When I first learned to rock.

I only vaguely remember this rocking horse, my only equestrian companion, although it is clearly being ridden at my maternal grandparents' home in a New Jersey suburb, out in the enclosed porch addition where my grandfather had his ice cold Manhattan

every evening after a day at the office in the eponymous city, Ritz crackers and sharp cheddar on the side, a simple, hearty supper to follow. I now remember this is where I acquired a taste for Maraschino cherries, those fluorescent pseudo-fruit confections I always relished with my Shirley Temple at elegant restaurants in the country.

I keep discovering photos of my smiling young self, which confuses parts of me. There are defenders in me, strategic selves who would have me only remember the difficult, and rarely the sublime. But now I wish to reclaim the capacity for joy I clearly felt astride this springy steed, watched over by some loving adult, camera in hand. Yes–I would tell my defenders–I know there were hurtful experiences, but the scary places you would keep me from also contain these treasures, and the possibility of both recovering the sweetness of childhood in myself, and of freeing myself to encourage that recovery in others, is too important to miss. Stand down, my brave warriors, and let me be undefended when it's called for. Turn your eyes from my vulnerability, and see the strength I now possess. Let yourself fall, and have faith I will catch you, just as the earth catches my body, silence catches my attention, and love catches my desire. Stand down, and let someone much stronger watch over you for a change.

Bless you, teacher!

Terence McKenna & Mark Pesce – Techno-Pagans at the End of History. This is a picture I took of Terence, the only time I saw him up close, at Esalen in August 1998. He had not yet discovered the tumor that was at that moment growing in his brain, the tumor that would take his life, after experimental cancer treatment, and a shitload of hashish, in April 2000. I had just discovered him a couple of months before, shelving BLs (mostly gorgeous books in Hebrew with color splashed, dappled edges, far too many to fit on the shelves) in a library at Stanford University, when I espied a strangely hued paperback with a wacky cover, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (a collection of essays from various publications), a book that completely changed my life, and goes on changing it every day. Miss you, Terence!

Because of you, I've made so many friends, and grown so much professionally. I've gotten to know your lovely family. Because of you, I got tenure as a librarian, and collected over a 1,000 books on psychedelics and cannabis. Because of you, I've started on a quest that has already taken me very far, and is still gathering momentum. Bless you, teacher! 

Of course, I also miss Mark, but that's a different story. He's alive and well and living on the other side of the Equator and the Date Line, and even when he's here, I don't see him any more.

Lovers in the garden

My parents, Bibi and John, almost swallowed by the foliage on the larger of two bridges over the pond in Claude Monet's fabulous garden. A bridge depicted in so many paintings, paintings of which my parents were, who isn't?, very fond. 

All those water lilies, colors, reflections, light. All the dreamy, nameless, but very specific, sensations available in that garden, that Monet has planted in so many imaginations, forever. And there they were, on their last voyage together in France, in August 2000. 

They've both left this garden, in two different Augusts, since then, but their ashes are side by side at home in Malibu, and if there's any justice for lovers, their spirits are still side by side, in a garden, filled with light, to which we'll all return

Somewhere behind California Street

Here's me, in my work uniform as a student at UCSC in the very late 1970s, in my busy, ramshackle, noisy/noisome, student-infested, off-street love nest ostensibly addressed "California Street." Many memories made here, as I moved from apartment to apartment, bed to bed, affair to affair, and still wound up being lonely and depressed most of the time, before I dropped out. Totally my own fault for not grabbing (both literally and metaphorically) all the drugs, good times, gusto and ass flung my way. Not that I didn't make friends (one to this day), make love and waste time with the best of them, just on a smaller scale.

Irritated all, disappointed many, ignored some, impressed a couple, and got to know too few of the other inmates. Heard everyone do everything at all times of day or night, there being naught but black plastic sheeting between ill-fitting planks lining the halls full of terrarium carpeting. The building was perfectly sprung for amplifying the weakest temblor, and I felt them all, rocking me to sleep, rocking me awake, and just rocking us in flagrante delicto. Salad days, and most of that from the dumpsters downtown. I'd only trade these memories for better ones of things I never tried.

Portrait of the artist

Here's a portrait of the artist as a young man, visible only as the shadow of the photographer on a bright autumn day. I vaguely remember the Brownie style camera, its airy heft, looking through the viewfinder, the plastic clicks of cocking the shutter, of taking a photo.

Here are Mark and Matthew, comrades in arms, guns at the ready, taking a break from patrolling the 3600 block of S Street, N.W., Washington D.C., a neighborhood I later learned was called Burleith, just uphill from Georgetown, and a short walk west of Dumbarton Oaks and the Naval Observatory. I was only two blocks from Kindergarten, and I came back across town years later to attend Gordon Junior High, another block east.

I remember the alley behind the houses where I searched for treasure in the cracks, a natural occupation for a child who always kept his head down. Washers, bolts, springs, and other wayward hardware, the occasional penny. Potential untapped. Mine to keep.

I remember the fragrant wisteria climbing a tree high into the cloud-strewn welkin, distant and cerulean. The shining realm to which I longed to escape, eyes straining to glimpse the path to safety, to glory, to my real home. The mourning doves who, alone, knew my sadness in exile, and returned my plaintive whistle.

Just out of the frame, up the walk, the sturdy wooden door, locked, the pyracanthas standing mute sentry before the bricks. The house, silent and dark. And I, keyless and home too soon, sink into despair at this, the emblem of my young life.

My list of feelings and needs

Inbal Kashtan http://baynvc.org/

I've been studying Nonviolent Communication (NVC) for a couple of years now. It has revolutionized my self awareness and the way I relate to others, to happy effect. Great tools! Simple and deep, with endless possibilities and variations.

I practice with others weekly, and a couple of fellow students recently asked me about my list of feelings and needs, a standard aid in practicing NVC, so I wrote up some notes to go with the list. The 'Newt' below is my excellent teacher Newt Bailey, whose Communication Dojo website and workshops I highly recommend.

Here's what I told my partners, when I shared the list: "I don't mind if you give this to others, but please retain the attribution, so that I remain responsible for its contents, OK?" 

• The List. The needs and feelings list that is often handed out in NVC classes made me very afraid when I first saw it! I think I had vertigo as I looked at the list of needs receding away from me as my head shrank back from that side of the page! No way do I have those needs! After some time, I realized that in order to make progress in recognizing, accepting and making requests about my needs and feelings, I would have to make the list mine. I chose to literally re-type the lists, adding my favorite words, under headings that pleased me, and probably dropping some that I just don't use. So, this is my idiosyncratic list, and not quite the same list handed out by, for instance, BayNVC. Just so you know. I would love to hear that you've made your own!
• Waystation feelings: This is my term for faux feelings, feeling words that contain so much judgment about others that they need translation. I felt the term faux--false--was itself a judgment that did not need to be propagated, so I came up with my own language. The sense is, when a waystation term occurs naturally to you, you take the time to translate into your own feelings and needs, without the assumptions about what others might mean or intend. Thus, the name waystation: a stopover on a longer journey to one's own feelings and needs. I don't think anyone else uses this term; why I'm explaining.
• Non-NVC Options: This, I believe, was Newt's concatenation of conversational or communication choices that are perfectly fine, and intended to meet our needs, but that are not NVC. So, while none of these strategies are 'wrong,' you want to be mindful that you are departing from NVC when you choose them. Helpful for Newt to cite during his practice sessions when he wanted to bring people back to our purpose for gathering in his home. I have added a few of my own activities to his original lists, so it has no single author now. 
• Sensations: I added this list, borrowed and edited, which is not NVC canon, as I have received it. I don't always know right away what I am feeling, as distinct from what my sensations happen to be. It's enough work to perceive and describe my sensations sometimes! I wanted to have a tool that would help me move from my actual sensations toward my feelings, when necessary. Also, the feeling words are often metaphorical (if I feel buoyant or radiant, I'm not actually floating or giving off light, except metaphorically), so sticking to sensations, as metaphorical as some of those words are, too, can keep me from staying in my head more than is useful. Not necessary in NVC, and borrowed from my work in Hakomi (a flavor of psychotherapy I'm studying, and loving!), but helpful for me.
• Values & Qualities: This is also not NVC canon! So, beware. I added this section, also borrowed and edited, following the many times I needed to characterize what I was feeling about my, or someone else's, actions or intentions. So, this is linked to the Needs list, under Meaning: Connection to Values. The sense is, someone else's act of kindness or sacrifice may meet my need for hope, peace, or whatever, but it may also just resonate with my own will to kindness, or willingness to sacrifice for some greater good. So, another's kindness may meet my need to connect to my value of being kind. This list thus helps me to identify the values and qualities important to me, as I recognize them in myself, or in others.
• How I use the lists: These are all long lists, and I have not yet connected to each and every need, feeling, sensation or value. Not in a hurry, either! However, as I've begun the study and practice of shamanism, I have come to appreciate the utility, ubiquity and antiquity of divination, of gaining knowledge that is ordinarily hidden, from sources of which we may not be aware. I happen to suppose, unlike many shamanic practitioners, most of this 'knowledge' comes from my unconscious or subconscious minds--rather than from divinities, occult entities, or the future--as they pare down my senses and sensibilities before presenting my conscious mind with a workable result. Thus, I consider it perfectly legitimate divination to interrogate myself by simply glancing at the lists, and seeing what pops out, 'making no decision,' rather than always 'making a decision' about what I feel, etc. I feel that 'making a decision about what I am feeling' can too often be a kind of compromise, also stemming from unconscious processes, that only wants to present safe, acceptable, socially approved, non-disruptive feelings and needs! So, glancing at the list, and being honest about what grabs my eye, seems like a better way to get at what's really going on, without the censor cleaning up my act for public display. Your mileage may vary.

Best of luck exploring NVC! I welcome feedback and questions.

The visually impaired persons, and the elephant

http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html

I've been fascinated lately with the parable of the blind men and the elephant, which I am charmed to find has instances from many cultures, some linked from the address crediting the illustration.

Nutshell: they all grab a different part, and assume they've grasped the whole, and know the elephant only from their limited perspective. So far, so good. The parable's lesson depends on us knowing that there is an elephant, and from our superior perspective, these silly blind men are clearly making an elementary mistake, a sort of synecdotal fallacy, the part not merely standing for the whole, but mistaken for the whole.

Good lesson for kids, and those still completing various chores of intellectual development. Careful, you may not have seen the big picture.

But I'm coming to think this is just the rez-de-chaussée of the parable, the ground floor, and that there may be many floors above. How's this for the premier étage? What if we—scientists, shamans, seekers of many stripes—come upon something in the wild, something new? Or, equally, what if we are striving to find something old, that has been lost, and needs recovering? Is there an elephant, after all? Maybe no one living can see the whole. We can only know what we perceive, at best, or what we've been told to look for. When we want to infer, to reify, a never-seen whole, from many fragments of observation, do we ever know that there is a whole to be inferred? Or, shall we just go ahead and crowd-source that iffy reification, like the visually impaired persons of legend, call it pachyderm, and muddle through?

What am I talking about? At last Spring's excellent MAPS Conference in Oakland, many of the sessions spoke to, or danced around the question of psychedelic psychotherapy and what it might entail, and how to train—or entrain—the doughty healers who will risk life and livelihood to support something good happening with sacred medicines. But, who is an effective guide, and what do they do, and what do they know? 

Is there an elephant here, and if so, of what parts is it composed? Leo Zeff, the late pioneering therapist, whose story is told in a delightful book The Secret Chief: Revealed, expressed the ideal of doing nothing beyond holding a safe space in which the client (the seeker, the voyager, the psychonaut...) can just be and do what they need to, to unfold as the unique spirit they are. Love and acceptance may be all that is required of either party.

A couple of the presenters assumed that the ideal guide would be a psychologist or psychiatrist, specializing in this psychological treatment modality, and sufficiently experienced with the medicines of choice to conduct psychotherapy in this unusual manner. They made many convincing arguments about the knowledge and personal development required for a therapist to be effective. Large barriers to entry, in other words; years of work for the right few, to treat the ordinary psychological problems of ordinary subjects of late capital in the industrialized west.

Another presenter from a large hospital study laid out the protocol for their crash course in training doctors to administer Schedule One substances, an earnest attempt to prepare white smocks for hazardous duty. Might fly, but what a contrast with the psychiatrists who made it seem one must always be preparing—and might never be quite ready—for this work, personally or professionally.

Yet another presenter laid out a blend of indigenous wisdom and archetypal psychology that also bore the scent of a stern, patriarchal, religious worldview. The expansive, feminine medicine needs the constriction of masculine structure to be effective. You need to be saved as much as healed. Hard to see how this model can be generalized beyond the specific cultural context from which it arises. But, can any model?

I was also privileged to hear from a third generation ayahuasquero, whose family has been brewing yagé since long before the norteamericanos y europeanos started trampling the undergrowth in search of... a lot of things.* This cultural matrix starts to prepare their members early, to gradually use the medicine regularly, as part of their society's jungle-sourced, organic healthcare system, if you will. No science, but a lot of successful treatments, to hear this wise, kindly and unassuming man tell it. More generations on the way...

Many perspectives, many visions of the work. Do they add up to an elephant, or will there be merely various chimeras of recent provenance, or revenants of the old ways, wandering in search of their blind men?

* my list would include improved health, wisdom, cures for the incurable, spiritual enlightenment, bragging rights, psychological insight, purification, business opportunities, novelty, initiation, religious experience, recipes, social community, cultural perspective, teachers, inspiration, professional training, lovers, friends, shelter from the storm, home...