Promoting Movement Up the Spiral

"I am not saying in this conception of adult behavior that one style of being, one form of human existence, is inevitably and in all circumstances superior to or better than another form of human existence, another style of being.

What I am saying is that when one form of being is more congruent with the realities of existence, then it is the better form of being for those realities.

And what I am saying is that when one form of existence ceases to be functional for the realities of existence then some other form, either higher or lower in the hierarchy, is the better style of living.

I do suggest, however, and this I deeply believe is so, that for the overall welfare of total man's existence in this world, over the long run of time, higher levels are better than lower levels and that the prime good of a society's governing figures should be to promote human movement up the levels of human existence."

--Professor Clare Graves,

 as quoted in Spiral Dynamics

by Don Beck and Chris Cowan



ON COMMITMENT by Goethe

Until one is committed there is always hesitancy; the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.  There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves, too.  All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred.  A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising to one's favor all manner of unforeseen accidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way.  Whatever you can do or dream you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Love and Justice

"The arc of the moral universe is long, 
but it bends toward justice."

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Love You Tonight

Remembering 9/11 and the tangled knot of anger and fear we all felt as we came face to face with our fragility.
I wrote this lullaby for my infant daughter that evening. She's now ten. Thanks to my genius brother Jeff Foster for producing it, and to my genius friend Amy Smith for sketching the artwork.
If you like it, please forward it. Go to www.authormarkfoster.com to download more songs for free. 

My album, Ghost/Machine, comes out this fall!

Zero-Point Energy and the Nature of Consciousness

Zero-point energy:  the energy that remains when all other energy is removed from a system.   

Zero-point energy exists, and this discovery by quantum physicists, originating from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, reveals that there is still energy in a system, even in a complete vacuum, when it would otherwise appear that all matter and energy had been removed.  Everything is gone, and yet something remains.  The existence of zero-point energy suggests that there is "an intrinsic quantum fuzziness in the very nature of both energy and matter," a vast sea of pulsating energy, and that this fuzzy sea of probabilities manifests as an all-present, all-pervasive energy field throughout the Universe, its very fabric.  Or rather, it is the Universe:  the Zero-point Field.

Whoa.  This has serious implications for science, philosophy, spirituality, and theories of consciousness.  Three inescapable conclusions are that 1) there is no such thing as empty space, 2) we are all as eternal as the Universe in an ever present Now/Here, and 3) we are connected, quite literally, to everyone and everything else in the Universe.  


Pretty cool, eh?

We now turn to author Lynne McTaggart to elucidate more of these implications, from her excellent book, ambitiously and appropriately entitled, The Field:  The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe.

(We join our narrator as she is describing the award-winning work of an international collaborative team of physicists, neuroscientists, physicians, biologists, and psychologists that described how human cells, both brain and other, are receptive to light wave interference patterns emanating fundamentally from the Zero-point Field, thus providing a possible mechanism for perception, memory, imagination, and consciousness.  Shhh.  Listen.)

"All of this led to a heretical thought . . . Consciousness was a global phenomenon that occurred everywhere in the body, and not simply in our brains.  Consciousness, at its most basic, was coherent light . . . Their work presented itself as a unified theory of mind and matter, evidence of . . . a world of 'unbroken wholeness.'  The universe was a vast dynamic cobweb of energy exchange, with a basic substructure containing all possible versions of all possible forms of matter.  Nature was not blind and mechanistic, but open-ended, intelligent, purposeful, making use of a cohesive learning feedback process of information being fed back and forth between organisms and their environment.  Its unifying mechanism was not a fortunate mistake but information which had been encoded and transmitted everywhere at once.

Biology was a quantum process.  All the processes of the body, including cell communication, were triggered by quantum fluctuations, and all higher brain functions and consciousness also appeared to function at the quantum level.  (This) set off the most outrageous idea of all: . . . memory doesn't reside in our brain at all, but instead is stored in the Zero Point Field.

Our brain is not a storage mechanism but a receiving mechanism in every sense, and memory is simply a distant cousin of ordinary perception.  (Perhaps) all of our cognitive processes result from an interaction with the Zero Point Field.  This kind of constant interaction might account for intuition or creativity--and how ideas come to us in bursts of insight, sometimes as fragments but often as a miraculous whole.  An intuitive leap might simply be a sudden coalescence of coherence in The Field.

The fact that the human body was exchanging information with a mutable field of quantum fluctuation suggested something profound about the world.  It hinted at human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper and more extended than we presently understand.  It also blurred the boundary lines of our individuality--our very sense of separateness.  If living things boil down to charged particles interacting with a field and sending out and receiving quantum information, where did we end and the rest of the world begin?  Where was consciousness--encased inside our bodies or out there in The Field?  Indeed, there was no more 'out there' if we and the rest of the world were so intrinsically interconnected.

The implications of this were too huge to ignore.  The idea of a system of exchanged and patterned energy and its memory and recall in the Zero Point Field hinted at all manner of possibility for human beings and their relation to the world.   (Undiscerning) physicists had set mankind back for many decades.  In ignoring the effect of the Zero Point Field, they'd eliminated the possibility of interconnectedness and obscured a scientific explanation for many kinds of miracles.  What they'd been doing, in renormalizing their equations, was a little like subtracting out God."

Dude. May the Force be with you.

Sometimes a Man

by Ranier Maria Rilke

 

Sometimes a man stands up during supper

 

and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

 

because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

 

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

 

And another man, who remains inside his own house,

 

dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

 

so that his children have to go far out into the world

 

toward that same church, which he forgot.

The Thin Line

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Time Held Me Green And Dying . . ."

(A favorite poem brimming with ecstasy and ache . . .)

 Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas
 

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

       The night above the dingle starry,

               Time let me hail and climb

       Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

               Trail with daisies and barley

       Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

       In the sun that is young once only,

               Time let me play and be   

       Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,

               And the sabbath rang slowly

       In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay

Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air

       And playing, lovely and watery

               And fire green as grass.

       And nightly under the simple stars

As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,

All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars

       Flying with the ricks, and the horses

               Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white

With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all

       Shining, it was Adam and maiden,

               The sky gathered again

       And the sun grew round that very day.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm

       Out of the whinnying green stable

               On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house

Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,

       In the sun born over and over,

               I ran my heedless ways,

       My wishes raced through the house high hay

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

       Before the children green and golden

               Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

       In the moon that is always rising,

               Nor that riding to sleep

       I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

               Time held me green and dying

       Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

 

No Victory Without Struggle

“There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”
  
--Martin Luther King, Jr. 

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle."   

--Frederick Douglass 

 

"Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy.  In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon . . . suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration.  Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic.  A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.  It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs.  It (should be) his task, rather, to pilot the patient through his existential crises."
"To be sure, man's search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium.  However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health.  There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one's life.  In the Nazi concentration camps . . . those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive.  I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, 'homeostasis,' i.e., a tensionless state.  What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.  What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."  

--Viktor Frankl

Skipping Stones

I was skipping stones over a remote mountain lake with Grant today, and I thought of a poem I wrote years ago about such an event.  Juvenilia, for sure, but I like the rambling rhyme scheme, the wilderness imagery, and the metaphors of opportunities gained and lost, the endurance of hope, the resiliency of the human spirit, the blessings of a short memory.

Or it's just a poem about a dude skipping a rock.

After skipping rocks, Grant and I built a campfire and then watched the sliver of moon set and the stars emerge, which reminded me of a similar moment several years ago.  My boy is growing up.


The Perfect Skipper


The wilderness traveler
happened upon the stone
and stooping, seized it so to skim
out over the slow bend in the river.
The canyon walls were growing dim.
The silken blue sky had kept
for a day's time
the stratus clouds bound
that now ignited and burned
rose and apricot into their native lime
then began to unravel or
sublimate into forever
for without so much as a sound
they surrendered to higher winds and dissipated.
He was alone
and out along the river he casually stepped.
In his hand the thin flat rock turned.
Such a skipper as this
he anticipated
seven or eight times might kiss
the green and silver surface
yet still reach
the purple shale slides strewn
along the opposing beach.
And if there on impact it should splinter?
This was of no concern, for by then
it will have fulfilled its purpose.
He grinned
cradled and gripped
his perfect skipper
then with precision let it fly.
But the downstream rapid's din
disguised the kerplunk.
It skipped
not once before it sunk.
Were it winter
even late autumn
it would have skated across like a hockey puck.
But swollen with warmer waters in June
the deep river bend
offered no such luck.
Its green elbow
absorbed the stone like a coin
compelling it to join
the rolling gravel at the bottom.
He stared out
at where the skipper had gone.
It's just as well, he thought,
then looked to the deepening night sky
taunting with its iridescent Dipper.
He looked at his feet
stones all around
but none quite so sweet
could just then be found.
He recalled a trout--
a rainbow--
he once had caught.
He spit, ambled on
and soon forgot.

Transitioning from Self to Soul to Spirit

“In the archeology of the Self, we are at the point where the soul has emerged from the interior depths of the mind and pointed the way to a greater tomorrow.  But, like Moses, the soul can see from afar, but never actually enter, the Promised Land.  As Teresa would say, after the butterfly (soul) emerged from the death of the chrysalis (ego), so now the little butterfly must die.  When the soul itself grows quiet, and rests from its own weariness; when the witness releases its final hold, and dissolves into its ever-present ground; when the last layer of the Self is peeled in the purest emptiness; when the final form of the self-contraction unfolds in the infinity of all space; then Spirit itself, as ever-present awareness, stands free of its own accord, never really lost, and therefore never really found.  With a shock of the utterly obvious, the world continues to arise, just as it always has.

In the deepest within, the most infinite beyond.  In ever-present awareness, your soul expands to embrace the entire Kosmos, so that Spirit alone remains, as the simple world of what is.   The rain no longer falls on you, but within you; the sun shines from inside your heart and radiates out into the world, blessing it with grace; supernovas swirl in your consciousness, the thunder is the sound of your own exhilarated heart; the oceans and rivers are nothing but your blood pulsing to the rhythm of your soul.  Infinitely ascended worlds of light dance in the interior your brain; infinitely descended worlds of night cascade around your feet; the clouds crawl across the sky of your own unfettered mind, while the wind blows through the empty space where your self once used to be.  The sound of the rain falling on the roof is the only self you can find, here in the obvious world, where inner and outer are silly fictions and self and other are obscene lies, and ever-present simplicity is the sound of one hand clapping madly for all eternity.  In the greatest depth, the simplest what is, and the journey ends, as it always does, exactly where it began.”

--From Integral Psychology:  Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy by Ken Wilber, pg 108

Quite lovely.  Please excuse me now as I go sublimate into ether and actuate my Oneness with the Source. 

If only it were that easy . . .

But I am in full mystical mode right now, typing this at a remote Colorado cabin with nothing to do but read, write, hang out with my boy Grant, ride four-wheelers, and think deep thoughts.  (And with the way the wind is gusting at the cabin, I just may blow into the Kosmos somewhere.)

I'm sharing this, because I find this book to be so empowering, and this paradigm of human psychological/spiritual development to be so resonant.  In the context of what Wilber is describing, the crimes of psychiatry begin to look even more dehumanizing, because first we are labeling symptoms and development stages/crises as disease, explicitly subdividing the self from itself and worsening the dissociation with ultimate Oneness; and second, we are numbing--or worse, obliterating--self's and the soul's spiritual sensitivities, which exist in order to gently guide us back towards that Ultimate Oneness, where the journey both begins and ends . . . and begins again.

In the Waiting Room

A favorite poem.  This is Elizabeth Bishop's recollection of the moment when, at age seven, she became aware that she was a Self in a world of Others, different from and yet still connected to everyone else.

In the Waiting Room

by Elizabeth Bishop 

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter.  It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited and read
the National Geographic

(I could read) and carefully 
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson 
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
 "Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an  oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was 
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't.  What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities 
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts 
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How I didn't know any
word for it how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot.  It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on.  Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth 
of February, 1918.

Gotta Love Steinbeck . . .

From East of Eden:

"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.  And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.  This is what I am and what I am about.  I understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system.  Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts.  If the glory can be killed, we are lost."

Sudden Solitude

I went for a hike up Massey Draw yesterday afternoon.  It was sunny and breezy, blue sky streaked with wispy white clouds.  I was alone.

I parked my truck and started up the trails through the prairie, mostly brown grass with green shoots poking through, and entered the mouth of the steep, piny valley.  Unexpectedly, the creek was completely dry at the bottom.  This far into the spring, I had thought the creek would be engorged with run-off, but I was wrong.

The climb was steep, and I took it fast, quickly breaking into a sweat.  After ascending a rocky staircase, the valley narrowed, thick pine forest on one side of the creek and sheer rock wall on the other side.  I stopped to grab my water bottle from my backpack, and listened to the breeze whistling through the pines.  I was only ten minutes and less than a mile from the parking lot, but already the valley had folded in on itself, obscuring any sign of the suburban sprawl below.  I looked up at the afternoon sunlight diffusing into the shadows of the pines, at the streaky blue sky above.  The tree tops swayed in the breeze, and I closed my eyes and swayed with them, the scent of ponderosa suspended in the shadows.  The sudden solitude was exquisite.

Then I was off again, more rocky steps, more pine.  Towards the top, the valley narrowed considerably, and heavy sheets of ice covered the creek bed, the tinkling sound of water running beneath melting snow pack.  Somehow, this scant stream of melt-water vanished before it descended to the prairie below.  It must go subterranean through some crack in the granite, I thought.  A fallen tree crossed the trail, a casualty of winter winds and age.  I scrambled over it and came out near a boulder pile, where a rush of movement caught the corner of my eye.

Out of a deep recess in the boulders, something large, black, and furry came lunging at me.  I jumped backwards into the rock behind me, and then breathed a sigh of relief.  Not a bear.  A large, friendly dog came sniffing from the cave.  I caught my breath and reached down to scratch his head.  "Hey, big fella," I said, "You up here alone?"

Then I heard voices tumbling down the creek from above, and four teens, two boys and two girls, emerged into view.  The boy with moppy hair and the profane t-shirt called out, "Here, Zeke!  Here, boy!"  And Zeke bounded up to him.  I continued up the trail, and as I passed the teens, I offered a friendly greeting, chuckling as I told them I thought Zeke had been a bear.  They avoided eye contact, offered uncertain laughs or silence, and kept descending without a word.

I made it into the aspen forests on top of the valley, all bare white trunks, no green yet, and then ascended into the scrub oak.  At a trail crossing, I veered towards Gothic Overlook, my intended destination.  Rounding a corner, I came over onto the crest of the foothills, the path meandering away from the sheer cliffs of the valley below.  In jerky movements, the vast horizon of Colorado's Front Range came into view.  Downtown Denver, Castle Rock, Chatfield Reservoir--hey, wasn't that the park where my kid's played soccer?--and then plains stretching forever eastward into Kansas.  It was always a breathtaking view.  Below, I could see my truck in the parking lot, and I could see the teens just emerging from the valley floor, Zeke still out in front.

The wind was chillier up top, but the sun was strong and warm.  I wound through the scrubs oaks and reached the end of the trail, a small clearing set atop the knob of the foothill.  Downward, towards the cliffs, there was an outcropping of rocks, a prime spot for a little reading, writing, and meditation.  Just a hundred yards off the trail, which was prohibited, but who was going to stop me?

I went off-road, stepped over the fledgling scrub oaks, greening grass, and scattered boulders and negotiated my way to the outcropping.  But once there, I saw that the terrain still continued to slope down towards the cliffs, where another granite crag jutted into the valley, punctuated by an ancient weathered juniper.  I kept descending.

The juniper was dead, polished smooth by wind and snow, a brown spiny skeleton perched on a shelf of granite.  Even here, the mountain sloped down further towards the cliffs, toward more jagged rocks and then the canyon beneath.  From the top, I hadn't guessed at the extent of this hidden pitch.  But I chose to stop now.  A flat indentation in the present rock looked comfortable enough, so I slipped off my pack and had a seat.

I grabbed a granola bar and had a sip of water, then fished my Robert Frost book out of my pack, pages rippling in the gusty breeze.  I opened to a new poem, "Build Soil: A Political Pastoral."  Long, and poignant, a hidden gem, Frost at his whimsical and melancholy best.  Then another one that was new to me:  "There Are Roughly Zones."  Brilliant.  Then I went for the familiar:  "Mending Wall," "To Earthward," and "The Road Not Taken."  The cadences of these poems are like listening to my favorite songs on my iPod:  I know them by heart, yet they (and all their connotations and reminiscences) carry me someplace private and transcendent.  Then I turned to "Desert Places," which concludes with these lines:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces 
Between stars--on stars where no human race is. 
I have it in me so much nearer home 
To scare myself with my own desert places.

With that Frostian prelude, I reached for my trusty yellow spiral notebook.  Spiral notebooks for me are like a security blanket.  My pen acts like a conduit between the ephemeral thoughts of my mind, filtering, amplifying, translating to the concrete paper beneath me.  This is why I have a box of a couple dozen old notebooks in my basement.  I can't bear to part with them, even if they are filled with random doodles and poem fragments.

But today, my muse failed me.  Nothing would come.  The wind was rippling pages and my thoughts weren't coalescing.  After some blank moments, I thought I would make a list of all the things I need to do.  It quickly became depressing, so I stopped.  Looking down into the valley where I had been an hour before, I saw the pines waving, and I thought, let me just connect here.  I have time.  I have nothing pressing to attend to.  I'm alone.  Let me just relax and exist in the moment.  Meditation.  Out of time, out of mind.

The granite rock had a nice flat space, so I lay back and closed my eyes, tried to empty my thoughts and cast them into the wind.  Time to be a human being . . . just being.

The sun was warm on my face, the wind settled down and was gentle, and for a moment--who knows how long?--I found my Zen Point.  Laying on my back in the sun and the wind, a child of the universe, existing on this rolling sphere, a speck in the cosmos, and I felt harmony, tranquility, surrender.

Then sudden sharp voices fluttered through the wind.  An F-bomb.  Teens.  More profanity, cackling laughter.

Bummer, I thought.  I sat up, and there, emerging over the cliff's edge fifty yards away, came three teen boys.  Different teens.  They must have climbed straight up the cliffs, I thought.  They didn't have any equipment.  Maybe those cliffs aren't as steep as I thought they were.

They looked up the slope and saw me perched on the rock, and I waved.  They were startled, silenced for a moment, and one of them waved back tentatively.  Then they huddled together, another burst of laughter.  They clustered over the cliff's edge for a while, one of them clearly more boisterous and the leader, all clutching cans that I hoped were cokes and not beers.  They were quite vulgar, from the fragments of speech that the wind carried to me.  The discussion seemed to be centered on Viagra and female anatomy.  I lay back down and hoped they would move on soon.  Thankfully, having conquered the cliff and discussed life's great mysteries, they had soon had enough of the experience, and they descended back down from whence they came, disappearing over the cliff's edge and towards more conquests.

I was alone again.  I tried to get back to my Zen Point, but my mind was now cluttered with other thoughts.  The afternoon sun was sinking low in the sky.  Reluctantly, I reached for my cell phone, checked the time, and in so doing my email chimed.  Six new messages.  I scanned through them.  Three junk, three important.  I considered whether to deal with them now or later.  Later, I decided.

I gazed out over the Front Range again, the sprawling city, a half million houses, two and a half million souls.  Rich ones comfortably in the mansions just below me, less affluent ones painting the distant nooks and crannies of the city.  Within my field of vision, someone was dying at this very moment.  Someone was being born.  Crimes were being committed, loves consummated, agonies endured, triumphs attained.  And here I was, invisible to them all, an ignorant eye in the sky, a part of their world and yet completely separate, connecting ever so tangentially and transiently with awkward words, fleeting gestures, scattered emails.  Sharing so much, sharing so little.

The sun was angling obtusely behind me.  The wind had settled down again.  A sip of water, a few hardened gummy bears that had remained in my pack after a recent airplane trip.  Time to go.  Time to reconnect with the civilization that lurked below.

How to descend?  I realized I was not interested in returning to the trail and going back the way I came.  Should I follow the teens down over the cliff's edge?  No, that might mean engaging with them in some manner.  Not a good idea to climb down solo, anyway.  I scanned the eastern contour of the foothills with my eyes.  If I headed north and down through the scrub oak, and climbed over a rocky rim, then the brush turned to a long, steep grassy slope that descended until it spilled into the trail that would lead me back to the parking lot.  Easy enough.  It was off trail, sure.  But again, who was going to stop me?

Heading east off the foothills, I dropped into shadow while the suburbs before me remained splashed in golden sunlight.  The wind died down to a murmur.  A few bikers crisscrossed the prairie trails below.  I was feeling mellow, rejuvenated.  I let out a subdued yawp that disturbed no one.  I picked my way through the brush and rocks and made it to the final steep slope.  I lightly traced my own mini-switchbacks to slow the descent, to take the pressure off my toes.  I was getting a blister.

I kicked a rock loose on accident.  It wobbled, paused, and then gravity pulled it over a threshold.  It tumbled a few feet, then paused, creaked over the threshold again, and rolled downward.  It bumped and zagged and kept tumbling bit by teetering bit, a slow motion landslide of one.  I was almost keeping pace with it.  It slowed, but nothing was going to make it stop.

My new rock companion and I continued to travel downward together, and it was with some sadness that I saw it finally come to rest in a clump of grass just as the slope flattened out at the bottom.  The pressure came off my toes.  This rock's journey was over, and so was mine, nearly.  It had been sitting on the side of that mountain for maybe a million years, heaved there by unfathomable seismic forces rumbling from the earth's molten core.  There it had sat as an inanimate object of potential energy until my misguided step unleashed its inner rolling stone.  Now it lay fifty yards off the trail, buried in a grass clump in a depression at the bottom of the slope, likely to never be disturbed again for a thousand years, maybe a million, its energy released, its potential energy depleted, one entropic step closer to its destiny as a nondescript component of a homogeneous, cold, and flattened world.

My phone chimed again.  Voicemail.  I ignored it.  Then my email chirped.  I had to look.  What was I doing here staring at this rock?  I better head back to my truck.  I had things to do.

New Beginnings

It has been a tumultuous and exciting few months.

I am no longer working for Chatfield Family Medicine.  Please check out this new blog for the details.  http://www.markfosterdo.blogspot.com/

I'm working on some very exciting projects, including starting my own practice or joining an existing practice, various writing and speaking opportunities, and some exciting family situations.

I'm juggling a lot of things write now, but I hope to get back to my musings on life, spirituality, medicine and family on this blog in the near future, so stay tuned.

Here's quote from They Might Be Giants that always gets me pumped up:

"They don't need me here and I know you're there
Where the world goes by like the humid air
And it sticks like a broken record
Everything sticks like a broken record
Everything sticks until it goes away
And the truth is we don't know anything . . ."

Don't read too much into that, except for the last sentence.  We humans have learned so much, and yet we know so little.  Which means there is so much to learn, so much to stand in awe of.

It's good to have fellow travelers on this journey of life.  Thank you, friends.