A note

Hello dog readers,

This week we’ve had to move from our house and everything is in chaos of boxes and balls in the air.  So in place of a further adventure of woody the dog, I have two things to tell you. The first is how I’m going to proceed from here on out and the second has to do with a mountaintop encounter with Kali herself who made me change my life and led to these writings.

First, I will tell you that I am abandoning the chapter structure from here on out. Kali herself told me to write as the spirit flows and write whatever part of the story emerges in muse time. This would, she said honor the inspiration of the moment and keep me in the joy flow of writing. Ordering, editing and deletion, she said, can happen after. So, beginning next week, the stories will be nonlinear in order. Later they will comprise a book of hopefully ordered demeanor.

Now about Kali on the mountain. This past April, Sophie and I made a quick climb up Mt Si near North Bend. It’s a leg burner, four miles, 4,000 feet elevation. The final 1,000 feet was slushy slippery snow. Up top, was radiant, a spring blue clear all the way to Mt. Rainer 100 miles to the south.

As we headed down, I started to talk about my life in Alaska. “I always figured I’d write about it, don’t quite know what happened.” 

“Why don’t you write?” she said. “People would love to hear about that time in your life. Look how many people read your travel blog in Asia.”

“ I know, but it seems like I’ve lost so much…” I replied.  I stopped to tie my bootlaces. Sophie walked on, a bit imperiously it seemed.  I followed, expecting to see her around the next corner waiting, but no, she had kept on. I hurried up and found the same empty trail at the next switchback. After ten minutes I began to wonder if I hadn’t passed by her. A young couple was hoofing up the mountain.   “Did you see a woman in a red coat?” I asked. The fellow thought a moment, “Yes,” he said, “A ways down.”

“Wow, I thought, she’s really booking.” I picked up the pace until I was nearly trotting, determined now to catch up with her. Another ten minutes and I turned a sharp switchback. There in the middle of the trail stood a fearsome figure.

Dressed in red, a woman that once had looked like my wife stood. Gone was her sweet and gentle demeanor. Her head was tilted down, her blue eyes turned dark and piercing. Her legs were spread apart with no way to get by her.

When I was three feet away, her arm jutted out with her finger pointed directly at my heart. “YOU!” She boomed. Her teeth had become fangs; hot saliva was dripping onto the cold forest floor.

“YOU! REGRETFUL WRITER,” she bellowed.  The woman who once was my wife seemed to tower over me, as if she had sprouted two feet taller from the sheer force of her simmering rage.

Kali jabbed the air again and reached inside my chest to grab hold of my beating heart. Like an Aztec priestess she held my life force in her hands as I lay on the altar.

“YOU REGRETFUL WRITER…,” words echoed through the woods, giving any bears emerging from hibernation second thoughts. A voice that made the cones fall prematurely from the Douglas firs and squirrel babies have nightmares for weeks. “…SHALL NOT PASS!”

Her eyes blazed with dripping blood from my severed head, steam poured from her nostrils and her arm made a sweep along the ground that made it clear that should I try and pass, my soul would beg for release from its bodily cage, no torment imagined by god, man or woman would compare.

And so I did. I laid it down right there. I vowed to leave behind the 100-pound rucksack of my regret. All the years I packed it around waiting for I don’t know what. All the years I felt as if I couldn’t start because there was just too much, I had written in too many journals, packed it away in too many boxes. I had forgotten too much.

I dropped it all, like a heavy wet wool coat, I flung it off behind me, grabbed Kali and kissed her black tongue and took it inside me until I was infused with her crystalline purpose.

She relaxed then satisfied at my offering and returned my lovely gentle wife to me. I help a spontaneous funeral right there on the trail half way down Mt. Si for my regretful writer and on that spot I vowed to begin my Woody the dog blog and to have a book ready to read by November 1, 2012.