To become aware of something for the first time is to come upon it in your own way, anchoring you to a new way of looking at the world, as you alone see it, which in turn, leads you to a way of becoming compassionate for others in an otherwise…

In 1966 I bought a 1939 Studebaker Hearse for 45 bucks. It was in mint condition. The red velvet interior sparkled and shone with a plush, brain-popping softness. When I looked into the ebony paint job of one of the fenders I saw William Burroughs…

A light, misting rain drops like a waving curtain out of a gray sky as I drive my Chevy Cruze to work. I switch on my windshield wipers, which swipe the detritus of a week’s grime precipitated by the heat to one side. Fifty years ago to the day I…

Dreams are the stuff that awaken you to another life, connected to reality or not. Dreams and memories take you backward and forward, often uniting the two. The past becomes the present and merges into the future and spirals back again. It’s all the…

You have thunder in your steps. You just have to use them. Get out and live. Don’t do what you know how to do (at least not all the time). Do what you don’t know how to do. Open yourself up to the thunder of new experiences, new vistas. Go ahead.…

I don’t know what it’s like to go into battle. Never been in one, the soldier-kind, I mean — the shooting-kind. I imagined the Vietcong storming a hill with my friends dug in on top, the lead filling the air like hornets with deadly stings. My cousin…

What you want is often not what you need. But we tend to fill our world with want, mistakenly equating the two. You end up throwing away the want and keeping the need. Because need is a part of you, part of your inner core. Want comes from outside.…

Read part one of this story here What is it like to hold a live chainsaw? A living breathing, barred chainsaw. If you’ve never had the experience, it can be daunting if not downright scary. It’s a killing machine, a concoction that could only have…

What do you do when your attempts to do something you absolutely must do are thwarted? Do you quit in the face of adversity? Or go for it? Of course, you go for it. Full steam ahead. Throw caution to the winds. Your passion demands it – in all things…

In November 1969 I was studying for an accounting exam — I would quit the class the next day. My classmates urged me to see the quarter out; my grades were so low I brought down the grading curve. I hated numbers and columns, addition and…

I met Allen Ginsberg in the mid-‘70s, when he was living and teaching in Boulder, Colorado, at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics. Boulder became not only famous for bike racing and mountaineering, but poetry. The…

The Sandman You’re not the same person you once were after you’ve come back from an adventure — the experience changes you — shifting you from your old ways and the ways of those you grew up with, to new ones. Even though you’ve returned, you find…

You know something is wrong, feel it deeply inside you, but you can’t put your finger on it. I first came to an inkling of an understanding of what burning coal did to the environment back in the early ‘60s, when I was 16. I took off on an adventure…

Take back your rivers — before it’s too late. And while you’re at it, take back your planet. Some say it’s never too late; others say the time is past and we are going over the falls, past the tipping point. Global warming, climate change, call it…

If you want to look back and examine the past, you better be ready. Like it or not, the past is never past. Look back with aplomb and revel in it, good or bad. There are lessons to be learned if you can unearth them, if you can dredge them out of the…

“I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains,” says Bilbo in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” “and then find somewhere I can rest. In peace and quiet … ”And I might add, for myself primarily, to partake in a good toke — or two or three. Not from a…

“Having no destination, I am never lost.” This from Ikkyū, the Japanese Zen priest and poet — Crazy Cloud, as he was called back in the day. Vietnam as a destination proved our undoing many times over. We lost our way. And then, when we found our…

Ah yes, I’ve said it before: war is kind. We are a species who love war like no other. But there are those of us who protest war, and militarism as well. Throughout history there have been war protests. From the earliest of times to the latest. In…

They call me an outside agitator. “Call me Ishmael.” I go by many names. But Ishmael I’m not. Never hunted whales. Only seen them when I was stoned or on acid. Never been whale watching, either. I once saw Killer Whales, the endangered Orcas of the…

I turned on the electric Tee-Vee machine late one night last week, lit a doobie the size of a Buick, settled back and punched the surfing stick 10,000 times, all five fingers skidding every which way while I traveled through hundreds of channels,…