FIRST LOVE

Among my mother’s friends was an older couple that lived in the small town of Nykøbing on Falster. Their grandchildren, Birgitte and Poul Reimer, were close to my age. Our first meeting I don’t remember, but a now lost photo showed Birgitte and me as toddlers talking, while Poul is looking on from behind the bars of his playpen. Later, when I was twelve and big enough to be on my own, I lodged with the Reimers when we visited in Nykøbing. The three of us teemed up well, with Birgitte as the moving spirit. She was a spunky redhead and a graceful dancer. Poul was a sweet kid, but overlooked by the grown ups since he had no obvious talents and did not excel in school like his sister. We did performances for the parents and their friends with Birgitte as both director and star.

At my first visit Poul and I were put in the same bed at night and Birgitte on a cot next to us. While she was asleep Poul and I fooled around with each other, and for the first time, being not alone, I came, while Poul at ten was still too young to have an orgasm.
Ancher, their father, was a bitter man. He had expected to follow his father as head of one of Denmark’s great banks, but because of a scandal involving the Minister of Justice, who was Jewish, he ended up as manager of the local branch in Nykøbing. This was his reason for being anti-Semite, but his mother-in-law was Jewish. Naturally there was no love lost between them. Ingse, his wife, was about 15 years younger than he and suffered from this constant war in her family. In everyday life it was glossed over, but at parties the alcohol brought it to the surface. Ancher would loosen up, I think that was the only times I saw him smile, but Ingse would be in the bedroom crying and complaining about her unhappy marriage. This happened a couple of years later when we were old enough to participate in the parties.

We also had our own illegal parties where we competed with the grown-ups in consuming vast amounts of alcohol. Ingse and Ancher were gone for the weekend and the word was put out. At this time Birgitte had a boyfriend. At the party they got into an argument and Poul threw himself down the stairs to divert their attention from the fight; he deeply loved his sister and was never jealous of her status as the preferred sibling.
In the early morning everybody helped clean up, but since they didn’t know where everything went, it all got jumbled, the glasses were where the plates should have been, the forks were mixed with the spoons, the person who rolled up the window shades tied some special Gordian knots, and at the last moment, when the keg was rolled out of the living room a remnant of beer ran out on the carpet and made the room smell strongly. We were found out right away, Ancher tried to catch Poul who had a narrow escape. In the end the tempers were calmed and we were punished only with a lecture.
This time I slept with Poul in his room in the attic. He had a huge old bed that had belonged to his grandfather. Here we took our innocent pleasures together every night, taking turns caressing and masturbating each other. Next time I returned we went at it with even more zeal. When I arrived, I asked for Poul and was told he was in his room. I ran up and found the door locked. I guessed what was going on in there, and kept knocking, saying: “Let me in, let me in, it’s me!” The door was opened, and there was Poul with a friend whom I had met before, when he was a very fat little kid. He had changed into a young Adonis, and I was pleased to find him included in our lusty play.
Poul came to visit me for Easter when I was 17 and living by myself in a pension. As soon as we were in my room we fell on each other with passion, and those four days we were as close as we would ever get, both best friends and hot lovers.
A year later, Poul came again and I was of course all fired up with expectations, but when I suggested that we take up where we had left, he turned me down with no other reason than he didn’t want to. I did not insist, for I knew that I was in the ‘wrong’.

Easter 43

So, I swallowed my sorrow and we remained best friends, and when Poul later moved to Copenhagen we saw a lot of each other, long nights of talk and drinking. Poul had quit his job as an apprentice in a grocery store and started at the Royal Academy of Arts and when I came out and changed my life, I chose to study art and be a painter in part because that was what Poul did. When I told him of being gay, he said: “If I ever said anything that hurt you, please forgive me.”
Poul married a strange American woman who drove him to drinking and on to his first mental breakdown. He divorced, but the alcoholism stayed with him, the first many years not too heavily, but later alternating between being on the wagon and taking a yearly binge of excessive drinking.

Early morning after a night of drinking

When I had begun to smoke pot I traveled to Paris and from there further south with a boy I had met. We paid a visit to Poul who was passing the winter painting in Nerja on the south coast of Spain. The visit was not a success. There was a definite split between the potheads and the alcoholic, between the gays and the straight that made communication impossible. It seemed to be the end of my closeness with Poul.
I traveled a lot until I moved to California in 77, and then in 84, after 22 years of silence, I wrote him a letter that became the first in a correspondence lasting till we met one last time. In long letters we recaptured memories from our childhood and youth together and exchanged the stories of our lives, and it felt as if our friendship was intact, but it was nourished by the past; in the present we were far apart.

In 89 I came to Denmark after twelve years absence. Poul was living in Roskilde, a small town about an hour from Copenhagen. I went there to visit with some friends and naturally also to see Poul. My friends took me to lunch in a restaurant owned by Poul’s second wife and she immediately grasped the phone and called him. He invited me over and I had a shock when I saw him. He had changed into the spitting image of his father, Ancher, whom I had feared and loathed when I was young. I was presented to his third wife and their daughter but I could not stay long because I was engaged for the evening. I think the haphazard character and shortness of our meeting hurt him, for after that he didn’t answer my letter and our correspondence died out.
Four years later he was found dead in his studio, sitting in his chair with the morning paper and a cup of coffee.

HIPPIES IN MARRAKESH

A drawing from our hotel room in Marrakesh 1966. In the foreground Lone lying, behind Anja and a German boy, Wolfgang.

MY AUNT INGER

My mother, Agnes, was the fifth of seven children, and early on I knew by rote their names: Inger, Eva, Anne Marie, Ellen, Agnes, Vilhelm, and Gudrun. Six girls and a boy.
My aunt Inger was the oldest and not as bright as the rest of the siblings. The story went that she had fallen off a swing and hurt her head when she was little. There was a degree of snobbery in the family; lack of intelligence, or just lack of higher education, was looked down upon, and there had to be an explanation for her not being up to the family standard.

The five oldest girls with Inger at the right, my mother at the left
In my home a lot of the social life was centered on Contract Bridge, the cardgame that rivals chess in complexity, and which was played with gusto. Inger liked very much to play, but it was annoying for the others when she stumbled through the game and brought her team down, so it was always a sacrifice to include her. My cousins and I didn’t much like her; maybe we were cruel in our self-centeredness, but we picked up on the grown-up’s attitude.
Inger also had a particular little cover-up laugh she laughed when everybody else was laughing and she had not understood. She was thrifty, not to say stingy, with small amounts. I remember her coming into the dining room with a plate in her hand, saying: “The liverpaste is still good, I have scraped the mold off.” That, of course, became part of the family lore. It happened in a summer cottage she had built in Arild, our favorite summer spot at Kullen in Sweden. Now we stayed with her instead of renting, for the family feeling was a strong undercurrent beneath the sometimes-choppy waves.
When I came out, I didn’t come out to Inger, but told her only about giving up my job as engineer and wanting to study with an art teacher and paint. She asked to have a talk with me and begged me to promise that if I hadn’t “succeeded” in a year’s time I would return to engineering. I was very insecure, but, without trying to hide my uncertainties, I made her see that such a promise was impossible and absurd.

For many years I didn’t see aunt Inger that often, for I lived far from her and traveled a lot. Several times she helped me out and she never withdrew her love or judged my life. When it came to true generosity, she had a big heart. As I was the only one in the family who didn’t have a secure and well-paid job, she wanted to let me inherit her whole estate, but my uncle, who invested her capital for her, talked her into establishing instead a trust fund, the interest of which I could receive as long as I lived. The others agreed to wait with their inheritance until my death. That was a good solution for me; I still have this welcome addition to my income. If I had inherited the capital it would have evaporated long ago.She was the only one of the six sisters who didn’t suffer from depressions or other mental illness, until, in her last years, before she died at the age of 92, senility clouded her mind. When I came back from two years in France and said I would go and see her, I was told: “It isn’t worthwhile, she will not recognize you”.
“Well I’ll go and see her anyway,” I said.
She was in bed and I could see that she was close to death.
I took her hand and she asked: “Who is it?”
“Åge,” I said.
“A nephew of mine?” she said, and I kept her hand in mine and sat with her for a while. I allerted the family and she died two days later.

Funny, I shaved once in my sixties after having had a beard for many years. Whose face should look out at me from the mirror but my aunt Inger’s! It was disconcerting - though I had come to appreciate her after I grew up and when her age fused her shortcomings with the natural frailties of old age. How many hours of Scrabble have I passed with her, leading to uncountable victories for me!

BAMBOO

Photo by Tony Orlando

THOUGHTS ON REINCARNATION

Reincarnation is very simple; it’s mental energy. Your physical energy is exhausted at the time of death and the energy of your consciousness separates from your body and goes into another form, that’s all. That’s the simple explanation. Mental energy and physical energy are different. Modern science has some difficulty with this. They do explain some difference between mental and physical energy but Buddhism explains it more clearly.
(Lama Yeshe)

Question asked Khandro Rimpoche, a recognized reincarnation: Can you recall things of your past life?
Answer: It depends on what you would call remembering. When one talks about the previous incarnations one does not necessarily say that it is something like flashbacks. But it is definitely something that one can feel.


Think about these three possibilities:
After death there is nothing.
After death there is an eternity, either in heaven or in hell.
After death there is a revision of the life lived and a return to a new life.

Think about why people are born into such different circumstances.
Is it just that everything is meaningless coincidence?
Is it that God is cruel and without caring?
Is it that we are all bound to go through life’s possibilities according to our own actions?

For me there is no doubt about the answers.
Reincarnation is the only way to explain the difference in our lots, without giving up a belief in some kind of ‘divine’ justice. This justice manifests itself in the law ‘What-You-Sow-You-Shall-Reap’ and that makes us directly responsible for our own life, from its original circumstances to the way it develops.

According to the materialistic view all activity, bodily and mental, ceases at death. But since the material elements basically consist of energy and we don’t really know anything about the true nature of this energy; how can we know for sure - or deny for sure – anything that may be going on in the mysterious realm of pure energy?
We have enough reports of phenomena that cannot be explained, such as out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and instances of clairvoyance and telepathy, to make simple coincidence very unlikely.
The spiritual view postulates the supremacy and unity of Spirit. The difference between this belief and the prevalent Western belief in God is that the Great Spirit inhabits everything and is not in any way separate from creation. This belief is more kin to animism, the most ancient belief of humankind.

Let us take a look at the cycle of life and death.
In the womb, between conception and birth, there is awareness but as yet no concept of life. Awareness is a quality of Spirit, and awareness contains memory.
Memory can be seen as being of three kinds that I will call: instinctive memory, immediate memory, and historical memory.
The instinctive memory is unconscious and it is necessary for survival in the world. It contains memory of skills and/or special phobias.
The immediate memory is the conscious memory of past events. This is what we normally call memory.
And finally the historical memory, which is special for humans, consists of the ‘stories’ that fixes the images of immediate memory into a fictitious past. It is also included in what we normally call memory. Because the historical memory is an individual transformation of the immediate memory, the same event is often remembered completely different by different people.

In early childhood, besides the instinctive memory, there may be shreds of immediate memory from last life. As the person grows older these memories fade away together with the memories of early childhood.
In the Tibetan tradition there is established a continuity between lives so that one can find the reincarnation of a specific person who has honed his awareness and thereby strengthened his memory. To be recognized he must choose, from among objects, those that were his in his former life.
The reincarnated is of course a different person with different genes derived from different parents and living in different circumstances; so what is it that he has brought with him from a former life, besides the fading memories?
He brings the honed awareness – like a light that dispells the darkness of ignorance, the source of all misery. He brings awareness with instinctive memory of skills that is perceived as giftedness or talent and makes it easy for him to relearn things.
Here we are talking about special individuals, but it’s the same for everybody; mental energy is indestructible in the same way as physical energy is. It can change form but there is a constant connection of causality and nothing is ever lost; so everybody is bringing with them baggage from former lives as fate decides. Cause and effect is like the glue that unifies the universe in the Spirit. In its subtlety it is what seems to be fate.
There is both determination and free will. When free will is in accord with the determined course, good luck ensues.

Death is the reverse of life; similar to the way sleep is the reverse of being awake. There are different stages and different states in death, just like there is in life, but they have a content that we can hardly imagine, except that it may be dreamlike sensations that we have no precise words to describe.
The first stage in death is the transition from life’s complex richness to the bare essence, the pure Spirit of one’s own being. According to tales of near death experiences this seems to begin in bliss, but soon one must confront truth. The mythical ‘judgment’ is the suffering or the joy that this confrontation will provoke, according to the life one has lived.
To go through this process there must be a structure connected to the awareness. This individual structure of awareness I call the Soul, and it is the mental energy that sustains, but is independent of, the physical energy.
The next stage then, is where the karmic repercussions of life have to be gone through. This could be ‘heaven’ or it could be ‘hell’, but in the end it will be exhausted and the wish for a new life will guide the Soul to seek reincarnation.
At conception we are thus transmitted from the unlimited mental realm of death into the bare essence of a one-celled organism. Conception, like death, is a paring down to the essence and there is bliss in both transitions, but it doesn’t last !

In all sentient beings the illusionary is coupled with the indestructible. If one can see through the illusion, only the indestructible is left.

TONIGHT

Do you like the new colors ? I'm happy about the title banner - don't ask me how I got that metallic effect ! It came by itself; I used iphoto and changed the colors on and on, five or six times, and suddenly the colors began to mix and glint like metal.
I had to change the other colors to fit but that you probably will not notice.

I got an e-mail from Ellesa and Michael saying they had been reading the blog. "You are all over the place," they said, and I guess that's true. I like that !

Besides blogging I also make jam. Today I made apple-guave jam out of the last Red Delicious and the first small guavas. The guavas have an intense taste that give pizzas to the apple sauce. For dinner I made Danish pancakes = crèpes, and ate them with vintage rhubarb jam. And I mean vintage ! I've had this jar and a jar of green tomato jam since 1987. My friends urged me to throw them out, but before throwing them out I ventured a taste and they were both totally preserved and tasty.

It's getting late and I wish you a good night and a bright morning.

A KISS

I couldn't decide on which blog to post this my latest drawing - so I put it on both !

NGAWANG CHOTAK

A word about Ngawang Chotak, whom I met in Nepal under the name of Chris in 1970.

Chotak recently went to a center in San Francisco that helps alcoholics and while he was there he lost consciousness. He was taken from the center to San Francisco General Hospital. The doctors found bleeding had occurred in his brain, like when a trauma to the head occurs. Further, he was put on a respirator, which means the doctors believed he was not able to breathe by himself.
Now he seems miraculously to be coming back from another brush with death. He can breathe by himself and communicate. His sister and his oldest son are with him and his younger son is on his way from Nepal.
Pray with Ngawang Chotak’s many students for his recovery!

THE TRAVELERS

It has taken time to sort out the photos, but here we are at the entrance to Yokohama's China Town, at the bus station in Yokohama and with June in his house.

OCTOBER SUN

INSPIRATION

This grafiti is inspired by the Music of Africa.
I'm listening to Baba Maal from Senegal.

A FIRST GAY PARTY

I had a best friend in high school but after we graduated we had less and less contact. The last time I saw him was a Saturday night about four years after graduation, and that’s when I realized that we had nothing in common anymore. The atmosphere had been strained and the night boring and I left early around eleven o’clock.
On my way home, walking to the train station, a group of laughing partygoers called out to me and when I responded they invited me to a party that was going on in the house right behind them. That was just what I needed to dispel the gloom of a friendship extinct.
I started out with some stiff drinks and then I noticed that the girls danced together and the boys likewise. Even though this was three years before I came out, I suddenly had no doubt that I belonged. I was rather drunk and I spilled my heart, how I was in love with a straight boy. I got some sympathy and soon forgot my laments and joined the party, totally letting go of my inhibitions.
One guy eagerly pursued me, but he didn’t interest me; there was a boy that I had my eyes on. With him I danced and there was a strong current between us. After a while we sneaked off to find a hiding place where we could consume our passion, but we had hardly gotten started when my pursuer found us and joined in.
This was my first genuine homosexual experience and however exciting it had been in the moment, the next day found me in a very different mood. I felt soiled and debased, I had been drunk, I had had sex with two persons I didn’t know and I had lost my undies in the mess.
The straight boy I was in love with was staying with me for the summer while we were both doing a workshop in survey. We were together every day, but I couldn’t talk to him about it. In comparison to that messy night and my drunken lust, my love for him seemed pure - but was it? Not really! It is true that I was happy just being with him, being his best friend, but the undercurrent of physical attraction was never the less at the bottom of our connection. My relationship with him repeated my pattern of furtive approaches to pleasure. If we happened to be in the same bed, I rolled close in pretended sleep. He, of course, had his suspicions, but since I was not explicit, it went on for several years and never came to any kind of clarity.
When he found a girlfriend and began to prefer her company to mine, it spelled the end of our closeness.

MY MOTHER - BORN OCT. 10, 1887

My mother always gave total support and she had a strong mind. As a young girl about nine or ten years old she had the sudden realization that religion was just old wives tales and since then she believed only in science. What science could not explain was better left alone. She became a chemical engineer and was working in chemical physics. In nineteen seventeen she was engaged to be married, but her fiancé died in the Spanish flu in 18. He left a teen-age son Jørgen and my mother was close to him and took care of him. When he became an officer in the army they drifted apart and in I my time they didn’t see each other often. He had married a woman who suffered from depressions. In the end she committed suicide by going away and taking an overdose of sleeping pills in a hidden place. My mother talked about this and I remember her having some admiration for a job well done, so to speak.
Jørgen shot himself when the Germans invaded Denmark. The government didn’t put upany resistance and his soldier’s honor was shamed.


After the death of mother’s fiancé she moved in with her elder sister, Eva, and they had great sisterly love for each other. Two independent women, young, free, educated, and spirited, living with a circle of friends in the liberal middle class.
They both had a couple of serious amorous affairs. I never could make my aunt Eva tell me about hers, but I knew about my mother’s.
She had an affair with her married boss, professor B. How many years it lasted I don’t know, but if it hadn’t already ended it was broken in the summer of 24 when she met my father and they fell in love and conceived a child.
My father was a painter with some succes in academic circles, married to a Polish artist who painted lyrical and genuine still-lifes with flowers. They had a daughter who was thirteen years older than I.
To be a single woman with child was not common in 1925. But my mother stood up for herself and she told family and friends how happy she was, and was generally accepted.


The birth was difficult and she had some complications, but they were soon healed, and that summer she often saw my father and I imagine they had a happy, romantic time. He promised her to get a divorce and to marry her, but I think they must have known that their happiness was fragile, for marriage was still a strong institution at that time.
When I was about a year old my father’s wife found a picture of me in his pocket and with her wife-power she made him promise never to se my mother or me again. He wrote to mother that he felt obligations towards his wife, whom he had brought to Denmark, and he thought my mother more able to be single.
I wonder what she felt, but it is my guess that she realized that life with my father might have been difficult and that living with Eva and having a child was in many ways ideal. I never felt that her life was not fulfilled, not until circumstances changed and her strength gave in.


She loved me totally and in spite of working 9 to 5 she gave me ample time. Every night we would sit by the lamp at one end of the sofa and she would read to me. She didn’t want to read things that she didn’t like herself. Of the early things she read I remember Hans Christian Andersen, Winnie the Pooh, Oliver Twist, Gulliver’s Travels and The Three Musketeers.
She was like a lioness if anybody threatened the apple of her eye, mama’s boy!
The time we were closest was when I was thirteen. That summer I traveled with mother and Eva to France where we visited with my former schoolmate. It was a fairytale trip for me, a new world opening up while I was still protected and taken care of. After that I began more and more to pass time with my peers, the war came, and decline set in.

Professor B had turned bitter and began to torment not only my mother but also his other assistant, who was easier to get to. My mother had reached menopause and the bitter unfriendliness at her workplace began to take its toll. She brought home a notebook where she had written down his harassments and she would often cry when telling about it. The assistant comitted suicide, and according to my mother it was he who drove her to it with his unpredictable rages when his unclear orders were misunderstood. Added to this was the gathering tension in Germany, the persecution of Jews, and also an estrangement from her old friend Holger. The cause of this was Holger’s wife, who could not accept her daughter’s marriage to a young teacher of proletarian roots. My mother gave shelter and help to the young couple, and as a result she was not invited to Holger’s 50th birthday. That was like a slap in the face. Years passed without communication and it was a thorn in my mother’s heart.


In 1940, three weeks before my 15th birthday the Germans invaded and occupied Denmark. My mother’s depression had completely taken over and incapacitated her. She was bedridden and every day when I came home from school I visited her and tried to cheer her up – a Sisyphus task!
She was scheduled to be hospitalized in a few days, when one day I found her bed empty.
“Your mother has gone to get her hair done”, said the new housekeeper, and so, when I later heard the front door I went to the top of the stairs to see mother. But it was Eva.
“I thought it was mother”, I said, and in that moment I read the truth in Eva’s face, and we both knew that there was no doubt; she had taken action and nothing could be done about it.


The impressions from the final years have always seemed to overshadow the feelings from happier times. There are images in my mind, of course, from these times, but I was still a child and her love was the very element in which I lived. With her sickness the communication turned into something more like a chore. You had to be careful what to say since everything could be the cause of new worries in her troubled mind.
It felt like a betrayal that I, who had always participated in every aspect of our family life, had been kept ignorant of the suicidal thoughts that mother had in fact expressed to Eva. She had preferred to leave, and even though I knew that she had done it in part because she knew she was a burden to us, I felt both bereaved and guilty.

Now our two lives span 120 years, and I still often think what she would have made of my life and times.

QUOTE

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

IS THIS REAL?

YES! It is called a 'Fire Rainbow' - One of the rarest of all naturally occuring atmospheric phenomena. The picture was captured on the Idaho - Washington border, and the event was reported to have lasted about 1 hour.
Clouds have to be Cirrus, at least 20K feet in the air, with just the right amount of ice crystals and the Sun has to hit the clouds at precisely an angle of 58 degrees.
(From Deejohnized)

THE 20TH DUNUN VILLAGE

The showers and toilets were finally ready and Chris performed the opening ceremony all-alone!!
Again, it was a small gathering, but the music and the dance were raging already Friday night. Rain was expected on Saturday, and during the afternoon it fell, mild and refreshing, without stopping the drums.
Sunday the sun was out again and there was still dance classes going on and a small group of drummers even stayed the night over.
I learned a lot of new stuff and enjoyed this gathering very much. I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures, but here are some for your enjoyment:

Ruben, Chris, Adley and Mario

Tenara

Friday night

The view from my camp

Raindrops

Greg, Diensu, Adley and David

This is not photoshop…

but a trampoline

GREETINGS

I'm going to Dunun Village tomorrow morning and will be outside the net the next four or five days.
Have a wonderful weekend!

EXPERT ADVICE

I grew up in Europe where we have trains like the ones in Japan, so I am an expert with trains. Brie is not bad at finding her way, but I have been in Japan before and I do know a little more about it.

So, anyway we had gone to Hakone and were caught in a thunderstorm walking to the hostel with our luggage - and no umbrellas. We were soaked and the hostel had mildew in the bathroom. So we moved to the Ra kuun hotel, which was not much better but a lot more expensive. When next morning was grey and foggy we decided to seek other pastures. Kamakura was the place we all had liked. Let’s go there!

We had come by train on the Tokaido line from Yokohama and an hour in a bus. Now we backtracked, but we didn’t have to go all the way back to Yokohama because half way back, in Ofuna, we could change from the Tokaido line to the line for Kamakura.
What we wanted was an express to Ofuna. The panel showing the next trains announced a Tokaido line Express, and there was only three minutes to get to the platform and the train. I urged Tony and Brie to hurry up and we got in just before the train left.

We went through a tunnel, and another tunnel and another.
Did we go through so many tunnels?
I didn’t think so.
I asked Tony and Brie and they said, oh, yes!
Then we stopped at a station that I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t want to believe it, and it was too late now to get out, but we are going the wrong way – away from Ofuna! The mountains are on the right, the ocean on the left, there’s no doubt. Oh, the downfall of expertise!
My fellow travelers took it quite nicely; they didn’t rage against me or stop talking to me, but I had to relinquish all leadership in railway stations hereafter.
In order to stop their snide remarks about my mental abilities, I promised to take them out to lunch in our favorite restaurant as soon as we came to Kamakura. In return I made them swear that they would never, ever mention this again, neither to me nor to anybody else.
So I know that you haven’t heard the story before!

FRUITS OF FALL

Click to enlarge!

Congress of Birds

Westcliff, Santa Cruz

Colors in the Backyard

Roses faded, Broccoli gone.

For Halloween maybe ?

Napoleon in the shade

My Friends

The empty Chair (I just left…)

I LOVE THE TRAINS

A local line in Kamakura

Looking out front on the Toyoko line

Shinkansen - the bullet train

BHAGAVAN DAS

In ‘Be Here Now’ Richard Alpert, aka. Baba Ram Das, told about the young blond sadhu, Bhagavan Das, from America who introduced him to his guru, Neem Karoli Baba.
The first time I went trekking in the Himalayas I met Bhagavan Das. With my fellow travellers I had passed the night in a small settlement; then, in the late morning, a tall figure was spied coming down from the mountains.
“Bhagavan Das”, said my one companion.
One did not often meet fellow Westerners in 1970 on the trek to Mount Everest; it was an occasion, and we sat down to drink tea and exchange news.
Bhagavan Das was fair and broad-shouldered with a crown of dreads wound on his head. I had never seen dreads before on a Westerner; I was captivated. He was such an ideal of what the sixties revolution was about, of freely following the re-spiritualized consciousness.
So he said: “Come and see me.” And he explained where he lived and I recognized Kopan where I had been called to watch the sunset once at the end of an acid-trip.
When I came back from the trek and went to see him, he was not there and before I had a chance to meet him again he was gone.

Ten to twelve years later I met Bhagavan Das in California. An amazing change had occurred. He now had children he had to take care of and he had become a car dealer, a totally straight-looking well-groomed American businessman. We only just saw each other shortly and acknowledged our connection, then again he was gone.

Now, another twenty-five years have passed.
I recently got a new housemate, Leela, and it turns out she is Bhagavan Das’ faithful associate. He has returned to his beginnings and drawn them to a conclusion and there is no trace left of the car dealer! He has for many years now been a travelling sadhu spreading good vibes with his devotional songs. Leela had arranged for a Kirtan in Santa Cruz Saturday night and Bhagavan Das came Friday and stayed in our house for three days. This time we had time to really connect. I played djembe as part of the musical support at the Kirtan and Sunday night we watched Lama Yeshe teach on DVD.

It is amazing how karmic connections manifest and how you can have a deep relation to a person you only meet a few times in a lifetime.

JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE

Tokyo

Yokohama

LOST IN TRANSLATION

We had spent the day in Kamakura, a small town that was the capital of Japan from 1185 to 1333 and contained many temples and a huge Buddha statue.
Brie wanted to visit a shrine that was right next to the first stop on our train ride home. She said: “If you guys are too tired you can go on home and I’ll go to the temple alone.” I was tired but not quite sure what I wanted to do.
When our train arrived at Kamakura station there was a first class car – a so called green car - right in front of us and I said: “That’s a green car,” and ran to the car in front, but Brie and Tony didn’t follow me. I wanted to find them before the first stop and when I went into the green car they were there, sitting all alone in the luxurious compartment.

“You can’t stay her,” I said, but Brie said: “Oh, it’s just one stop.” So I sat down with them, but just before our stop a railway lady came in and explained, mostly in Japanese, that we had to pay extra. The train had now stopped and Brie said: “But we get off here!” The lady began to explain again that we had to pay extra, but when Brie insisted: “We get off here!” she relented and said: “You go other car.” We jumped up and ran to the next car and straight to the door out, Brie first, then I, and Tony last. Just as Brie ran out the door it started closing and I stopped, afraid of being caught in it. We were separated. Brie put up a cheerful face and waved goodbye as the train started up and all the Japanese, who are normally so polite, laughed at us.
Tony wanted to go back, but I was too tired to follow and at the next station he left and I continued home.

I had been home nearly two hours when Tony arrived - alone.
“Is Brie not here?” he asked. He had not been able to go back because he didn’t know what train to take. The station was big and trains went off right and left. He waited to see if Brie would come and when she didn’t, he gave up and continued homewards. At the huge Yokohama station he got lost when changing trains, and when he finally found his way he took the express train that didn’t stop at our station.
Thanks to an herbal relaxation we began to see the comical aspect of our adventure, but when Brie arrived half an hour later she was quite mad. She had waited in vain for us to come back, and it didn’t help that we were giggly when recalling the Japanese all laughing at us, but when she understood that Tony had done his best to join her, but was lost, and with a helping of saké, she joined our mood and we all had a good laugh.

JAPANESE FOOD

From the supermarket

Breakfast

Dinner

Vegetarian

Even the garbage looks tasty !

VACATION

I'm going to Japan soon and will take the month off from blogging.
Please enjoy the summer - or the winter if you live down under!

THE FOG

is always ready during the summer to come and chill Santa Cruz: