The Winding Trail

There are trails of tears and trails of blood
And trails of cows as they chew their cud,

Up-trails 'n down-trails,
'N going-around trails,
Pause-for-a-smile...even
Pause-for-a-frown trails...

But don't be fooled by the seeming abundance
For it all adds up to a lot of redundance.
The great Winding Trail toward a waning old sun
Is the one and only . . . the only and one.

And here, my friends, will be the artifacts of my own Winding Trail - or at best, the latter half of it, for there was a severe earth-shaker in my mid-forties, and the earlier portion is largely beyond recovery.

Maybe what really happened, about that time, was the realization that one can't always hold onto the past when urgently pressed to move with the life-current toward the future. The Winding Trail, for this wanderer at least, has had few spots for lingering - and many challenging, risky passages. But all the more to write about, and here you'll find much of that writing. The order in which they are offered, here, is not entirely chronological, but more in line with my sense of their significance.

For now, this is what is here for you . . .

• The Summer of Infinite Presence. Flashes from a hitch-hike trail around the country, in 1985. Not merely an adventure, it was the culminating passage - a Grand Test, in a way - for all that I had learned of living in a fluid, creatively malleable reality that displays its beneficence as we let go the insistent urge to control and direct its course.

• Derelict Days in the Northwest. The sendoff I gave myself, in July 1990 as I was about to go abroad, recapping for my friends the hard-to-believe Providence that nourished me through five adventurous years since leaving Berkeley (for that "Summer of Infinite Presence") and embarking on a Taoist trail.

• A Hitch-hike to Rajneeshpuram. Another hitch-hike report -- this one, the brief tale of a 4-day road trip undertaken without any cash funds at all, to see how that would affect the nature of the journey . . . and it certainly did!

• Pass the Bucks!. My inspired response, sometime in the early 1980's to the growing flood of chain-letter schemes that were camouflaged as New Age methods of raising money.

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