“It was pre-dawn when we exited the dorm. The two Labradors, one perfectly black and the other perfectly white, ran ahead of us excitedly. The heavy slumber of night was lifting off the campus, but the neo-Gothic buildings remained dark piles, whose contours looked like a very nervous ink graph. Silence, pristine and palpable, pervaded […]
Continue reading“At Yak’s guidance, Hebie had put the Dead’s “American Beauty” album on the turntable. “Ripple,” the song Artus had earlier talked about as relating to Pure Consciousness, began to play. First, there was the downhomeyness of the acoustic guitar. Then Jerry Garcia began to sing to us, as though he were just casually sitting on […]
Continue reading“When I turned my attention from the floor back to the room, I experienced a surge of love for all my friends. It was the tenderest, most caressing love I had ever felt for anything. There was Yak. How generous he was to host us and provide for our comfort and pleasure! There sat Hebie […]
Continue reading“If I were asked to sum up my status in the world at that time, I would say that I felt intimately connected with something that wasn’t there and only remotely connected to a lot of things that were. What I mean is that the invisible spirit behind nature drew me powerfully into its embrace, […]
Continue reading“Artus was a slim young man with soft brown hair that fell below his shoulders. His smile beamed pure kindness to all whom it graced. He lived high up in the tower of the dorm, where I imagined him working as a sort of modern Hermes Trismegistus, a 20th-century alchemist performing wonderful spiritual experiments in […]
Continue reading“On those rare days when the sun succeeded in emerging from the dense blanket of clouds that typically covered the sky, I would marvel at it. What hidden meaning lay in this star whose brightness precluded direct view? How moving were its long-stretched beams as they made their way over millions of miles to glorify […]
Continue reading“The glory of nature enwrapped me in her sensuous arms. The rich, heady smell of the earth awakening after winter wafted up to me from the lawn beside the school. The eager, needful cries of the birds carried my eyes up to the trees to and from which the creatures continually flew. The pansies in […]
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