• Messenger Chapter 13

    Chapter Thirteen. Responsibilities Six weeks later. Early evening. Eight of us sat around a polished wooden table in one of the library alcoves. The two senior monks, Mr. Chin and Mr. Petrov; Mr. Conway; Mr. Herrick; Mr. Chang; Sunnie; Mr. Barnard, and myself. I was emphatically in the presence of my betters. Mr. Barnard occasionally…

  • Messenger Chapter 14

    Chapter Fourteen. Messenger “Mrs. Bolton,” Mr. Petrov said politely. “Your dream. Mr. Chiari, you will listen inside.” By now it was night. The table we sat around was illuminated by the two oil lamps on its surface. The room’s walls and ceiling had become shadowy, indistinct. The effect was not one of gloom, but of…

  • Messenger Epilogue, 1994

    Epilogue. 1994 If my life in the monastery hadn’t taught me about chance and accident, my return to the world would have. I could have gotten to Pakistan at any time, weather permitting. But getting home from Pakistan, without papers, without money, without a coherent story explaining how I’d arrived there, might have been a…

  • Read not the Times

    The field of economics points out that everything we do prevents us from at the same time doing something different: This law of life economics calls “opportunity costs.” If you do this, you can’t at the same time do that. Being here means you can’t at the same time be there. Despite what commercials tell…

  • Messenger Afterword

    Afterword Fifteen years ago, I was reading Lost Horizon repeatedly and thinking about Shangri-La continually. Like Alexander Woollcott so many decades earlier, I had gone “quietly mad” over James Hilton’s book, I think now because I was clinging to the thought that somewhere there existed a refuge of sanity. In September, 1979, I began to…

  • Love is in the Moment

    A friend reminded me that I had sent him this a few months ago. I liked it then and i like it now. This comes from Fred Burks for the PEERS network and WantToKnow.info Team. I think, myself, that her day turned not when this lovely incident occurred but earlier, when she determined not to…

  • George Chiari after Tibet

    Those who liked Messenger might like a few chapters I wrote that tell of George after his return. The novel was to be called Conspiracies of Men and God but it looks unlikely that I’ll ever finish it. Too much water under the bridge in real life since this was written. Just for fun, then.…

  • Conspiracies, Chapter Two

    Chapter Two And so George returned to the family, and for a few months things were back to, shall we say, readjusted-normal. He moved in with Mom and Dad, to their great joy, and he somewhat diffidently asked Tommy if he could use another hand on the farm. Tommy, looking at George’s state of obvious…

  • Mystic Margot in Marrakesh

    Interesting thing, this blogging. I put up the text of Messenger and someone in Morocco finds it interesting and posts a couple of comments, and we exchange a couple of emails and then I realize that she has a blog, and I go visit her blog and I see why she liked Messenger, and presto,…

  • Conspiracies, Chapter Three

    Continuing, just for fun, with bits of an unfinished novel about why George Chiari left Tibet, and what he hoped to accomplish. Chapter Three “You keep talking about my life being in danger. Why should it be?” “Because of what I’ve been doing since I’ve been back.” “You keep saying that, too. But it doesn’t…