barracks in a bunker! The Annapolis Hotel in downtown Saigon was a bunker where Navy personnel are billeted while awaiting their duty assignments in-country! We were all wearing out dress blues which was a big mistake. Somebody back in the States should have told us how to dress for the trip. We were all sloshing around in the sweat that had built up underneath our blue wool dress uniforms. Welcome to hell on earth, but of course as we would all soon find out, we were no longer on the earth. We were in Vietnam.  At least I could take a shower. By the time we hit the showers it was late.  No sooner had I started my shower, trying to rinse the shampoo from my hair, we heard several loud booms and then the water stopped flowing and the lights went out. About five minutes later, the water and the lights came back on. So that’s how it was in this place?  Things progressed downhill from this point.

The rest of the night was filled with the smell of diesel, steamy sultry heat of the tropics, ceiling fans that moved air that never actually reached a sweaty body laying in a bunk, and swarms of mosquitoes that bit me all night long. When I awoke in the morning, it was still dark outside. We got dressed and were instructed that our chow hall was about three blocks down the street, turn left into the alley, and we would see it about one hundred yards down the alley. There were seven of us that stepped out onto the streets of Saigon in the hot pre-dawn air. Immediately we found ourselves walking on the side of the road with millions of scooters, bicycles, and autos streaming by us. We could barely see them, but could hear the noise of their scooters. It was terrifying at first trying to figure out who were the Viet Cong. This was impossible as we stumbled and fumbled our way to the chow hall.

After morning chow it was even worse! By the time we left the mess hall the sun was up and all of us instantly felt our vulnerability to sniper fire. Now they could see us! Who is the enemy and where are they? How will we know them when we see them? It didn’t matter. None of us had weapons. We didn’t know what the enemy looked like. They all looked like the enemy. We were in a war zone! This was our first day in a warzone in Vietnam! This was the Catch-22 we’d been reading about-darkness or daylight! Only 364 more days to go if I’m lucky! I hadn’t received my calendar yet, so I made a mental note. Every GI gets a calendar when they arrive so they can start marking off the days until they can go home.

When we got back to the Annapolis we checked in at the desk and the desk guy asked if any of us would volunteer for mess duty at Nha Be. We all said yes immediately. Anyplace was better than here.  There were two black sailors decked out in their “greens” carrying M14s standing at the counter. “You guys can come with us” one of them said. And that’s how Rauscher and I found ourselves sitting in the back seat of a truck headed for Nha Be. But first our new guardian angels needed to make a little stop. We parked the truck on the street and went inside with them. “You guys want a woman?” the big guy asked. “No, but we’d like a beer?” We both said at once. Rauscher and I sat at a little table at the back of the lobby with two M14’s and a couple of bandoliers of extra bullets. Our buddies disappeared up a staircase.  It was cool and quiet inside the hotel or whatever it was. There was some kind of Vietnamese music playing softly and the atmosphere contrasted sharply with the steamy noise and confusion out on the streets. One thing we noticed right away was there were no mosquitoes in this place.

“Hey Smith, not too bad for being in-country less than twenty four hours huh” Rauscher asks looking very satisfied with his cold beer in hand.  “Not bad at all Yosarian.”I smiled back. The only thing that had kept our sanity the past six weeks was sharing a worn copy of “Catch-22”. It seemed like the perfect book to read for any eighteen year old going off to war, especially Vietnam. It was my mom’s, but she had read it years earlier and probably didn’t even know it was missing from her library. She had about a million paperbacks. Anyway, Rauscher and I needed a distraction as we prepared ourselves for war. Actually I stole the book from my mom’s library because I thought it looked interesting. After about forty or fifty pages I started talking to Rauscher about how funny it was, so we started sharing it. For the past six weeks I had the book every other night. We compared notes each day and had begun to act out our favorite parts.

It takes a whole day to fly from Travis Air Force base in California to Saigon, Vietnam. It gave me and Rauscher time to relive all the funny parts of the book and to act out the absurdity of war we’d recently learned about reading “Catch-22.” We were reading about World War Two, but Vietnam was after all another war. War is war and war is hell for so many especially if you were going to it. It wasn’t so much hell for us as it was a digression into the politically absurd notion of stopping communism on a foreign shore.  At least that was the idea. We were active combatants in a proxy war to save Southeast Asia first and the entire rest of the free world second from the invasive tide of communism. And by God we were Americans and part of the best equipped and best trained military force in the whole world!

After about an hour the two sailors came back down and collected their firearms from us. Our watch was over. We were able to salvage a couple of beers out of the deal.  We followed our protectors back out to the truck. The one riding shotgun looked the vehicle over closely especially the undercarriage. “Always check your vehicle when you park in Saigon. Charlie likes to bobby trap them” he said shooting us both a serious look.  We all loaded up and were once again swallowed up in the swarming traffic.

Vietnam, all of Vietnam, is an ancient land with an ancient civilization. It is extremely biologically hostile and at the same time extraordinarily beautiful. Everywhere you look there is life, there is beauty, and there is nature blooming right before your eyes. The term fecundity comes to mind or a word like fertile. The Vietnamese people are exotic. They are a graceful and beautiful people that seemingly bond with the natural hostility that surrounds them. Driving through the city with these two veterans and their rifles, with them knowing exactly where we were going, made me feel like I was being chauffeured first class to the front of the war. The sights, sounds, and smells of Saigon were exhilarating and exciting for an eighteen year old that had never been out of Fresno. I was on my own here and would have to depend on myself and my instincts to stay alive.

I had no idea where we were going, no sense of direction. The entire city is a beehive of scooters and bicycles. The poverty is massive and on a scale I never could have imagined. I saw hundreds of cardboard boxes the size of refrigerators neatly maintained on the wide boulevards of Saigon. Under the filth and silt that covered the city, you could see the wide streets, well maintained and manicured at some point in the past. “The Paris of the Orient”, yes indeed. I could see it through the filth and human anthill it had becomes. I came to understand that Saigon was built to accommodate maybe a couple of hundred thousand people and there were three million people living here now. I could see most of them today going about their business.

It wasn’t long before the city gave way to brief snatches of countryside and fairly soon, there were rice paddies and more countryside. And then there was just countryside. There were no more homes, no more buildings, only the jungle and rice paddies. We were on our way to Nha Be! Finally we were getting somewhere. It was a drastic contrast from the busy city to the tranquility of the country. The beauty of the sky and jungle and water was stunning! I had never imagined a land like the one unfolding before me. It was breathtaking and savage. I was swept away into an ancient Oriental world that must have always been this way. It was hot and wet and sticky and alive. Every single inch of the place was alive and hungry and willing to take whatever it needed from whoever offered themselves up in the moment. The environment itself forced you to become a predator. That’s what was required to survive in this place.

That’s what I was feeling as we rolled along the tiny dusty road to Nha Be. I couldn’t help but think of my mom back in Fresno going to work at Lauck’s Bakery in her white bakery uniform. She’d never been anyplace either and I wanted her to see this place with me. I wanted her to be sitting in the seat right next to me on the road to Nha Be so she could see the raw beauty of this place. She would have appreciated it more than anyone I know except my Grandma. My mom and my grandma were both very good with plants. They could grow anything and if they had been let loose over here, who knows what they could have grown. But she wasn’t here and all I could do was make mental notes of the place.

After another twenty minutes or so we roll through a small village of sorts. It was more like both sides of the road suddenly filled with makeshift buildings. They weren’t exactly real buildings, but there they were! It was the village of Nha Be, but I didn’t know it. I say makeshift because it looked like the buildings were made with old pallets and cobbled together with a few timbers and then covered with what looked like beer cans. I found out later that the Vietnamese would cut the ends off a beer can and use it as a shingle of sorts. Well it worked! It kept the rain out and the dirt floor inside was dry! That’s all that mattered. I also noticed all the wires hanging off the power lines. Later I came to understand the villagers would simply throw a copper wire over the power line and hook up their electricity. The whole setup was very simple, elegant, and practical.

We finally made a right turn at the end of the village and pulled up to the main gate at Nha Be. The Naval base at Nha Be was located at the tip of a peninsula on the Mekong River. There were actually two commands at Nha Be. One was the Naval Supply Activity Saigon and the other one was NSA Detachment Nha Be. Rauscher and I were not sure which command we were serving, but were glad we were out of the city and out in the country. The first thing we noticed was a swimming pool! There was a swimming pool! How bad could this place be?

Our chauffeurs dropped us off in front of a weathered bungalow and set us up in a room, if you can call it that. There were two bunks and it was hot, very hot! When we were in the room it was sweltering. All we ever did was lay there in the dark and stew in our own juices- very miserable.

Fairly soon someone came and took us over to the supply department where we were issued our very first “greens”. This was exciting for both of us. We had been wearing our dungarees and blue work shirts. We looked like sailors from a ship, which we were not. Everyone in Vietnam wears the greens, but us. Now we had our own set. We were officially part of the fighting force in Vietnam and we had on the right uniform! We were silently proud to finally blend into the local military effort. Rauscher and I laid there sweltering in our room until one of the mess cooks came and took us to the mess hall.

Our first night in Nha Be on mess hall duty was a strange and exciting night for both of us. Instead of sleeping and resting all day like we should have, we sat around the pool like we were on vacation. We toasted our good fortune to be in a war zone with a swimming pool as we roasted in the sun. We were soaking up the tropical sun like tourists and had no idea that sunlight could kill you and should be avoided at all costs. We should have realized this when no one ever came to swim in the pool all day long. Now we would be working most of the night in the mess hall with no sleep at all.

It was about ten PM when the first rounds went off. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Each round shook the building and you could feel the round as it passed overhead. BLAM! SCREECH! BLAM! The rounds would squeal as they passed overhead and then you could feel a percussion blast or sonic blast or something. You could feel those shells as they passed! Rauscher and I just looked at each other nervously. It was an ungodly noise those shells made as they passed overhead. The sound was as if they were ripping the air to shreds and making the air molecules scream as they were being destroyed. We thought we were being bombed. It felt like incoming. It felt like the bombs were exploding all around us and we just kept rolling out the dough for biscuits and donuts and whatever else the baker was making for mid-rats. (Midnight rations.) We had no idea there was an Army 105 Howitzer farm down the road lobbing 105 shells into the jungle across the river. We didn’t know that! No one told us and we didn’t ask. We just kept rolling the dough and looking at each other like we’d join the program here. Neither of us had a gun. We wouldn’t have known what to do anyway, so we kept on rolling out layer after layer of dough for the baker.

A couple of hours later they started coming in. There were probably thirty or forty of them and each one was a brave warrior. They must have come from the front. It was good they could stop shooting long enough to come in and have some food, some nourishment before they went back out to the war. Rauscher and I silently assumed the fighting was about two or three hundred yards away. We assumed this because these guys had walked to the chow hall in the middle of the night so they could have some biscuits and donuts and whatever else they were cooking up in the other part of the kitchen. These were brave souls and true American fighting men every one of them. Not like us. What did we know? We were just the guys that rolled the dough out.

About three in the morning our boss let us go and told us to get some rest. He’d come and get us when he needed us. We went back to our room and went to sleep. There was no fan, no breeze, but at three AM the night air was tolerable. We both fell asleep quickly and awoke when the sun came up. It’s not possible to sleep in this place when the sun comes up. As soon as sunlight hits the ground here, it’s hot! It’s very hot! We were growing accustomed to being soaking wet all the time. You never stopped sweating.

We found the shower area which was one long room with about twelve showerheads. Rauscher and I showered up and just as we were finishing up, here comes two or three old women with these strange little brooms sweeping the floor. We were both naked, but they didn’t seem to notice at all. They didn’t pay any attention to us at all, which was a relief because we were both terror stricken at being caught naked in front of strange women. Vietnam was a different kind of place. This was our first encounter with mama sans.

After the shower we went to the chow hall and ate breakfast and then we walked around the base. It was a good and beneficial expedition. We were able to get our bearing and understand where we were. There were a couple of administration buildings, a guard shack, the officers barracks, the officers club, the EM club, several rows of enlisted barracks, a couple of warehouses, several guard towers on the perimeter, and a helicopter pad. We learned later that the Army ran the helicopter pad. It was a place where the Army helicopters could get fuel and also reload with rockets and ammunition for their battles across the river.

The waterfront at Nha Be was very large. The entire base was at the very tip of the peninsula, so there was river on two sides of the base.  It was over a mile to the other side of the river. That’s where the war was. On one side of the base were the docks where they pulled the PBRs out of the water to patch them up during the day so they could go back out at night. The PBRs were made of fiberglass, so they didn’t stop bullets very well. All the holes had to be patched up during the day so the boats could go back out on patrol the next night. Quite a system I thought.  I began to understand the need for the base and the mission of the whole place.

Basically the entire base was three acres, maybe four acres tops. It was a very small shithole stuck on the tip of a peninsula on the Mekong River. It was perfect! Rauscher and I fell in love with it and hoped beyond hope that when we got back to Saigon, we’d both get orders back out here. In the afternoon, the EM club opened up and so we went in and ordered our own drinks. Beer was a nickel and mixed drinks were a dime! As an eighteen year old, I had died and gone to heaven! After a couple of drinks we both realized we had found our home in Vietnam.

That night we reported for duty again at the mess hall sometime after dark. The shelling started again. It was a strange feeling for it to be so quiet during the day and then for all hell to break loose at night. This was a night war we were fighting. Working in the kitchen at night, with fans and air conditioning, it almost felt like home, except for the shelling. Between the shelling barrages, there would be periods of silence. It was during those times I‘d think about my mom and brothers and sister back home. I was at peace knowing they weren’t here, knowing they had no knowledge of this place or the mysterious dangers it held. I had no idea myself, but was glad my family was no where around.

The next day the black guys came back and took us back to Saigon. Rauscher and I didn’t want to go, but our sea bags and our future were waiting for us back at the Annapolis Hotel in Saigon. So were our orders. When we got back to the Annapolis, we checked in and were told to wait. Our orders had come in and we would be assigned shortly. A couple of hours later they called our names. Rauscher had been assigned to the Naval Supply Activity Saigon at Nha Be, and I, I had been assigned to the Naval Supply Activity Saigon, detachment Nha Be. We were both going back to Nha Be! Our dream had come true! One of us would work at one command and the other would work at the other command.  We grabbed our seas bags and loaded up as quickly as we could. In a way, we felt like we were going home.

Looking back over the past forty years I have only fond memories of that place. It was a strange and magical land that consumed my youth.  The whole place was a portal from another time, a place where a modern war intersected a pre-historic civilization and I was there to see it. Why wouldn’t I want to write about that experience? How could I ever forget any detail of it? Burning my book thirty years ago was simply one act of a much longer play about a frustrated writer. Oh, the ways we find to express ourselves!

When I came back home the whole world had changed in some obscene way. When I left to go to Vietnam, my mom was a young and vibrant woman. When I came home 363 days later I could see how much she had aged and from the look on her face she could see that I had aged as well. My magical mystery tour in Vietnam had robbed my mom and me of our youth. Somewhere in the exchange for life and time and worry and love and living, there had to be a positive.  That one year has made all the difference in my life. It was an eight year college education in a single year. In Vietnam I learned how to tell time. I learned how long a year was when you counted it one day at a time.   

We are all lost children now looking to find our way home in a world of uncertain variables. The greatest horror for me on 911 was the remembering the terror of uncertainty in Vietnam and knowing it had been unleashed on our whole country, on the whole world. I was not a Christian when I was in Vietnam, but I had one rock solid belief and grace that sustained me: my family would never know the terror, the human tragedy, and the complete uncertainty of our immediate future like we felt it in Vietnam. When 911 happened, that illusion was destroyed.  I don’t know what else to do with my time in life except to write stories, even if people don’t read them. Now I have no problem asking God to help us. We need it!

Raison d etre

It’s a simple question-why are you here? What is your primary function? Why are you alive? This is something so simple we should all know the answer.  And on some level we all do.

I walked into the emergency room at the hospital and asked what room he was in. The attendant was very polite and told us where we needed to go and where the elevators were and more importantly, where the rest rooms were located. We forgot everything she told us except where the rest rooms were and after we went to the rest room we could better understand everything she said.

That could be life in its most basic modern form. Let me go to the bathroom and then I can listen. When someone walks into an emergency room at 11PM after driving two hours in the dark and not drinking their champagne in the hot tub as planned, but getting in their car after hastily packing a suitcase to drive to some godforsaken hospital, life gets pretty basic.

When you strip away all the social myth and bullshit we’ve wrapped ourselves in, we get down to some very basic truths. They are elegant and simple and profound. They provide all the sustenance we’ve ever needed although, God forbid, we should ever wake up from our self-induced daydream about who we really are long enough to revisit our whole reason for being. After all this is the new millennium and all that stuff we learnt when we was children don’t work no more.

When we walked in the room I was reminded of about a million other scenes in my life when I walked in the room in the hospital. You walk in and there they are, your blood relative, laying there in their sterilized hospital gown, existing on the most advanced medical terms possible and you just want to cry because it’s not natural. Aunt Betty or uncle Bob or mom or dad or little sister shouldn’t be lying there now. They shouldn’t be in this place at all and I always feel like some kind of intruder in a foreign environment sent there by secret forces to rescue them and take them home where they belong.

Emergency room memories are a stark reminder of our mortality and just how fragile life is. It’s mostly in these strained moments out of time that we can understand our birth certificate didn’t come with a warranty. Despite all the social reminders we are constantly bombarded with, life itself is precarious, and there are no guarantees of a next breath for anyone. We’re mostly unconscious to that last part. It’s somehow irrelevant to whatever scheme we’re working on right now.

At the beginning of each day we need to review the little note we posted on the mirror in our bathroom to remind us for our reason to be. Oh! I don’t have one. Neither do I, but I’m going to get one when I finish typing. I never realized how important it was for me to have a reason to be and was a little stunned when I thought I did, but couldn’t quite formulate it into actual words. Well now I can. And here’s the cool part…I think this might be a reason to be for everyone on some level. I mean, there will be at least seven billion different variations and expressions of this truth, but they can all boil down  to this….

“My role in life is to bring light into the darkness, to bring joy to a sorrowful heart, and comfort to anyone who needs comforting. My job is to mirror back to everyone I meet just how beautiful and perfect they really are.”

What I realized of course is I can never do that until I completely forgive myself for screwing up absolutely everything I’ve ever touched. And I can do that by grace and gratitude and by accepting the loving kindness all around me. I release my own sins and craziness to a universe that only wants to help me bring light and love to others.  We each must do the work necessary to discover our own reason for being, but in the end, it will be pretty much the same for all of us. We are after all only people trying to live the best lives we can without hurting those around us.

The Emotional Gravity of Dissonance & Binary Stars

It’s always there affecting me, but I never notice. It is the same as the air I breathe, the light of the sun coming with each dawn. I take it for granted like a sub-routine running in the deep background of my unconscious and so I don’t waste any time at all ever thinking about it.  It keeps my feet on the ground, helps me water my lawn, and keeps my clothes hanging neatly in my closest. Of course, I’m talking about gravity. What would we do without it? We’d probably just float away, but we probably would never have been here at all. Gravity keeps the air in place, keeps the earth’s atmosphere close to the earth where it belongs. And gravity is a strangely universal force that works the same no matter where you find it in the cosmos.

It’s not that easy to recognize dissonance when it’s staring us right in the face. We may be working with it, coping with it in our day to day struggle to survive, or we may be married to it. For some, they may have given birth to it, or escaped it when they left home so many years ago. For most of us, we probably work each day with a great deal of dissonance since most people hate their jobs and are doing it “just for the money.” Dissonance is that phenomenon that happens when two or more things don’t vibrate at the same frequency. Dissonance is experienced when the salmon swims upstream to spawn. It’s like spitting into the wind. It’s the thing we experience while driving to work each day or standing in line at the grocery store. It mostly happens to us when we get locked inside our own biorhythm and the world view our thoughts produce. It’s that thing that happens when our illusions collide with what is actually physically happening around us and we are slapped out of the oblivion of the daydream back into real time. It’s a psycho-social, mental, emotional, physical joyride where the car jumps completely off the tracks and we are in freefall against a chosen course. Somehow, we spend an inordinate amount of energy struggling against the flow of time trying to accomplish whatever it is we think needs to get done in order to deliver some kind of payoff for all the effort we’re putting out. This kind of thing rarely works out for the best. More often we end up shattered and broken, more broken than our latest dream.

When we cannot even think because of the roar of time raging by and raging against us and against our intentions, we somehow know, on some level, we’re going the wrong way. The problem is we’ve locked onto the prize for all our efforts. Somehow winning the prize or getting what we want is enough stimulation and motive to help us ignore the dissonance around us. The dissonance that I inherited came to me through my father.  Of course I never recognized it as dissonance. I only understood that my dad was pissing into the wind and as the eldest son, I simply assumed it was my job to take over for my dad someday. And boy did I try to succeed where my dad may have failed. That’s how things go in this life. They go from father to son, from mother to daughter, and we don’t even think about it. It just happens and then one day, we wonder why every single thing in our life makes no sense at all. That’s when we have to sit down and feel our way through our thought system. I say “feel” because that’s how we store the memories that shape and direct us. Until we are willing to face the music in our heart, we will continue to play the game of life in the safe role we crafted for ourselves.

The dissonance in our world today is almost invisible. It exists as background noise in our very busy lives. We accept it, embrace it, and navigate around it as if there is nothing we can do as individuals to change it. We simply rationalize it away as the way things are nowadays. The question is: how to we change the dissonance into resonance? How can we all find the path that leads us to begin to resonate at the same frequency? How can we align the energy we are channeling into the world in a way that creates a melody or a song rather than a cacophony of noise?

 Binary stars are two stars that have formed a single system. They’ve come together or always were together and they will never be apart. Some stars may have started out on their own, traveling through the cosmos, swirling around their galaxies, following their own single, solitary path. At some point in time, they come together, their paths cross, they are attracted to each other, and begin to swirl. It’s not love. It’s just gravity and the proximity of physical mass to physical mass. It’s not personal. It’s physical.  During their courtship and throughout the entire lifetime of the relationship, binary stars affect each other in strange yet predictable ways. They share a common space. They revolve around each other, attracting each other into a shared gravity, a common purpose, a cosmic dance.  They not only reflect light from the other, the big one sooner or later sucks the light and energy and stuff from the other. When one star projects itself outward toward all things, some of its energy and stuff passes an imaginary line in space called the Roche Lobe Line. This creates what is referred to as “Roche Love Overflow”. One star gives and one star takes.  Sooner or later the little star is absorbed into the bigger star and they become one.

This magnificent cosmic image is not wasted on stars alone. The same cosmic dance occurs all around us every day in the form of another naturally occurring phenomenon called love and marriage. Life finds most of us pursuing our dreams, charting our own personal course through the cosmos of society and setting our own orbits. We do that long enough until one day, she walks in, or he walks in, and then our trajectory changes. It’s time for a course correction and we are pulled into a close encounter and set up a mutually attractive gravity field and we start swirling. It’s the most exciting time in our life. We are in orbit around that special creature that makes the sun shine during the day and the moon come out at night. We are headlong into the gravity of love.

If this dance goes on long enough, there is usually marriage and then the orbit is set for both stars. They have been revolving around one another for some period of time and now they will share their gravity and alter their own personal path through the cosmos together. They have become a sort of binary star system right here on earth. The most hoped-for balance is one where both stars learn to identify where the Roche Lobe Line is and they respect it. Neither star seeks to pull energy or matter from the other. There is a sort of celestial intentionality and foresight into the future path for the two companions. A path that let’s both stars remain intact as they circle each other.

So many times, two people are mis-matched with one being bigger than the other, having more mass, more gravity, and both not knowing about the Roche Lobe Line. When this happens there comes a time when the line is breached and one star begins to lose energy and matter. Over time, they become a shadow of themselves and become powerless to escape the gravity of the other. They will no longer fight the gravity, but stay in their orbit and allow the inevitable. Eventually you see them and they have no more light of their own. They are defined now by whatever light is given off by their companion star.  

Hopefully in matters of love and romance, we count ourselves fortunate to be coupled and paired with a partner “of equal size.” And when this fails to happen, well, we all know couples that can be defined by “him” or “her”, with the significant other being little more than a shadow of their former self. It makes you wonder what the initial attraction was, what specific value created the impetus towards, and what emotional gravitational field was set up to keep the whole constellation in place? Did the imaginary Roche Lobe Line start out equidistance from both celestial bodies? If so, when did it shift and move and how did one companion manage to increase their specific gravity and begin to feed off their mate? This is only one of the many mysteries of the universe yet to be unraveled.

It is in this gravitational field where we can more closely examine the effects of dissonance and hope for a cure. Even in a relationship where the gravity of both partners is unequal, there still may be an opportunity for resonance. Resonance is that great equalizer that offers a harmonic melody throughout the cosmos and brings order everywhere it goes. It is resonance that provides the foundation for growth, for wonder, and for the blossoming of all things to their fullest potential.  The hope is that binary star systems can achieve some sustainable level of vibrating on the same frequency or wavelength and establish their own unique harmonic resonance. It may even be possible that both stars can contribute to their own new relationship in the same way that couples, even the weak and the strong partner can establish an equilibrium where the two together become more that the sum of their total. In those moments we may be witnessing a kind of constellation of sorts where the weak force and the strong force affect each other in a way that creates a synergy of brightness that can be shared by all. At least I hope so.

Act Three & The Magical Stent

 After all the festivities had died down and the guests and well-wishers had cleared out of my hospital room, I laid there in the dark adding up the cost for this whole thing and realized the curtain had just gone up on my own act three, and the only wardrobe change required was a little metal stent hidden very carefully in my heart.   

The mystery and excitement of life is in discovering who we are and why we came here, and what we are being called to express in our authentic being. When we get it right there will be incredible energy flowing as we connect with others. If we don’t do this, life sucks. If we’re lucky, we get a wakeup call somewhere around the beginning of act three that teaches us to get busy with whatever the hell we were born to do.

The truth is, no matter what sides of the looking glass I find myself on, I always want to get to the other side.  The instant I connect with the oneness, the collective unconsciousness, God, the universe…once I get to that center point of focus, the other side of the rainbow, I’m ready to run off in my body and live for a while someplace nice. I want to take that small glimpse of eternal clarity and gobble it up right now.  I always have my own little plan for myself just in case God’s plan doesn’t work out.  It’s my backup plan if God gets too busy with other things. And when that doesn’t work out, which after a while, it doesn’t, I want back into the circle of eternal bliss where maybe I can get whole again. God waits patiently for my attention. He has forever.  We have an average of 80 years to cram in the whole experience. Life is like taking your kids to Magic Mountain and as soon as they hit the gate, they’re gone, until they want something, and then they’re back. We’re too busy doing stuff to spend time with God. He’s waiting for each one of us to get to the end of ourselves, to let our curiosity run its course and run out of ambition, to ride all the rides in the park, so we can finally be together.  It’s only then that we even consider making time for Him. This process usually involves struggle, suffering, and several humiliating defeats and retreats before we’re willing to throw in the towel. There is no easy exit from this place! Sooner or later we must all do the work of the soul. Some people never do. 

And there is the gravity we all try to escape! Gaining enough velocity, enough centrifugal force to escape the pull of our past mistakes and misery and breaking into the brilliance of the present moment to be ourselves. But how do we shed all the weight and pull of the past, of the womb, our infancy, past the family dynamics and dysfunction? How do we outrun our karma? Where do we begin to attack the ghosts of yesterday that haunt us and stalk us every waking moment? We simply want our wounds to heal so we can go on living and yet, have no clue how to get healed up. We have no idea that we’ve spent our whole life spinning a protective cocoon where we can hide in relative safety from all the barbs and sharp words from those who claim to love us. It is always our loved ones that hurt us the most. We have given them the power and the keys to the kingdom of our hearts and they don’t even wipe their feet on the mat before they come inside!

There are laws of physics and mathematical formulas that govern the universe and all the quarks, neutrinos, planets, stars, bosons, and galaxies. So where are the laws that govern us? What are they? How can we derive a mathematical certainty about everything we do, everything we are? We remain undefined and always in the superposition, never knowing which way we will go.  What is our mathematical equation? Science and mathematics moves closer and closer each day to unveiling a new truth about the universe we live in. There is a concept in science that discusses something called the Akashic Record, which is a signature of information for everything that ever was. The theory goes on to describe the possibility that all physical matter is blessed with specific knowledge or in-formation about itself and its relationship to the rest of the universe. The term they use to define the relationship is called “coherence’. How do we discover this “coherence”?

We turn to the ancient philosophers, theologians, and wise men from the East for our answers, but, we don’t accept anything they have to say. Somehow in our modern world filled with all the new conveniences we no longer ask the right questions. We don’t need the answers. We don’t care about the answers. They are no longer relevant to our everyday life as they have no power to define us.  The modern mind has become so self-absorbed that we define ourselves now in every narcissistic moment and who we are changes with our clothing. That works for a while as long as the merry-go-round keeps turning and we can keep the illusion in focus. Eventually, we slink back into our own heart, look deep down where we hid the grief and pain, and have to face the music. It’s the only way out of our dilemma if we have the will and stamina and faith to take it. It is the journey of a single subjective lifetime. It's time to do the work our heart demands of us!  

Finding Our Authentic Self In the Butterfly Effect

Every minute of every day the storehouse of human knowledge grows bigger, and yet we still have so many questions. New theories are emerging from ancient beliefs that are changing the very foundations of our sciences. Specifically, progress is being made in mathematics, cosmology, and a new science that investigates something called the “Akashic Field” or “Akashic Record”, which may eventually evolve into a theory that explains everything. Mathematics, physics, medicine, and even history itself changes each day as new discoveries are made and ancient relics are uncovered. The truth is; what many people believe to be the truth about something may change radically with each new discovery. The truth is; as the collective body of human knowledge grows, the knowledge of what we don’t know grows even larger. Every question we answer raises more questions.  So this is the dilemma; the more we know the more we realize there is so much more we don’t know. Understanding the dynamic ratio of the known versus the unknown is the beginning of true wisdom, and the sign at the entrance to the rabbit hole.

Sometimes life is strange and unpredictable, and we aren’t so sure of our next move.  Maybe its chance or Karma, when life itself seems to takes us in directions we never considered.  It could be that we interpret everything based on an invisible set of rules from long ago. It is this dynamic reality of life, of a single, solitary life that has not been considered thoroughly. How is it possible to quantify the value of subjective human experience?  How can we share a single experience with everyone else? How can we ever know for sure if we’ve had a good life? How do you measure that?  How do we know what we know and know that we know it? These are questions for the theologians, for scientists, and psychologists.

Many of us have our own personal theory that explains what everything means and the truth is, each theory is a little different and a little bit the same.  How do we ever really know other people? How do we ever really know ourselves?  Some of us believe that we know who we are. We’ve already figured it out and found our authentic self, but we haven’t. We’ve only settled for who we think we are and fooled ourselves into believing the persona we created is our real self instead of discovering the true and authentic person we really are.

For most of my life, I felt there was something wrong with me. Something was broken, but I could never put my finger on it. I spent most of my spare time and effort studying and searching for “the system” that would define me, heal me, and help me find my exact spot in the world.  Searching and studying is what I do. Questioning everything is what I’ve learned to do.  I haven’t found anything outside Christianity that offers such a complete explanation of who I am and what my life means. Christianity helps me understand my place in the universe. I’ve studied Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, the western philosophers and many eastern philosophers, and while I appreciate what they teach, they never quite answered all the questions like Christianity does for me. What I now understand is that each one of us is a unique holographic fragment of the universe. It’s interesting to me that when I reconnected with my authentic self I gained a “legitimacy of self” to all the other belief systems, even agnostics and atheists! Through the lens of my authentic self I began to better understand the priceless value of each single human life in the story of our history. How is it possible that each of us plays such a critical role in the grand scheme of human history? This concept seems fantastic, unfathomable, and crystal clear at the same time! I am only one person and such a small part of humanity. How can I ever make a difference?  How can I matter at all in the history of the world? It becomes possible to understand when the perspective of the questioner changes from a general point of view to the experienced insight of a single life lived.

In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that all he could promise him was the truth. My hope has been to find truth and meaning in my own life and to “know myself” as Socrates challenged us to do. The truth is, many years ago, each of us very carefully and cleverly hid our real self someplace…a place we knew we would never ever return to willingly.  My prayer is that you can discover and recognize your own truth in my collection of thoughts, ideas, and feelings. My hope is that I can share with you how I found my way home and maybe that can help you do the same.  No one can do that for you, but we can help each other in our journey. We must each do the work for ourselves. With less than six degrees of separation between us it makes sense to say the whole world is depending upon you to find your authentic self. When you find your path in life, you will know what you were born to do. But the path will not appear until you are calm, clear, centered, and willing to accept what appears before you. Spend some time with yourself, examine what you believe to be true, and test it to see if it’s real.

In The Matrix, Neo was “the one”. Unlike the movie, each of us is “the one”.  We are all more interconnected than we imagine. Believe nothing you see, hear, or feel, but test everything to determine if it is real and true for you.  I hope my words and ideas will help challenge you as I have been challenged, and then, dig deep inside and find what is there and witness it. You must want to begin the journey and believe that at some point you will find your extraordinary self, or you will never make the effort. You are “the one” and we are waiting for you to show up. We only ask for you to share your real self with us and show us who you are.

In Praise of Our Elders

In most cultures around the world, the elderly are revered as sacred, valuable, wise, and even essential to a healthy society. They have lived longer than the rest of us, and therefore, have learned things we have not learned yet. Our elders have developed a special wisdom of living and by virtue of their days on earth, deserve respect for surviving the rigors of everyday life in this world. After all, we suspect they may know something we don’t, not having traveled that road yet. Fortunately for me, I grew up with my great grandparents. I remember studying my great grandmother’s hands. They were wrinkled with very thin skin, so much so that her veins stuck out. They were beautiful! My hands didn’t look like that at all. Even at such an early age, on some level I marveled at how long my grandma had to live to have hands like those! They were very special hands. They were the hands of a very old lady who had lived a long and full life. “If I’m lucky someday my hands will look like that,” I thought, holding one of her hands in mine. My great grandmother had a wrinkled face and I’m told she was about five foot three inches tall, although I remember her as a giant! She had an ancient calmness about her that cast a magical spell over whatever she was doing. I watched those hands put bread in the toaster and then spread butter on the toast and open the jam and put just right amount of jam on each piece. She always knew how to do that! I so grateful I got to spend my first five years of life with seventy-somethings! Maybe that’s why I love the elderly so much. I don’t see them as old. I see them as regular. There is something to be learned spending time with our elders as they go about their daily business of dressing, fixing meals, and taking time to sit quietly to watch the sun come up or to listen to the birds in the trees. Fixing a nice simple lunch and taking a short nap afterwards is an absolutely beautiful way to prepare oneself for an afternoon to do nothing except enjoy being alive. For seventy-somethings and little boys, it seemed like the good life! None of us do that anymore. Who has the time? We’re all too busy with important stuff. We can’t be sitting around wasting time doing nothing! Now we have to take classes to learn how to let go and do nothing. A lot of my friends now are seventy, eighty, or even ninety-somethings! Far from being old, they have more life in them than I do. I can only hope to have that kind of energy if by some chance I manage to make it to their age. I’ve studied these folks and find they all have one thing in common: on some level they’ve come to realize that their best days are ahead of them! They are just now starting to deliver on the gifts they are intended to give to the world and they give them with joy. They aren’t getting older at all-they’re all getting better at living and they have so much experience. Being a sixty something is kind of an in-betweener-not young anymore and not really old either. Not to take anything at all away from the young, but being twenty, thirty, forty, or even fifty isn’t that hard when you see it in the rearview mirror. Like my friend Bob told me once, “You’re not a real stud until you turn seventy!” That was ten years ago. I’m starting to understand what he was talking about. I hope I can measure up someday and can’t wait for those hands like my great grandma’s!

The Light Bearer

People say they don’t exist. They say they’re a fairy tale spun by the brokenhearted to give them hope. They say there used to be many of them, but now they are all gone out of the world. Now we live in a civilized world, an intelligent world defined only by scientific fact. The world we live in today has been stripped of every myth and legend ever known. No one believes in fairy tales anymore, except what we see in the movies. The big screen is alive with superheroes, myths, and legends…tales of every strange and weird creature imaginable. That’s great for entertainment, but where is the food for the soul? We are all starving now. Somewhere just below the surface of our awareness, comfortably inside our consciousness, are the instructions for bringing light into the world…for becoming a light bearer. The problem is…we don’t remember how to access it. We don’t even believe it is possible, except that once in a while, we encounter a person that brings light into our world and we wonder how they did it. In those moments of crystal clarity, bathed in the brilliant light of their serenity, we know it’s still possible. We’ve experienced it! Then mostly, we shy away back into the shadows from where we came, pondering the mystery of the light and hoping we get to see it again. What we don’t expect or even look for is the possibility that we may become light bearers. We like to imagine ourselves as some kind of superhero, but never seriously expect our selves capable of greatness, yet we are. We all are…capable of greatness. This superpower comes at a very high cost. It is a cost most people are unwilling to bear. The cost is nothing less than a near elimination of the ego. We must become as nothing, or more exactly, we become a mere presence, an awareness; a watcher of things. Our thoughts and opinions mean nothing apart from a focused attention. There is no substance in them anymore. They don’t matter. All that ever matters is becoming more aware of this present moment and bearing witness to it. If you do that long enough the light begins to shine in you and through you. Sooner or later we all get an invitation to become a light bearer. We will mostly ignore it or not recognize the value of the offer, but one day, one day it becomes painfully obvious that was always available to us, but we didn’t honor it. Once we make a conscious choice to embrace the light, to let go of the pain and anguish and fear, and allow creation and connection to work in us and through us, we become transparent beings. We no longer concern ourselves with self-preservation, rather, we simply trust nature to unfold our path before us and take us where we need to be. Once there, the only single requirement is to be fully present in the moment and allow “it” to happen…. whatever that means. The only way “it” ever happens is when we are flooded with gratitude. There are only two ways to get gratitude: one is to receive an undeserved dose of unconditional love from someone, the other way is to give someone undeserving a dose of unconditional love. Giver or receiver doesn’t matter much-the result is the same. Being fully bathed in a miraculous moment is enough to make the transition. It’s always the same when waves of gratitude flow over you and through you and you realize you are the richest and luckiest person in the whole world. Before you even know it, you are giving light to those around you through your focused attention and concern for them. You almost forget you have any of your own problems at all. Congratulations- you are now a light bearer! We seriously need more light bearers among us.

Residual Self-Image

Looking in the mirror just now turned into a semi-religious experience. I know the guy looking back at me was not my dad, but it wasn’t me either. It’s not that I don’t recognize my own face-I do! It’s more like it just doesn’t seem to be me anymore, at least not the way I think of myself. As I apply the shaving cream to my face and then perform the ritual of shaving, which I’ve done faithfully for over forty years, everything seems familiar, so familiar that I almost never cut myself anymore. As I finish up my shave and rinse my face, taking a sideways glance at the face in the mirror, the images of all the days and places seem to offer themselves up right in front of me. It was a surreal moment of brilliant insight that left me reeling from seeing my life flash before my eyes. Where does the time of our life go to? It seems to slip by so slowly at first and then one day you wake up and you’re on a roller coaster hellbent on jumping the tracks. I remember all the times, all the days spent working, fixing things around the house, going on vacation, family birthdays, baptisms and funerals. I remember all the holiday scenes and Christmas presents and the family and friends that are no longer with us and all the new babies in the family. Maybe it’s a trick of memory to suppose that everything in the past happened in its own time, unfolding without hurry or bother, as it was always intended. It could be that things have changed in the world so much that now we don’t have time to cram anything into our already crowded schedules. I mean, when I go on vacation now, I need four power cords to charge my two cellphones, Bluetooth, and Nook! What’s up with that? Checking in with myself at age sixty is both rewarding and perplexing. As I grow older life itself seems to deliver up gifts I never imagined, never could have received in my youth; patience, perspective, and a slower pace more amenable to actually getting something meaningful accomplished each day. It is finally possible to begin to experience a sense of rhythm in life. Some of the unintended consequences include all the medications, doctor visits, and the stuff that comes with it. There is also something else that showed up in my life when I turned sixty: the need to reinvent myself or rediscover who I really am! Sometime in the past year, a new image of me has come into focus: it is a faded residual image from my youth of me actually conquering life or something like that. Anyway, this morning, the image in the mirror realized that I had almost accomplished so many things in my life. I almost completed my educational goals. I almost helped my parents in their old age. I almost succeeded in business. I almost went bankrupt. I almost became a pastor. I almost went to Europe. I almost became a writer. I almost became a ballet dancer. I almost lived my life. I don’t know how much time I have left to live, but I’ve learned to be fully grateful for each breath of air I breathe, for each bird song I hear at sunrise, and to watch the sun go down and just sit on the patio basking in that indirect sunlight time of day we call twilight. Having found my authentic self, time no longer seems to matter, as each day unfolds on its own, in its own time and me along with it.

My New Book

"God vs The Rest of Us
...my journey into healing"

Where I will lead you by the hand through a lifetime of searching for my identity.

If you ever wonder about who you are or your life's purpose, this book is for you. 

The book will challenge you to take the steps necessary for you to begin your own self-excavation process and find the your authentic self... The Real You! 

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