The Decision to Leave Came in an Instant [The Abundance of Less]

Chapter two of The Abundance of Less is centered around Osamu Nakamura. One of my favorite excerpts reads:

"The decision to actually leave," he continues, "happened in an instant. I looked at my life, and I knew that I didn't want to wake up one day and find myself an old man filled with regret that I hadn't seen the things of the world...Of course, there are two kinds of regret I could have faced: I knew it was quite possible that I might end up stranded in some foreign country, miserable, without a

ny money, and knowing that I had given up my job. But when I compared that possible regret against retiring at sixty-five years old, having known nothing except working at my job -- that was when I knew. The decision, as I said, came in an instant."

Couturier, soon after the above passage, notes that "In the world system of increasingly discrete labor...the act of disentangling oneself from the whole might, in hindsight, appear quite radical." So, it really is a heroic act to live a truly individual life as disconnected from the invisible social pressures that are all around us.

I've written a thread on r/MindBodySpirit about this book which you can find here. Please comment if you can.

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Nature Writing Case Study: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I didn't read this book till recently, and am a little surprised that I passed it over when I was younger, though not that much so because I read few female authors then and wasn't quite as enamored with the natural word back then as I am now (I adored vistas from afar as opposed to getting right in there with them as I do now).

The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) is a tale set in northern Florida just after the American Civil War. It's about a family living off the land and all of the pleasures and hardships that come with such a life. More specifically, it's about a young boy learning to cope with loss while using his compassion to care for a fawn whose mother had perished.

I picked the book up in my quest to become a better nature writer. Flipping through the pages I encountered paragraph after marvelous paragraph filled with descriptive gems of the great Earth and her landscape.

One such passage is as follows:

...during the past months, he had learned the value of his father's trick of an unarguing silence...He watched the sun rise beyond the grape arbor. In the thin golden light the young leaves and tendrils of the Scuppernon were like Twink Weatherby's hair. He decided that sunrise and sunset both gave him a pleasantly sad feeling. The sunrise brought a wild, free sadness; the sunset, a lonely yet a comforting one. He indulged his agreeable melancholy until the earth under him turned from gray to lavender and then to the color of dried corn husks. He went at his work vigorously.

In the above extract Rawlings seems to mesh the beauty of the outer world with the beauty of mankind's inner world (his soul, or whatever you choose to call it) when she intimates that he "indulged his agreeable melancholy," an act that could be interpreted as a sort of communion with the mystery of nature. To expand, nature has an unmistakable sense of order, yet the purpose or drive to achieve said order; therefore, man, with his own, alien order in his society, separate from nature, feels left out when he appreciates Mother Earth's beauty but her secret isn't whispered into his ear.

Rawlings also does an excellent job of contrasting society and nature, pointing out the merits of the latter. She writes:

"But in the towns and villages, in farming sections where neighbors were not too far apart, men's minds and actions and property overlapped. There were intrusions on the individual spirit. There were friendliness and mutual help in times of trouble, true, but there were bickering and watchfulness, one man's suspicion of another...He had perhaps been bruised too often (by society). The peace of the vast aloof scrub had drawn him with the beneficence of its silence. Something in him was raw and tender...The wild animals seemed less predatory to him than the people he had known.

Here Rawlings makes a case for leaving society, not out of fear or incompetence, but simply because the family in The Yearling have made a choice that there just might be something better receive from nature's bosom than from man's. Too often we buy in to the belief that society has improved man's lot in life in comparison to nature. Perhaps it's time to question that supposition. Perhaps it's time to return to the garden that we blossomed from, if only for a time.

Rawlings also attempts to pinpoint the Catch-22 that is man's fondness for nature, yet his need to destroy it in order to ensure his survival. In a beautiful paragraph, Rawlings writes:

Jody examined the deer hide. It was large and handsome, red with spring. The game seemed for him to be two different animals. On the chase, it was quarry. He wanted only to see it fall. When it lay dead and bleeding, he was sickened and sorry. His heart ached over the mangled death. Then when it was cut into portions, and dried and salted and smoked; or boiled or baked or fried in the savory kitchen or roasted over the camp-fire, it was only meat, like bacon, and his mouth watered at its goodness. He wondered by what alchemy it was changed, so that what sickened him one hour, maddened him with hunger, the next. It seemed as though there were either two different animals or two different boys.

Of course, this Catch-22 can be superimposed onto anything. For instance, our labors are sometimes lusted after, whether it be acquiring a sought after title to print on a business card, or something far more simple, such as developing a farm that can provide all of one's family's calories. Yet, the reality of toiling in the office or in the dirt can be hair pulling and back breaking. However, once we push through the uncomfortable stage of labor, we are able to reap the attached rewards. So, just like Jody above, we all feel some sort of ecstasy in the chase, pain in the toil, and satisfaction in the remuneration. Perhaps this is a fact of life.

No. Perhaps knowing this is a secret of life. If we decide to set a goal, whether it be material or otherwise, let us embrace the toil that is required to reap the satisfaction at road's end.

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Into the Wild and House of Cards - Envy For Simple Living

Into the Wild promo poster

Into the Wild is one of my favorite films. The hauntingly beautiful soundtrack composed by Eddie Vedder coupled with the stunning scenes of landscape and of human will make for extraordinary cinema. It was a shame that that film didn't get nominated for best picture in 2007, let alone win.

Not being a film critic, or even a knowledgeable viewer in the technical aspects of creating movies, I cannot make the claim that what I enjoy has much to do with the technical process or planning of the director and his or her staff. What I can say unequivocally, is that I know good story telling and I know good mythology. I know when I witness something that rings true, whether it be a film, a song, a novel, or a poem. There is no prerequisite to make it possible to engage with Truth, for she wants to touch us all.

Where I'm going with this is that I see Truth when I see Chris McCandless leave society. I see Truth in House of Cards when I observe a young and former prostitute leave her twisted and complicated life in D.C. for an anonymous, day-to-day, subsistence-based existence in the American Southwest. I see Truth and feel Envy.

Envy pulls on me hard when I see scenes of simple living like these, no matter if the characters choose their paths of wanderlust, or if they are forced into them like an arranged marriage, and I want to know why. What about poverty and self-reliance is so sexy? What about an unpredictable day, week, month, or year to come is so liberating? Thoreau and Emerson come to mind. I have read them and should re-read them. Emerson himself says that "envy is ignorance," so I should be kicking myself and ignoring the urge to write this, right? 

But it is something more than the satisfaction of taking care of one's self without the help of others, of getting past the coveting that fuels Western society. It is something beyond the communion with nature that the city-life longs for.

So, I dug around and found some other interesting answers.

First, Joshua Becker writes: 

"Of all the life-changing lessons I learned, perhaps the most significant was the importance of competing less and encouraging more. Marathon runners are notorious for offering encouragement to one another. They understand an important race principle: there is room at the finish line for all of us."

This point is important because the vagabond is in competition with no one.

Matt Welsh talks about the fame trap and its crushing weight:

"Once I had kids, I really started to appreciate the toll it was having on my family (…), and I started to realize that maybe I had my priorities all wrong. (…) I think chasing academic fame is not the best reason to go down that path. I wish I had known that when I was finishing my PhD."

His point is relative to the powerful academic or businessman, but also to the ladder climbing middle manager or budding elementary school teacher. Success and advancement in this culture and economy require a certain level of fame. Fame gets the musician the Grammy, but it also gets the teacher tenure and the maintenance man a pension.

Time Magazine brings in another excellent point: this race for fame, this prison of habits and expectations which comes with its own obvious level of stress, feeds on itself: 

"Facebook is supposed to envelope us in the warm embrace of our social network, and scanning friends’ pages is supposed to make us feel loved, supported and important (at least in the lives of those we like). But skimming through photos of friends’ life successes can trigger feelings of envy, misery and loneliness as well."

Then what is there for us to do? Are we doomed from the start? The hero in us sees McCandless and wants to become our own version of him. To be an off-road vehicle and not a train fixed to a track. The mythos of "I think I can, I think I can" has been drilled into so very deeply. Thomas and Friends pile it on for our kids with a connected message of utility and hard work.

So what's the fix? Dr. Andrew Weil encourages us to "embrace our inner neanderthal," something that McCandless didn't have to be told, revealing his true wisdom, an intelligence that is often ripped away from him by the book and movie's fiercest critics who lambast him for his carelessness. 

To leave you with something practical, Dr. Weil suggests the following (source):

Nurture Your Inner Neanderthal

According to Dr. Weil, one way to combat modern stress is to return to our roots. Spending time outside, eating natural foods, and getting a full night’s sleep are among the basics that many of us overlook.

1. Indulge your hobbies. Hobbies relax and revitalize us. Even just six minutes of pleasure reading can lower stress levels. If you need inspiration, try new activities with an open mind. Yoga classes are filled with people who never thought of themselves as the meditative type.
2. Move your body. Exercise breaks the physical stress cycle and promotes restorative sleep. The trick is to find a practical activity that you truly enjoy even if it’s power walking at the mall.
3. Try mind-body activities. Disciplines such as yoga and meditation induce a calm state that counteracts the stress response. You dwell more in the present and feel less anxious about the past or future.

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Podcast For March, 2015

Here is a collection of audio files from March. Skip tracks using the arrows on the player. The link to the RSS feed is on the right sidebar for anyone interested in subscribing. For now, I'm calling it AJ Snook's MindBodySpirit Hour.



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E.B. White: What Makes So Many Writers Unusual?

E.B. White

E.B. White, the famed author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, wrote in a letter to his editor that "a book is a sneeze." That quote was the final line of the letter, but the lines preceding it were full of little tidbits sprung loose from the mind of a successful, unique and creative individual -- lines like, "Once you begin watching spiders, you haven't time for much else," and, "I took a razor blade, cut the sac adrift from the underside of the shed roof, put spider and sac in a candy box, and carried them to town." This begs the question, in the most positive way that I can put it, "What makes so many writers unusual?"

For starters, writers and all artists for that matter, are in the business of novelty. The famed ethnobotanist and spiritual philosopher,Terence McKenna, said:

We're playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it can not. It's an essentially preposterous situation. It is essentially a civil rights issue, because what we're talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility. In fact, not a religious sensibility, the religious sensibility.

If you buy into McKenna's words you understand the crucial connection between spirituality and creativity, but you also understand the risk expressing one's curiosity can lead to, and the ridicule that can result. People like Terence -- and I think E.B. understood it too -- knew the difference between the material and the conscious universes. The fact that White could sit for hours on end admiring spiders was unusual, yes, but not nearly as novel as his writing of Charlotte's Web, a story that has passed the test of generations, nurturing countless imaginations in the process, and teaching children the value of exploring the far reaches of the conscious universe, the value of going to novel realms that the mind has yet to witness. He took just enough risk -- not too little to be bland or unoriginal, and not too much to be crazy. I don't know if anyone has ever said this, but if you think about it, E.B. White was quite psychedelic.

Writers' words are like tendrils outstretched, fishing line for the minds of the readers, hoping to hook as many as possible and reel them in to foreign shores. Sometimes they cast too far and into waters too deep and scary. Other times their bait is undesirable. There is a mutual bond between psychic fishermen and the minds that they catch. But authors like E.B. White serve a great purpose. They inch the school just a bit further toward the abysses and trenches that McKenna so willingly explored alone. It's no wonder some call him crazy and unusual.

What makes so many writers unusual then? The words "unusual" and "novel" are synonyms as far as I can see, so we should be asking what makes them so novel (a novelty that White reminded us in his letter, is as unavoidable and inevitable as a sneeze). If astronauts exploring the depths of outer space are considered heroes, then so writers and other artists who are willing to take risks, to create conscious experiences for audiences that they have not yet been able to experience, should also be called heroes in the eyes of world.

E.B. White's Author Page

Who Are You?

The Self / Deviant Art

Perception isn't truth

Freedom is the will and power to change perception

Her exoskeleton solidifies
With each mistrust and act
Against all things genuine

His extrasensory perception,
Aware outside of language,
Sees her,
an entity of conscious evil

She presents herself with class and grace
Though her motives are for self
And material
raping

He is pure

Her extrasensory perception knows it
And pounces

All elves aren't benevolent

All inexplicable realities aren't divine

In this moment

Who are you?

Amor Fati - Love Your Fate

While watching some True Detective clips the other day, I then revisited Nietzsche and the whole "the universe is a flat circle" idea. It's all mind-blowing stuff that can really get the dome scintillating. Time is cyclical, not linear. Micro-time, or the accumulation of moments, is reactionary and independent of free will. Macro-time, or the mapping out of one's future, is malleable within the constraints of imagination and the laws of physics. How can the two co-exist?

Sam Harris is convinced there is no free will, but Nietzsche and Sam agree says this doesn't stand in the way of beauty and love. Amor fati prescribes us to love existence because it is all we have. It is unchangeable.

Nietzsche said:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

It is a very Christ-consciousness approach if you ask me. Love all things. Even the mundane. Even the "evil". Love annihilates the wicked. "Love without power is sentimental and anemic."

If time is cyclical, and if consciousness drives reality, then it's not total lunacy to wonder if our own subjective state will change the course of reality. To love everything, to love what is "necessary," or to love the mechanism, might just change the mechanism in the course of all that lovin'.

Like Nietzsche, I'm a nihilist in the sense that there is no objective meaning to this universe. The universe, in a sense, is cold and follows rules of science and order. But (and this is a big but) this objective universe is filled with a great number of subjective minds, minds that have the capability of wielding the ultimate weapons of subjectivity: Love and Beauty.

There are a few ways you can be a hero and support AJ. Free things are: try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link us to a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money you can send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through the Amazon links on the site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ

Ray Bradbury: We're All Poets When We Get In Tune With Really Living

Do you think of yourself as a poet, that kind of wordsmith who can transmit beauty the way a 5th year frat boy transmits STDs? I don't. At least not while speaking. Speaking's never been my strong suit, but occasionally words seem to dangle off of my fingertips and find their way through the keys and onto the computer screen like meandering ants to an open jar of jam, impossibly making it to that sweet slice of heaven without getting squashed by a hidden and malevolent force in the universe.

Too often our society makes us feel like we're nothing more than worker drones (to continue with the ant metaphor, this time flipping it on its head). Poetry and art are not worth pursuing unless we are exemplary individuals, folks with unordinary lives, aliens of the "regular" world. To this, thankfully, Ray Bradbury would respectfully disagree. It is precisely the "regular" world where our beauty comes from. In Zen in the Art of Writing, he writes:

Oh, it's limping crude hard work for many, with language in their way. But I have heard farmers tell about their very first wheat crop on their first farm after moving from another state, and if it wasn't Robert Frost talking, it was his cousin, five times removed. I have heard locomotive engineers talk about America in the tones of Thomas Wolfe who rode our country with his style as they ride it in their steel. I have heard mothers tell of the long night with their firstborn when they were afraid that they and the baby might die. And I have heard my grandmother speak of her first ball when she was seventeen. And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

It's refreshing to hear, rather spiritual, adding credence to the title of the book that this is excerpted from. Zen. If we cannot find beauty in our daily lives, if we cannot find art and poetry in each moment, then what lives are we choosing for ourselves? If we can only have fun during our week-long August vacation, then let us put in our two weeks notice, turn the page and find a new life waiting patiently for us there with a welcoming smile on its face, with open arms, eyes glittering fantastically, and hands full of party favors and discoveries.

There are a few ways you can be a hero and support AJ. Free things are: try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link us to a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money you can send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through the Amazon links on the site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ

Writing Advice From Bradbury

"What, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all. Secondly, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that. Not to write, for many of us, is to die."                       - Ray Bradbury 

 

Don’t Be Passive: Stephen King Gives Advice

I almost titled this post in the passive tense, so thankfully I’m learning from Stephen King already. Not that this is new information by any means as I have a recurring waking nightmare of my elementary school teachers warning me about passive voice as they called it. Perhaps fear is a good motivator in this case.

King writes in his fantastic book about our craft, On Writing, “I think timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason time lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”

Safe is a polite way to put it. Cowardly is another. I argue that writers who align with the passive voice are generally afraid of getting close to their characters and the worlds they inhabit. These writers see themselves as outsiders or lurkers of these words, and they don’t give their creations the respect that they deserve, the perception in the mind of the reader that they are tangible and real, that their faces are pressed up against you, breathing on you, inviting you into to their rising action, climax, and denouement.

King continues:

"I won’t say there’s no place for the passive tense. Suppose, for instance, a fellow died in the kitchen but ends up somewhere else. The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa is a fair way to put this, although “was carried” and “was placed” still irk the shit out of me. I accept them but I don’t embrace them. What I would embrace is Freddy and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid in on the parlor sofa. Why does the body have to be the subject of the sentence, anyway? It’s dead, for Christ’s sake! Fugeddaboudit!

Two pages of the passive voice – just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction – make me want to scream. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently tortuous, as well. How about his: My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun. Oh, man – who farted, right? A simpler way to express this idea – sweeter and more forceful, as well – might be this: My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I’ll never forget it. I’m not in love with this because it uses with twice in four words, but at least we’re out of that awful passive voice."

With these simple and active revisions my mind sees the characters more crisply and I am more open to the possibility that they each have unique quirks and subtleties, just like you and me. How does either active or passive voice affect you as a reader? Is it intimidating to rub shoulders with your characters when you write your verbs actively? Too intense? Or is that the kind of punk rock prose that you live for?

There are a few ways you can be a hero and support AJ. Free things are: try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link us to a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money you can send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through the Amazon links on the site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ

The Tao of Fishing (Poetic Prose)

Riverside sitting, the kind that summons the blood sun and sets aside the urge for instant gratification, is just one activity (calling it such puts a burning stretch on the definition of that very word) that brings Stu, like a child, close to the heart of all things. A school teacher by trade, his life affords him 14 weeks a year devoid of responsibilities apart from the exuding of compassion toward his fellow man...and taxes. He fishes to remind himself that he is of nature, that he is nature. He is an assortment of atoms and an illusion of empty space, arranged in a way that has allowed the alias Stu to come to be.

Patience is his beacon, and though not always pointing to true north, he's often aimed in its vicinity. Whether nine fish or none, Stu remains. His trusty blue denim hat, bleached by the sun's tendrils and frayed by the wind's whip, is closer to compost than to top-shelf and has seen better days. He waits out the sun and the flies and the false nibbles -- grasses, pebbles, and the probing turtle that hasn't made the menu.

Sitting by this river has taught him to smile at an empty stomach and a cold damp drizzle, as well as at a fat fried fish and the late May breeze. Companionship he occasionally finds in a colleague or a friend from out of town. Loneliness tells him as much about nature as the shapes of rocks and the changing hues of the sky on high. An empty moment is nothing more than companionship out of time.

He is turmoil. He is peace. He is nature.

Simplicity, patience, compassion.

These three are your greatest treasures.

Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.

Patient with both friends and enemies,

you accord with the way things are.

Compassionate toward yourself,

you reconcile all beings in the world.

Lao Tzu

Sage Ritskan Flash Fiction Series: Meet the Principal

"You know, it's funny you should ask, because my old school really was just like the Wild West."

"Saloons and floosies?" asked Mr. Peters. Mr. Peters had already put in his leave notice (off to the smoggy port appendage of Beijing known as Tianjin in the fall) so he was relishing the opportunity to be crass (borderline subordinate) with the new head honcho (wagering his daily peace for the chance to, for once in a rare while, push the new chief's buttons, pleasurably) on his way out the revolving door knows as Sage Ritskan School.

"Pretty much. Well...the saloons anyway," replied the new principal, Mr. Schlagenfucher.

"Allegedly, there are floosies to be found around here, as well as saloons," said an increasingly bold Mr. Peters. "Not that I would know."

Like a disinterested toddler in front of a butterless, saltless bowl of greens, Mr. Schlagenfucher disengaged this bout of infantilism and flipped his switch to silent stoicism, absent of ego, a calm breeze gusting from within, whistling through his peach-fuzzy ears like they were mystic kazoos. 

Just a week before his flight to the new school his aunt, the woman who raised him alongside her own flesh and blood, devoid of descrimination, pure with hot white intent, had passed away suddenly. A bridge accident was all he was told. Fond of both the card game and the engineered variety, Mr. Schlagenfucher thought it best not to inquire as to which variety of bridge did the poor old lady in, for it comforted him to believe that a doozy of the first variety was the experience to end her.

There are a few ways you can be a hero and support AJ. Free things are: try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link us to a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money you can send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through the Amazon links on the site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ

Anna Kamienska: "A Prayer That Will Be Answered"

I found this is Upside Down Zen and determined it to be grounding, even freeing, in its message.

Anna Kamienska, an obscure Polish poet about whom little is known, wrote "A Prayer That Will be Answered." It begins, "Lord let me suffer much / and then die." That is possibly the one prayer that will always be answered. She continues: "Let me walk through silence / and leave nothing behind not even fear"; and she ends by asking, "And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane / bumped by a bumblebee's head."

In every condition of the world's unfolding, we have only this moment now to be who we truly are. And part of who we truly are, very recognizably, is that insistent bumblebee -- bumping [our heads] against this strange glass we call the mind.



There are a few ways you can be a hero and support AJ. Free things are: try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link us to a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money you can send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through the Amazon links on the site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ

Louis Zamperini Stranded at Sea, Lucidly Hallucinating, Unbroken

WWII Soldiers Stranded At Sea
(Unbroken by Hillenbrand)

I'm nearly finished with Unbroken, a fascinating account of World War II told through the lens of Louie Zamperini, the Olympic runner turned bomber who was stranded in the Pacific and kept as a POW for two and a half years in various Japanese territories. It's a harrowing account of persistence and endurance told (often a bit too simplistically for my taste) by the Sea Biscuit author Laura Hillenbrand. I would have preferred a first-person narrative through the eyes of Mr. Zamperini rather than a somewhat distant tale from the perspective of an unknown, impersonal narrator. Still, the story is riveting solely due to the facts at hand, facts that would take an ingenious imagination (not to mention a heart of darkness) to fabricate. Kudos to Ms. Hillenbrand for her journalistic endeavors, those meticulous steps which have preserved such a remarkable story.

Of all the details that pour through the story, the voyage upon military issued rafts across the perilous ocean gripped me most. Here we have helpless, starving soldiers who know they are floating ever-further into enemy territory, soldiers who must brave the elements and the fear that bubbles up inside of them ever hotter and harder to handle each day. Yet they persist. They must. And as they do, they learn the limits of their bodies and the expansive possibilities of their minds and their souls.

The following is an excerpt from the novel that is a must-read and, in my opinion, something we can all learn from and use:

They were, as Coleridge wrote, "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." It was an experience of transcendence. Phil watched the sky,  whispering that it looked like a pearl. The water looked so solid that it seemed they could walk across it. When fish broke the surface far away, the sound carried to the men with absolute clarity. They watched as pristine ringlets of water circled outward around the place where the fish had passed, then faded to stillness. For a while they spoke, sharing their wonder. Then they fell into reverent silence. Their suffering was suspended. They weren't hungry or thirsty. They were unaware of the approach of death.

As he watched this beautiful, still world, Louie played with a thought that had come to him before. He had thought it as he had watched hunting seabirds, marveling at their ability to adjust their dives to compensate for the refraction of light in water. He had thought it as he had considered the pleasing geometry of the sharks, their gradation of color, their slide through the sea. He even recalled the thought coming to him in his youth, when he had lain on the roof of the cabin in the Cahuilla Indian Reservation, looking up from Zane Grey to watch night settling over the earth. Such beauty, he thought, was too perfect to have come about by mere chance. That day in the center of the Pacific was, to him, a gift crafted deliberately, compassionately, for him and Phil.

Joyful and grateful in the midst of slow dying, the two men bathed in that day until sunset brought it, and their time in the doldrums, to an end.

Louie found that the raft offered and unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about. 

The ocean was featureless flatness. He looked up. Above him, floating in a bright cloud, he saw human figures, silhouetted against the sky. He counted twenty-one of them. They were singing the sweetest song he had ever heard. Louie stared up, astonished, listening to the singing. What he was seeing and hearing was impossible, and yet he felt absolutely lucid. This was, he felt certain, no hallucination, no vision. He sat under the singers, listening to their voices, memorizing the melody, until they faded away. Phil had heard and seen nothing. Whatever this had been, Louie concluded, it belonged to him alone.

We will never know whether or not what Louie saw was real or not. I believe him when he says that he was lucid, for these stories have been told time and time again by people deprived of sleep and of food, both of which Louie was managing without. I would love to hear that song that they played. Let this be a reminder to us all about how much of an impact our environments do in fact have on us. They pull at us like strings on a puppet. They hypnotize us and make us forget that we have the final say about where we choose to dock our bodies. For me, I find art, music and literature to be inspiring reminders that I am more free than I sometimes think. When I read a good book or watch an inspiring film, I am reminded that I am creating the world around me, and that society is a tame-able trickster who wants rights to my mind.

There are a few ways you can be a hero and support AJ. Free things are: try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link us to a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money you can send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through the Amazon links on the site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ

True Detective on HBO

A new HBO series call True Detective started up today. It's tough for them to do wrong over there at HBO, so I made some time to give the first episode a watch. Matthew McConaughey's character, at about the fifteen minute mark, gave a short spiel on his world outlook that I had to transcribe and share here. I don't necessarily share all of his viewpoint, but it's smart, dark and worth contemplating.

I contemplate the moment in the garden...the idea of allowing your own crucifixion. I consider myself a realist, but in philosophical terms, I'm what's considered a pessimist. I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self -- a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each some-body...when in fact everybody's nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

What's your reaction to this? Do you find it unnerving? Truthful? Brave? Disturbing? Or something else? Let me know if you have a moment.


There are a few ways you can be a hero and support AJ. Free things are: try Audible or AmazonPrime for 30 days, link us to a social network like Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, or download and rate the podcast in iTunes. If you have a little spare money you can send a Paypal donation to ajsnookauthor@gmail.com, buy one of AJ's Kindle eBooks, or buy anything on Amazon by going through the Amazon links on the site. Thanks so much for your support, AJ