It was 24 years after the major eruption of 1980, and the mountain had been restless. My son Charles who was 19 now and I decided to drive down from Olympia WA and sit vigil for a while just in case something dramatic was about to happen. I took notes. 6PM Oct 3, 2004 —We’ve …
Author Archives: Ciel
Mount St Helens Diary–part one
We’re approaching the 45th anniversary of the May 18th, 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens in Washington State in the US. I was there that day. I lived in Olympia, about 60 miles from the volcano. For months we’d been hearing news of the rumbling earth, increasing intimations that St Helens was restless. At the …
The School of Becoming
Here we are, living on this fairly special planet; as Terry Pratchett described it and us, “…where the falling angel meets the rising ape.” That’s us, indeed: a spiritual entity living in a body evolved over time from ape ancestors. Spirit vibrates at a high frequency while the body vibrates at quite a slower frequency, and …
Stopping Shopping
The sun is shining, the temperature is over 60F and I’m off Facebook. This is the day that’s been set aside by a few million Americans, perhaps, to pull back our credit cards and our wallets and withhold our coin from the profit-driven commercial segment of America. One day, 24 hours… to deliver the message …
Death and Past Lives
January 2, 2005[January 15 2025] These are two things that appear quite differently to Body and Spirit. An eastern teacher taught one day, ‘Death is an Illusion.’ The next day, he taught, ‘Death is Real.’ His students tried to pin him down: ‘Today you tell us Death is Real, yesterday you told us it is …
Having and Being
Dec 31, 2004[2025 edits] A model of human-being: I don’t have a soul: I am a soul; I have a body. A simple reframe and all at once, many things that didn’t quite fit, fall into place. Body and soul each has its own protocols: its own needs and problems, and its own solutions, too. When we try …
If you’re disappointed in God
it could be your expectations are unrealistic Dec 31,2004[2025 edits] Maybe it’s because you don’t have a realistic notion of what God is, and what you can reasonably expect. Maybe God doesn’t do the kind of stuff you’ve been led to expect God does. Maybe the role of God in the Universe isn’t what you’ve …
How The Universe Looks From Here
The last day of 2004 I wrote the first words of a blog on a quiet little site of writers and readers. There are now nearly 400 pages of that blog, and it’s still there on Blogit; the site that has become quieter over the years but still hangs on. I still add to it …
What’s Old Is New Again
I have begun a shift of one of my oldest blogs–HOW THE UNIVERSE LOOKS FROM HERE–from it’s original site, Blogit, to WordPress. It has its own page, and I am having to figure it out all over again, how to get things going, how to add tags and categories… All very confusing! It begins 20 …
The Value of Trust
Hannah Arendt told us: The lies are not meant to be believed, they are meant to make us not trust anyone about anything. And being unable to trust the information we’re given, we can’t make any choices because there are no sure safe trust-worthy choices. And that’s why so many Americans stayed home on Election …
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 