My first novel Messenger won an award, and is still my baby, but it is long out of print. I have the remaining copies, which I sell when someone wants one, but I have no objection to giving it away for free in digital form. For the next fourteen Fridays, I propose to print one chapter here. It’s a slow way to read a book, but its free.
I just read a short story of Doris Lessing’s called “The Reason For It.”
In this terrible year 2016, the story has such resonance for me. If I had tears, this would bring them.
Find it. Draw your own analogies.
Do anything long enough, consistently enough, and it adds up. On Sept. 6, 1966, I bought a blank book (as they were called) and made my first journal entry.
Fifty years and 102 journal books later, the collection looks like this.
Any way you measure it, that’s a lot of water under the bridge.
Thinking of time as always existing, rather than coming into existence and then ceasing (as in the past / present / future scenario that common sense suggests) is just what Rita Warren and I were told by the guys upstairs 15 years ago. Interesting to see science seeing the world that way as well. The past doesn’t dissolve; the future doesn’t appear. It’s all there, all the time. As advertised. (See The Sphere and the Hologram.)
http://sci-techuniverse.blogspot.com/2016/03/according-to-einstein-time-is-illusion.html?m=0
As one who is trying to figure out what’s happening around us, I found this article deeply interesting.
http://amygannett.com/2016/07/29/why-evangelicals-are-losing-an-entire-generation/
Those of you who have spent any time in Charlottesville sooner or later will have come across our monthly free-distribution paper The Echo, founded a couple of decades ago by Kim Isaacs and owned and operated for – I don’t know, 15 years? – by Jim Ward. The Echo was a quirky mixture of local and metaphysical, and there was nothing else like it anywhere around.
Jim recently sold the paper so he could re-retire. Echo is now called The Echo World, and it is edited and published by the very talented husband-and-wife team of Michael Langevin and Sofia Axelsson. Michael, a transplant from California, published Magical Blend magazine for 30 years, and is the author of three books, one of which was published by Hampton Roads. Sofia came to us from just as far away, but in the opposite direction. She was born and raised in Sweden, and has published two books there. (They are in Swedish, but she is fluently bilingual.)
(So you ask, How do Sweden and California meet? They travel, separately, to Peru, of course. But that’s another story.)
You don’t have to be here to read it, if you have access to a computer. (And if you don’t have access to a computer, how are you reading this?) Click here to see the digital version: www.theechoworld.com
Naturally you will want to turn immediately to page 13. I say no more.
Had my usual good time, last night, talking to the current Guidelines class at The Monroe Institute. Since the program begins Saturday after supper, by Wednesday night the participants have a pretty good idea of the obstacles they have faced and those they still face, and everybody is in the mood to do some work to see what we can do to help them address them.
When you have a dozen and a half people united in common purpose, bonded by a few days of sharing meals and conversation, you have a temporary group mind of some power. And what I like best about being at TMI is, as I have said many times, it is like being in the future. You can talk about shared understandings that just don’t commonly exist in the outside world.
So now I wait till tomorrow, when I start teaching my first weekend class there. Thank God for Bob Holbrook, who will be there to catch!