Foot of the Mountain

Back in the Cowichan Valley, my friend Robert James introduced me to Jeevan Singh Mangat, an elementary school teacher and gentle friend who hired me to work on a government funded (LIP or Local Initiatives Project grant) project called KARMSAR (Jeevan translated this as Pool of Positive Activity), an attempt to form a bridge between the East Indian, mainly Sikh community and the local community which was largely ignorant or even superstitious of the Punjabi cultural traditions.

Jeevan was also a writer of poetry, a lover of beauty and a living example of the kind of personality that is cultivated in the mystical traditions (in the world, but not of the world - in Jeevan's words). He was a loving family man, friend to many, humble and unassuming and at the same time sweetness and strength personified. Jeevan was the first person to introduce me to the name Baba Farid. He loaned me a booked by Sikh author Gurbachan Singh Talib titled Baba Sheikh Farid. I guess I had been discussing the writings of Inayat Khan with him and Sufi philosophy. He told me that Baba Farid embodied the Muslim, Sikh and Hindu traditions and that his bani or writings was included in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. He also told me he was a famous Sufi...I had no idea at the time how famous!

I moved into a small apartment in Duncan which was the headquarters of the project and plunged into cooking classes, film nights and readings in Sikh philosophy as well as the paperwork needed to report the project's progress to government. I continued writing, meditating and solitary walks by the Cowichan river.

After the project began to wind down, Jeevan kept me on for a month or two to sort out his personal paperwork, letting me stay in the apartment and paying me a modest fee. But I wasn't happy now and I felt that my time there was over. I just did not know where to go. One fine morning I got the urge to go and climb Maple Mountain, out at Maple Bay, just to shift my perspectives.

Hitching out there,  I picked up a ride with an acquaintance from Bird's Eye Cove, Dan Kenney who was living on a boat out there with his partner, Tina Rose.  Dan told me of a small cabin vacant on the Genoa Bay road and I went out to see it.  The cabin had been vacant for some time since it's use as the residence and workshop of its previous inhabitant, who'd left it full of oily pieces of boat engines, molding furniture, assorted junk and a fridge full of maggots.  I must have been able to see the possibilities despite its appearance because I negotiated with the owner of the nearby farm to rent it and after an initial rejection was given it at the sum of $30. per month.

I can't believe that I was motivated enough to clean it, because it took me a bucket of Pinesol and nearly a week of scrubbing to do so. The place had electricity but no water, so I had to transport the water from a spring a couple of miles down the road.  I bought a small airtight heater and some stovepipe and installed that to provide winter heat.  Some straw matting from Chinatown in Victoria, an electric hot plate for cooking, a few second hand pots, pans and dishes, some incense...and I was home.  As the farm caretaker had told me originally, when I first inquired, "You can live like a hermit up there!" and I did, sort of.

Inayat Khan's photograph hung by my sleeping platform where I meditated daily.  I was reading his books and practicing my own music assiduously,  trying to find a common ground between the music of the singer-songwriter and the music of the mystic, as I imagined it to be.   My friend and teacher reps once wrote, "One picture worth a thousand words, one presence worth a thousand pictures." It was Inayat Khan's picture that led me to the study of his words and it was reps' presence who led me to the reality behind them.  But it was not an understanding that I gained. Rather it was a welcoming.

Inayat Khan was a musician-mystic and only such a soul at such a time in my life could have helped me understand the course I was on and give me the strength to walk further.  His picture on the wall beside my sleeping platform gazed upon my meditations and dreams with eyes that seemed to look out of the life of celluloid into an ever present reality where we both met.

I drank the words from his writings as a thirsty man drinks water. I couldn't believe the simplicity and depth combined in them that spoke directly to me and my needs. It was a time when it was difficult for me to perform my music anywhere in public because the music I was creating seemed so far removed from anything people enjoyed in the bars and cafes where a musician might make a living. I had not yet developed the insight that the words and the melodies that were coming out of me had any relationship to anyone else other than myself or any real meaning. It was as though I was flying blind, operating on pure instinct. I meditated, I wrote my songs, I created the melodies on guitar and I fused them together, recording the results on an old Sony portable tape deck that played back the songs in an ever-decreasing volume but still preserved a wavering echo of those days.

I was listening to Tony Scott's "Music for Zen Meditation", the hymns and chants of Yogananda and bursting with frustration trying to get a note on the shakuhachi, a bamboo flute given to me by another friend.  I transferred the discipline of putting the breath into each note to guitar, where I spent long hours focusing on breathing to single notes.

It seemed to me there was great energy in simplicity and I attempted to translate this into song.  But the songs of their very nature came in their own way and time and were still relatively complex although the language of meditation and my readings into Buddhism and Sufism found their way into the lyrics.  All of these attempts were faithfully recorded onto my little, failing Sony portable cassette deck.

I was also reading Chogyam Trungpa's "The Myth of Freedom", Hawthorne's "The Marble Faun", Henry Miller and of course, daily, The I Ching.  Thanks to the help of an artist friend Blaine Shaw who'd given me the shakuhachi and who now also loaned me an ax and Swedish saw, I began cutting up fire wood for my winter supply, relying only on windfalls and dead timber.  There was a little leaking outhouse hidden under a big maple with a front open to the sweeping valley which was very conducive to meditative shits and the path up the mountain started from my own back yard.  I took to the habit, once I'd attained to blowing my first few hair-raising notes on the shakuhachi, to carrying it up to the mountain top with me and trying to communicate with the wildlife, Orpheus-like.

One day I happened to notice a pair of low flying eagles and the thought came to me that I might imitate their cries on the flute and so I began to try. To my amazement, the eagles turned from their flight path and glided over to where I stood in a clearing among the trees and began circling over me,  first one way and then another, lower and lower until they were at tree top level, getting a good close-up of me.  They listened to my flute for a good few minutes before taking off with their own wild cries.

So it became my favorite meditation over the next couple of years, to practice my shakuhachi in the hills, where the sound of it carried so naturally anyway and to talk to the eagles.  I came to see this as my first encounter with the eagle "spirit" which was a harmonizing with the natural world, a kind of preliminary "tuning up" process.  I also expanded this communication to animals and plants, trying to find in the sound a way of understanding nature.  It seemed to me that the breath and the placing of the breathing in the sound was the key to this musical experiment.  I felt there was a connection between my breath and the "breath of nature" around me.  Maybe this focus on the breath was one of the strongest elements in the Sufi work that attracted me.

Jeevan had gone back to his home in India for a visit and had brought me, at my request, some japa beads from the Radha Soami Center in the Punjab, which I had begun using regularly, using each breath as a kind of silent prayer while counting the beads, one by one.  In this way I found that I could shift from a "bad" mood to a better one.  I also discovered that one could cure headaches by the same method.  I took to wearing these beads around my neck so I could practice this discipline anywhere and as a reminder of my focus in this regard, something I still do today, nearly 20 years later.  However, I was to learn that the solitary work of shifting moods is no challenge at all compared to the same effort when one is in a close relationship with another.

Hitching into town one day I was picked up by a man driving a small Renault station wagon, late  '60's vintage,  who offered it for sale to me at a price I couldn't refuse. Reps teased me that it looked like a miniature German Army staff car and that I would now have to carry the car on my back as well as the water but it was a labor I looked forward to.  So now I was mobile and although my rent was very low I found that my expenses were now too high,  so I took a part-time job at the Mai Tai restaurant in Bird's Eye Cove washing dishes.  It didn't last too long though because the enormous waste of food disgusted me, especially all that discarded steak in the face of a vegetarian.

I was always skirting the possibility of some kind of job and even the owner of the cabin tried to corner me into working for him as a farm-hand but I couldn't seem to accept this, feeling that my work lay in an infinitely more subtle direction.  This was not so clear to me then as it is now.  It was, and is, all about getting into one's own rhythm.

Winter was cold but beautiful alone in that little cabin and I was lonely but oh how poetically so.  It was one of the most wonderful times of my life.  I felt I had discovered something about inner peace and that in a sense I had come to a place of realization.  But of course there was the issue of sexuality and the deep need for companionship that was not being met.  There is something artificial about the peace of a hermit if that person is in the prime of life.  No matter how fulfilled I felt, something basic was missing.  The relationship with Sue was resolving itself too and she came to visit me less and less. Yet I yearned for a complete relationship.

I lived in the cabin through two summers and then in the early fall of '78,  Reps came out to visit with me.  It was the first time he'd ever done this and it was a turning point in my life.  He praised me for living according to my beliefs but he suggested that the time had come for a change.  He suggested I sell my car and redistribute my few belongings and come to Hawaii for the winter.  There was a zendo there he said and perhaps with luck I would find a community in which I could live and work.  "I'm not going to support you" he cautioned, "but if you get there I'll come and visit you."

The next time I visited Reps in his trailer,  he gave me a personal cheque for $100.,  to help me on my way, he said.  This was the incentive I needed.  I sold what I could, stored the rest and prepared to head south for Los Angeles where I learned I could get the cheapest flight to Hawaii.

As it turned out, Robert's life had also undergone a major shift. His marriage had dissolved, he'd sold his studio and he was going south too, so we drove down together. He helped me find a little motel suite, paid the cost for a week or so, to give me a boost and basically treated me to a good time in Laguna Beach where he and his wife Jean and daughter Mary were also spending their last days together.

We all said our good-byes at the same time.  Strange how life conspired to put us all there together and how everything sorted itself out so smoothly.  It was the last time I ever saw any of them.