Well!...I see you made it through our little game. Portrait byAlice Joy

Welcome . . . to the world of Irv Thomas

And I hope you're as glad to be rid of the gnome, Chomsky, as I am. Which points up our first order of business: If you plan on coming back here, better set your bookmark on this page instead of the other, or you'll get that fool gatekeeper every time.

We don't need his game anymore. I wanted to give you an idea of the ambiguities that thread my life, before getting down to the serious business of trying to offer it in a sensible pattern (assuming there is one).

On the other hand . . .
If you've arrived here by a different
route, and not seen the Gnome's page,
he wants everyone to have a go
at his diversionary game
of matching heroes.

(That's just a courtesy note. Frankly, I'd rather not have anything more to do with that gnome - I'm just glad you got past him.)

If you've been here before, you have two immediate branching options:

• In case you want to know what's going on with me at the moment . . . [And I should note that this part of the site is being newly reactivated, if you've "been there, done that," and are wondering where I've been hiding, for so long.]
• Or, you can head directly to the Staging Area, from where all the current and archived material on this site can be reached.

There, that takes care of the preliminaries. Come along with me, now, for a quick BioTour of my world, to get you oriented. [That's a double-hooked word, biotour, for it's going to be a swift synopsis of my recent life (bio.), in a nature (bio-) metaphor.]

We are situated, right here, at the present moment's junction on the long Winding Trail that has been the course of a rather strange but very rewarding life. Down the trail, it twists on and out of sight, toward the Great Sea that all of us came from and will eventually return to - but that part's for the future. In the other direction is the convoluted path that brought me here. Not easy to follow, so let me point it out to you.

You can see, way up in the distance, the dark tangle from which the trail emerges. That's a real wilderness, believe me. I spent some forty years of my life coming through those wilds, and I don't plan to take you into them. Maybe an occasional reference or two when background explanations are necessary, and you'll know, then, what I'm talking about. But just this side of it, and off to the right, you see those towering redwoods? That's a lovely old-growth forest that's perfectly safe to roam in. I lived there for about a dozen years, just after I came out of the tangle. They were some of the best years of my life, for I was learning a whole new way of living.

I call it the Black Bart Memorial Grove, and when you get there you'll find a lot of the writing I did in those years. It's not open just yet, but it will be soon, and I'm readying a way-station, going into it, that will provide much more detail as to what those years were all about for me -- and tell you why that grove memorializes an old outlaw.

My home, these days, is in a little meadow alongside Providence Creek, over there to the left. Leafy Meadows, I call it, and I want you to come and visit me there - often. It's a sweet little spot that catches all the seasonal changes and keeps me aware of what life is really all about. For life is seasonal, you know. Every year and every day of it.

My most current writings are there -- mainly a series of reflective commentaries that I call Ripening Seasons. You'll also find, there, my work on the mystique of the seasons, the personal bridge to Nature that resides within each of us, and something I have been studying for the past quarter-century. When you stop by Leafy Meadows you'll find, there, a briefing on what that's all about.

Providence Creek, by the way, has been the inspiration for much of my writing. Whether it's a trickle or a floodtime flow, that creek has kept me from thirst (and hunger, too) for all the years since I came out of the wilderness. Few people will believe it, but the source spring is up among those barren rocks you see beyond the meadow, in a particularly rugged area called Poverty Bluff. The uninviting look of that rocky area puts most people off, but I've spent a lot of time up there -- time that's been unusually productive of insight and personal revelation. Poverty and Providence are like cousins; I regard both of them with a good deal of affection, and write about them often.

Folks generally assume, in these parts, that Providence Creek is fed by that waterfall way over there near the wilderness, but the waterfall isn't constant. In fact, I call it Prosperity Falls for that very reason. Prosperity just dries up, every now and then, but Providence never does. It's worth a hike out there, though, for the rocky climb alongside the falls that will take you up to Signal Hill -- not really a hill, but just the top of the falls. You can see much more of the countryside from up there, though, and I'm going to use it for links to interesting places. Not your usual variety of Yahoos and such, but out-of-the-way sites that have particular relevence to my own concerns, along with references to other good resources that have no Web links at all.

From up there, too, you'll get a glimpse of The Pinnacle, a peak that I metaphorically climbed back in 1991, when I spent a vagabonding summer in Europe with hardly the funds for it -- part of a 19-month first-time sojourn abroad. You can read all about that journey in the book Innocence Abroad, which is at the Pinnacle site. All of it but the illustrations (my own), which will get up there, one of these days.

Then, dropping back to Providence Creek again, I'm planning to turn that quiet spot into a kind of time-out browsing area, where all sorts of providential things: book excerpts, interesting news clips, passages gleaned from here and there among the newsletters that come in . . . just about anything at all that seems worth sharing can be put up one month and taken down the next, in a rotating fashion, so that the watering spot will be worth returning to anytime you stop by. I'll let you know (here and in the Staging area) when Providence Creek opens up.

And I don't want to forget to mention Ivy Glen, for you might miss it if I don't point it out. It's on the far end of the Meadow, but you don't see it until you're right there - an overgrown bed of ivy, so delightfully cushioned that you could take a mid-afternoon nap there. It's my academic glen, devoted to preserving some of the forty trenchant and provocative columns I wrote for the U. of Washington Daily, when I was an undergrad student there in the late '80s. (Yes, you read it right: I took a baccalaureate in my 60s, during the late '80s.)

Finally, you should be aware that all sorts of writings are to be found along The Winding Trail -- things that just don't fit in the dedicated areas I've been describing. That would mainly consist of journaling newsletters that I've sent out, from time to time, along that very trail . . . but other material could wind up there, too. Check it out. A full listing will always be available as you enter the Winding Trail.

The Staging Area:

Links here for all points presently open on this site

Surprise! . . .to any faithful readers who check this out from time to time, and have seen nothing new since the end of June, 1998. THERE IS SOMETHING NEW!

In the spring of '99, I lucked into a superb psychology class at the U -- auditing it, as I regularly do, but this one allowed and called for my full participation. It had to do with exploring the course of life's latter stages, which was pure soul-food to such a reflective soul as I, and perfectly timely for what I am doing, on my own, as this century moves toward closure. I haven't really had the time, since summer began, to do a proper reflection on the class, itself, but one of its fruits was the 'forced march' completion of the last project I began, for this site --- to get my departmental thesis, for the university, on board. It was relevant because my personal focus, in the class, was on the essentially cyclic nature of my life; and the thesis is a scholarly inquiry on the evidence that remains to us of a cyclic awareness among earlier cultures.

If you're interested in checking it out, it's in the Leafy Meadows section. But be warned, it's not in my usual easy style, but a serious study.

Also new, by the way, is a revitalized attitude toward this site. Yes, yes, I know...you've heard it all before. But even these bare notes of revision constitute a return to it -- for the first time in more than a year! There are certain reasons for it, which are best elaborated not here, but in a September '99 entry in the At the Moment section -- which, itself, has a brand new start.

You can reach me right here.

The birthday of this site was Valentines Day, 1996
Since then, you are visitor number