May 25/26, 2002 From Australia back, on the New Moon day itself, to Los Angeles, thence to Toronto, and the American Holistic Medical Association conference. Most AHMA members are M.D.s seeking new avenues toward living and practicing more healthily, and what I saw at the conference heartened me to believe that the subversion of the ossified, sickly North American medical establishment is now well under way.

After enjoying the toothsome classical Chinese Spring Banquet on the conference's first night, I plunged directly into the business of lecturing and listening, sharing the experiences of physicians healing themselves as they learn how better to heal their patients. Two of the stories that stuck with me most I heard on the night I stayed up late at the resident physicians' soirée, organized by Dr. Bhaswati Bhattacharya, the AHMA Board Member who arranged my conference appearance. The first story was of a birth during which the husband had immured himself in a distant corner of the birthing room, in a state of mixed disgust and anxiety about the process. When labor stalled, and he was requested to come offer some support to his wife, he came to her side and kissed her, and wouldn't stop. They remained engrossed in one long kiss, oblivious to their surroundings, even as the baby popped out. Only when the attending obstetrician brought the newborn to the mother's breast did she break off long enough to notice that she had given birth!

The other story was that an assistant professor of medicine in Russia who, after emigrating to the USA, was still forced by the medical powers-that-be over here to go through residency again. Because of his age (well into mid-life), it took him a year, interviews at 20 hospitals, and $15,000 in airfare, hotel, and sundry expenses to find an institution that would take him on. He brought with him the legacy of his stint as a medical officer in the Russian navy: exposure on a submarine to an experimental nuclear propulsion system that apparently leaked; the navy's cover-up of the incident; the deaths in the ears following of many of his crewmates; his own ensuing health crises. His overall conclusion: that "although America has done many terrible things, it is still a great privilege to live here."

From Toronto to Sonoma, and the ever-hospitable Bette Timm, whose beautiful daughter Marijanna told me the story of Ocean Robbins, whom she had recently met. When he was 8, Ocean's home was invaded by fruit flies. On learning that his mother planned to purchase a flyswatter to deal with the invaders, Ocean bought 24 hours of time, and wrote a long letter to the little critters, warning them of the flyswatter's looming arrival, informing them politely that they were eating food that belonged to Ocean and his family, and suggesting that they could live comfortably on the nearby compost heap. He posted the letter on a window, complete with an arrow pointing toward the compost, and next morning - no flies in the house! His mother was duly impressed, and then removed the letter - whereupon the flies returned. Up the letter went again, and the Robbins' abode remained flyless from then on, for quite some time.

That heart-warming story was balanced the next day by the heart-chilling sight, in a park in nearby Sebastopol, of bright green, leafy parasites on mature trees that looked from a distance like nothing so much as patches of pathological fungi in a lung, tree "cancers" that looked all set to spread to the not-yet-devitalized "tissue" of the surrounding forest.

Suitably chastened by how oblivious we are to the rot that is eating away at the very fabric of our lives, I proceeded to Albuquerque for the night of May 25/26, and the eclipsed full moon that Dr. Welch & I worshipped there, begging forgiveness of the Lord of Plants for our depredations as a species, imploring that silvery orb to send us all holistic, healthy thoughts that we will need to rejuvenate ourselves and our environments.

April 27-May 12, 2002 Australia! Austral, antediluvian continent! Red center cloaked in green integument! Married long ago to India, and when, after the split, India steamed northward to slam into Asia's soft underbelly and give birth to Himalaya, Australia remained behind, taking the evolutionary road less traveled by.

The 23 days of this stay there I spent in the subtropical rainforest, about 3 hours south of Brisbane, half an hour from the Byron Bay haven of alternative culture, 10 minutes from the Mullumbimby municipality, just outside Main Arm, up Blindmouth Road, in the chalet of Rose Baudin, who has made Australia her official home for 16 years now. Tall stands the rudraksha tree that guards the driveway; lush grows the herbage surrounding the house; abundant are the animated life forms in the forest nearby. Flocks of brightly painted rainbow lorikeets had wheeled tree to tree in the week before my arrival, and on my first full morning there we started to hear a reverberating thud on the upstairs room window. There on the landing sat a stunned lorikeet, having slammed into the glass, neck providentially unbroken. Each feather on its head ruffled by the shock, it sat there uncomprehending for several minutes until some minimum of neuronal net came back on line, at which point it suddenly pulled itself together and left in a flash for the nearest tree, to resume its previous life.

Like the lorikeet (save for the head-banging), I escaped from my ordinary consciousness into an altered state while I was in Oz, shaking out of it only after my return to the Greater L.A. Illusion World. After a couple of days of yoga with Shandor and meetings with various remarkable people, I began on Hanuman's birthday a period of more than a week of "cultivation of the mouth" by observing verbal silence (i.e. refraining from speaking aloud) and a restricted diet.

Rain forests thrive on rain, most of which fell while I was silent and moving about sparingly. Enough dry days appeared for several beach outings (Brunswick Heads being a mere 20 minutes from the homestead), to punctuate the writing and meditating that was my main focus. Nature responded to my interest in Her with portents: a small kangaroo (or large wallaby) hopping past the clothesline on the morning of May 8; the cloud cover parting on cue at dusk on May 10 for a clear view of the reunion of Mars and Venus, in the company of their cousins the other three visible planets, in the western corner of the Southern Sky; and encounters on May 11 with the monitor lizard known as goanna, and a python that had just eaten, on the path down to sacred pools in an ancient lava flow. Aboriginal lore holds that goanna and snake are the two animals that epitomize that land, and to have their darshan on the penultimate day of my trip there seemed a sign that Oz had at the least not objected to my stay on her soil, within the bowl of what is the largest caldera in the Southern Hemisphere. I flew off on May 12, the New Moon Day, already plotting a return.

Link to News of the Past