A friend of mine wrote yesterday, “I imagined that you were climbing a big mountain with your laptop and was sitting on top of the mountain typing away a new york best seller while swatting away bears with your free hand…hehehe.”
That does sort of sound like me, except that I don’t actually take my laptop. Sometimes I take manuscript pages to read and mark up or I take a pen and journal. If I have a scene I need to work on, I scribble in my journal, then type it up when I get home.
I did go to my favorite mountain yesterday. It’s starting to get a little chilly these days, but as long as the sky is clear blue, that’s all I care about. It’s the light and fresh air I go for. It’s in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, facing Denver, so once I get some altitude I can look out over the city. On a clear day the colors are breathtaking. On a smoggy day, the city looks like a cesspool and I’m glad I’m not in it.
I know there are some kind of predator animals up there because just yesterday I saw a fresh fawn’s calf bone lying on the path. I assume the rest of the fawn is in some animal’s stomach. But I’ve never seen any of those predators. Usually I see deer. They go springing across the path in front of me quite often. Other than that, I see lots birds, sometimes rabbits, sometimes snakes. I’ve seen a couple of rattlesnakes on the path, but they don’t really want to have anything to do with humans. They will only strike if they feel they have no other option.
I’m always on the hunt for Magic. Have you ever read the books of Carlos Castaneda? If you want to know my philosophy on life, that’s about as close as it gets. Don Juan is always taking Carlos into the Sonoran desert to hunt for Power. Magic and Power are the same thing…. but it’s not an easy thing to explain.
It’s sort of like a key to opening the Doors of Perception, but without using drugs…. to be able to see Magic or Power and take it in to make it part of one’s consciousness. When I write, it’s my way of putting that Magic on the page so I can verbalize it. Otherwise it’s just a feeling that I can’t explain. I use language to cross the “feeling” from my right brain to my left brain.
In our modern culture, mysticism and science have been set apart and opposed to each other, but they are not natural enemies. In fact, science was invented by mystics and some of the best scientific minds were also mystics. Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Carl Jung were all occultists.
Anyway, not sure what got me traveling on that tangent today, except that I wish there were more people around with whom I could have these kinds of conversations. So I hope you find this blog post interesting.
