Welcome to my blog, my invitation to you to tag along for the ride as I share a few moments of enlightenment that have come my way over the years.  I remember an esteemed teacher many years ago recounting the counsel of the old wisdom when he told me our intention in this world ought to aim at reducing suffering and the causes of suffering and to increase happiness and the causes of happiness. I’ve not forgotten this counsel and it gives me pause as I remember another teacher, a writer from Chile known to the world as Pablo Neruda. He was a poet, diplomat and politician who once read from his writings to an audience of 100,000 people in a football stadium. His legal name, before he changed it, was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He wrote under the name Pablo Neruda, in honor of his hero, the Czech poet Jan Neruda. In one of my favorite poems he invites us to seek wisdom where we find it:

Pay Attention Traveler

Because of this, traveler, pay attention to all that passes before you;

there are people that look like trees

and rivers that flow as they are intended.

Pay attention, traveler,

and revel in what you do not see but could

if you paid attention to the wind telling you stories of lovers and play -

and of wonders as yet undreamed.

Because of this, traveler, pay attention to the leaves of gold flickering in the water which are not leaves and there is no water.

Because of this, traveler, pay attention.

-Pablo Neruda

December 3, 2013

   When I published  my novel The Gift, a dream came true (you can get it in paperbook and ebook from Amazon). A dream hatched quite some time ago in my high school sophomore study hall. I wanted to write a story. Sitting at my high school desk I began writing, and completed about half a page. I didn’t know yet that in order to write worth a whit, I had to listen to stories, tell stories, read stories. And have a life. That was all in the future.

   After my wife and I moved to Northern New Mexico in the mid-1990s I became interested in the colonization of the southwest which began in 1599 when a caravan of adventurers, treasure seekers, monks, lawbreakers, crypto Jews, and women with their finest clothing and household items set out from Mexico City to establish the Kingdom of New Mexico. I wrote their story from the viewpoint of one of the monks, Brother Antonio, who went native in the colony, was excommunicated and then condemned to be burned to death by the Inquisition. But that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell at that time. So I set it aside.

   I took up writing again about ten years later, this time setting the characters in the 1960s with Father Jonas Fielding as the protagonist. Jonas’ story soon evolved so that I was able to combine the 1960s story of Jonas’ experience with the church with the 1599 story of Brother Antonio. The thread weaving the two stories into one is the affiliation between Brother Antonio and Father Jonas, set in the empire of the Church. Both Antonio and Jonas are priests of the imperial church but neither one wore the yolk of empire comfortably. Their stories are fiction existing only in the mind of the author. Fiction is like that. It’s created, a story, a point of view, what one person sees.  But wait. What would we see if we looked with new eyes?

   Pablo Neruda cautions us to “pay attention.... revel in what we do not see but could if we paid attention.” What would we see if we paid attention? Can we? Dare we? Is this the beginning of a new journey and a new story? I think so.  I invite you to come with me down this road that surely will lead to new stories and dreams.