Colva Beach

We are lying on a dark blue quilted blanket, big enough for all four of us, on the deck of the ferry headed along the coast south of Bombay.  Destination: Goa. The weather is balmy, almost tropical after the chilly Delhi mornings and the rocking of the boat is soothing to us. I feel we are riding a magic carpet, especially when I consider how this blanket was purchased from an old Sikh merchant in Delhi who tried everything to get us to pay a higher price, even asking me to throw in my pocket calculator, an item that has already proved its value to us many times this trip. When we refused to budge, having already priced blankets for a few days now and recognizing its value, the old merchant sold it to us anyway, happily smiling as if there had never been any haggling at all and saying, "You are good customers."

At the Bombay ferry terminal, this blanket was then given to a red-jacketed porter who we hired before boarding, in the accustomed local fashion, to jockey for a space on the deck. His job was to race on board, at a given cue, with forty or fifty other porters and beat them to a choice spot on deck which he would then claim by spreading out our blanket and sitting on it until we arrived. "Otherwise you will never get a place to sleep", he had informed us when selling his services and he was right. We had a choice spot on deck, while many who arrived later were forced to the inner decks with little or no view. 

There is a photo of us lounging on deck, me in shirtsleeves leaning on my guitar and Karen and the girls smiling happily. We felt quite proud of our coup and the lazy ambiance of this overnight journey was a pleasant contrast to the hectic, dust-bowl-days journey by train across northwestern India to Bombay. 

I close my eyes and feel the warm sun and soothing brush of the sea breeze on my face. This is the closest thing to heaven yet, this absolutely unhurried sense of proceeding to an interlude in what has already been described to us as a tropical paradise. Although I had been reluctant to leave New Delhi, for there seemed to be so much to see there, this is surely one of the main reasons we have come to India, to experience this healing tranquility of the warmer climate. To dry and bake our frosty northerner bones for a spell in the mystical Indian sun.

Twilight falls in its own leisurely rhythm and we have barely budged from our place on deck. I was sure that at nightfall we would be chilly but the temperature remains warm all through the night so that we drift off to sleep and dream like babies, totally unconscious of any discomfort. This sleep is one of the most relaxing on our journey, having been rocked all night in the arms of the Great Mother Sea. 

In the morning we are wakened by the familiar cry of "chai walla, chai walla..." the tea seller making his rounds, who pours us steaming cups of sweet, spiced tea from an enormous rustic teapot. We purchase some sweet rolls from another vendor passing along the decks and  enjoy our first breakfast in Goa. Soon the harbor is sighted and the passengers line the decks to get a better view. Almost before we know it we are jostling down the gangplank with the pushing, shoving multitudes and trying to avoid being pigeon-holed by the throng of porters, each one competing to personally wrestle our baggage from our hands.

In a flashback from my youthful travels in the late 60's, we fall in with a group of four other young westerners who are all bound for the fabled Colva Beach and we agree to share a taxi. There is a humorous end to our journey, for so intent are we to getting to the beach that we neglect to ask the proper questions in regard to accommodations and after paying the cab fare wind up trekking across the dunes alongside the ocean in the wake of a local urchin who offers to guide us. Heavy luggage in hand, our comical caravan struggles along until, one by one, our companions drop out realizing that our miniature guide does either not know where he is taking us or there is a relative with something to sell us waiting for our arrival far off the beaten path.

Already forty-five minutes away from human habitation we too make the decision to pay off our young guide and retrace our footsteps through the sand towards what appears to be a village. The young boy now follows us as we make our way wearily back and begin to ask our own questions of passers-by, none of whom seems to guess what in the world we are talking about. Finally, exhausted, we stop at a little grocery store for a soft drink and our little guide finally proves his worth by asking the right person the right question and leading us to the home of Madame Silva-Pareda, who rents us a room for fifty rupees per night. This is much higher than we thought to pay but not nearly as high as the fancy hotels near the beach, we discover.

Madame Silva-Pareda is a dignified, elderly matron and wife of a reputable local doctor who has recently passed away. The rambling old vine-covered house on its tropical acreage reminds me of stories of "the old south" with its aura of bygone grandeur. Madame Pareda has now converted the mansion into a rooming house and at the rear of the courtyard, in a long, detached wing of the estate, are several large rooms that are rented out to travelers. Our room is high-ceilinged and dark, with small shuttered windows that do not receive any direct sunlight. The floor is cool, marbled stone, and a large overhead fan is the only thing that keeps the room from becoming stifling. The bathroom, a cold shower and seatless toilet, is down the hall to the left and shared by occupants of the other rooms, which at present are vacant. The bathroom floor is always streaked in wet, muddy sand, no matter how often we mop it, as though it is leaking in from a crack in the foundation somewhere. No matter how we try to keep it clean, it stinks.

However, we are happy to find this room as we are dead tired and so set up house here. There is a large wooden table in the courtyard where we can sit in the shade of a banana tree. The kitchen serves as a laundry room but is not set up for cooking as there is only an old propane stove which has no tank attached. We plan to eat out anyway except for light meals which require no cooking. A clothesline drapes across the courtyard where our hand-washed garments can dry in the sun. The beach is about a twenty minute walk from here and I can already picture myself strumming my guitar at the wooden table and munching on watermelon, after a refreshing swim. My foresight is fairly accurate, except that the walk to the beach with two, young children in the hot, humid sun is usually exhaustive, taking up the better part of a morning. What better way to spend it though?

We have come here for one purpose, to relax and heal but I find I have to remind myself of this. From time to time I try to write a song but my mind is a blank screen. I hear ragas playing in my head but the music coming out of my guitar is strangely and inexplicably more Celtic than I have ever heard myself play. So I go with the flow and decide to experiment in that playing mode and for most of our time in Goa that's exactly how it sounds.

I scribble daily in my little Saraswati notebook and in a way that keeps me focused or I think my nervous energy would drive me to distraction. There is a contrast between the sleepy, fluid rhythms of this Portuguese influenced community and the highly intense nervous energy we have brought with us from Canada. We find it difficult to simply be, although that is exactly what this setting calls for. Rather we are always asking ourselves what we are going to do today, fussing unnecessarily about it and often getting on each other's nerves.

About five days into our stay we hit a crisis. Karen seems to be smoking more and more, although she's been trying the cardamom seed cure prescribed by Ali Moosa. She's angry with me about something although I can't figure out what. Finally one morning she explodes and starts packing her bags. "I'm taking the children and getting out of here. You do what you want."

Clearly this does not include joining her. I can't believe this is happening and I try and talk her out of it which only makes everything worse. She is in a frenzy but by the afternoon the emotional hurricane has passed and we are all out at the beach, our bodies covered in the fine white salt that dries on the skin like a powder after a swim. In retrospect it is easy to see this as part of the healing we went in search of.

Each time we swim I am amazed at the amount of mucous that comes out of my lungs. I feel we having been storing it up all our lives and if not for this sojourn in the healing south perhaps we  might have all come down with pneumonia or worse. I wonder if this is a natural condition of northern peoples.

These daily walks and swims are literally squeezing the toxins out of our bodies. I feel  everyone should have the chance, once a year at least, to do nothing but let their bodies release all the poisons built up by daily living. There is a darker thought that follows this, that this need is the symptom of a larger, much more innocuous disease that is permeating our Western world in the form of widespread, unhealthy living. This influences all areas of our lives in terms of the energies we devote to developing technologies in business, arts, medicine and defense. In a culture that is physically unhealthy, how can technologies be developed that are ultimately life-enhancing?

These introverted thoughts are worlds away from our daily strolls along the palm-fringed white sands, our children frolicking naked and our only consideration where we might eat that night. The Paradise Cafe, constructed out of driftwood and local timber is our restaurant of choice. There are several eateries like it, hand-crafted rustically along the waterfront, right on the beach, but none offers the special charm and culinary arts of this one. Here, seated around a circular table, travelers from different countries convene nightly to share good food and regale each other with stories of their journeys.

A Conversation With The Teacher

Back at the Marina Hotel our tourist life proceeds, usually beginning with an English tea and toast breakfast in the hotel cafeteria. For about $20. Canadian per night we dine amidst brass fittings and the ministrations of white-coated waiters. This is far too expensive for us however and using our tour books we begin the search for more reasonably priced accommodation. Soon we find what we are looking for, not too far distant from Connaught Circle, a hostel that also serves meals and with a room large enough for our family.

We are on the top floor with access to the rooftop and from here we can look out on the looming and burgeoning architecture of New Delhi complete with Western-style high rise office towers built largely without the use of the high tech machinery so common in North America. The hand constructed scaffolding on such a structure comes straight out of Gulliver's Travels. Whole families camp out at the construction site while the work is going on and it's not uncommon to see very young children playing, or even tied up near construction sights while their parents work.

We are able to have a hot shower here and then walk out onto the roof to dry in the sun. The children sometimes walk up here naked and in the early mornings the sounds of bells, conches and voices chanting from the nearby temples reach us and wake us peacefully.

This early morning devotional activity in India is a wonder to experience. Even many businesses spend a part of the morning garlanding their altars with marigold and incense and offering up prayers for the day. Flower sellers are everywhere and walking into the bazaars is a little like walking into church although if you go down to the more Westernized areas where business is being conducted this feeling is rapidly diminishing.

Our second or third day at this hostel however, brings with it a rude awakening. We have noticed that the room is damp and chilly, especially early mornings. When we change our bedding, we find that the underside of our mattress is crawling with bugs seeking the moisture there. Fortunately we have met an English traveler who has just returned from a place called Colva Beach in Goa and we have already made up our minds to depart for the warmer, southerly parts of the coast. Goa sounds just right and so begins the frustrating ritual of trying to purchase train tickets.

There is a saying that the only thing in India that is on time is the trains. Perhaps, in order to keep this inheritance from the British Raj running so smoothly, this is why there is so much red tape around catching them. Or maybe they are simply trying to keep impatient travelers away, for it takes the patience of a saint to wait in the queues to buy a ticket. After two hours of trying to find the right terminal and another three hours waiting in assorted lineups, we finally have tickets in hand. We will travel to Bombay and from there take a ferry overnight to Panjim, Goa's main seaport.

The day before we leave we decide to visit Ali Moosa once more. We intend to tell him we will be gone for a month and to bring he and his wife a parting gift of some kind. This time we find a real taxi to take us, that is one with four wheels. However, the driver takes a long, roundabout route and it is obvious, since we can see his meter running, that he is going to soak us.

Unfortunately for him, his taxi breaks down en route far away from the bazaar and with the meter already reading twice the fare. He demands payment then and there and when we ask how we will get to our destination he shrugs as though it's not his problem. Karen refuses to pay. A street-side shouting match ensues witnessed by three or four individuals quietly waiting for a bus.

One of these, a middle aged man dressed in western-style shirt and slacks steps into the fray asking both us and the driver what is going on. The driver yells back his side of the story but is obviously in the wrong. After Karen explains, our intercessor all but begins beating the cab driver over the head with his newspaper. He hails us another cab and threatens to call the police if the cabby doesn't leave us alone.

We stop in a small market along the route and purchase a brass tea tray to give to Ali Moosa and his wife as a gift. We arrive at the bazaar and request a passer-by to guide us to the house of Ali Moosa since we will never remember the way. He does so smilingly but refuses our proffered tip. Ali Moosa is home and very glad to see us.

Once again we are in for a whole afternoon of conversation and supper with his family. This time there are three or four children running around but I don't know who they belong to. They seem quite comfortable coming and going without any adults paying particular attention to them. There is that sense of extended family or community in this area, a safe feeling. Washing is hung on the line that drapes across the courtyard and there is brisk domestic feel to the afternoon.

When supper is finished and the dishes cleared away we are seated in the main room preparing for a little after-dinner tea and talk. Ali Moosa has lighted a cigarette, when there is a knock at the door. A group of young men enter and there is an immediate shift of energy in the room. The feeling is palpable. From what was a friendly familial gathering, something much more formal has suddenly developed.

Ali Moosa asks the young men to be seated but does not introduce us. He immediately shifts into a different gear. His demeanor becomes more paternal, even authoritarian. He takes charge. Our visit it appears has coincided with an evening sohbet, in sufi terminology, or conversation with the teacher. These young men are students of the sufi way who have come for their regular meeting. What impresses me in retrospect was that Ali Moosa did not suggest or hint that we leave, knowing this was coming, nor did he tell us beforehand.

The conversation we were having before the newcomers arrived is now knit seamlessly into the sohbet. Ali Moosa speaks mostly in English although he says a few words to the young men in another language, from time to time as though clarifying thoughts that might be difficult to comprehend in English. "These young men are dacoits, or thieves" he explains. "They have all been in much trouble. And this young man" he gestures toward one of them in particular, "has committed many crimes and murders."

This is a somewhat chilling revelation and I look toward the man in question. He is probably in his mid-twenties, dark-skinned and very handsome with a scar across his forehead. I am aware he has been observing us throughout this exchange. He returns my look evenly, betraying no emotion but there is a hint of pride in his look, as though he recognizes himself as a dangerous and tough customer. In that moment I feel I can even detect some humor in his glance although what I am feeling, a mixture of shock and apprehension, colors everything. I have had similar encounters with strangers in closed rooms on my travels and they have not always turned out fortunately.

"The police have come here several times", Ali Moosa continues, "asking me why I am allowing these dangerous young men to come here. I tell them that this is a Sufi center and that no one is turned away, no matter what they have done in their life. They don't understand that it is not my business to judge them but to help them."

Ali Moosa's look is measured but despite the seriousness in his voice I see that shining forehead, that strength dwelling in the eyes that reminds me of photos of Inayat Khan. "They have decided to change their life." he says, looking at both us and them with an equal measure of intensity. What he is saying is clearly meant not only for them but for us too. "When a person decides to change his life, then God forgives everything they have done. Only they must really change."

" When a man is young he works only hard enough to make enough money to satisfy his own pleasure. That is enough for him. But when he marries and has a family, everything changes. Now the work he did before does not provide enough money to satisfy his pleasure as before and feed his family at the same time. He must decide what to do. Either give up his pleasures or cause his family to suffer."

There is silence in the room as Ali Moosa takes another draught of his cigarette. "When you change your life," he continues, "you must change your habits entirely. You can't hang around with the same people who will pull you down. And you must also be careful with those you feel you can trust."

"Suppose you have decided to quit smoking" he says. "But here we are all gathered in this room together for a good purpose and we are all friends and you trust me. So, when I offer you a cigarette, even though you have decided to quit, you accept. Just this once. You are wrong. When you decide to change, you must change inwardly. No more smoking, period. Otherwise your resolve to change is weakened when you accept my cigarette, even though I am your friend and you trust me."

As he speaks, my mind goes over my own problems, my ongoing difficulty to find a way to provide for my family. All my life I have been a musician and have been somehow able to provide for myself but now I have two children. Must I give up my music and that whole way of life? I know the answer. If my family is suffering, the answer is yes.

Soon the meeting is at an end and all parties depart for home. Before we leave we present Ali Moosa and Margaret with the brass tray we bought for them. They accept it graciously but even as we give it I sense they may never use it personally. I feel that everything that happens here is an offering to the greater good of the community as a whole.

Ali Moosa walks us to the cab stand in the darkness and speaks to a Sikh cabby, a young man in a scarlet red turban, telling him where we want to go. He asks us to return to see him when we come back from Goa and reiterates his offer to put us up at his house. Then we are gone. To our surprise, when depositing us at our hotel, the cab driver refuses to accept his fare.

Our Guide

Once again we are walking through the winding, confusing streets but this time we have retrieved our shoes. Sayyed Ali is leading the way towards his house. I try to make mental notes of our direction but keep losing my sense of it. Finally we come to a worn-looking, narrow wooden gate that opens into a tiny, paved courtyard. Three small buildings enclose the space and a smaller one than these, the toilet. One building is the living room, one the sleeping quarters and the third a tiny kitchen. The colors here are predominantly white and a pale, washed-out green.

Sayyed Ali introduces us to his wife Margaret who is much younger than he is and she greets us warmly. She is small but compact of build with a round, pleasing, even pretty face and her hair tied back in a Bavarian-style braid. Her smile is infectious yet restrained and there is a strong character in her penetrating look. She holds her hands demurely together as we talk.

There is an immediate affinity between us which we all seem to feel. We are taken into the main room through another narrow wooden door. The walls are covered in a darkening whitewash, the many niches are empty and there is not a single piece of furniture in here. The only apparent decoration is an ornate electric wall clock of polished brass.

Margaret enters the room carrying a carefully folded and ironed, white, embroidered cloth which she spreads over a thicker blanket for us to sit on. Despite the poorness of the surroundings there is an elegant beauty about this gesture, a pure simplicity that enriches the look and feel of the room. Sitting on this spotless white cloth, I feel like a visiting king, a guest of honor.

I ask Sayyed Ali what his name means and he explains that the Sayyed is an honorific term that has been inherited through his family line and that he would prefer if I drop that and call him Ali Moosa. Nizami is the family name, he explains and that the family have been the custodians of the dargah for centuries. He explains that his position is Sajjadah Nashin, which he translates as meaning "sitting priest" and which I later discover means "the one who sits on the carpet", welcoming guests and acting in all official capacities.

Margaret brings in a pot of spiced, sweet tea and milk and after a word with her, Ali Moosa asks us to please sit and enjoy ourselves, explaining that he must run an errand and will be right back. We learn later he has gone to the market to get some food to prepare for us. These sudden departures are very much a part of visiting with Ali Moosa and they are usually related to us in some way. He has gone to get some food, some books for us, some sweets for our children.

When he returns the conversation resumes where we left off. Everything is unhurried, there is no sense of rush about anything. He is never too busy. He always seems to want us to stay longer. We can rarely manage to depart without eating. Being in his house is extremely relaxing and comfortable.

During one of his departures Karen confides a dream she had the night before, which she had begun to tell me earlier, at the dargah. She claims she dreamed our arrival here the night before  and that when I sat down to play music at the tomb she had found a rupee on the carpet in front of her that brought the whole dream back to her mind. In the dream she said we had been walking through winding streets, just like in the bazaar and had come into a courtyard where there was a huge carpet spread and on which she found two rupee coins.

"It happened just like in the dream!" she exclaimed again and again. Later I would discover that we came on a Wednesday, the traditional day on which visitors would come to visit the saint during his lifetime and that he used to "tip" them a bit of money as a blessing of good fortune.

We have come for tea and nearly four hours have passed. The clock on the wall reads 6:30 p.m. and Margaret is bearing in a huge steaming platter of rice pilaf. We did not intend to stay for supper but both Ali Moosa and Margaret seem delighted we are still here. There is so much to talk about and it's also pleasant to sit and talk about nothing.

Karen and Margaret have an instant rapport and so when Ali Moosa and I are talking of religious matters, Karen and she are conducting a conversation all their own, equally animated. The children seem delighted to nibble, listen and play.

I am curious about the nature of the dargah, its historical beginnings and Inayat Khan's connection with it. Although we talk at great length, because everything is new to me, I do not process a lot of the information. Ali Moosa plays down any talk of Inayat's work in the West. I revere Inayat as a kind of demigod but he sees Inayat, apparently, in a much less important light.

The way he talks, Inayat is only one of many great saints and teachers who have passed through or been associated with the dargah. To me, Inayat was the bringer of Sufism to the West but in Ali Moosa's view this is a transmission that has always been going on from time immemorial.

Ali Moosa explains a little of the history of the 13th century sufi saint who is buried here, Khwaja Nizamuddin Aulia. Somehow the family line goes back to the prophet Mohammed in Arabia but I do not follow the connection because I know little of the history of Islam.

I will learn more later as I read and study some of the materials that Ali Moosa will give me. "I will send you some books about this" is one of his favorite lines. Years later, although he has sent none, many books on the subject have come my way. Perhaps there is more than one way of "sending" study materials in the Sufi way.

There is a firmness about Ali Moosa as he talks and walks. A kind of royalty or aristocracy in his bearing and demeanor. Yet hand in hand with this sense of certitude about things is a gentleness, a sweetness that keeps him from being overbearing. We are talking about God now. Ali Moosa seems to indicate that although I say I meditate and have done much self study that I still doubt the existence of God.

"You have to learn to talk to God" he suggests. "I will teach you how." I take it for granted that this is part of his duty but feel slightly annoyed that he would think I don't really believe in God. Why do I feel annoyed? Could it be because there's truth in his observation? How does one learn to talk to God, I ask and he tells me that his method is called murakabah, stopping the breath. For a brief instant he demonstrates but I can't tell whether his breath has stopped.

There's a little bit of fun in this exchange, sort of like telling fish stories. We don't go any further and I assume that he will get around to telling me more in his own time, although it is already late and I have no way of knowing if we'll ever come back to see him. I mention that it is strange being here and that I'm not even certain why, exactly we have come. "Do you think it's an accident you are here," he asks, his voice penetrating, "at Sufi headquarters?"

I don't know what to make of this statement, although I've been asking myself the same question. There's no doubt that I feel an affinity with the Sufis but after all I simply came to visit a grave. Or did I?

All the while we talk, Ali Moosa smokes. He is a heavy smoker and the coughing accompanying it tell me that his health suffers. I mention this and he says he knows it's not good but that it's a habit. He tells me that he gets up before dawn and jogs five miles each morning before going to the mosque. He feels this helps to counter any ill effects and to keep his lungs strong.

However, this does not prevent him from cautioning Karen, who has smoked on and off all her life, to quit. He says he will prescribe her a remedy to help her quit and writes down the Indian name of a seed that he suggests she chew when she craves a cigarette. The name is ellachi which we soon discover is cardamom seed. Karen has tried to quit smoking ever since we met and I have little hope of ever seeing the day she will stop.

Before we leave Ali Moosa reads Karen's horoscope in the Indian style. He asks her birth date and from this makes an elaborate series of rapid-fire calculations of the back of an envelope. He tells her many things that she feels are true about her life including past problems with parents. He foretells difficulties and strengths about our daughters and forecasts the birth of a son in 1987.

He says we will have two sons and two daughters. Karen is very impressed by his reading and I am waiting for my turn. Ali Moosa doesn't offer and by the end of the evening I manage to ask if he will do mine too. He reminds me that once I learn to "talk to God" that I won't have to ask any of these things, that everything will be between God and myself.

Now we are at the gate to the courtyard, saying good-bye. Ali Moosa offers to walk us to the edge of the bazaar where we can find a cab but before we leave he suggests we check out of our hotel and come and stay with him. Considering the tiny and rudimentary space of his dwelling I feel we would be much more comfortable in the hotel and so I decline.

He suggests that sometime before we leave India we spend as couple of days, at least, living with him. I don't say no but feel that we would not be comfortable, all of us, in that little space. Now I regret that we did not.

Ali Moosa is taller than I am or if not, he walks taller. There is a willowy spring to his step and he walks with dignity. I feel he must be a very respected member of this community. He shows us to the cab stand and at the moment of parting I give him a hug. My guitar, still in my hand is in the way of the traffic and while returning my hug he gently pulls me out of the stream of it.

On the homeward ride I am filled with conflicting emotions. I did not come to the dargah looking for a new teacher, only to pay respects to an old one. Could Ali Moosa be my new teacher, I wonder and dismiss this thought when I remember his smoker's cough. At the very least my teacher must have clean lungs!

Yet, I can't deny the magnetism of his presence. Especially the look in his eyes and forehead, that power and serenity that reminded me, even as we talked, of pictures I had seen of Inayat. Could they be related in some way or was this the power of brotherhood shining through the teaching they both shared in?

All he said, I remind myself, was that he was going to teach me how to talk to God. He never said anything about becoming my guru. Maybe he can really teach me something, I consider.

As I look back now I laugh at these musings of mine. Perhaps I could not believe my good fortune. At any rate my brain was working overtime trying to poke holes in a meeting that had already been truly remarkable.

The Dargah

We finally arrive at the end of the narrow lane our noses full of the scent of rose blossoms. Here, two men sit taking the shoes of those who wish to enter the precincts of the dargah. Only when I bend to take off my shoes and socks, do I realize that both men are legless and sitting on small wheeled platforms so they can move about. Their faces are radiant and they smile sweetly at our children, seating them on their laps and helping to remove their shoes. We tip them a few rupees and turning left, enter the narrow passageway toward the dargah.

To our surprise, beggars are sitting all along the lane, their palms outstretched silently beseeching alms. Some of them are noticeably crippled or deformed, some old, some with babies in arms, some begging for no apparent reason. Although their mouths remain closed, their eyes say all.

I am aware of the feeling of the dirty street below my feet and feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. There is something dreamlike about our movement now which is contributed to by our bare feet, as though we might be sleepwalking. Taking off my shoes in these streets is not something I would ever consider doing. I am worried about the children, about cutting ourselves or picking up some disease. We tread gingerly and finally the passageway opens into a marble walled courtyard, quite elegant in appearance. I take it in at a glance, the intricate stonework, the tiled pavement, the canopied structures.

We descend a few steps to enter the courtyard and a man approaches us. He is dressed in typically Indian style with a sleeveless vest over a gray kurta which reaches to his knees and wearing a thin cloth cap. He is smiling broadly beneath his graying mustache and welcoming us. He asks where we come from as he begins to conduct us on a tour of the grounds. I am struck by his natural and dignified bearing. I explain that we have come to visit the tomb of Inayat Khan. "The singer man." he replies, "Yes, I will have someone take you there after I have shown you around here." Something in the way he speaks triggers in me the feeling that Inayat's tomb is not the main center of attraction here.

He escorts us to a smaller domed structure away from the central, largest one, which he says is the tomb of Amir Khusrau but the name doesn't ring any bells with me, as I still don't know the history of this place. At the entrance is a small donation box and he asks that I put whatever I feel into it. I put in a five rupee note. He asks that Karen and the children wait outside and that I go in alone.

I am not sure what I am going inside for but the interior of the tomb is compelling. Everything is red on the inside and effect augmented by the mounds of roses and rose petals distributed inside, mainly over the coffin. I kneel down and begin to say a prayer, since I don't know what else to do. A minute or so passes and for no apparent reason I am suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of immense sadness. I begin to weep copiously. I can't understand what has come over me. After about five minutes the crying has stopped and I step out into the bright sunshine of the courtyard. I feel inexplicably refreshed and relieved. Karen looks at me strangely, asking what happened. I reply that I don't know.

Our guide leads us now to the main structure where a large carpet has been spread and where some people are sitting in prayer or mediation. There are maybe seventy or eighty people mingling in the central courtyard, coming and going at random and against a far wall a lone drummer is seated, playing and singing steadily.

Our guide, who has now told us his name is Sayyed Ali Moosa Nizami, suggests that I offer some of my music in front of the tomb. The whole family sits down comfortably and I unpack my guitar from its case. As I sit cross-legged to play, the drummer against the far wall stops playing. A crowd gathers to watch. Some with cameras begin to take pictures of me. Shannon plays with a garland of roses, poised peacefully nearby but from where I sit I can no longer see Karen and Nika. I am self-conscious as this is already clearly one of the strangest performances I have done.

As I start playing I become aware that I have neglected to take off my back-pack but decide against stopping to do so. I play a raga-like song called The Green Water which I composed in London years before. When I am finished, people politely applaud as though this is a formal concert. A young man steps down from the entrance to the tomb to tell me to please play some more.

I do another song called Inside, still feeling slightly uncomfortable and not yet fully drawn into the mood of the music. Again the polite applause and more camera clicking and then our guide reappears to ask me to come and see the inside of the tomb. The same ritual is followed with the collection box at the entrance and the family asked to remain outside. I go in to kneel at the graveside and this time there are about a dozen other men all kneeling, praying, offering flowers. For the first time it dawns on me that this is what the flowers are sold for in the bazaar.

When we were coming in, we'd purchased a few garlands which Karen playfully draped around our necks. She'd done that when we visited Hawaii several years earlier and so she repeated the ritual here. I am still wearing my garland around the neck and have forgotten about it entirely. A young man with an angry expression on his face approaches me. "Did you remove this from the tomb?" he asks. I tell him no, that my wife has given it to me in the bazaar and immediately he apologizes and backs away. However, I feel immediately embarrassed that I have not realized what the flowers are meant for.

After a short prayer I emerge to be greeted by Sayyed Ali as I have started to call him. This time I experience none of the emotion I had in the first tomb. He asks me to sit with him and several other men at a little table where he produces a huge account book. Pen in hand and with the other men looking on he asks me point blank, "How much would you like to contribute?" Now I am really taken by surprise. What is this, a huge tourist trap? They must note my look of surprise but he continues smilingly, "It doesn't matter how much. Whatever you like to give. Five hundred? A thousand?"

Caught by surprise I explain I can only afford fifty rupees. They are ready for that. Sayyed Ali writes in the amount in the appropriate ledger column and then asks "...and how much will you contribute for..." My glance falls on the pages of the ledger and I see that there are about 10 separate categories to which I am going to be asked to donate. They have me!

After that it is not difficult to separate me from several hundred rupees. In retrospect, I see that this was an old and exact science and also a necessary one in that the dargah only existed through its own efforts at survival and not through any government support. At the moment, however, I feel I have been royally fleeced.

My sense of unease is short-lived however because the moment Sayyed Ali puts the ledger down he becomes our guide again devoting all of his energy to our need. He summons an old man to whom he speaks in his native language and then tells us that the old man will take us to see the tomb of Inayat Khan. "Be sure to come directly back here," he says, "because I would like to invite you and your family to join my wife and I for tea."

With all of the activity here the possibility of finding him again seems remote but we agree and set off in the wake of the old man who leads us out of the dargah through another gateway and along more back streets. We follow him wordlessly although again I am plagued by the fact that we are still barefoot and now being led down streets that look even dirtier than the ones leading into the dargah.

Avoiding mud puddles, piles of human and animal waste, broken glass and who knows what else we walk for maybe a half mile more.  People look at us in amusement as we pass on near tiptoe in white bare feet, like the first bathers of summer out at the beach. All the way  I am reprimanding myself again and again for allowing the children to be placed at risk by this childish desire to visit the grave site of a holy man I've only read about.

In the midst of this unease we arrive at the gates of the dargah. The huge heart and wings on the wall, the symbol of the Sufi Movement and the Sufi Order in the West, would be the first indicator that we are at the right location. In the stone wall is a huge wooden gate. The old man knocks and waits. No answer. He knocks again several times and finally shrugs and walks away without looking at us.

Have we come so far only to be locked out? I overcome my inclination to leave and push the gate which swings wide open revealing an empty courtyard. We cross into it and climb a set of stairs leading upward to a door in the main building. A young woman with a French accent answers and points out that Inayat's tomb is on a nearby rooftop. "We have a library inside too" she says, "if you'd care to come and take a look?" I thank her but reply that I haven't come all the way to India to read more books.

Mounting another staircase, we find ourselves at the rooftop graveside of Inayat Khan. The place is serene and deserted with no one to say who can come in or out, male or female, adult or child. This is a relief after the ordeal at the main dargah. From the rooftop we look out over the roofs of the poor looking neighborhood. Inayat's sepulcher is surrounded by stone plaques with some of his writings. There are a few lonely, dried flowers on his grave.

We light incense, kneel to say a prayer and then join hands to circle his tomb. I feel that all of us are children of the same age. There is a feeling of joy and innocence about this, no overpowering feelings about having reached our goal. We take a few photos. Then we depart.

Another old man who we meet in the street guides us willingly all the way back to the dargah and as we walk in, just as before, Sayyed Ali is striding smilingly up to meet us.

3rd Day in India

Early morning, our third in India. We are in the waiting room of the bank manager of The State Bank of India. We have only come to cash some travelers cheques but when we ask for a couple of bundles of two rupee notes, we are referred into the manager’s office. As we wait in chairs, our children on our knees, we see the manager at his desk conferring busily with a group of men. Their voices are rising in agitation and they seem to be upset about something.

The manager’s face is stern, his tone strident as he apparently admonishes the men. Then, in a moment, he comes over to where we are sitting. His face is transfigured. Smiling radiantly almost sweetly he asks what he can do for us. The change in energy in the room is startling. We request the bundles of notes and he returns to his desk barking a command and one of the men departs.

The angry conversation continues for about 10 more minutes and then the man returns and hands the manager the money we requested. Immediately everything stops and the manger returns to us smiling so sweetly, so gently that I can’t believe it’s the same man.
         
I am familiar with the labyrinths of bureaucracy from my travels and know that running into a burned out official in some office can cause wasted time and headaches over the littlest thing. Seeing the angry situation we walked into I expect the worst but this is something new. In the instant of walking toward us the angry manager has transformed himself into a smiling holy man and as he hands us the crisp bundles of notes, it is as if he is bestowing a blessing upon us and as he waves good-bye, it feels like a benediction.
         
Our bundles of rupees in hand we prepare ourselves for the task of bargaining at the cab stand. Perhaps the bank manager is a saint but our first experience with Delhi cab drivers has warned us to gird our loins when we approach them and take nothing for granted. We have already inquired at our hotel for the taxi rate to the Nizamuddin bazaar and have been told not to pay more than 20 rupees including a tip. We have also been advised to settle the rate with the cab driver in advance so as to avoid arguments at the journey’s end.

Many of India’s taxis are curious little motorized three-wheelers called rickshas and as we approach the first driver and ask the rate to the Nizamuddin bazaar there is an immediate misunderstanding. Two or three cab drivers join in the conference. They can’t understand where we want to go even after we’ve pointed it out on a tourist map. Finally it becomes apparent that my pronunciation of NizaMOODin instead of NizamooDEEN with the accent on the last syllable has confused them and we are immediately quoted a rate of 40 rupees, double the suggested fare.

We counter at ten which quickly angers the cabby and he won’t speak to us further. So we approach another one and he quotes us 25 rupees. We settle on 20 and off we roar in a cloud of dust.
         
We are all in ecstasy. Our first cab ride in India and we are in this crazy surrey-with-a-fringe-on-top, wide open to the elements. After our long trudge through the streets the day before, this soaring through the city at high speed is exhilarating. Add to this the cabby’s natural daredevil approach to traffic congestion and it feels like we are on a circus ride.

We pass oxen and donkeys in the street, pulling heavy loads and we even pass elephants. Elephants! All of this mingled with cars and trucks zooming along at breakneck speed.  Soon my mind is reeling!

Before long we arrive at Hamayan’s Tomb, a tourist landmark on the outskirts of the bazaar. The cabby points the way across the busy street and we find ourselves entering the portals of the 1001 Nights.

Central New Delhi is still very Western in look and feel but this bazaar is old India. We are asking directions as we progress, “Where is Inayat Khan’s tomb?” The responses are conflicting to say the least and we soon find ourselves walking along a street filled with the scent of roses. Flower sellers line both sides of the narrow lane, selling all manner of fresh and dried roses of all shades of pink, red, yellow and white.

Also there are incenses, perfumes, essences, books, icons, rosaries and everything to do with the life of the bazaar which is basically the business growing up and around the site of the tomb of a great saint. We do not know yet that the saint is not Inayat Khan who is being venerated here but rather a 13th century holy man who was one of the founders of the Chishti Silsiliyah, or lineage, in India, to which Inayat belonged.

His name was Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia. His tomb and courtyard called a dargah, is the center of this bazaar. To it flock thousands of pilgrims annually, from all corners of the globe seeking the barakah or blessing of the departed saint which is said to pervade this holy site. Legend has it that anyone who visits this place with a request or desire will have it satisfied after coming here.
         
I am carrying my guitar with us because I have it in mind that we will find Inayat’s tomb and we’ll maybe say a prayer, light some incense and play a wee bit of music. My image of a grave site is that of a western style cemetery, peaceful and grassy with no one around. As we progress down the seemingly narrowing lane this image is slowly being squeezed from my consciousness. Buildings and people are crammed in here like sardines. There is no breathing space in this riot of color and sound. Now it is obvious that we are on the only path towards our goal.

I feel a slight nervousness growing in me. The only way I can explain it is to compare it with the sense of nervousness I felt when I first visited Paul Reps in his little trailer on Vancouver Island in the mid 70’s. In a deep sense that was the beginning of this journey.
         
About the same time I met “reps” as he was familiarly known, I had also come across the writings of Inayat Khan. I did not know at first that there was any connection between them. I can’t recall nor do I seem to have any record of my first encounter with Inayat but I believe that my reading of Idries Shah’s “The Sufis” led me to be curious about anything to do with Sufis and that I had already seen pictures of Inayat but did not make the connection with his books until I specifically chose to purchase second hand copies of the first two editions of this 12 volume series on Sufism. The connection between music and mysticism drew me as much as the sufi reference but I feel I was most strongly impacted by his picture which I’d seen several times before.

A great energy seemed to emanate from his picture in a tangible way that is difficult to define, almost as though the picture radiated energy. There was something very compelling that drew me to this being and I knew that I had to find and read his books. Of course, money was always a problem and purchasing new hard cover books was usually impossible but eventually they came my way.

My photographer friend Robert James in Duncan on Vancouver Island where I was living at the time who took a photo of Inayat from one of the books and made me a copy. I put it in a little gilded frame and kept it by my bedside where I meditated each morning and night. Inayat’s wise and deep ecstatic eyes seemed to observe me in my meditations and I in turn felt that I was not sitting alone but in the presence of a friend, no matter that he had passed away in the 1920’s.
         
I felt that I was a sufi at heart without really knowing what a sufi was although Idries Shah’s “The Sufis” had been given to me a couple of years earlier by my then partner and friend, Veronica.  What prompted her to give me this gift I will never know but it heralded a significant change in my life just prior to our eventual breakup.  I read this book with a mixture of avid curiosity, excitement and familiarity that I think has been echoed by many other readers around the world.  The spinner of these tales of mystery, Idries Shah  was at the same time a stern task master who cautioned readers against glib and false interpretations of the doctrine he was expounding.  The fantastic nature of the material however seemed to belie his admonitions. 

I drank from the pages of this little book for many a year and still do.  What kind of medicine I am extracting I am not sure but it has soothed and comforted my disturbed spirit on many a long and difficult day.

There are many of these days to negotiate between the time I first read of the Sufis, meet Paul Reps and finally find myself on the rose-scented lane of this Indian bazaar.  There is a surrealistic sense of moving in slow motion or even backward in  time as we make our way along the crowded lane, our attention captured at every turn by the unfamiliar sights and sounds surrounding us. 

Karen stops at a flower seller’s booth to buy several necklaces of roses which she places around my neck and the necks of the children.  We do not seem to stop and question why these roses are being sold but bathe ourselves in the fragrance and beauty of them and the rose scent that pervades the streets.  The presence of my family and the weight of my guitar case are the only things anchoring me to reality as we proceed.

More Culture Shock

It is not yet 9 a.m. but the cool morning air has already been supplanted by a gassy, dusty heat. The sweater I wore when we left the hotel is off and sweat has begun to streak my forehead. Our forward pace has slowed considerably by the time the ramparts of the Red Fort loom over the ramshackle color of the Chandi Chowk bazaar in the old city. The sights, sounds and smells of the crowded shops and streets have begun to fill my senses quite agreeably. In the space of a few short hours the paranoia we felt upon arriving in this country has somehow evaporated leaving in its place a quiet contentment and sense of wonder that we are actually in India. Imagine! As a young man I had dreamed of reaching this enchanted kingdom and here I walk in the company of my family.

The streets are already so crowded and there is so much activity that I am overwhelmed as we walk. This would be a fair or circus in North America but it's everyday life here. I am not processing much yet. I am drinking everything in as we walk. Even in Central America I never felt such a bustle of activity everywhere. There is a feeling of vastness about it all, of it being so big, so much, that it's impossible to comprehend.

We walk through the parking lot towards the Red Fort entrance. It's already jammed. A disheveled drunk is careening between the cars waving a liquor bottle. He's wearing a shabby sports coat which flaps loosely over his scarecrow frame. His whitish gray hair is wild, his aboriginal face, his bony black legs extending down to cracked, dirty bare feet. He seems to be cursing in Hindi, yelling  interspersed with singing. Though we are the only Westerners in sight he pays no apparent attention to us nor does anyone in the crowd seem to notice him. He is a streak of raucous activity in this sunny morning but might just as well be invisible to everyone but us.

We pay a small admission charge of a few rupees and enter the grounds. This fort was built by Shah Jehan but its rust red stonework seems light years away from the serenity of the Taj Mahal. Inside, even the earth is of the same brilliant red and where we walk red dust clings to our shoes. Tourists with cameras, mostly oriental or Indian, stroll leisurely across the grounds. This is our first actual experience of Mogul architecture and we find ourselves gazing in wonder through the intricately carved marble pillars of what the guidebook says was once the harem. I imagine the dry pools filled with water and people the courtyard with figures from the past. Our voices seem to echo slightly. Once again I wonder how we got here, what we are doing here.

Days before leaving I had picked up a travel book that was crammed full of information on how the traveler to India might best proceed and in this book it was mentioned that the tomb of the great sufi teacher Inayat Khan was in New Delhi. Since this was our first stop, I decided then that visiting the tomb would be a priority for us.

The writings of Inayat Khan had been an important part of my life since the early '70s when I became aware of his books and the connection between spirituality and music that he expounded in them so succinctly.

In my mind, since I felt the need to rationalize such things, this alone was sufficient reason to come, to pay respects to a revered teacher but I also knew that the decision to come had not come from me and the fact that we were now here opened my mind to a play of fantasy, the idea that perhaps we had come for a reason  that was yet to be revealed. However, I was no longer the naive young man who had traveled towards the East in search of the sacred wisdom of legend. I felt I had already journeyed far and perhaps even learned a few things along the way.

So my sense of wonder was tempered with a growing sense of my own maturity. Had I come to India to meet my guru? Not likely. There were however things in life like kismet, fate, not so cut and dried nor open to analysis but real, operative behind the apparent play of things. In other words my need for romance was undampened by age and as far as I was concerned, anything might be possible.

Standing within the precincts of this medieval fort strengthened my sense of mystery. I was no student of either history or architecture but something in me loved to absorb the  ambiance of this site, took it in like a food. Perhaps there is something to be said for study of the history of a country one intends to travel to, opening one to a greater depth of knowledge on the journey.  I, however, reacted more like a sleeper suddenly awakening into a strange and exotic dream.

Although I had done a fair amount of reading and studying in my life I knew little or nothing about India. My brain was a tabula rasa. What was written there was strongly influenced by the moment, by what I was feeling, what I thought I saw. If there was such a thing as destiny then this trip was surely an example of it. There was no doubt about it, there was something here for me. Something which had little or nothing to do with analysis or rational thinking.  I could feel it in my bones.

After a couple of hours of camera clicking and pondering vistas over the wall, we are ready to leave. We are momentarily distracted by a man on the grounds outside the wall, holding a monkey on a leash and yelling upwards for us to pay attention to the tricks they are preparing to perform. He prods the monkey viciously with a stick. My daughters exclaim how mean he is being.   He will get no baksheesh from us.

Outside in the parking lot, the drunken wild man continues his perambulations but somehow his intensity seems muted. We cross the busy intersection bisecting the tourist attraction from the chaotic bazaar and have not gone far before we are stopped by a street photographer. The four of us pose at curbside in front of a backdrop held up by an assistant. The photographer huddles under a black blanket behind the ancient wooden frame camera and there is a flash of gunpowder, like in those movies of the Old West. The film in its clip is extracted from the camera and developed in a galvanized bucket. Our sepia portrait, a lasting treasure, shows me as Clint Eastwood, Karen a princess from the Arabian Nights and our angelic children as themselves, too beautiful to be fully human.

By the time we return to the hotel we are exhausted from our long walk in the hot sun. My nostrils are dust-caked, a new and soon to be familiar part of daily life here. We have not yet fully recovered from our first encounter with local cab drivers and so our walking tour is a form of self-preservation but I resolve to keep to my resolution and take some kind of public transport to visit the tomb of Inayat Khan, tomorrow. For tonight it will be further rest and pampering in the form of a fine dinner somewhere near our hotel.

This evening after dinner I write down my intention to visit Inayat Khan's tomb in a little black journal I purchased from a bookseller in Connaught Circle with the word Saraswati embossed on the cover in gold lettering. The goddess of music and learning is a fitting symbol for the cover of my travel sketchbook. In it, I intend to keep a daily record of my thoughts, experiences and dreams in much the same way as I have done for the past fifteen or so years.

Before going to bed I perform a familiar meditation. Out of its new black traveling case I take my old Suzuki guitar, a companion of many other journeys. The touch and sound of its strings is soothing and healing to my spirit.

I came to India with my family this time, a very different mode of travel from one used to solitary journeying but also with one item from my days of past travel, this same guitar, which miraculously materialized in the mountain of unsorted luggage at the airport just about the time I had given up on it. At the very least, I felt that I would continue writing songs while in India and have some tasty material to bring back to the West and record when we returned. Little did I know that India would impact me so strongly that I would not be able to write any music at all until after we had left it behind.

Culture Shock

"A healing wind blows in India."
    - Banta Singh Sihota
           Victoria, B.C. 1985


 Early morning in a clearing mist and rising sun I am walking along a precarious crumbling curb carrying two year old Nika in my arms.  It is early January of 1986.  The air is cold but the dry dusty street shows little sign of the night's moisture.  Karen follows close behind me with four year old Shannon in tow.  We are leaving the hotel in Connaught Circle and walking into old Delhi towards the Red Fort, our first "tourist stop" in India.  I can't believe these streets.  The curbs are nearly a foot and a half high and breaking off in huge jagged chunks along the cement gully that passes for a sidewalk.

It is not fully light yet.  An ox cart creaks by pulled by two ancient white beasts of burden, the traffic weaving by around it.  At a bus stop ahead, a group of elderly sanyasins clothed in orange robes await the bus.  They seem to have stepped out of another century and appear specter-like in the dim morning light.

Although the dilapidated condition of the street is a surprise to me I am still basking in the glow of the hot bath and night in a safe hotel.  There is a security in the fact that we passed the first test of any new arrival to India, the initial culture shock.

Although I had traveled to Greece, Mexico and Central America and felt that I was a man of the world, the first 48 hours in India were a plunge into cold, sobering waters.  The main airport had the feel of a military prison and after waiting forever in the wee hours of night, being interrogated by customs officials in military khaki and pulling our baggage out of a veritable mountain of unsorted luggage, we were basically hijacked by two young cabbies who charged us ten times what we should have paid and took us to a hotel that was a nightmare of disrepair.  Karen was so afraid that the children would electrocute themselves on the bare wires protruding from the wall outlets or fall down the open elevator shafts that we left after only one hour despite the fact that they would not refund what we had already been made to pay in advance.

By this time the sun had come up and the cab driver dropped us off at the edge of Connaught Circle, the center of New Delhi.  We had not walked a block when we were accosted by money changers who approached us with all the sophistication of street muggers, scaring Karen badly and adding to our general sense of depression. By the time we had extricated ourselves from their clutches and passed three or four more beggars we were ready to pack it in.

We had been too scared to eat yet, for fear that we might eat the wrong thing and become ill but Karen was now weak from hunger and so we chose a restaurant at random, descended into its near empty interior and asked for menus. By this time we were on the verge of a nervous collapse and we began arguing about what was safe to eat and what was not.  A young Westerner dressed in Indian clothing who had entered the restaurant ahead of us, got up from his seat and approached our table.

"Excuse me" he said, "I couldn't help but overhear your conversation.  I went through exactly the same thing when I first came to India.  Perhaps I could help by suggesting something?"

After our recent encounters on the street, my alarm bells all went off, but we badly needed a friend.  He recommended an omelet to us, which we devoured hungrily and washed down with tea.  After breakfast he suggested that we might book a room in the hotel where he was staying where he felt we might be comfortable. 

He explained that he was an American student who had spent the past few months in India with several fellow students and their professor.  They were doing an in-the-field study of Indian dance and music.  We followed him to the hotel where he introduced us to the desk clerk and we checked into a room with a hot bath.  We only saw him once again.  The next morning he appeared at our door with a friend and gave us a travel guide, something like "India on Five Dollars US per Day," saying that since they were returning to the States they had no further use of it.  He was the first of many angels we met in India.

After a night in a good hotel, a solid meal and a hot bath, things would look vastly different.  The first thing Karen said to me when we checked into our room and I was beginning to talk about getting return airfare was, "Remember God".  After all, God had been uppermost in our minds when we made the decision to come to India.  Or should I say, when Karen made the decision?

When Karen announced that we were to leave our cozy little lakeside cottage at Shawnigan Lake and fly to India I was stunned. How did she imagine that we could withstand the rigors of foreign travel with two young daughters?

India was a distant dream to me, a place I'd once tried to reach, long ago and far away, guitar in hand and knapsack on back, in the magical 60's.  But these were the days of terrorist bombings, closed borders, soaring costs of living and practical thinking.

Not that my thinking had ever been very practical.  I was about to turn 40 and still dreaming of supporting my family through music.  But Karen's decision really pulled the rug out and I suddenly felt like Rip Van Winkle.  Where had I been all these years?  What had I been imagining?  This was certainly Karen's way of getting revenge.  You want to play music?  Okay!  I want to go to India.  Are you coming or not?

Although on the surface I was having a prolonged anxiety blitz, underneath, a wiser, quieter part of myself knew something had to give.  We'd been living on the edge too long with our bank balance going down and no real possibility of immediate income. Karen is restless by nature anyway and her spending one year in this blissful lakeside setting while I volunteered my music at rest homes and hospitals was an act of tremendous discipline and reserve. 

We'd sold our house to come to live on Vancouver Island and when a friend's investment proposition did not materialize, we were suddenly aware that at the rate our money was disappearing we would soon not be able to do anything extravagant even if we decided to risk it.  This new idea of jumping on an airplane was truly diving in at the deep end and I have never been a confident swimmer.  However, the more I thought about it, the more attractive the idea became.  This still did not prevent me from getting sick only a week before our departure.

There were other factors, however, adding to my state of tension.  A friend of many years had only recently suffered a mental collapse and this event had caused much chaos and confusion in our home since we were his closest friends and what at first was aberrant behavior soon became a psychic chasm gaping wide and seemingly ready to swallow all of us.  I was so intimidated by what was happening that I just wanted to lock my door and hide.  But we had some good guidance in the form of an elderly Sikh gentleman who'd been a friend of the family since we'd moved to the island. In the midst of this crisis at a point of what we felt to be real physical danger, we went to the home of the man who'd introduced us to him and who was also Sikh.  He called the older man who was then living in Victoria and over the phone, translated our dilemma.  The elderly man's advice: we must help our friend no matter what the danger.  And so we did.

This man had counseled us on several other occasions and had helped me before I was married.  He was known in the community for his gift of foresight and his ability to counsel and guide.  After the above mentioned incident had passed the crisis point, we consulted him as to the wisdom of taking our children on a long voyage to India.  He assured us that this was a good thing for the family, he gave us some instruction and blessed our journey. 

That settled my conscience, but as I said, still did not prevent me from falling sick just before moving so that the weight of the last minute details fell on Karen's shoulders.  If someone had told me twenty years earlier that I would have to be coddled into going to India, I would've laughed.

Most of our friends were shocked at our irresponsibility in taking our children with us.  Many said things like: "You're not taking the children....are you?"  But our experience was that the children were the most natural travelers of us all, the most adaptable, the most courageous, the most uncomplaining and the most willing to open unfamiliar doors.  In a deep sense they were our guides and through them we were introduced to a side of India that perhaps not many childless voyagers will ever see.

Most Indian people responded to our children as though they were related to them and so we were all immediately closely related.  And the journey itself, far from being the physical and emotional struggle I anticipated in view of my past, was a healing release from a culture where our spirits had felt such restraint all our lives. India is a land of Living Spirit. 

Not that Spirit is less alive elsewhere, only that in India there is more consciousness it seems, of it's living presence by more people.  For us, India was to be a doorway into the deeper country of our Spirit, a reminder that in trusting in God one is not sticking one's head in the sand but rather accessing an ancient wisdom alive and active in the Universe. 

Here, in a way that had never happened to us in North America, the power of the Spirit would be demonstrated to us.  In a strange way it is not Spirit alone that directs and guides, but one's individual openness and consciousness of its presence that acts as an activating power in our lives.

The Girl With Stars In Her Eyes

I was hired by the brokerage firm Adanac Customs Brokers to run documents to the trucking terminals, the airport, the docks and to various businesses around town in a little VW Rabbit.

A part of the day which I spent in the office was devoted to menial office tasks such as filing, opening mail and a little basic paperwork which, although I worked at Adanac for 5 years, I can’t exactly remember the nature of.

This memory lapse on my part reminds me that the job served basically to provide me with an income and to take my mind off the concerns of my musical life which had confounded me for so long.  To this day I dream of being back at Adanac up to my ears in my assigned tasks, somehow preserved from my struggle as an artist and its demands. Adanac is Canada spelled backwards and it seemed to me, as it still does in my dreams, that I had returned to my native land, the land of my school days where progress was a straight line ahead, passing grades, following orders and ultimately, getting a good paying job.

Years ago, when I had started out to follow the path of my musical dreams and left the solid world of work and career that school had been preparing me for,  I left Canada too, metaphorically speaking and entered a much larger country, not surrounded by national boundaries, the country of the artist.  But in those days, I could not have defined it that way. 

In fact,  I may still have been headed for that pie-in-the-sky of respectability in my chosen career.  Not that it isn’t possible for some, as evidenced by Neil Young’s and other musicians’ acceptance into the Order of Canada.  But for the many struggling artists, there will be no such time of acceptance and praise.  To the many, the simple success of continuing to follow their own visions despite the pressure of society to conform is the only reward they ever get.

There is no doubt that finally receiving a paycheck on a regular basis gave me a confidence boost.  That is, I once again became a respectable Canadian citizen who paid taxes like everyone else.  It eased my mind from the constantly nagging worry about where the next rent cheque was going to come from.  But on a deeper level, my inner crisis as an artist was only postponed.

I continued to keep a journal, write songs and think of myself as an artist but I did not try to perform.  My heart wasn’t in it. Instead I marked time, did my duty, meditated all the while and prayed for some kind of divine intervention that would show me my path.

After a while I was evicted from my little artist’s pad on Trafalgar, as the house was being sold and the new owner wanted to occupy my suite.  Through one of the girls in the Adanac office,  I found a much more “upwardly mobile” apartment on the 16th floor of a tower at 1111 Beach Avenue in the West End of downtown Vancouver.

My friend Bruno helped me move.  I was given a bunch of free furniture and dishes by the caretaker, who had been stuck with the task of removing them from the apartment of someone who left without taking them.  Suddenly, I found myself paying double the rent and living the hectic life of an urban worker, hiking every morning across the Burrard Street bridge to my job and wondering how much more this would change my life.

The answer to this is that my life had already changed but I didn’t realize it yet.

Sue was still in and out of my life.  She would show up, unannounced, once every few months and my hopes of a relationship would briefly resurface only to be dashed by her departure.  But shortly before moving to my new apartment, in the summer of ‘79,  I had gone to the Ridge Theater to see “The Buddy Holly Story” for the second time and stopped for a bite at the Mediterranean Cafe next door.

A young woman serving me expressed an interest in the I Ching hexagrams scattered across the pages of my journal, which was open on the table.  We talked and exchanged addresses and a few weeks later met for breakfast.

One of the things she told me was that she was having difficulty holding her job as a waitress because while she was working,  sometimes all she could see around her were stars and when that happened she couldn’t think or concentrate.  Indeed, looking into her deep, brown, wide eyes I could well imagine that what she saw out of them was far different from what others saw.

We met several times after this at my place on Trafalgar and then I didn’t see her for awhile until just before I moved.  Since I didn’t give anyone at the house my forwarding address, had she not shown up at that moment, we might never have met again.  But she did reappear a day before my move and in the New Year she came to live with me.

Even then, I thought I was simply helping her with a temporary place to stay.  But in June of that year we married.

Karen tells me that even as a young girl she knew she would marry a singer.  But I wasn’t much of a singer in those days although I played regularly at home and my dream of success as a musician remained undiminished.

I was soon offered a chance to better my lot by taking the Customs Brokers training course and so I signed on for it.  This would mean that I could eventually move into the office as a career broker.  But I had only studied the course material for a week or so when that part of my mind that is needed to concentrate on work that doesn’t particularly interest me, began to close up.

I knew then that no matter how hard I tried I would never be able to persist or succeed in this course. It was exactly the same kind of labor I’d fled from years ago when I hit the road with a rock and roll band.

However, there was a bright hope on Karen’s horizon, for an uncle had left her a modestly large inheritance which she was now in court contesting against his son, who claimed the inheritance to be rightfully his.  By the time our daughter Shannon (who we now call by her second given name, Chaya) was born in the spring of ‘81,  Karen had won a large amount of the settlement, enough to buy us a house outright. From this new base, in the Marpole district of South Vancouver, we tried to conduct our lives as usual.

Something was changing, though.  We were not completely happy just existing in this way.  I was taking the bus to work every day but we both felt a growing unrest, a kind of aimlessness in living our lives in this way.

Karen became pregnant again and in the early spring of ‘83 we took a trip to Seattle, for the Northwest Folklife Festival.  I had reconnected with my friend Chris Lunn from my Palo Alto days via my old friend Jim Luft (now Jim Page) who we’d run into at the ‘82 Vancouver Folk Music Festival and he’d invited me to come down and perform at the Victory Music Review’s open stage there.

While there, we also looked up Paul Reps who owned a house in Seattle and found him staying at the University Towers hotel.  Karen was very impressed by Reps (who wouldn’t be) and we wound up organizing a series of “play shops” (as opposed to workshops…a bit of Reps wordplay) for him at UBC in the fall of that year.

That summer I also started to play in public again, doing my first solo concert in years at the locally prestigious Soft Rock Cafe.  I was hired by Patti Fiedler who used to run the Mousehole in Yorkville where I had studied other singers in the late ’60’s while learning to play guitar. She and her husband Bernie also owned the famous Riverboat coffee house in Toronto. Attendance wise, my Soft Rock gig was a disaster, but it opened up the door to my musical career again.

Karen funded a cassette tape which was recorded in a small studio in West Vancouver, with the help of Marty Hasselbach a recording engineer we’d met at St. Paul’s Hospital during Karen’s pregnancy.  And so I produced “Border Crossings,” my first album of original songs.

Thanks to Herb Gilbert a professor of Fine Arts at UBC and long time Reps admirer, who was to become a close friend over the years, we found a space at UBC for Reps and during the time of his playshops in September of that year, our second daughter Nika was born.

I also contracted my second bout of pneumonia. This time it was in both lungs and I chose a natural fast rather than a medical cure. My employers advised me that I would probably kill myself doing this and since they couldn’t afford to risk waiting, they fired me.

This was an eleven-day fast, the longest by far I had ever tried, although I had tried a few short fasts over the years.  A natural hygienist by the name of Helen Ritchie helped me through it and I needed her help too, when mid-way through the fast my whole body broke out into hives.  It turned out this was a natural occurrence when the body is so full of long suppressed toxins. By the time the fast was ended I looked like a skeleton but the pneumonia had broken.

For the first time in 5 years I found myself with my own time on my hands and so I ran an ad and began teaching guitar lessons in the front room of the house, which Karen had converted into a study.

In the meantime Marty delivered my completed album to our front door and I began the learning process of trying to market it myself.  Actually, “market” is a pretty sophisticated word.  What I tried to do, on no budget at all, was simply to knock on doors and interest people in it.

I did mail quite a few copies away to recognized musicians and people in the business.  However, without the formality of first sending query letters and mailing tapes to addresses that may or may not have been current, I received virtually no feedback.  The major record companies’ business offices in town took copies of my tape and forwarded them and I received my first complete set of rejection letters, none of which had much of anything good to say about my record, except for one executive somewhere in the eastern U.S. who praised “Master Five Willows” and suggested I “write more like that one“!

Chris Cairo of Co-op Radio played my tape and even got a bit of good listener feedback but the feeling was one of throwing a pebble far out into the ocean and barely being able to hear the splash!  Karen was as disappointed as I was if not more so because I think that we both felt that my album would go further and make a big difference for us.

My unemployment insurance was paying the bills but the house began showing signs of wear and tear, most noticeably a major leak in the kitchen roof.  All of our money was tied up in the house and we made a decision, one Karen says she still regrets at times, to sell the house and move to Vancouver Island.

Jeevan, my friend and erstwhile employer with Karmsar from Vancouver Island, who helped us move, offered to reinvest the money for us and for a while Karen was tempted by his offer but this would once again mean losing control of the money.

We found a little one bedroom cottage in a trailer park, overlooking Shawnigan Lake and there we spent the next year.  I began doing benefit concerts in hospitals and rest homes in Victoria and the occasional restaurant gig.  I also connected with the Cowichan Folk Guild, still in it’s primary stages and played the very first Islands Folk Festival at Providence farm.

My studio was a tiny loft above the house accessible by climbing a step ladder through a trap door in the ceiling and there I wrote songs, strategized my future and looked out over the beautiful ambiance of the lake.

The summer was a chaos of tourists and vacationers but the winter was solitary and healing for us.  A local island musician named Gordon Curtis, a clarinet player, showed up one day to introduce himself and I did a few gigs with him playing a mixture of folk, blues and ragtime. We became collaborators and good friends.

Early that winter my friend Kent had a breakdown of his mental and physical health that resulted in his being committed to the local psychiatric ward.  This event scared Karen and me badly and we felt we had to re-evaluate what we were doing with our lives.

Karen had never traveled and desperately wanted to do so and we decided against the advice of all our friends, to put our stuff in storage and to travel to India.  This, we felt, would give us some badly needed perspective in our lives.

I was against the trip at first and my response to all the packing and arrangement was to get sick.  The children were only two and four years old and I suppose I was worried and affected too by all the negative feedback from friends.

But Karen persevered and one snowy morning in early January of ‘86 we flew east out of the Victoria airport, India-bound.

Zen, Music and Madness

In between excursions around Laguna Beach with the James family,  I meditated in my room under a print of Van Gogh's sunflowers.  I was also faithfully keeping my journal.  I had an experience just before I left of waking up within a nightmare, still dreaming, but conscious enough to begin to chant a mantra.  This banished the nightmare completely and woke me up.  It was an auspicious start to my journey, I felt, for it seemed to signal a new plateau in consciousness, a growing awareness in me of the power of meditation in my life.

I found my cheap charter flight to Hawaii and soon found myself walking through the exotic, somehow dreamlike landscape outside the Maui airport, guitar in hand as always.  It was the one possession I could not leave behind me. 

I had a strange encounter with a huge, pock-marked Hawaiian man who picked me up hitching and began checking my arm for "track marks".  It scared me and I got him to drop me off at a hostel where I took a room for the night, changing my initial plan to sleep on the beach. 

In the morning I set out for the community of Haiku where the zendo was, found the path leading up to it through a jungle-like grove of trees and shrubbery and arrived, asking to speak to Robert Aitken, the roshi.  He was there, in shirt sleeves working in the garden with the students, a gaunt, gray-haired, fatherly, academic-looking man who, when he heard that reps had sent me, asked me a few pointed questions about reps and then directed one of the other students to find me sleeping quarters.

I was put on a foam mattress under a picture of Suzuki Roshi in the office, because the main dormitory was full of students.  I realized soon enough that this was not a strictly religious center full of monks, but also a kind of Zen school for paying students who came for a couple of months to work and meditate and that my acceptance here on the spur of the moment was a minor miracle, probably due to my association with Reps. 

I had already read "Zen Mind, Beginners Mind" and so sleeping under a photo of Suzuki Roshi seemed to be a kind of benediction.  I had also, on the way here, been strenuously studying Philip Kapleau's "Three Pillars of Zen" to get a feel for the discipline of zazen or sitting meditation.  It had already become clear to me by reading this latter book that there was nothing "imaginary" about doing zazen, but the reality of being suddenly immersed in this community was a physical shock, for I was immediately put to work in the kitchen and during my first hour there sliced off a sliver of my finger, grating beets into a huge salad.

The regimen was tough.  Work, meditation, more work and more meditation, but mostly work.  Turning the compost heap, weeding the garden, picking and preparing vegetables, cooking and a labor-camp, blistering discipline of cutting down trees and building a road using no power equipment.  The sitting meditation was very rewarding as I was prepared by my long residence in the cabin and solid meditation practice leading up to this. 

There were others sitting next to me in physical pain and some who had to meditate on chairs, but I was able to sit reasonably comfortably in "half lotus" position.  My sitting posture was corrected by a senior student and I had some difficulty in learning to breath more quietly but all in all I found the meditation extremely relaxing and rewarding, especially after long periods of hard physical labor. 

Since everyone at the zendo paid their way,  the subject of how I would pay came up and it seemed that there was an opportunity for me to do some accounting and bookkeeping for the zendo.  However there was some confusion around my not having a U.S. "green card" in terms of earning wages and during this time I made a decision to leave. 

I had been there only a short while  and I used most of my spare periods to play my guitar.  It seemed that the problem of money was going to become an issue and I did not want to be forced to leave because of it.  At the same time, some old confusion within me was becoming clarified, the romantic issue about the life of a monk.  I had now had a sharp taste of life in a zendo and it seemed to me that the life of an itinerant musician was infinitely more important and more to the point to me, than trying to turn myself into a full-time monk. 

Many of the students gathered around to join me in music making during our breaks and many complimented me on my skill as a guitarist, reaffirming for me that my musical discipline was a very valuable part of my life.  Perhaps I had not valued it enough?  After all, was it not in its own way as spiritual an art as sitting meditation?  Could I not also continue to grow spiritually as an artist, through the medium of the music?

 These were some of the thoughts that percolated through me at this time and gave me the strength to make a decision before one was made for me.  So, when Robert Aitken heard I was departing he gave me "dokusan," a personal interview, during which he said "Remember, you can surf to the left and you can surf to the right, 180 degrees, but you can't go backward!"  I departed from the zendo with the good wishes of all my new friends there, feeling very supported and confident of my direction.

But as I left along the road, my thumb extended for a lift, I realized my problems were far from over, for although I had a ticket to Honolulu, I was all out of cash.  I was also remembering Reps' injunction to find a community to work in and felt that perhaps I had failed in this.  Now I would not get to see him in Hawaii after all. 

As I was pondering this I became aware that someone was coming up behind me on the road.  I turned to see a youngish, long-haired man walking a German Shepherd on a leash.  The dog was straining and growling with bared teeth and the man seemed to be imitating the dog, except he was raving into the empty air around him like a lunatic.  I have had more than my share it seems,  of encountering maniacs along the road and this one seemed to be gaining on me.  If I was having any second thoughts then about choosing to sleep on the beach until something developed, they vanished at that moment and I saw that I really wanted to get off Maui. 

I guess this represented a much larger fear of the unknown in my life that I had not come to grips with, something that had been driving me down the road already for many years, something I was running from which scared me badly but which I couldn't put my finger on.  Why I should have to witness this even in the paradise of Hawaii seemed to me very unfair but after all,  wasn't this a facet of life that had to be faced wherever one went?  Hadn't I come up on forms of this madness during my drug experiments, in my own dreams, in my relationship with my father and in many past encounters on the streets of other cities at other times of my life? 

Yet, once again I felt scared and even betrayed by my purpose in coming here, to find myself and maybe to meet my teacher again.  This one ranting, apparently crazy person coming up behind me on the road brought up this "stuff" in me that couldn't be denied but which life itself was forcing me to look at.  I crossed the road and went into the courtyard of a restaurant and fruit stand just to get out of this person's way.  I had just sat down when to my horror, into the courtyard he walked, still yelling obscenities into the air and holding back his growling dog and he began to swear at the person behind the counter who basically ignored him, as though maybe he was a familiar character in these parts.  He ordered something to drink and came towards where I was sitting but I didn't wait around to see what might happen.  I just got out of there. 

All the way to the airport I kept looking over my shoulder to see if he might resurface but he did not.  It was with a great sense of relief that I took my seat on the short flight to Honolulu, for I felt that whatever difficulty I might have to face there without money, paled in comparison to what I felt I had just escaped from. 

Once in the Honolulu airport, however, my fear returned because I had no way of getting out of there, except into the streets of the city without a dime.  I walked briefly a few blocks from the airport just to get a feel of things and they did not feel good.  Bars, hotels, strip joints, endless traffic and business as usual did not seem a good location for a homeless minstrel to go strolling in, not in the state I was in.  I wandered back into the airport and got into a short conversation with a ticket clerk who divined that I was stranded and told me I could always sleep in the airport.  He asked if I had anyone I could call and I immediately thought of my friend Kent Steele, who might wire me the money.  But I did not have his phone number so I decided to call Veronica instead.

Another miracle!  Kent was visiting with her.  He got on the phone and said it was almost 5 p.m. there but that he'd go straight into town and try to get the money to me.  The weekend was coming up and I was certain that I'd be spending the next few nights in the airport.  But about 10 p.m. I decided to check at the ticket counter and lo and behold, hallelujah, my ticket awaited.  I left an hour or so later, Victoria bound and ever grateful for the presence of friends.

The flight back to Vancouver was like a warm bath to my emotions.  If going to the Andes mountains was the "wrong" direction, this was surely the right one.  Never in my life has going anywhere felt so right. Perhaps it was simply the security of moving back toward the familiar, the known after such a long period of uncertainty and perhaps it was the feeling too that there were friends who cared enough about me to bail me out in an emergency, that I was not alone in the world.  It didn't even matter where I was going to stay when I got back, just that I was going back.

I knew my brother Ken was living in a rooming house in Victoria, so when I got to the Victoria airport I called him and he invited me to come and stay.  It was late fall and with winter coming on I was very grateful for the old mattress on the concrete floor in the furnace room, where the hum of the furnace was like the soothing beat of the womb to my ears.  I had complete privacy and could spread out my sleeping bag and meditate into the wee hours. 

During the day I had the run of the suite, which Ken shared with another friend but it was not too long before I ran afoul of his boundaries.  I was not motivated to do much except sit still, play my guitar and meditate.  Ken was urging me to do something, get a job, anything but this was the last thing I felt like doing.  I felt I needed quiet and the space to just play my guitar.  Soon my guitar playing began to get on Ken's nerves.

My mother and youngest brother Eric arrived from Winnipeg for a short visit.  I hadn't seen them for years and so the ice was broken momentarily.  But when they left,  it became obvious something had to give.

One day I was practicing and Ken blew up, forbidding me to play any more in the apartment.  I wasn't angry but that was a warning bell to me.  It had started to snow, but I packed my bags and left.  Mumbling something like "once more into the breach, dear friends", my face set against the elements,  I set off for Shawnigan Lake and the protection of my friend Kent Steele who was teaching school there and had a little cabin in the village where he was living alone after the breakup of his marriage. 

I stayed with Kent a few days and resolved to head for Vancouver since I was newly decided on living the life of a musician.  Kent drove me to the Nanaimo ferry terminal.  There was some classical music playing on CBC, something very strong and soothing and as we drove I once again had that feeling of complete rightness and security about my direction, though I had no destination or money to speak of.  Kent was another friend who continued to support me through all my difficulties, giving me confidence and never making me feel that I was making a mistake in my life.  Rather he used to admire my music and assure me that one day, with a little luck, I was sure to "make it in music".

I arrived in downtown Vancouver and called my friend Bruno Castellan from a payphone at the Hotel Vancouver.  Bruno was an architect who came from Brittany and who I'd met years ago in just these circumstances, no place to go, stranded in the CN terminal in town. A stranger had handed me a newspaper asking if I wanted to look at it.   I'd turned to the housing ads and called a number advertising for someone to share a communal house. Though I had no money, the man who took my call accepted me on faith.  That was Bruno. 

Now he was married and living with his wife Brigitte and two children in Kitsilano and once again he invited me to come and stay.  I was given a sleeping bag on the living room couch and tried to make myself as unobtrusive as possible, helping with housework and whatever else I could do.  But it was close quarters for them.

Fortunately, I found a job working with Greenpeace on a project preparing a slide show on whales that was intended to be shown in the schools.  This gave me enough of a boost to take a room in a crumbling old building down on 2nd Avenue near Arbutus. Bruno lent me a little blue bench he'd made and which was my only piece of furniture in that completely empty room, except for a mattress which I'd salvaged from the storage out back.

I worked and lived here for the next few months but the job was unsatisfying to me as I felt nothing was really being accomplished and that I was out of my element.  There were also constant distractions in the building itself, drunken parties that went on until all hours with the sound from them coming straight through the heating registers.  I couldn't cook at all and the whole feeling of the place was transient.  However, fate was on my side. 

The Castellans had planned a trip to France and needed someone to look after their house for a month or so and I was elected.   It worked out in the best of all possible ways for all concerned.  Even for Kent, who'd decided quit teaching school and make the jump to Vancouver, because he was able to stay with me while he found a place.  The job with Greenpeace came to an end but I had put in enough time to collect unemployment insurance which started to arrive regularly.  Then, only two or three days before the Castellans returned I found my little room on Trafalgar, just half a block away.

This was like an urban echo of my cabin at the foot of the mountain.  Finally, a place of my own where I might write and meditate in peace and play music to my heart's content.  It was a small second story room looking out over the street with a tiny balcony and old fashioned radiant steam heating.  The bathroom was shared with two other suites, both occupied by single men like myself, one an aspiring actor/musician named Gary Chalk and the other a Nicheren Buddhist named Phil whose meditation bell and chanting gave the floor a very familiar feel.

The place was simply furnished with a kitchenette that was basically just a cubbyhole with room for one person to sit and eat, or in my case, write.  I put a few samples of Japanese calligraphy on the wall and with my books and possessions that Kent had kept for me and returned, I had the makings of a workable bachelor pad.

My insurance cheques continued over the winter and then the ubiquitous notice forms arrived in the mail, stating that my claim was finished and so I went through the dance with the welfare office once again.

It was a powerful healing time for me.  I did a lot of writing and playing in my solitary way.  I was reading "The History of the Kings of Britain", other "Arthurian" material, the writings of Arthur Machen and exploring the magic of myth and the myth of the magic of writing.  Every poem or song I wrote seemed to me to be a real exercise in magic and outside the misty winter ambiance seemed to support and reaffirm my ongoing daydream.   I seemed to be wrapped in a cloak of mystery and magic.  But as spring came and the pressures from the welfare office for me to work grew,  I had to make a decision.

I remember sitting in a coffee shop on Broadway across from the Manpower office.  I was reading a book of poetry and trying to decide whether to follow the dictates of a dream I'd had or not.  A few days before this I had a dream that I was dressed in a cap and bells like a medieval fool and had dispersed all my possessions once again and hit the road, eastward this time. 

It was now spring and it was a good time to travel, so I'd taken the few journals that I'd kept over the last months down to the beach and burned them.  These included all the records since my trip to Hawaii.  My idea was to completely erase the past.  Thank God I didn't have all my journals at the time.  Having taken this step, I began to have second thoughts and now was seriously considering my future.  Did I want to become that wandering fool again?  Yet, getting a job now seemed to be a further admission of failure in my quest to live the life of an artist.  But I had been cut off by welfare before and they were threatening to do it again and I was tired of living on the edge.  I wrestled with my conscience and made up my mind that I needed some security in my life.  So I bit the bullet.  My mind made up, I went to the Manpower office and there found a sympathetic ear in a worker there who immediately sent me out on an interview for a job that the employer had not wanted advertised generally.  This job was to become my occupation for the next five years of my life, the longest job I'd ever held.  I was hired on as a courier for a customs broker, a job that provided me with a good salary, benefits, a car during the day and the chance to redeem myself from the pathway of errors that had led me to failure to make a living as a musician.