How do I find my powerful voice without falling into either entitled, arrogant, White Guy™ pronouncements about “how things are” or the opposite, a timid, mushy hesitancy? This is the question that has kept me from regular blogging. Without resolving this and finding a powerful but non-dominating voice, I felt I no business writing a blog, and no business inviting you to read it.

I’m ready now. Ready to step into the true voice that now issues from me. Ready to blog. Ready to take this step on the journey and see where it leads me. And ready to invite you to come along.

What will I being doing here? Playing. Playing as this adult human plays. Playing with mindsets and stories, with dogmas and thoughtforms and paradigms. For me, play offers access to the whole of the Cosmos. As Richard Bach said in Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, “we are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe.”

Yeah. Like that.

I’ve long felt like Dr. Felix Hoenikker from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle: ”a pure-research man” who gets to work on “what fascinates them, not on what fascinates other people,” who tries to approach old puzzles “as though they were brand new.” Pure-research, for me, is playful and expansive and ottery. It follows no rules and questions all assumptions. And because I see our present time as one of both unraveling and transformation, as a time of insoluble predicaments and changing paradigms, I feel excited. A “pure-research man” like me can find all sorts of things that fascinate in such a time. I am always and forever interested in something “new.” That’s what What a Way to Go was, really, a two-hour documentary wrapped around this bit of copy: ”If what we want is to stop the destruction of the life of this planet, then what we have been doing has not been working. We will have to do something else.” On a daily basis, I look for that “something else.” It’s what I came here to do. It’s the central conversation of my life.

With what do I wish to play? Lots of things. Societal, economic, and environmental collapse. Limits and growth. Destruction and redemption. Climate, population, oil, and extinction. Spirit, meaning, direction, creation, conversation, love, gratitude, guidance, resistance, shame, guilt, doubt, and submission. Quantum mechanics and torsion physics and the holographic universe. UFOs and ancient civilizations and conspiracies and anomalies on the moons of Mars. The hearts, minds, and souls of the hidden layers of control. Nothing is forbidden in my pure-research laboratory. No questions are out of bounds. No assumptions are sacred. No orthodoxies get a free pass. My laboratory is a danger zone for the dominant culture: abandon all paradigms, ye who enter here. If you’re not up for that, and you try to knock over my Bunsen burners and break my Erlenmeyer flasks, I’ll have to ask you to wait outside, where the magazines are really old.

Some days I’ll play like a filmmaker, other days a sci-fi writer. Some days I’ll play like a monk, or a preacher, or one of those spiritual teachers Tami Simon interviews on Sounds True. Some days I’ll play the sorcerer, the wizard, the shaman living on the edge of the village. Some days I’ll play like a Cassandra or a scold, a crank or curmudgeon. Some days I’ll play with gratitude and love so fierce they split my heart open. Some days I’ll play with grief and rage so sharp I’ll curl up into myself. Some days I’ll be playing for the life of this planet. Some days I’ll be playing for Sally. All days I’ll be playing mostly for myself, playing with a new kind of Self-ish-Ness™ that supports service to the highest good.

I’m trying to burn it all away, you understand? The dominant global culture that has lodged in my body and mind. The crazy. The exile. The separation. The illusions. The blindfolds. The living world shrinks daily and I can’t even figure out how to have relationships with my grown children? What is up with that? I have no idea what to do, most days. No rational idea, anyway. So I’m learning to rely on the sputtering, chugging pulls and proddings from a heart that seems, at times, to have been trodden upon without mercy here on this strange, beautiful rock I currently call “home.” There’s something else besides “thought” that can guide me, I think – call it my joy, my bliss, my what-I-most-deeply-want, my muse, my goad, my work, my calling, my central conversation, my longing. I trust that it’s there. It’s my work, my play, to find it.

I want to burn it away, to stoke up the fire to heat my laboratory. In the slightly-altered words of the great and powerful Mary Oliver in her wonderful poem, “The Journey,” I’m determined to do the only thing I can do, determined to save the only life I can save. That poem resonates deeply. When I get right down to it, what I am doing in my lab is trying to save my own life. Not because I’m a tall, white, American male with a big brain who Deserves™ to be Saved™, whatever the hell either “deserve” or “saved” really mean. But because the thing I’m looking for, the “new,” the “something else,” might be inside of me somewhere, as it might be inside of all of us. As it might be inside of you. If it is in me, then I, for one, feel it worth the effort to try to find it.

I think of that bit from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”

Unfortunately, before she could tell anyone, the Earth was destroyed by a Vogon Constructor Fleet to make way for an interstellar bypass.

The possibility that one of us might right now be that “girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth” fascinates and excites me. I wonder if it might be me. Or you. Or that woman over there. I wonder if there’s not something essential and grand to be learned from our millennia-long descent into the cold, dark cave of control, domination, separation, and delusion. I wonder if there’s some gold hidden deep in that cave. I wonder if we might grab that gold and get out before the cave collapses on us. And I wonder if, should we learn what there is to be learned, whether we can consider that, in some way, a job well done, even should we plunge ourselves, and a great deal of the rest of the community of life, into the seeming abyss of extinction. Even if we don’t make it back out of the cave. Perhaps our learning would go into the Universe, the Cosmos, the Great Hologram, the Absolute, the All, the One, the Mind of God, even as our bodies, and our civilization, fall into ashes and dust. Perhaps, even when all is lost, not all will be lost.

These are the questions that fascinate me in my lab. I’m seeking redemption for all of this pain and destruction. Redemption for myself. Redemption for the whole of life. Redemption for everything and everyone in between. Somehow. In some way. Before the Vogons get here.

We might conspire in that. That sounds like play to me.

Jump in, otters. Welcome to my lab.