Updated Excerpt

Getting Away From It All…

            The Pressures of life are increasing for all of us.  To remain strong, sensitive, able to love and create, we need a vital center that remains clam.  A place away from cell phones, the internet, radios and television. 

            Antoine De St. Exupery found it among North African desert sands and the stars.  The Japanese build a special niche, Tokonoma, to hold one poem on a calligraphic scroll and a spray of rum blossoms.  We all seek a private place that makes contemplation, mediation and love more possible.

            Where to go alone ( or with one other) to think, to talk, to listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or to hear Corneils Vreeswick’s Saskia or La Flute Des Andeas? 

            A place for seeing nature, burning joss and candles, reading poems, playing flute.

            In our societies places like this have ceased to exist-> To remain sane, we must make some…

            You may be lucky enough to look out your window at the bottle-green sky meeting the sea and the tundra.  Sled dogs barking and howling through your village and your own hands are busy with the mending of fishing spears and nets.

            Or you may lie back against the sun drenched wall of your pueblo.  Your son drills the center of Turquoise and Chalchihuitl and the steady beats of the dancers comes from the square.

            The wind rustles through the pine trees as you look at the moon above the lake at night.  You sit in sound completely at peace, with the smell of birch – whisks in your nose.  Soon you’ll race streaming to the lake, to be embraced by the icy water. 

            Sunlight breaks over the desert.  It is still cool as you hitch up your robes for the day’s journey.  The camels snort and the air is so clear that you can hear a village dog barking from miles away. 

            It is late at night.  You return to the village.  There you find the love of the people you know and there are none that you do not know.  There is only a long “Today”, a time-continuum of births and deaths, marriages and rituals, rain and earthquakes. 

            But most of us who read this have never lived these lives, or only for a few years at most.  Lacking nature, lacking close connection to a life-cycle, we need a place for being at peace.  But in this area, needs will be radically different.  You must invent for yourself.