​           
​                 In late September – about three weeks previous to this writing – I was asked by an old friend to help her through an operation necessary because of cancer.  She had no one else out in eastern Washington State where she had recently gotten a job, and so I acquiesced.  It turned out to be a tremendous experience for many reasons, one of them being the uniqueness of the hilly wheat-growing land there called The Palouse.  This was not a small thing; for some reason, this uniqueness seemed to color the human experiences as well.  Maybe it was because the landscape tilted me off my normal balance; or maybe it was because, for me, the experiences were truly as unique as I felt them to be.  But for whatever reason, the faces I recall will forever be framed by the great, pointed golden hills fringed with ponderosa pine, set in a wide, deep-blue Western sky.  And in that frame will be this one face which will always lend both pathos and wonder to my mood.
 
            Our first meeting was not during the greatest of circumstances.  It was late at night for me, 9:PM Pacific time,  11:00 my time, when all the light came from the ghostly glare of scintillating fluorescent tube which cast their bluish light everywhere like beacons from another dimension.  In this ghostly world I sat beside the bed of my friend, who was recently post-op and still deeply under the influence of anesthesia, drifting between wake and sleep in a dream world of visions and spirits.  Next to us was the perfunctory curtain separating this bed from another, from another woman in the cancer ward who I studiously tried to ignore to give her privacy.  I could not help but overhear her conversations on the phone, however.   She sounded young, and when she sang a bedtime story to her child – ending in “I – Love – You!,” I knew that she was both young, a mother of a very young child, and very sick.   How sick she told to some other person on the phone who was obviously not her child:
 
            “I was so mad at them last night!  I was throwing up non-stop and I asked for an IV of [some anti-vomiting medicine] but they gave me pills instead which I threw up.  I mean, couldn’t they figure on that?  Finally I got them to give it to me.  It was worse than the last time.”          
 
The last time: so, she had been through this before.   For me, one cancer episode and operation and so on would make me a nervous wreck.  For her, it all seemed normal.  How?
 
Next morning I came around again, and again my friend spent most of her time in an unconscious state.  She, too, had thrown up most of the night and was now exhausted.  The woman next to her, though, seemed to have recuperated very nicely.  In fact, I tried not to watch – again for privacy – as she wafted back and forth to the bathroom and outside to the hall a few times in her hospital nighty, her face so pale and thin she appeared near death.  During one of her passes she said “hello,” wherein I said that I had heard her singing in the phone the night before and guessed that she had a young child.  At this, with nothing much else to do, she began to tell me of her illness and her life, which should not have been so busy given her mid-twenty age.
 
“Yeah, that’s Pam, my six-year-old.  She’s not used to me being in the hospital again.  She’s with my mother now.  My mother is just great.  She stays with her a lot because of my cancer.  It’s a really rare one.  It just happens to some people some time.  This is my sixth operation.  They saw the cancer first when I was pregnant with Pam in the ultrasound.  It was as big as a basketball and made her grow out sideways.”
 
“Wow.  I guess she kind of saved your life.”
 
“I know.  I’ve been really lucky.  (She gets a phone call from her mother, and then is back).  I have the greatest mom.  Her (Pam’s) father is gone.  I divorced him after he broke my jaw.  Now I just got divorced from Brad.  He knew about my cancer before we married, but he couldn’t handle it.  I…can’t do some things, and he started having affairs.  I let him back several times, but I’ve had enough.”
 
“I wonder why he married you in the first place if he was going to do that?”
 
“I know!  I asked him that and he said that it was because he loved me.  I told him I loved him too, but all thiis was too much for him.  Since he wouldn’t stay with me with my illness, we had to move to my mother’s.  He said he couldn’t stand that, but he could have helped me himself.”
 
Pause – yes, I thought, the story always gets more complicated.
 
“But my mom really helps me.  And my sister too.  She’s come up from Portland to see me and should be here this morning (she came shortly after our talk).  She’s great, too.  We’ve been the best of friends forever since I was adopted (adopted too?).  She’s an alcoholic.  She’d go to the bars and have like all these guys and was really lost for a while, but she’s been sober for four years.  She’s still my best friend.”
 
“It’s really good to have a sister like that, and a really good mother too.  I know some people who have terrible mothers.  You’re really lucky.”
 
She agreed.
 
I meant that last statement, but I would not call “Luck” her middle name.  How could she handle all this?  And yet, when her sister came, they talked excited gossip, men and family and all, as if they were meeting at a café, not in a hospital room for recovering cancer patients.   “Oh, well” she would say, “some people just get this one in 10,000 type of cancer and I’m one of them.  No biggy.”  No biggy?  I’d be shouting at God for this curse while overdosing on Valium to keep anxiety from tearing me apart.    
 
But she, with her horrible disease and screwed-up life, ended our talk by thanking God for her daughter and her mother.  She DID think she was lucky.   How could that be when I, healthy for most of my 63 years, with never a jaw broken by a spouse, and never having been abandoned for adoption, have sometimes cursed my luck, or lack of it?  As a high-school jock might yell at me, “What a cry-baby; what a candy-ass!”
 
True.  But maybe we all need to be called out; certainly the cancer had called her out to a place where she felt lucky for what most of us feel we deserve as a matter of course.  From where she sat, she called me out, too, oh yes - not to feel guilty for my health and circumstances, but to appreciate despite the setbacks, the ailments and the lack of getting everything I want.  Getting everything might be the point for many of us – we call that being ambitious – but what of the gems in the dirt, or, as they say, the roses that grow along the path to work? 
 
I was thinking of this woman this morning and pictured the bleakness of her diagnosis and the operations and the nausea and the stress on family.  Such is the shroud of death, a dark, still place that is as hushed as a funeral parlor.  But it is only one spot, a small chill center from which springs all the things of life.  It is up to us to choose lightness or darkness, but really, even the darkness is not bad in itself.  It is the necessary backdrop to light, and in its hidden sphere lies all the secrets to life.  It is the making of light into darkness, and darkness into doom, that sets us apart.  We should not laugh at the funeral, for there is something solemn there that is to be learned, but we should not curse all else that springs from its void.  
 
Her darkness, it seems, has lent her light.  It was her daughter who brought the doctors to delay her cancer, and her daughter and sister and mother who have shown her the remarkable resilience of love.  Darkness also makes the holy man and the prodigy, and such is the lesson burnt on the altar, slain at Gethsemane, and risen every morning and every day.  Despair has its place only when we can see nothing else that is greater than that knife, that tumor, that life which swirls as a lone moth before the flame.  As  the young woman might say,  it is not only light that saves us, but also darkness that gives us back everything of worth in the brightness of day.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
           
 
  

Today, an essay, "Finding the Key," under "Essays" in the website.  FK (Note again -a book of my Essays, Beneath the Turning Stars, can be found at Amazon and Kindle).  

​In response to Cal Roeker’s comments on the last blog:
 
            A couple in New Hampshire around 1960 – the Hills, if I remember correctly – became famous after they went to a psychiatrist for mutually disturbing anxieties.  Something traumatic had happened near that mountain in New Hampshire, but they simply could not remember.  After being regressed with hypnosis, both told the same tale of abduction, differing only when they were separated in the alien space craft.  They were “talked to” telepathically and experimented upon, and then set free, left to struggle with their hazy memories.  They did not want to have had this happen; they were not doing this to make money or to grandstand.  They were both terrified beyond anything that had happened to them before.
 
            A little more than 10 years later, in 1973 (a year that was, I recently discovered, filled with UFO sightings) my girlfriend of the time told me a disturbing tale of her own: driving back in farm country after a visit to a hospital in the late evening, a light came from behind her car that was disturbingly aggressive.  Slowing down to let it pass, the light slowed down with her, then hovered above the car, then appeared in front of her.  The car engine died.  Tapping sounds came on the windshield and car body, but after a while, the light left and the car started again.  In telling me this, she was terrified.  I thought it was cool and told her I envied her the experience, but she did not agree.  She was afraid to tell anyone else because they would think she was crazy, and the experience had been clearly traumatic.  A month afterwards, she still trembled when she told the story.  She decidedly wished it had never happened.
 
            Other strange events happened to her and her family, as well as to our rural neighborhood at large during that year, but I mention it here to clearly state that one does not see UFO’s because one wants to believe, or even because one is open for belief.  These things simply happen.  It is one’s willingness to accept such occurrences as “high strangeness” as UFO investigator and astronomer Allen Hyneck called it, or not, that depends on one’s mental set, not one’s sighting.  In other words, as Hyneck explained, some phenomena were (are) currently beyond explanation.  People or organizations like the US Air Force did not want to believe, and so accepted conventional explanations that did not fit the situations, but that did or does not make such occurrences any less real – or dependent on one’s psychological profile.  In the X Files, Mulder had a poster in his cramped little office that read “I want to believe,” but in real life, most people who experience UFO’s do not want to believe.  But what happened, happened, and from then on they have to wrestle with it for the rest of their lives. 
 
            UFO’s and spiritual beliefs do come together on this front.  Spontaneous healings have long been well known among the faithful, for instance.  Lourdes and Fatima have not gained their reputations for nothing, and many other miracles have taken place there and elsewhere.  The Vatican does not really like miracles, and it really doesn’t like to be hoodwinked, and so they investigate those that supposedly occur to Catholics very, very well. What has come from these investigations is this: now and then, real miracles do occur.  Cures happen, and as is with the recent investigations of Sister Faustina, very specific prophesies do come real.   People float in the air, they suddenly have stigmata (bleeding from the “wounds of Christ” such as Padre Pio), and they tell the future accurately.  They also see God or Jesus or Angels (or Krishna – this is world- wide) and often speak to them.  These might be called simply subjective, but sometimes things happen afterwards that defy current scientific explanations.  The apparitions that do not produce physical affects will always be shadowed with doubt, but for those that do, it is obvious that something very strange, and perhaps very important, is going on.
 
            And there’s the point of this little essay – something is going on.  The Church might say it was the Holy Spirit; pagans might say it was the spirit of the forest; and UFO people might say it was aliens come down from a hyper dimension (or something), but something is going on, or really, many things are happening around and within us that we cannot understand with the modern empirical paradigm.
 
            Seeing Jesus and seeing UFO little gray men are probably not the same – although they could be, given our internal attempts to explain to ourselves the unusual.  But both are often accompanied by very real phenomena that defy explanations.  Such events should prove to us that we really don’t know more than a smidgen of reality, or really, of ourselves, but still, we fight this truth; really, I think we all do to some extent.  Being lost in the sea of reality is not the way we want to perceive our existence.  Our little self doesn’t like this, as it takes away its authority.  It makes it obvious that it is small, ineffective, and fragile in the face of the ALL, which is true, but we really can’t handle the truth.  Look at the Hills; look at my old girlfriend; look at those who scoff at “miracles” without any decent inquiry into them; and look at how they scoffed at Hyneck as well, and anyone else who believed or believes that what happened really happened.        
 
            Should I wish for Cal Roeker to have a UFO experience?  Sure, why not.  But he probably won’t like it.  And, who knows, just like the hero in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” he might end up endlessly making mountains out of mud and mash potatoes, obsessed with a new knowledge that he cannot understand.  May the force be with you and Godspeed, Cal.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​The subtitle to the book, The Close Encounters Man by Mark O’Connell, is “How one man made the world believe in UFO’s.”  It is, I think, an overly-grand claim, but that one man, J. Allen Hyneck, is as close to ground zero as any one man has been in the past century as far as UFO’s are concerned.  The fact that he is or was not a nut, or a New Age guru, or someone claiming to be the second messiah, is both telling and surprising; telling in that the phenomena must be considered as something other than hallucination, and surprising in that a scientist of impeccable credentials would be the one to lead the way. 
 
Born during Haley’s comet in 1910, during which his parents took him to the rooftop of their apartment building in Chicago at age 5 days to have him take a look, seems to have predestined this man to be an astronomer, which he became.  In fact, he was not just any old astronomer, but considered at various times to be one of the best in the nation, given his study of black holes and anomalous stars.  But it was WW11 that got him into UFO’s.  During the war, his work on a timer for explosions gave our bombs and missiles much greater impact, exploding them not on target, but near-target, where they would have a greater chance of destroying the chosen object.  This device was finally used in the A-Bombs over Japan, to set them off well above ground for maximum destruction, making Hyneck an important person in the atomic bomb project.  Surprisingly, it was also this work that propelled him into Project Bluebook, among other government investigations of the UFO phenomena. 
 
Surprisingly, it may have been this work itself on the A-bomb that began the tremendous spate of UFO sightings around the world as well.  As long-time readers of this blog might recall, my father was a gunner on the B-29’s that bombed Japan during the last year or so of the war.  It was on one of his final flights that he, as well as all of his squadron, witnessed “cigar-shaped ships” that cruised by their planes for several minutes before whisking away at unheard-of speeds at unheard-of angles.  Soon the A-bomb would be dropped.  Could not the sightings have something to do with the development of man’s most destructive weapon? But such questions were never to be encouraged.  When my dad and his fellows got back to Guam and informed the CO’s of their sighting, for instance, they were ridiculed and told to shut up – which they did, and which most pilots have done ever since. 
 
But not all, and that was the problem after WWII.  There were so many sightings all of a sudden that people demanded an answer, and thus study committees were formed.  Because Hyneck was an astronomer and already had top security clearance, it was he who was chosen to work on one after another of the government committees – and it was this work for which he will always be remembered.   
 
He was a scientist first, and at first he was extremely skeptical of the phenomena.  Even years later, it was he who worked up the “swamp gas” explanation for a series of sightings that were so widely distributed that no one believed him.  In fact, it was as much his fault as anyone else’s that many now believe the government is covering up a lot of information on UFOs.  In all, however, he claimed that he was just trying to be an honest scientist, and from the things he wrote, I believe him.  Further, and as proof, it was he who well-described just how the Air Force was trying to cover up UFO’s – not in hiding aliens or spacecraft, but in hiding reports of sightings and abductions and so on because they did not want to believe them.  As Hyneck would find, many of the sightings did not conform to anything known by our society, and because of this, the hierarchy simply did not want to deal with them.  Let them go back into the closet with ESP, ghosts, and Jesus impressions on waffles, they said.  But real scientists don’t do this.  They go where the phenomena take them, being as objective as possible.
 
It was because of his position and his take on science that he would become enemy #1 of Carl Sagan, whose theories on ET’s were different from Hyneck’s. Sagan did believe in intelligent ET’s, but thought that the light speed barrier would allow only one group to visit earth every 100,000 years or so.  But Hyneck remained open about the whole phenomena – what the heck do we know? – and it was because of this openness that Sagan ridiculed Hyneck, equating his interest in the UFO phenomena with the belief in little green men.   With such publicity, by the time of his death in the 1980’s (on the appearance of Halley ’s Comet 76 years after his birth) Hyneck had become Mr. UFO, even as his university cringed from the publicity despite his other outstanding scientific contributions, simply because he refused to not NOT believe.  Instead, he would take the information as it was given and run with it as far as his knowledge would permit - regardless.
 
With his dogged interest in the subject, it would be Hyneck who brought in the more sophisticated, and more applicable, notion of the UFO: that it was not necessarily a spacecraft in the manner that we understand it, but rather an inter-subjective, perhaps inter-dimensional phenomena that is currently outside our normal cognitive models; and it was Hyneck who pointed out that an investigation of such phenomena might reveal much more about our reality matrix than we could possibly imagine, just as his study of black holes and supernovas had done for astronomy.
 
And so it is with this that I (almost) leave the reader:  one can read about the strange stuff in this book or in others, but it should be acknowledged by all those who roll their eyes at such stuff that there have been sightings by hundreds and even thousands of reliable witnesses, not only in the US and Europe but around the world, sightings that have displayed shockingly similar patterns everywhere.  Any scientist should be as open to this query as Hyneck was, but most are not, because who wants to be made a fool of?  We might also see that the UFO phenomena is not the only thing that we deny because of our ignorance and our egos; rather, our biases also extend to the other spooky stuff that can include spiritual knowledge and religion itself.  It is Hyneck who would tell us to not be afraid, but to go where the evidence takes you.
 
One last thing: we all know Hyneck whether we think we do or not.  It was he who came up with the “close encounters” terminology, including “close encounters of the third kind.”  He advised Spielberg on the set of the movie, and had a very short but very famous cameo in the film: he was the scientist with the goatee who first dared to walk towards the ETs on Devil’s Tower.  Even in film, he was the one always open and unafraid to go where the information led him.  FK
 
 
 
 
 

[Note: my new book of essays, Beneath the Turning Stars, ​is now available on Amazon and Kindle]

​It was unexpected, as these things often go.  A friend of mine from the old days had learned that she had cancer and needed an operation.  She had moved throughout her life and had no long-term friends in the area, and for whatever reason her family members were unavailable, and so it fell to me.  Suddenly, I was in the position to fly out to eastern Washington State on a complicated series of flights of many hours to be a driver and a helper.  Suddenly, I was going to end up in Spokane (pronounced “can” at the end) of all places, just a few days after getting back from the Dakotas.  I looked longingly at my regular bed even before the flight, but such is life, or the whims of the gods - or the workings of the Great Design, causing everything to fall into place as easily as a child playing with a simple set of blocks.
 
It seemed a mere whim at first when we checked into the hospital.  Nerves, protocol, visits from everyone from the anesthesiologist to the assistant nurse, signing of papers, injections, more nerves, and then the last good-bye, myself in relief and the patient in the unbelievable position of hanging between life and death.  Shockingly, she was supposed to be released later that afternoon, and I had come prepared only with an extra jacket and a tee-shirt in case it got cold.  Silly me.  Just as the gurney was being rolled out, the surgeon made it imperative, all of a sudden, that she would spend the night.   But of course, and  as she disappeared into the maze of gleaming clinical tile and steel, probably making amends to her maker, I began to worry about me.  Damn.  Hopefully a nearby hotel; hopefully a place nearby to get something to eat; and, hopefully someone had those little kits for the stupid traveler – me – that allowed him to brush and shave and smell like chemical flowers under his armpits.
 
The hotel came easily and somewhat cheaply with the hospital discount.  Fast food abounded in the area.  But, somehow ignoring the hospital gift shop (where I later found had the things I needed), I was hard pressed to find toiletries.  The hotel did not have them, and all the shops in the area carried only food and drink for the hospital workers.  Everyone else, it seemed, always remembered their necessaries, and so it was left to me to travel around Spokane on foot to find a pharmacy, anyplace, that might fill my need.
 
Spokane is built on several steep hills that once abounded with ponderosa pine amid high-prairie pasture.  Since, in Gringo America (not Latin America), the finer parts of cities are built on the hills, and the poorer houses and commercial strip malls are in the valley, or down- town, I naturally head down to find what I would soon so desperately need.  After bypassing the massive Sister Joseph Hospital, I went down, down, down uncomfortable declines (that would become very uncomfortable inclines later on), crossing highways and intersections in places that were built almost exclusively for cars.  Finally, I saw neon signs amidst a flattening out, and at last I was able to set my compass on a Seven Eleven a quarter mile distant.
 
At first I was relieved that I would not have to walk around a strange city past dark, but in those last few hundred yards, my relief turned into tense concern.  At first it was only one – one homeless man probably in his thirties, sitting in his bundle of filthy clothes on a curb wearing an extremely odd feather and fur long-brimmed hat.  He had a beaten guitar in his lap and a cardboard sign clumsily upheld by his feet pleading for alms.  Remembering my city survival skills, I began to curve away from him and then thought – ah, what the hell, I’ll give the poor devil a few bucks.  Before I could reach him, however, I saw the others: a pimp and his prostitute, an almost good-looking woman deeply flawed by a look of incredible hardness, and all those others, men mostly but some women, sitting, smoking, pulling on oversized cans of beer, reeking even from a distance of urine.  Some looked lost, but others looked predatory, and all had the wasted and hopeless aura of the junky; skinny, jittery, eyes darting, life a living hell without the help of the illusory paradise of heroin. 
 
I did not give my pathetic alms, afraid I would be mobbed by the others.  Instead, I walked past them all to the Seven Eleven and found a toothbrush and toothpaste.  All was too expensive, so I settled on only those, for my own sense of cleanliness.  I would shower in the morning to reduce my odor, and look cool with my day-plus growth of beard (old men do not look cool with bristles.  Instead, they look dirty, but I can pretend and save a few bucks).   That decided, I stood in line to check out among suspicious city dwellers, and then carried my little plastic bag with toothbrush and paste past the motley crowd and up the hill.  Dusk was settling in, and I was relieved to make it past the hospital and into the safety of the hotel without one of those all-too-common incidences that happen in certain areas of nearly every city. 
 
The hospital area was safe, though, and later that night I returned to check in on the recovering patient before finding myself again in an unfamiliar bed.  Next morning, I did the same, and as the friend went back into a deep, drug-tinted sleep, I headed out for a morning walk – up the hill.  The hotel was on Rockwood Blvd, and sure enough, as soon as I got out of range of the hospital, the nice housing began.  Actually, it was not just “nice housing;” it was mansion country, mansions that had been built, it looked, between the 1930’s and 50’s, which were surrounded by massive conifers and maples; beautiful mansions built mostly of stone or brick, but also of wood, sometimes of cedar and redwood that is now so precious and scarce. 
 
Beautiful and quiet, too, although I knew that troubles still happened within them.  Still, although only a few miles from the junkies, they were so far removed in style that we might think of them as part of another country.  A Marxist would jeer at this wealth, but I suspect that most of these mansions belonged to professionals, surgeons and upper-level management, people who had worked hard for their possessions; people who had passed over the instant glory of certain seductive drugs to get stuff done.  
 
And we should be glad that they did.  The Hospital of Sister Joseph – I don’t know if that’s its real name, but it should be – was begun in the early 1880’s by said Sister Joseph after she had turned 63 years of age.  She had planned and administered and even helped build the hospital for miners and Indians alike, and it has grown into both a monster and a regional gem.  My experience there was unexpected.  From youth, I had been used to hospitals filled with Nurse Rachets running a tight, military-like ship, and aloof, god-like doctors.  Here, in a hospital filled with crucifixes and Virgin Mary statues, everyone was treated like a person who mattered.  I have no idea if this was because of the still-religious backdrop of the hospital or new training, but it was startling and humanizing all at once.  If it had been me being operated on, I would have feared the pain and the mortality of it, but not the coldness that many hospitals radiate.  I am sure that the Rachets and the gods still exist there, but these forces are muted by the greater force to help and heal,
 
It is here in the hospital where we find middle earth, between the heaven of luxury and wealth and the misery of addiction and poverty.  This is our earth potential, for we will forever have differences of wealth and well-being amongst us, as Jesus said, due to decisions made as well as circumstances beyond our control, but this can all be ameliorated by the startling notion that care is essential for everyone, and can be given to everyone.  In this, the inevitable pains and sorrows of life can be tempered to make it all human, and indeed, as some suspect, make even the pains of life experiences for growth.
 
Not that this is easy.  I did not stop to help in any way the junkies at the bottom of the hill.  Instead, I avoided them like the plague, and looked upon them almost as another race.  I had thought of the old Christian expression then, to “look upon every face as the face of Jesus,” and I knew that I could not.  It takes someone better than I, someone more sensitive and perhaps better trained, to do this, and I know where some of them live.  Some of them live at the top of the hill in big mansions, whose ownership is far beyond my own means, and I don’t resent it one bit.  But some of them might also live at the bottom of the hill, trapped by their own poor decisions.  It is only those who care who can ever bring this inner grace out again, and I am both grateful and surprised – as usual – that such people exist.  A hint, although not proof, that a greater force does indeed exist to guide us, even as we fail ourselves.  FK
 
 
 
                       
 
            

​We had almost gone there several times before, but always it had come down to this: North Dakota or someplace else?  Someplace else had always won before, but not this time; this time we would make it to perhaps the most dismissed state in the great West.  And by golly, we did.
 
Not that it had been a certainty from the start.  We had originally planned on Glacier Nat Park, but that had been partially closed and fogged in by huge fires both in the park and upwind, causing not only smoke but ash to fall from the sky, and Theodore Roosevelt Nat Park in N Dakota would have been our stop-over sight – if we had the time.  And then we had nixed N Dakota all together, to go maybe to Rocky Mountain Nat Park in Colorado.  But by the time our momentum had got to the level of actual plans, Rocky Mountain was having snow and temps in the low 20’s.  So, in the end, Teddy and N Dakota became not only our stop-over site, but THE site.  Oh, how jealous the fates of N Dakota had been!
 
First, though, was more weather, and it looked to be raining in the north longer than in the south, so we  chose to make the Badlands Nat Park in S Dakota our stop-over point.  It turned out to be the best of our decisions.
 
The Badlands are every bit of what the name implies if you are a farmer.  Multi-colored sandstone and clay cliffs dominate the area, and that gray clay turns to an impossible sticky gumbo with even the slightest bit of moisture.   Often, though, there is no moisture, and it is impossible now to think that this area was once farmed.  For grazing it had been all right, and now buffalo dominate the area, to such a point that on two hikes into the hills we were suddenly confronted by grazing buffalo who were not too happy to see us.  Believe me, they are very, very big up close. 
 
For a national park, they, the Badlands, are even better than for grazing.  We chose to pull our camper into a campsite labeled “primitive,” where the only service was a pit toilet.  It was also used by horse people, and the horse manure and buffalo chips which were scattered and piled everywhere gave a ranch-y odor to the place, as well as food to more than the occasional fly, but it was all marvelous.  Situated way, way away from any town or thru-road, there is a quiet there that is nearly impossible to find anywhere in the world.  
 
And by God stars, too.  That evening we had hiked to an overlook and there met a man of around fifty who was traveling alone from his home in Canada to visit his girlfriend, a professor at Stamford U in California.   He was an artist and free thinker – a bum, really, not much different from myself – and he had come back with us to our site to sit around the charcoal fire (no wood was allowed because of drought) and talk about truths both real and imagined.  There, the stars soon overwhelmed the conversation, as satellites and meteors whizzed beyond us with startling regularity.  And the Milky Way was truly a royal road.   What a night.
 
But Teddy awaited us.  There are two sections to Theodore Roosevelt Nat Park in N Dakota – one to the south and one to the north.  We stayed first in the one to the south, which was big and beautiful and full of buffalo and elk, but it rained that day and then the next, and the campsite was crowded.  Even with the rain, no fires, or even charcoal, were allowed, and after a long wet hike the one full day that we stayed, we headed to the north section.  There, the weather cleared and the campsite – with drinking water but no shower or electricity – was beautifully located on the Little Missouri River.  Wonderful hikes were taken through more badland-style cliffs mixed with good pasture and so many buffalo that it was often dangerous – and exhilarating – to walk anywhere.
 
But that first night we discovered that our gas canister was out of gas.  And worse, the battery for the pop-up was dying.  We could live without either, but the battery ran both our lights and the water pump, the loss of both causing some discomfort.  So we walked and explored all the next morning and the first part of the afternoon and then headed to the nearest full-sized town some 30 miles to our north to charge the battery and exchange our gas cylinder.  And there, oddly, we were to find the most interesting, if not the most beautiful, part of the trip. 
 
We had seen the oil pumps working away all across the landscape ever since we had entered North Dakota.   In some spots one could see for dozens of miles in every direction across the rolling prairie, and in that scope one could pick out dozens of those pumps see-sawing among Black Angus cows, making money for the once- struggling ranchers.  But on our drive to the town of Watford, Katie bar the door.  It was oil, oil, oil, from pumps to tanks to muddy roads that led to pumps and tanks, and to power lines that burned the oil.  Here, one is in the famed Bakken oil field, and oil is impossible to ignore.  It is no exaggeration to say that at least half the vehicles in the region were pick-up trucks, most the big, noisy, powerful diesel kind with 4 wheel drive and enough equipment in the bed to run and service a small town.  And more: nearing Watford, we were startled by the thousands of cheap make-shift housing for the thousands of workers who had come to lift the oil from the ground and make big money off of the boom.  The shacks were usually ugly and often located in fields that were nothing but mud flats, unadorned with any vegetation or sense of taste anywhere.  Still, they came.
 
The workers - almost all young to middling-age men – were as unadorned as the housing.  In every store, restaurant, and gas station we went to, men filled the spaces with muddy boots and muddy overalls and hardhats.  They also filled them with a restless energy that spoke of drunken fights and harassed women, but also of hope and fun.  It was a somewhat dangerous energy but one that was overall good: things were happening, everyone was making big money, and so much now seemed possible in a town that just 10 or so years  before had been a fading pastiche of leaky houses and rusting cars.  Now, the sky was the limit, and the boom was on.  Roads were being built, more and more housing was going up, and more and more shops and stores were rising from the dry Dakota earth.
 
But are there new schools among those new buildings?  Do all those young men have a future in the area?  And that is the problem with such things, such boom towns that the Dakotas have seen time and again since the Black Hills gold rush.  Money is flowing and dreams are being realized, but all will probably be short-lived in Watford.  Yes, it could become a new center for cancer research, or for engineering or whatever, but it will probably slide into oblivion once the oil runs out, and everyone knows it. 
 
Make hay while the sun shines, they used to say; live life to the fullest when in the glory of youth, some might also say.  In America, the waves of boom times never seem to end, as if a perpetual teenager has become our permanent mascot, or volkgeist.  The Europeans make fun of this, telling themselves that we have no culture – why, we do not even have a cuisine!  But boomtowns are hope themselves, and the temporary is the ordinary.  The old cultures seem to bleed themselves out, dying, as TS Eliot said, with a whimper, not a bang.  He did not mean this as a good thing, and in the 1920’s he envisioned what seems to be happening in Europe today.  But we have immaturity and energy and a lack of “culture” on our side, with little to tie us to any spot or regime or glory days.  It makes for a nervous nation, one that is always on edge and always tinged with just a little fear, for without tethers, where might we run to?  No one knows – and that’s the point of it all.  No one knows anyway, even when they think they do.  Our way of life is truly “living the dream,” for that IS our universal dream: hope, fear, impermanence, and the inevitable crash.  It is not only much more theatrical and interesting this way, but true to our vison as a species; true to our eternal sense of hope, and to our eternal blindness. 
 
Make hay while the sun shines - great art and philosophy are not built with such a notion.  But we are restless seeds and this is our way.  We will reach the stars long before we understand why they are there, but maybe then we can sit back and contemplate. Until then, welcome to Boomtown.  It is seldom dull and always a risk, and there is always the next horizon calling from some other godforsaken place that will slack our thirst before we again move on.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                        

Today, a new essay, "Zombie at the Picnic," under the "Essays" section of the website.
Note 1: A book of 35 of my selected essays, Beneath the Turning Stars, has been published recently and is available at Amazon and Kindle. 
Note 2: I will be taking a last summer vacation for the next 7 days or so.  See ya then, FK

​[Note: my new book of selected essays, Beyond the Turning Stars, is now out on Amazon and Kindle.]  

It was just another Sunday morning, with only the dog and I out for a hike along the same trail that I had taken with her for these past seven years, and yet there was something particularly beautiful about it.  Certainly it had to do with the time of year; just looking at the post date above, I am reminded of just how beautiful a day it was as well when I turned on the radio after dropping my son off at school on that day to hear of the perplexing tragedy that had just happened at the New York Trade Towers.  It would not be until the second jet came in that the source of the tragedy became known, but still it was such a beautiful day, just as yesterday.  But there was something more than just light and crisp blue sky to this Sunday.  I could hear the dropping of the acorns on the forest floor, abundant this year and good news for the squirrels and deer, as well as the rain-like patter they made in the nearby lake and it felt like the Holy Spirit was present, an undefinable thing that still could make its presence known, like a thin mist that cannot be seen but somehow can, nonetheless. 
 
In the realm of The Real, one might even call this unseen mist a miracle, although the sight – the feelings like this - happen a million times a day around the world.  How they come is unknown, too.  Just the night before, I had started the book Integral Christianity by Paul Smith, and I hadn’t been particularly inspired.  In those opening chapters, Smith blandly charted the course of spiritual evolution as seen by his mentor, Ken Wilbur, who is anything but a romantic.  I digress to say that I have a particular fondness for Ken Wilbur, for it was he who I was reading nearly 25 years ago as I waited to be interviewed by a committee for my PhD oral defense.  It was he who helped take away my nerves as he plotted, matter-of-factly, the various circles of awareness that culminated in God Consciousness, a plateau so far removed from the academic mind that it made both my tormenting professors and myself seem as insignificant as wall paper.  Still again, he in no way gave form to what he discussed, as dry it was - no better than Smith’s.  Both also reduced the kind of religion in which I now participate to the spiritual level of a child, to superstitions that were OK for kids, but not for the more advanced – that is, for those who could grasp Integral Christianity. 
 
Here’s the thing: normally I would agree with the two of them.  That morning as I hiked, I had just come from attending morning mass at the local Catholic parish.  The priest in charge is a good man, but his dedication, his duty as he sees it, is in saving us from hell fire because we do not obey the moral commandments of the Church.  He is not hateful in this, but pleading: listen, he said from the pulpit: “I do not say these things to condemn you, but because I want you to be right with God.  I do not hate you for acting on your homosexuality, or living together without marriage, but am only telling you that these things are wrong because they are against the commandments of God as understood through the Church.  You must obey these laws so that you will go to Heaven and live with God.”  The theology is a little thicker than this, if one wants to go into it, but one gets the idea – the good Father is an active representative of the church that Smith and Wilbur claim is for spiritual adolescents.  Intellectually, I would generally agree with Smith and Wilbur.
 
And yet, it was not to Wilbur or Smith’s philosophical musings that I give partial credit for having that beautiful sense of spirt that morning, but rather to that same immature church.  It was not what was said there by any means, but rather what was performed there – the act of the communion of Man with God.  As a preacher, Smith has acknowledged this value, but I do not think that he acknowledges it enough.  The rituals of the Catholic Church, as well as those of American Indian tribals or Tibetan Buddhists and so on, are what raises the spirit, as the spirit would tell you itself if it wished to – which it doesn’t.  It doesn’t, because spirit reaches far beyond our words and logic.  The words, the Creed - all that is necessary to hold a set of rituals together for a people over generations,  but it, they, are not of the core.  The core goes beyond the daily images, and even beyond our wildest fantasies; the core goes beyond quantum physics and different dimensions and all manner of magic mushroom experiences; the core goes to the very end, to that end that is also a beginning, and it defies every explanation.
 
Rather, it is poised within, waiting for its time with us. Sometimes it comes without notice or any preparation at all, but sometimes it comes from the mystery of ritual that we have somehow obtained, coming as that which goes beyond the stages of life, beyond evolution, and certainly beyond our cleverness and our philosophies and phrases.   All is foolishness from the height of the mist that is not mist.  What is important is that it comes.  I may wince at the words and the silliness of doctrine, but must remain grateful for the magic, the ritual, whatever one calls it that brings even the faintest hints of the beauty that lies so subtly but so pervasively both without and within.  FK
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​[Note to readers: At last, the book of essays long promised is available at Amazon (paperback for 12.99) and Kindle (for 3.99).  Titled Beneath the Turning Stars: glimpses of the sacred in a very profane life,” (by Frederick Keogh), it is a collection of 35 of my essays written over the past 3 or so years, many of which first appeared in the website in the Essays section.  As for me, I like them all, and love many of them.  I feel profoundly grateful for having been able to write them, for I do not think that I have the depth or skill to have done so on my own.  Most are multi-layered, giving different perspectives depending on one’s mood – something that I alone am incapable of producing.  I thank the spirit of the unconscious, or simply spirit itself, for having used me for such works.  They will never be good enough to thoroughly reflect the source, but I believe many are good enough to give one a look – a glimpse - into the greater depths of what it means to be alive.  FK]
 
I had scoured the Amazon website looking for books for a week without finding much, when suddenly, this long weekend, I happened on a treasure trove of marvelous works.  I wanted them all at once, but my grown-up side had me decide on one, as if I were being watched by grandma while at the cookie jar.  It was tough at first until I met with an old friend, Dr Raymond Moody, out with a relatively new (2009, I recall) book, Paranormal: my life in pursuit of the afterlife.  Not that I really knew him, but it seems so because of his books, particularly the groundbreaking Life after Life (@1975) which has changed our worldview forever, whether we know it or not.  It was he who first gave us the studies (and the term) on Near Death Experiences (NDE’s) with the whole gamut of strangeness that many people have had while near death, including leaving the body (out of body experience), seeing The Light, having a full life review, meeting a holy person (for Christians or those of Christian background usually Christ), and then joining dead relatives and friends who tell them “it is not your time.  You have more to do.  You must go back!”  And finally, showing us that many did not want to go back – that the after-life was better, and more real, than this life. 
 
This is now a part of popular culture, and has fostered dozens if not hundreds of other books based on his research.  But we did not really get to know the real Dr Raymond Moody – until this book.  Here we find that he had an undiagnosed thyroid condition that caused him to go crazy at times, so much so that he lost his money from his books, then his wife, and finally, almost his life when he attempted suicide by swallowing two dozen sedatives.  In the suicide attempt, he heard the spirits and levitated from his body, but was resuscitated before the other conditions of NDE’s prevailed.  He had, as he said, experienced some of what he had studied for so long.  And perhaps it was that experience (after which he took medication and was far better for it) which sent him on to other trajectories of investigations into death.
 
One, past life regression therapy, has resonated with time as well.  I do not know if he was the first to get into this, but he was certainly not the last, and again we can find dozens of books on this subject now.  But there was another, called scrying, which I will get into here simply because it is so bizarre and spooky.
 
I had heard of scrying before.  The Vikings claimed to be able to navigate around much of the globe without sextant or trigonometry or clock because of a scryer, or special crystal rock that they gazed into for the needed information.  I read a scientific piece that claimed that the crystal could actually enable one to see where the sun was on a cloudy day, facilitating navigation, but I believe the Vikings saw much more, thanks to another book I read about John Dee.  He was the physician/wizard who cared for Queen Elizabeth in the 1500’s, just before the time when the Inquisition and witch trials permanently separated science from the “spiritual arts” (which also began the separation of religion from science, a fascinating accident of conditions that created our world today).  One of his main instruments was a crystal ball, which is another iteration of a scryer, in which he claimed to talk to angels who gave him sage – and sometimes  treacherous – information.  Moody had read of Dee and of others, especially the Greeks who used pools of water in caves as reflective tools for people to see and conjure the dead, a practice also known a necromancy, something so condemned by both Protestant and Catholic teachings that one could be burned at the stake for it. 
 
Thus I was surprised and a little alarmed when, toward his final chapters, Moody wrote of his studies in scrying.  In his case, he set up a dark room lit with candles and had people stare into a mirror that was placed above their heads (where they would not see their own reflection) after a day of meditating on the person they wished to see.  Remarkably, some 80% of the subjects actually saw that or another dead person, with about a quarter meeting them fully in the flesh – with warm touches and everything.  Moody had started the experiments first with himself after a visit to the caves in Greece where such things had once been done.  In his case, he meditated on his maternal grandmother, who he had dearly loved, then mirror gazed for an hour or so before turning on the lights and going down to the kitchen to get a snack.  It was there, much to his surprise, where he met his grandmother as if in the flesh (I do not recall if she, too, possessed body heat) – except that it was his fraternal grandmother, who he had not liked.  They chatted and got to know each other better, Moody changing his opinion of her for the better.  And then she left.
 
I will not be doing any scrying soon – conjuring ghosts is not my style.  Generally this reluctance is out of fear, including a perhaps archaic belief that I would be damned for it.  It is only recently, after all, that I have accepted the occasional visits in dreams of dead people without terror.  But this line of inquisition is important – as is the NDE and another he is currently working on, the so-called shared death experiences (where those near a dying person experience death as well, while fully coming back.  This is important, because such an experience could not be caused by a diseased and dying brain, as some doctors and scientists have claimed is the reason for the NDE).  All have led Moody and some others who have experience such things to believe – emotionally as well as intellectually – that this life is little more than a mirage.  As one of his clients put it, “it’s as if we’re in Disneyland, and all the important stuff is done backstage and our life is only the superficial outcome.”  Moody himself had a talk with some spirits (I cannot remember the context) where he asked about his financial situation and his attempted suicide.  Those from the other side replied that suicide was ridiculous, because it meant we took this life too seriously.  As for money, they barely gave it a thought: “Money is of no importance at all.” 
 
All of which brings us back to our perennial concepts contained in religion and in spiritual experiences in general.  More than once I have had the wonderful feeling of spiritual fullness, and in this felt that none of the problems of the world were worth anything.  And yet, once that feeling has left, the problems, the desires for more, return as usual, as if the feeling were a dream. 
 
It is not a dream.  More and more we are shown that there really is more – much more; that the life we are living, for the most part, is flat and cartoonish compared to what it really is.  It may be even larger than the afterlife of Moody, as he noted towards the end of his book: “There may be something much more profound beyond even the initial journey to heaven, a story that goes far beyond what even that could bring us” (all above in quotes are my paraphrases).  Yes, most certainly.  What we have on our hands is an adventure that only God could, or would, make.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​I first opened its pages on a dark evening in a campground in the Pennsylvanian hills as it rained buckets, the sound so intense on the canvass roof that talking had to be done in shouts.  The first chapter I could not believe – it was Dr. Seuss mixed with Dark Shadows.  By chapter two, it had added Playboy to its background, but with a quiet woman’s touch, not just sensual but smoothly, artistically pornographic.  By chapter three I had to decide – should I continue with this oddity?  The erotica was enticing, but the weirdness…was it too much? 
 
The book, Palimpsest, was written by a young author, Catherynne M. Valente, who well represented her age group in the novelist set.  I have ventured into new authors before – the cutting edge sort – and found them well-done but too odd, too straining to be something unique, and this book certainly fit that bill.  But maybe not.  With its high poetic vibration, it seems that it might be something more.  On page 61 now, I will continue to read, and if it really is “something more,” I will offer more comment on it in another blog.
 
Or maybe not.  Maybe this introduction is enough, for I have already referred to a “something more” which is at the crux of this book’s worth.  It is so ephemeral, this something more, that it can be referred to with many words – magical might be the best – but I will be more scientific, or really alchemical, in my definition, and call it “astral,” where its quality, its rhythm and its words bring one, ready or not, into another plane of thought and feeling, a place where nothing changes, and yet all becomes spiritually charged and fundamentally different.
 
Children’s books are generally of this sort, but so simple they do not really speak to adults.  Nor do they take children to another astral plane, for children are already in that other plane.  Rather, they speak to them in their own language, one that we find cutely, but not alchemically, enchanting.  But there are the others meant for both children and adults.  The Mary Poppins books were the first that I can recall, books which both speak to children and transport adults into other possibilities and other openings in reality - if one is willing.
 
Some are not willing, as can be seen in the latest film on the author, P.L. Traverse, which is centered on her involvement with Walt Disney and the making of the musical in the early 60’s with Julie Andrews.  For Tom Hanks and the author of the book from which this movie is adopted, Traverse’s Mary Poppin’s theme is a fantasy about her father, a tragic figure from her youth in Australia.  While there may be something to this, it is a very little something.  Rather, in full life Traverse was a member of the Theosophical Society when such things weren’t as popular as today, and her primary concern was for the raising of consciousness so that we might see into the unseen.  Her efforts through her books were so effective that I would call her a true magician of the old variety, where magic, science and religion are considered parts of the same coin.  Her works are of Merlin proportions.  The same can be said for another child’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, as well as my youthful favorites, the books of Carlos Castaneda. 
 
The reader can probably add many more.  The point is, that such books make of the ordinary an enchanted land.  I do not include many of the fantasy books here, for they may speak of enchanted lands without creating an enchanted reality for us.  The authors I speak of are or were true alchemists.  A psychologist might call these writings dissociative, as they separate us from ordinary reality, and might tell us as well that such thinking is unhealthy.  There is good reason for believing this.  Many of the “wizards” of which I write did have severe mental problems – Carlos Castaneda, for example, slipped into a lost world by the time of his death.  Closer to home, I knew a transpersonal psychologist and New Age priest, the man who married my older brother to his second wife, some years ago.  He lived in a beautiful home in the country surrounded by trimmed willows and flowers and garden pools that made the place into an exotic paradise.  By all accounts, this guy was living on another astral plateau.  It was a shock to hear that he had killed himself just three years after the wedding.
 
It should not be a shock.  It is known by the experts in spiritual flight – especially those gurus of India who have become so familiar to us – that the astral world is no joke.  The enticements are no less filled with thorns than those of this world.  We are told by the enlightened that the astral planes are no more about true heaven – about life with the absolute – than is our own world, but there is a difference.  In the astral planes we are enticed by something of a finer quality, something that is not God, but that points to God, or at least to something beyond the material sphere.  More than that, though - these other worlds tell us that there ARE other worlds, and that ours is only one of many.  These authors show us that what we have here is not all there is.  And with this knowledge, we no longer must be bound by earth; with this knowledge we can press on to something greater, or at least to something more.
 
Those of the true faiths might be concerned here with Idolatry and illusion, but I believe these are not our main problems today.  Rather, it is our inability to even have idolatry or illusions.  It seems that for many now, life is dead, flat, fallen to the limited vision that we have of ourselves, which prove to be empty vessels indeed.  Perhaps at one time, the religious authorities would have brought Traverse before the Inquisition – and most certainly, they would have burned that wizard, Carlos Castaneda, at the stake.  But the hell of our times is much deeper.  Our hell is that we lack a true vision of anything beyond the conventional empire of empirical world culture.   It may be that the alchemists at long last have come to take their place as our saviors, or at least as our life rafts that may bring us to another island, where we can then think again of home.
 
 
I hope young Valente is another alchemist, a spark of light coming into our void.  I will read on.  FK