Life—
Aromatic, munificent,
Chirpy, melodic,
Mirthful, meaningful,
Scrumptious, dazzling,
Ebullient, bright,
DAY.

Life—
A lane, to pass by.
Making me a lane,
Passing me by.

If passing this sub-lane of our issue, feel free to drop a line.
Buckets of sunshine,

Manjit

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When you decide to claim your power in this lifetime it can often seem a daunting task. Many of us are raised to be afraid of speaking up or standing out and learn quickly to become invisible. Especially so, if we come from abusive backgrounds. To many of us, when we talk about power we often do not know what that is. It is difficult or even impossible to grasp the meaning of what power is.

Personal power is often mistaken as the ability to become successful in today’s world, usually that means with our careers and our finances. So we strive harder everyday to move ahead with promotions, or work as much overtime as we can manage, as we juggle raising and supporting a family., or at the very least making ends meet as we support ourselves. This leaves very little time, if any, for ourselves, our dreams, our pleasures in life.

The downtime we do take is often filled with a deep guilt that the time we are enjoying could be making us more money or we find ourselves spending money on our down time that we feel should be going towards other things. There is not much value placed on the being-ness of life. We are filled with an anxiety to go out in the world and be do-ers all the time. The lack of balance between the two manifests in many different ways, disease and debt being two of them. We tend to give our power away to money and let it dictate our lives.

We are obsessed with making more of it, knowing that more will never be enough. In the spiritual communities we find an even greater confusion to how money is supposed to fit into the greater scheme of things. Living humbly and without is a dogma found in many different religions. The basis for this is to learn the lessons of not having the distraction or ego attached to what money does to the human soul. What does money do to the human soul? Could it be that living a life filled with abundance and a combination of doing and being, of working hard and being responsible with what we have and spending downtime is a wise investment? In my work, I often see an abuse of money and sabotage in people’s financial lives.

Hidden deep within is often a feeling of unworthiness that seeps into our lives as a whole and affects every aspect, especially when it comes to our financial lives. We dream of success, of fulfilling our dreams, of traveling to faraway places. We secretly wish for these things, or perhaps we have less dramatic dreams for ourselves. So what is it that keeps this from happening? How often do you find yourself saying you cant take that self help workshop because you cant possibly spare the $50.00 it costs. So you don’t and you go back to your life. Money is really energy and energy follows thought and moves towards it.

You create your reality by what you think and how your emotion directs your thoughts. When we meditate we see how our thoughts try to distract us and pull us off our center. We know that if only we can quiet those thoughts long enough to move past them into the void that lies behind them, we may in fact reach enlightenment. But what about those pesky thoughts that keep pulling you off your center, distracting you with all the fears and doubts and voices of criticism that always remind you of what a waste of time it is to pursue all of this.

Those thoughts that we watch pass us by are like guardians of that void, and if we acknowledge them and detach from them, they move aside and let us in. So what happens when we are here? And what does this have to do with money and abundance and being able to follow our dreams? Everything. You see once we become more self aware of what makes us tick internally, our inner life begins to change and shift. As a result eventually our outer world, our reality, changes. You attract into your life reflections of the inner dialog.

If you are experiencing debt, over spending, sabotage in saving your money for investments, can’t get out of renting to become a homeowner, then begin by taking a look at your fears of being seen, taking your power in this lifetime, and becoming successful. It may at first seem irrelevant, but in the cosmic workings of the universe, everything is interconnected. Taking responsibility for what we do in life and acting on our deep knowing that change is needed, is often the biggest fear of all because it is like facing your own death. We experience little deaths all the time, in many ways.

In relationships, job changes, even finishing a school or work project,. Whenever we have closure on something we experience a small death, and often it is not seen as such. We avoid looking to closely at what is uncomfortable for us because we fear the release of emotions associated with letting go. So we hold on, and we hold tightly to what we know, to our routine and to what seems to be working. Even if it creates stress in our lives, our bodies, our minds and in our spirits. We tend to blame others for our situations, our spouses, children, or our parents.

The truth of the matter is that no matter what your situation or what you suffered from in the past, and no matter what others are doing in your life, ultimately you are responsible for your experiences. You have the power of choice and free will. You only have to act on it and move outward to create the kind of life you are truly worthy of. So how does this happen when you are buried in credit card debt, behind on your car or house payments, and can seem to find a way out of your situation as you live paycheck to paycheck? When there just doesn’t appear to be any extra money? Lets start with the basics. Sit down and write out a statement to yourself.

Commit to admitting yourself into financial rehab. Sign and date it and put it somewhere where you will see it everyday. Spending problems, addiction to debt, is like any other addiction. Commitment to yourself is the first step. Next, make a list of all your bills, know the current balances and especially what the interest rate is for every one of them. List the credit card debt in order of balances from the lowest balance to the highest balance. You will target the lowest payment first so you can feel a sense of accomplishment quicker. Keep a list of updated balances and update them at least twice a month.

Next, stop spending. Period. Put the credit cards away and if you’re too tempted to use them, cut them all up. If worse comes to worse, you can always reorder a new card. Next, take a look at your mortgage payment. Do you pay bi-monthly? You may want to consider taking the initiative to setting this up automatically with your mortgage lender. It will save you thousands of dollars in the end and bring you closer to owning your home free and clear. Cut back on any extras, take a look at your cable bill, your internet service, cell phone bill, and figure out what you can cut back on. You will be astounded at how much money you can find in doing this simple act.

Next take a good hard look at your daily routine. Write down every penny you spend throughout your day. Do you stop and get coffee and a bagel every morning before work? Do you do that 4-5 times a week? Lets say you spend $5.30 everyday before you go to work. That’s $26.50 a week, $106.00 dollars a month, $1272.00 dollars a year. Just by buying a large canister of coffee and brewing it at home along with making your own bagels, you have just found yourself an extra $1272.00 a year. The same goes for the take out food, buying a pack of cigarettes a day.

Find what your habit is and write it down. Figure out the math and see how much you can save yourself by changing a simple part of your everyday routine. Take small steps for really big results and start living your dreams. That coffee and bagel in the morning could be your ticket to a new life. Making a few small changes here and there and getting a grip on your spending habits, your credit card debt and setting up your finances so that its automatic will change the way you see life.

You see, abundance and the way money plays into our lives is a great opportunity to take our own power and take back your life and with that begin to feel worthy of becoming what we are destined to become in life. It starts by seeing that there is another way. By understanding your fears and having the courage to look within and face the fears and changes that you need to make in your life. We then begin to move out of our everyday existence and routine and we begin to move, and this movement creates a force by which enables us to act. It is then our choice to act and create our own lives and follow our innermost dreams. Money is nothing more then an outer expression of our inner life.

Originally published in SaskWorld.com. Reproduced here with permission from the Author.

⁽⁰⁾

The medical disorder Pseudofolliculitis barbae results in hair growing back into the flesh in the beard area and, like the condition, these stories get under your skin, they itch and irritate and fiction does not get any more virtual and hairy than this. It is surreal when surreal does not mean advertising. It is media savvy when there is nothing left to sell. Think Terry Pratchett for the de Sade set, Douglas Adams with a hairball of Krafft-Ebing, or William Gibson bent over and buggered by Sergeant Bertrand.

This is postmodern science fiction that takes more from William Burroughs than it gives away in free moustaches. Speculative fiction with a speculum for a bookmark. I am not sure if the book holds together as a map of cities of the imagination in the same way as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, and William Burrough’s Interzone, but I had fun trying to figure out my route among the characters and descriptions.

Surrealism is hard to do these days; it comes over as old-fashioned, trite, even hokey, but D. Harlan Wilson gets it just about right. Not since Mark Leyner has there been such an able fusion of fantasy and satire. I am not saying that Mr Wilson is on a par with Leyner, or Vonnegut, or Tom Robbins, who all work in a similar vein, but he is at least following closely in their footsteps.

Unencumbered by a fixed narrative, Pseudo-City elides genres and explodes fictional stereotypes. D. Harlan Wilson writes a universe that he considers “irreal”, a universe that, in reflection, is more real than our own. The novel investigates interzones between fiction and reality, the human and the non-human, prose and poetry; often when a writer attempts this, the writing comes over as a mulligan stew of half-baked ideas and flowery verbiage but Pseudo-City excites with its fictional flavourings and heady broth of poststructural philosophy.

So, it’s that good, huh? Well, it is an enjoyable read, supercalifragilistic in fact, despite the bad jokes – dollhairs for dollars – a bit strained that one, and the somewhat metaphorical names of the characters –Dr Beebody, etc.–become tiresome, plus the connections between the stories can, at times, be tenuous; but if you like Philip K. Dick, Norman Spinrad, or Rudy Rucker, you will enjoy this. I would argue D. Harlan Wilson’s writing style is taken from André Breton’s ultimate surrealist tenet to go ‘down into the street, pistol in hand, and shoot at random into the crowd’, only, instead of bullets, D. Harlan Wilson’s gun is loaded with words.

Pseudo-City
by D. Harlan Wilson
Raw Dog Screaming Press
224 Pages

Reprinted with permission from The Absinthe Literary Review

⁽⁰⁾

That can't be Kesey they wheeled away from Sacred Heart in Eugene, Oregon, last November, like hauling off the corpse of some lobotomized savior in a movie about lunatics. Kesey was much bigger than that. Younger. Louder. Handsomer too. Looked kind of like Paul Newman, some said, before Kesey lost his hair, and that middle-age spread set in. And those hands--folded like doves' wings as some orderly rolled him away, no doubt.

Listen up. I knew those hands. They contained worlds, man. They bled two novels onto the page that may never be surpassed.

Read 'em and weep. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion. Brassy, voluptuous, tender and, yes, sometimes vulgar books, not what you'd call PC at all.

Yet subtle too. Subtle as voices of doves. Subtle as new moons and heat lightning.

Ah, what Kesey could do with voice and perspective. He proffered gifts and notions that made him a writer's writer. That first book--published in 1962--made you want to give up reading and writing, except for the haunting idea that lightning might strike again. Read on. Write on. Further. You read his later books wishing Kesey had turned out more classics, but he had nothing left to prove after all. He attained immortality with those early works, and if not with them, then with the movement he started. A movement that changed the world if the truth be admitted.

Kesey dead? You might as well say Captain America died that day. Or Santa Claus. Buddha. Jesus even. Tepid descriptions buried inside newspapers and magazines following Kesey's death scarcely resemble the man who once slew giant timber and hauled driftwood logs up off wild Oregon beaches, and midwifed dairy calves for most of sixty-six years. Such descriptions don't account for those hands, after all:

A wrestler's hands that grappled their way to a Big Ten crown and alternate on the U.S. Olympic team.

Hands that transformed a family barn into home for generations of Keseys and also a pilgrimage shrine--destination for seekers after truth of one sort or another.

Hands that dug a grave in 1984 for Kesey's own son, Jed, killed, understand, in a bus accident while on his way to compete in a college wrestling match.
Kesey's fingers were the thick, deft digits of a magician who could make coins disappear and who--take a deep breath now...

Wrestled the wheel of a 1930s-vintage psychedelic bus back and forth across this country several times in the sixties, with a little help from his friends.

Wired California warehouses and clubs into electrified palaces that conjured revolutions in music, fashion, art, lighting and social mores.

Clutched a microphone as Kesey carney-barkered the Grateful Dead and other bands into existence.
Grasped an iron ladder and heaved himself aboard a moving train one afternoon in Old Mexico, just before the authorities would have nabbed him in the middle of a desert.

Those hands hauled his brawny hide out of harm's way more than once while on the lam for drug charges both trumped up and real.

There's not space enough nor time to chronicle all the exploits of the man who, as a struggling grad student, hired on to take something called LSD for government-sponsored mind-control experiments at Stanford, then took the magic candy and ran, releasing it to the multitudes, for better or worse.
Imagine a pinhead speck of LSD rolling around in those meaty, over-sized palms. Imagine the furrowed brow as Kesey tries to figure how something so tiny could unfold, conjure and illuminate the whole crazy cosmos for you. How it could allow you to see clear to the wounded hearts behind the faces of those emotionally disturbed souls you tended in the mental wards to pay tuition at the Stanford writing program. How in the heck....

But there it is. Something to be faced. Our hero, Ken Kesey, was a drug-user. Even drug distributor.

Only that's like saying Einstein was a back-alley nuclear waste peddler. It's like calling Henry Ford a junk car dealer and ambulance chaser.

For Kesey, drug use was not escapist. For him the psychedelic experience was like America itself--a just-discovered continent that became setting or laboratory for exploring new conceptions of freedom, art, religion, science, personality, and some infinitely receding intersection where those things merge into evanescent metaphors and temporal paradigms for larger conceptions of reality.

No reductionist Kesey. No minimalist he.

Kesey was the ultimate expansionist, the maximalist, to coin a phrase. To read him is to entertain no precious personal authorial neurosis or conceit. Rather, it's to be baptized in notions of life, death, sacrifice, redemption, rebirth, creation, mythology, civilization, Jungian archetypes.

For Kesey, drug use provided a way of apprehending the big picture. It was an aid for writing great novels and establishing movements that would allow the human race to survive the nuclear age. When asked to define his movement, he tied it to an impulse old as history.

"It started the first time a caveman picked up a meat-bone and handed it to a stranger rather than hitting him in the head with it," Kesey said.

He reveled in bringing tribes together. Hippies, bikers, bankers, Jesus people, ministers, writers, artists, mountain girls, rockers, poets, soldiers, athletes, politicians and protesters--that whole crazy mix that was the sixties.

For better or worse, this alchemy led to events that led to the rise of rock bands like Santana, the Doors, the Grateful Dead and dozens more who brought the counter culture to the mainstream of American life. It led to movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy.

That popular revolution either broke down a stifling conformity or unleashed demons, depending on your point of view. Eventually it reached the Beatles and popular culture generally. Finally it infiltrated the world's intelligentsia. There's evidence that John F. Kennedy--who gave us the moon--experimented with psychedelic drugs.

Even Dick Nixon and Brezhnev became actors for an international audience that was turned on, tuned in--if vicariously in many cases--an audience that yearned for peace and transcendence over hoary old ways of war and prejudice which we knew in our guts could kill us all... as the psychedelic movement went global.

Yes, Kesey proselytized for drug use, and doubtlessly was a proximate cause of suffering. It must be said that many have suffered and died because of drug abuse. Never mind that many lives were changed for the better in the 1960s, and that an expansive new worldview took center stage that doubtlessly saved millions. Never mind that LSD was legal back then, and that it was the CIA who introduced the drugs to Kesey, or that it was the government's own faulty drug policy that gave rise to unregulated use and the resulting cocaine wars in our inner cities. It must be admitted that Kesey was part of the mix that popularized drugs.

Still, I could draw that particular thread from the fabric of recent world history, would I? Not on your life. It just might be one of the threads by which the world hung on long enough to survive the Cold War.
I exaggerate? Perhaps so.

On the other hand, I once interviewed the engineer who designed the air-conditioning system used in Lenin's Tomb. The amiable Russian immigrant to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, told me that by the 1970s the elite of Moscow were listening to the Beatles and American jazz and reading writers such as Kesey. Even as they paid lip service to socialist dogma; even as they chilled Lenin out. I heard similar stories from a Russian interpreter.

Détente brought hiatus to a runaway arms race and international tensions that were goading us towards nuclear Armageddon. Changed hearts and minds made Détente possible, just as changed hearts and minds made it possible for Congress to vote into law the clean air and water bills and establish the EPA under Nixon, and give rise to a generation that decided the environment needed saving.

Not that Kesey alone saved us. No more than Vietnam vets or demonstrators in the streets or nuclear test ban treaties or Billy Graham or the Pope, or Nixon's overtures to Russia or pictures of the whole earth or Reagan's get-tough talk or rockets to the moon or Jerry Garcia saved us.
It took all of those elements and more to forge a detour around a bizarre intersection of history where our government--bristling with nuclear arms--played chicken with an enemy holding too many missiles to count.

Kesey was part of the mix, maybe its saving grace.

For him, drugs and writing (yes and music, art, magic tricks, storytelling, light shows and outrageous garb) were tools of a shaman on a life-long vision-quest.

Such quests were common in the sixties and seventies. Kesey's fellow- voyager, Stewart Brand--one of the original fourteen Merry Pranksters--took it upon himself to make the image of the whole Earth into the world's most visible icon. In the mid-to-late sixties, Brand went around the country passing out cards and pamphlets that asked the simple question, "Why haven't we seen a picture of the whole earth yet?"

Within a couple of years we had, and Brand plastered the picture everywhere, most notably on the cover of The Whole Earth Catalogue, a scruffy manual of sorts for living an ecologically sustainable lifestyle. Today the whole Earth is as ubiquitous as the crucifix. Some credit the psychedelic movement with spawning a new vision of the earth as a living entity and thereby contributing to the peace and environmental movements.

Others have taken it a step further, saying the new "global consciousness" marks the emergence of a new paradigm or new religion--one that is growing even now. If true, then Kesey is a founding prophet. Kesey never donned the crown and scepter of king or savior, as other sixties gurus did, even though his following was immense and loyal. He never scored status points by running down institutions such as the church or family or by advocating violence to fight violence.

"That's the oldest game in the world," he once said.

One of the few times he found himself on stage at a peace rally, he angered and befuddled the organizers by eschewing angry rhetoric, by declining to work the crowd into the desired frenzy. Instead, he simply blew into his harmonica and urged the following response to the Vietnam War, as though it were just another street brawl:

"Just walk away from it."

Read all about it in Tom Wolfe's 1968 new journalism classic, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. There's something of the real live Kesey captured there, though not the whole man.

No more than any facsimile corpse with a bum liver is the real Kesey.
Who they tryin' to kid?

Look, I knew Ken Kesey.

It was in 1972, one of those hurly-burly years that joined the sixties to the seventies that I had my introduction to him. I was hanging out at my Knoxville apartment upstairs in a student ghetto on Tenth Street--a hilly street of sturdy, wooden houses and a brick-factory and shops that would be sacrificed a decade later to a World's Fair.

My apartment had stains on the ceiling and sometimes at night my friends and I would lie back and decipher them like so many clouds.

"Look, there's a herd of buffalo; now it's turning into, oh m'gosh, Dick Nixon...."
One day, tired of listening to music and looking at the stains there, I picked up this book that belonged to my housemate. The cover featured a drawing of a red-haired anguished man struggling to free himself from a strait-jacket. On the cover in vibrant script were the words, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Normally put off by psycho dramas, I nevertheless opened the cover and read that first disquieting declaration.

They're out there.

I read on and fell into a black hole of sensation, imagery and ideas I would never escape. Those words led to words that led to books and ways that transformed me. I'm typing this sentence because in three words a sense of dread, paranoia and mystery was conjured. The voice of Chief Broom mesmerized me.

His is the voice of the classic unreliable narrator, in English Lit 101 jargon. Chief Broom is a storyteller who can't be trusted. He's paranoid, delusional, drug-addled, bigoted, unschooled and allegedly catatonic. Yet Chief Broom is also yearning, confessional, pathetic and hopeful. You don't know whether to believe his amazing story or not.

The Chief himself ups the ante by admitting such doubt at the end of the first chapter.

I been silent so long now it's gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving, my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It's still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.

Here's Chief Broom's truth--maybe Kesey's: People are falling under control of The Combine, a vast organization that manipulates the world with pulleys, levers, pills, and by implanting eavesdropping devices and other control mechanisms into our very bodies and souls by night and generally sapping our free will.

Nurse Ratched is The Combine's agent inside the mental institution where the story takes place. A dictatorial and cold overseer, she has killed her very own womanly instincts in her drive to force herself and her ward to conform to a strict and sexless code. She rules an insular, claustrophobic world in microcosm. But it is a world that also glimmers with possibilities of cosmic wonder, of epic struggle, of redemption and death and life everlasting....

That shot at redemption comes by way of Randle P. McMurphy, maybe Kesey's greatest character. He's an unlikely modern day savior--a red-haired card-dealing outlaw of Irish descent, with a brash voice, tattoos, heeltaps that strike sparks from the tile when he walks, and larger-than-life hand gestures to go with a mission cosmic in scope.

I laid the book down seven or eight devastating and thrilling hours later, transfixed by Kesey's electric prose.

For an English major tired of reading Tennyson, this was mind-blowing stuff, to use a vernacular that might not exist without Kesey.

Later I discovered Kesey was this weird character who often traveled with the Grateful Dead and once led the FBI and other cops on a merry chase through California and Mexico in the late sixties.

He first started getting into trouble in 1964, after he and his friends took a school bus, painted it burnt orange, yellow, saffron, crimson, violet, mauve and other shades of psychedelia, wired it for sound and cameras inside and out, then set out across America with a group of like-minded friends to transfix the multitudes.

They called themselves Merry Pranksters, I learned from Wolfe. Later, others would chronicle the trip, including Kesey himself in The Further Inquiry, a coffee-table book jam-packed with photographs, movie stills and psychedelic art from that epic school bus ride.

A saying arose from that trip. "You're either on the bus or you're off the bus."
In the early seventies, like millions who had never even heard that expression, I was on the bus. At least on weekends. I wore sandals and patched jeans and grew my hair down over my shoulders. I wrote bad poetry and tried my hand at electric-flavored fiction in the Kesey style (I liked the way my thoughts seemed to swell and take hold of big questions, apprehend the great mysteries, permit appropriate awe at being alive in this crazy universe in certain states of mind). And I dreamed of one day taking a ride across America in a jazzed up hippie bus.

Ah, life on the road.

It was every weekend hipster's dream to trip out on America. To follow the white and yellow lines on the highway through as many states of the U.S.A. and of consciousness as you could conjure. I didn't get around to making my journey until 1979, a ridiculously late date to be nurturing such hippie pipedreams, but that's how powerfully Kesey had influenced me.

That year my then-pregnant wife Jeanne and I took a little 1965 VW bus with a split windshield that was held together on the passenger side with a plastic rainbow sticker. We painted the insides, hung curtains, built a sleeping platform over the engine compartment and christened it Jasmine, and henceforth it was a she.

With Jeanne and our collie-shep named Lady and the last-minute addition of my nubile and free-spirited sister Kathleen, we drove Jasmine out across America, traveling this country's secondary roads and interstates in a gigantic loop that took in some twenty western states in six weeks.

A parade of wonders marched across our windshield as we followed squiggly, multi-colored lines on a map from Knoxville, northward, then west. We walked the steel canyons of Chicago and toured the Art Institute with the gleeful sensation of having at last arrived in the larger world. We drove down Lin-coln Street and tasted pure blues music, unlike anything we'd known. We chased the sun across golden wheat fields of Wisconsin and South Dakota to the Badlands, a portion of the planet inhabited only by bleached bones, snakes, and spirits of the Sioux dead. A universe unrequited. It was a land of leaning bluffs and cracked, craggy canyons whose shadows constantly changed to evoke birds in flight and silhouettes of warriors. Pink and green rock strata ran throughout all the buttes and bluffs. After looking at them so long, all we saw when we looked away were pink and green stripes glowing in the sky, on Jasmine, on each other's faces, on one another's clothes and skin. We camped that night in the Black Hills against a cliff face--burning sticks and dried buffalo chips to keep the fire blazing beneath a star-spangled sky. The next morning we drove on.

By moonlight we walked around Devil's Tower in Wyoming. We stood on a gentle incline above the Snake River in Montana, studying the landscape where Crazy Horse defeated Custer. We raced heavy snowfalls across the Rockies, learning the next day that eighteen inches had fallen in our wake. Through Idaho we drove the route blazed by Lewis and Clarke across the Bitterroot Range, where Chief Joseph led his band of Nez Percé Indians while fleeing the U.S. Army in the late 1800s.

I drew a blue line on the map marking our travels, and watched as it grew, fascinated by the dimensions it embraced. Still fleeing the snow, we crossed Washington, drove to Mount Rainier and Puget Sound, then on to the Olympic Peninsula and its snow-capped peaks.

Picking our way through unmarked gravel roads of an Indian reservation until we could drive no farther, we parked and hiked through a rain forest to the very tip of Cape Flattery, arriving at last at the farthest point we could get from Tennessee in the contiguous United States.

Before us, the not-so-peaceful Pacific flung frigid fists against bluffs; extended fingers among caves that pitted the stony coastline. Tantalizingly out of reach, a lighthouse beckoned from its perch on a little long island there in the unruly sea, representing in that moment everything I had ever yearned for that was beyond reach.

And in this wild and raw place Jeanne felt a quickening. She placed my hand and then Kathleen's on her belly and we felt it too--a gentle fluttering as our first child, Alexis, as she would become--serene and thoughtful Alexis--announced her presence in the world.

We drove down the coast of Washington that night and into Oregon swathed in notions of new life.

In Eugene in early November we stopped one night at a pool hall and eatery to take a break from the road. Kathleen and Jeanne reminded me of a pledge. I had said years before, "If I ever get the chance, I'm going to shake Ken Kesey's hand."

As Jeanne slept in her warm nest in the van, Kathleen held me to it, shaming me into giving Kesey a call. His wife, Faye, told us to come by in the morning--a brisk Indian summer's morning, spangled by fading gold and russet leaves.

As we approached Kesey's Pleasant Hill house--a big, red, remodeled barn with a cut-out of a white star shining from a peak in the roof, doubts assailed me. Questions like, gosh, gulp, how do you even shake his hand? Is it in the cross-palmed hippie handshake of brotherhood or like my daddy taught me....
In the yard were metallic, Day-glo sculptures like giant masks--faces that glared and flashed toothy grins. Peacocks and goats inhabited a fenced-in lot, and through the open door of a severe, cement-block building we saw The Bus, its psychedelic swirls giving way to rust; its once transparent bubble-top command post now a milky white. We were gazing at it in dis-belief when this balding but handsome man strode out of the house. He looked like a lumberjack in his red-plaid flannel shirt, jeans and work boots.

"You must belong to that dog back there," he said in a quiet mid-register voice that conveyed Oregon wilderness.

I said hi, uh, gosh, good to meet you uh....

He smothered my hand in a fist thick as a catcher's mitt, then led us to the bus. He ran a hand along a fender.

"It died on the way to Woodstock," he said. "I think it died of a broken heart... or maybe a broken gizzard." He let us climb aboard and sit where legends had uh... left impressions, including Neal Cassady--a man made famous in the fifties as the inspiration for the fast-talking, fast-driving Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel, On the Road.

Kesey led us around the grounds, showed us his workroom in a wooden shed out back, complete with desk and rustic furniture. Draped over the chair he seated himself in was a sheepskin vest--a gift from a medicine man, I believe. We shared notions and sacraments, then he led us from the shed and into his house. Upstairs he walked us through the terrain of his wall-sized relief map of Oregon with its hills and cascading rivers--settings for his second great novel, Sometimes A Great Notion (1964).

A sonic boom shook the walls and floors as we stood there. Kesey shrugged it off, muttered about military jets, then led us downstairs to see the giant pentagram and zodiac painted large upon his living room floor. The cover of this book is a detail from that painting.

Back outside he set his peacocks loose, their iridescent plumage furled. How they hung back in the gateway, each posing with one claw held aloft on the threshold to freedom.

"They're testing the reality of it," Kesey said.

And so were we, walking cautiously, tiptoeing around questions like, "Why aren't you writing anymore?" "Is the bohemian life suited to a family?" "Are you a religious man?"

We met Faye and two of their children--maybe Jed and Sunshine--who rolled their eyes and acted bored by the visitors from Tennessee, and it struck me that for a former Merry Prankster, Kesey seemed quite settled into the good old American life.

As we stood in his driveway to say goodbye, Kesey said, "I'd consider it a favor if you would stop by my beach house and check on it for me. The key's above the garage door." Consider it a favor! We drove out of sight, then whooped and hollered at our good fortune.

A couple of unreal hours later we stood on the rugged Oregon coast and listened to the tide fire its howitzers, clatter sticks, beat percussion, in a barrage of sounds that demands mixed metaphors to describe.

We watched the ocean reveal her colors--turquoise and teal and mother-of-pearl--as they rocked endlessly in. We picked up driftwood souvenirs, etched with script from unknown hands.

The modest beach house was a treasure chest. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of movie reels lined wooden shelves along walls adorned with photographs of Cassady and other pranksters. I marveled that Kesey had entrusted such treasures to us, and I fought an urge to pick up and quietly steal a hardcover copy of Sometimes A Great Notion that lay on a table. Kesey had inscribed on the front flyleaf these words from Keats:

... Then on the shore of the wide world I stand alone and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink

We emerged from Kesey's beach house three days later and continued an odyssey now tinged with magic. In northern California, the beams from Jasmine's headlights bounced off giant trunks of redwoods. We stopped and gawked up at trees that were old when the Roman Empire was young. We trundled on to San Francisco, with artists on the streets and sailboats in the bay. Out of money, we were rescued when synchronicity prevailed. Kathleen met an old friend from Nashville, a former chemist who had dropped out to juggle and tell jokes to tourists on a pier for a living. He put us up until we could wire home for paychecks.

It was as though in a dream that, still clutching our map, we drove down Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, played the slots in Vegas, stared into the Grand Canyon, and witnessed the Northern Lights fluttering and dancing across the skies as we drove snow-crested ridges of Arizona. We stood underground in Carlsbad Caverns, awed by byzantine formations. Everywhere was evidence of wild divinity in the world, hands of whimsy creating and destroying all in a motion.

It was as we drove again down off the Rockies--this time east towards Albuquerque--a galaxy expanding in the desert night, marking homes where families lived, worked and played, making lives together, making a town--that I realized, You can't stay on the bus forever.

With our trip across America coming to an end, with a child on the way and a dead-end job facing me, I quietly reconsidered those virtues I had been reared on--the same I had read about in Tennyson. Notions such as duty, work, responsibility... and quietly embraced them.

Two weeks later, I saw the mountains of home as a stranger must see them. Lines of undulating blue drawn on the sky--now waves of blue rolling in, piling up, waves to wash all horizons. Closer now becoming distinct giants, the peaks shouldered one another in the fog, straining to peer above the smoky mist that wreathed their brows to see... what? Boulders and river channels and valleys jumbled and gouged and suited for a flourishing of life... life upon life, life upon death... The lump in my throat, that swelling of life in my wife's belly, this my home, this my land for me for now, maybe for all time....

Flash forward to less recessive time, all the way to 1986. Still yet the near and distant past. I was writing an article for The Knoxville News-Sentinel about Kesey's just-released book, Demon Box, when I had occasion to look up the closing lines to Tennyson's epic poem, "Ulysses."

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I quoted the poem in that article for the resonance it would have with Kesey. I pictured this aging hippie tripping over the gunwale as he tries to board his ship to test the wine-dark sea once more. Like bold Ulysses, Kesey too was venturing out again. He had created a replica of the old Merry Prankster bus in some heroic or pathetic effort to reclaim faded glory, and was taking it on the road to promote the new book. I wrote then that I hoped he would search for muses who'd inspired Sometimes A Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. If so, he never found them. None of his later books could match those two.

Demon Box is a compilation of articles and stories. It contains an emotionally devastating tribute to John Lennon, occasioned by his murder in 1980, the event that finally took the air out of the sails of the sixties. That essay is patterned after A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. It's about three ghostly visitors to Kesey's Oregon farm, including one seeker after truth who showed up on his doorstep unannounced... and packing a gun.

There is also an affecting account of the day Kesey learned Neal Cassady had died of exposure, stoned out and trying, on a dare, to count all the railroad ties between Puerto Sancto, Mexico, and the next town over. Cassady's last words? "Sixty-four-thousand-nine-hundred and twenty-eight...."

There's a sweet children's story in there as well, "Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear," which I used to read to my children.

Despite such treasures, Demon Box isn't a miracle of literary creation like those first two books. Sadly, neither is Sailor Song (1992), a novel about Alaska; nor Last Go Round (1994), about a real Oregon rodeo a century ago, although they're charming enough tales.

The Further Inquiry (1990), the coffee-table book mentioned earlier, is a good read and a document of some importance, chronicling the days when Kesey was a lightning rod for change.

Kesey once said he'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph--cultural activist rather than chronicler. For much of his adult life, though, Kesey dropped out of both roles. In the late 1960s, he settled on a dairy farm, where he tended cattle, wrote sparingly, taught occasionally at Oregon U in Eugene, edited the Merry Prankster archive of film footage, hung out with the Grateful Dead, but mostly raised a family and served his community.

If lightning never struck again for Kesey it was largely by design. Likwise, if he never recorded anything very earth-shaking after those first two novels, it was his own call.

But oh what novels. Many a writer would give their entire body of work to have written just one book as good as either of these.

More than anything else I ever read... more than modern American icons The Catcher in the Rye, All the King's Men, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Rabbit Run... more than mossy old classics of world lit like Madame Bovary, The Brothers Karamozov, The Odyssey... more than boyhood favorites Tarzan of the Apes by Burroughs and Tunnel In the Sky by Robert Heinlein and Expedition to Earth by Arthur C. Clarke and The Boy's King Arthur by Sidney Lanier... One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest made me want to be a writer.

I was into my second reading before I realized Kesey is retelling the Jesus story. Pick up the book or rent the Milos Forman film Kesey couldn't bring himself to watch, if you don't believe me. (O.K., Jack Nicholson is no Randle P. McMurphy. He may be an unforgettable version of McMurphy, but he is not Kesey's version, not the brassy flamboyant Irish-descended American Kesey imagined.)

Both the movie and the book struck chords that resonate still in our Americanized English. Nurse Ratched, The Combine, Chief Broom, They're out there, have all become shorthand for larger concepts.

But what resonates most, I believe, even for those not conscious of it as they read, is the subtle retelling of what may be the world's most powerful myth. For brooding in the background of this novel is the image of a man or God broken on a cross.

There is crucifixion, resurrection, a voyage on the sea in an open boat with twelve disciples. There are miracles in which the blind learn to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak. There are stones rolled away and a last supper and final communion of wine and bread in those pages. There's a microcosm redeemed and even a crown of thorns. Read it and weep.

Change it around, disguise it, turn it into a tale told by an idiot, inform it with psychedelic imagery and energy and still the Jungian power of the redeemer, the scapegoat, haunts us. Kesey knew that world-class archetypes reside under the twitching nerves of most every American, perhaps most every world citizen--Christian, Jew, Muslim or atheist--and that most of us, whether as children or adults, have taken part in the human compulsion to single out an individual to blame, shun or ridicule, or have become victims of such compulsions ourselves on some small scale. There is comfort to be had in such pitiable human acts--even redemption of sorts.

People respond to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest because, like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, "it's the truth... even if it didn't happen."
But that's a different question....

Sometimes A Great Notion covers similar terrain. Hank Stamper--leader of a renegade strike-breaking family of Oregon loggers--is the man his suffering community loves to hate. The man they blame for all their woes. Like McMurphy, he is the strongest among them, always fighting attempts to be laid low by his weaker, more... yes, mortal, kith and kin.

Both books are miracles of perspective and voice. Sometimes A Great Notion, despite its slower start, may be the more daring, more accomplished book in some ways. Kesey writes several visceral and believable paragraphs from the point-of-view of a dog, and it's not uncommon to encounter three or four first-person voices intermingled in internal monologue on the same page, along with their external dialogue and the voice of a third-person omniscient narrator.

What pluck, what virtuosity, what fine sensibilities.

I was astounded once in a creative writing seminar to hear the instructor--author of twelve books himself--dismiss Kesey's technique as undisciplined and inconsistent. To me, Kesey's approach was a miracle of perception and technique.

Everytime I re-read those first two novels, I'm thrilled by the delicate... toughness of Kesey's craft and vision; his rendering of life's amazingly complex simplicity (or simply amazing complexity); the word-play; the love of living expressed; the awe at everything in the world; the daring leaps into minds and voices of others, especially in Sometimes A Great Notion. That whole sprawling contraption of a novel effuses divinity and deviltry in each line, and I never quite got it out of my system.

Whether Kesey changed the world or not is, I suppose, debatable. That he changed my world, for better or worse, I can never doubt. There's too much documented evidence among my files and souvenirs to believe otherwise.

Take this fragment from a letter I wrote on the night of June 30, 1997, asking Kesey for an interview....

I often wonder what direction my life would have taken had I not, in deep and droning lassitude, lifted the cover to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest one Saturday in 1972, and disappeared without a trace into a weekend of written wonders.

I know I wouldn't have driven to Eugene, Oregon in 1979 on the off-chance that you would allow me to shake your hand, and therefore wouldn't have had an awakening of sorts as I drove down out of the southern Rockies into the furling galaxy of lights that was Albuquerque and heard a voice tell me I could do damn near anything I pleased--despite my poverty at the time, pregnant bride and paucity of skills--if I would simply go home and get started.

It took years of work, worry and occasional awards to realize doing damn near anything is a lot tougher than voices in the night might make it sound. Still and all, it was in that spirit of boundless optimism you helped bequeath through your writing and hospitality (you've probably forgotten that November afternoon we came calling in the yellow Deadhead-style van) that I ventured to quit my job as feature writer at The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1996 and follow yet another of my heart's true callings....

Need I add that it would make for a crowning kind of honor to feature an interview with you in some future New Millennium Writings.

Please let me know, Mr. Kesey, if you are up for this. I will gladly proceed in whatever manner you choose, whether submitting questions in advance or (what seems more practical) a simple Q&A session recorded by phone. I have enough background about you to fill in any missing colors.

Best regards, Don Williams, Editor.

P. S. I just got off the phone from talking with you, and you said to try back in a couple of weeks. I will give you a call mid-July in hopes of picking a date on which to interview you. Thanks for your consideration, and all that you have meant to so many.

When I phoned back, Kesey was hard at work, after all these years, editing video footage of the Merry Prankster bus ride. Faye was worried. He was working way too hard. Then came the stroke and one thing and another. The formal interview never took place.

Fate and coincidence--synchronicity--would bring us close together once more, however, just months before Kesey's death....

It's 1 p.m. Thursday May 11, 2001, and we've been in Manhattan about an hour when synchronicity strikes--the kind that raises chill bumps. We're sitting in a cafe taking refreshment, when my cousin Mike, who lives in New York, hands me the Times, and there on page one is a picture of Kesey talking to actor Gary Sinese--who's been starring in a revival of the Dale Wasserman play based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Kesey has flown east from Oregon to visit his New York agent and dropped in to see it the night before. He rambles in the interview. He likes the production, but he liked Kirk Douglas, in 1964, better than Sinese. His favorite production was a high school version. Personally, he's doing well, save for a little liver ailment....

That evening, my brother Tim and I pick up tickets at a Times Square booth, and our party--including Kathleen, whose environmental group recently saved a whole gorgeous Tennessee mountain from development--attend the play. Sinese is a fine McMurphy. He's loud and brash, thumps his belly with his thumb for emphasis. The Combine is evoked through psychedelic machinations, trick lighting and good acting.

Whether The Combine really exists in any sense has been much debated, and New York is as good a place to debate it as any. Stand in Times Square and you feel the glowing ads crawl across the walls of skyscrapers, including one digital advertisement swarming over a space ten stories high to promote an Internet company. Corporate America is everywhere. On clothing, buses, subways and more. Moreover the triumph of unadorned architecture seems almost absolute. To look across Manhattan is to gaze upon glistening cubistic crystals of varying heights--almost as if they grew there chemically. Some of them, such as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building are elegant, crown jewels of the city. Most are unadorned slabs.

On the other hand, few cities have celebrated individuality like New York. To stop in Washington Square on a Sunday afternoon is to be serenaded by musicians--many adorned in tie-dyed clothing and other counter culture accouterments. It's also to be entertained by break dancers, acrobats and jugglers who draw crowds wherever they perform. To jog through Central Park is to witness all manner of athlete, actor, filmmaker and activist hawking their wares. The freedom of expression espoused by Kesey is alive and well in New York City. All of which makes viewing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on Broadway an anachronism. Ken Kesey flew--or drove--over the cuckoo's nest of American life nearly forty years ago, wreaking havoc with the system.

In November, 2001, almost exactly twenty-two years to the day after that memorable afternoon on Kesey's farm, a friend phoned to tell me the great man had died. I sat scarcely breathing, scarcely believing, as I absorbed and rejected at once the notion of his death. I thought of myself in 1972 when I picked up my first copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in that run-down Fort Sanders apartment. I thought of New York and Albuquerque and Jeanne and Kathleen and Cape Flattery where my daughter Alexis fluttered to life, and I thought of that yellow van and Kesey's peacocks--iridescent tails still furled, feet poised on the threshold of some freedom too great to imagine.

It was nearly impossible to imagine Kesey dead, so I quit trying. I felt like one of those reborn witnesses to Randle P. McMurphy's symbolic crucifixion at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, when those inmates poised on the edge of freedom turn away in disbelief from their lobotomized savior.
Kesey dead? Joined to eternity?

Who they tryin' to kid?

He was joined to eternity in waking dreams and living words decades ago. Even now he stands on the threshold to some cosmic ocean, one foot poised to enter.

Testing the reality of it.

Originally published in New Millennium Writings. Reproduced here with permission.

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This is not an unusual occurrence, but it is a symptom of an underlying problem with potential repercussions far more serious than hampering Olympic events or adding to the negative publicity surrounding China’s games. The blooms – along with a host of other problems – are caused by excessive amounts of nitrogen from sources such as road and industrial run-off, untreated sewage, and, most of all, fossil-fuel combustion and agricultural fertilizers.

Because it is a major component of proteins and the atmosphere, nitrogen is a vital element in the biosphere. In the soil, nitrogen stimulates growth in plants. Normally, bacteria in soil can take atmospheric nitrogen and combine it with hydrogen to create a molecule that plants can use. We can “fix” nitrogen from the air into fertilizer in a process that takes a lot of heat from fossil fuels.

Applied on farmers’ fields, this artificial fertilizer induces plant growth, but scientists believe that this has resulted in nitrogen entering the Earth’s soils at more than twice its natural rate. This ripples out from the land to affect freshwater and marine ecosystems. Besides giving Chinese Olympic organizers headaches, algal outbreaks have also contaminated drinking-water supplies used by millions of people.

Excess nitrogen can also disrupt or change plant-growth patterns (including contributing to the spread of invasive species), poison freshwater environments, deprive ocean ecosystems of the oxygen needed to support aquatic life, and even contribute to global warming.

In one particularly troubling example of the impact of all this nitrogen, scientists predict that a massive “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico will grow to more than 26,000 square kilometers this summer, which is more than 50 percent greater than the yearly average since 1990. That’s an area about half the size of Nova Scotia! Dead zones are caused by nitrogen and phosphorous washing into the ocean and stimulating growth of excessive amounts of algae and other plants, which then starve the area of oxygen.

Ironically, the increase is fuelled in part by the rush to find alternatives to fossil fuels that contribute to global warming. Farmers along the Mississippi River have been planting more corn and using more fertilizer to meet the demand for corn-based bio-fuels. Corn’s shallow roots don’t hold and absorb all of the fertilizers, so much of it washes into streams that flow into the Mississippi, which drains into the Gulf of Mexico.

In a process known as eutrophication, the nitrates and phosphorous from the fertilizers, along with carbon from the air, stimulate growth of algae and other nuisance plants in the water. When the plants grow, die, and decay, they block the sun and use up oxygen, thus decreasing the supply of dissolved oxygen in the water. This process occurs in lakes as well as oceans. The decayed plants also fall to the bottom and create layers of slime on the lake or ocean floor. Scientists say these dead zones are growing in size and number, with as many as 200 now believed to have formed in the Earth’s oceans.

Nitrogen also contributes to global warming, through fossil-fuel emissions and other human activities such as agriculture, as well as by eutrophication. Nitrogen itself is harmless and makes up 80 per cent of our atmosphere, but nitrous oxide, a byproduct of nitrogen from fossil fuels and agricultural practices, is 300 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – although carbon dioxide is far more prevalent in the atmosphere.

Because we know where much of the excess nitrogen in the environment comes from, we know how to reduce the levels. First, we must cut back on fossil fuels. But we can also reduce our use of chemical fertilizers, in agriculture, on golf courses, and even in our own back yards. We may not be able fix the problem in time for the 2008 Olympics, but we need to get on it now, or we’ll have far bigger problems to contend with than where to hold Olympic sailing events.

Originally published on July 11, 2008

Dr. David Takayoshi Suzuki is distinguished Canadian geneticist who has attained prominence as a science broadcaster and an environmental activist. He is also a co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

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A circle is forming.
You can't hold your breath forever.
Everyone thinks they know you.
Candy dissolves.

There is already, without you, a moon.
There is never, without you, a revolution.
Laughing alone is not recommended.
The melody is strong.

You are dressed for it.
The pen fits, exactly.
Can you breathe otherwise?
Nothing satisfies like removing your gloves.

Why not? Brazen made the dictionary.
So did brine, bombast and brioche
Denouement is really a word.
Disobedience can be looked up.

Thousands of sparrows are counting on you.
Space can fold in on itself.
Reasons line the roads back, but not the way out.
Staring is required.

Besides, do you really think Truth hangs out in a bar?
Or that she would talk to you without her bodyguard?
Check out what marks her shoes make on the floor.
Wait for her at the sink.

Don't double-check my math.
There are no warriors without wounds.
Thirty-nine is as thirty-nine does.
Do you?

Produced here with permission from the author. Visit her website here.

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DōMatcha is a rare and ancient Japanese green tea that combines an ancient tradition with immense health benefits.

Dō (pronounced ‘doh’) is the Japanese symbol for ‘way’ or ‘journey’. DōMatcha means ‘The Way of Matcha’. Discovering the way of Matcha is a journey well worth taking; a journey that brings people together in celebration of health and the simple beauty of life. We invite you to share in our journey and discover DōMatcha - The Way of Tea!

In the 11th century the Zen priest Esai initiated the cultivation of tea in Japan. His famous book about tea opens with the sentence: “Tea is the ultimate mental and medical remedy and has the ability to make one’s life more full and complete.” In saying that, Esai was referring to Matcha, the powdered green tea of his time, later to become Japan’s most treasured kind of green tea and the only tea to be used in the traditional Tea Ceremony (Sadō).

The Japanese Tea Ceremony Sadō (‘The Way of Tea’) in its modern form was developed by Zen monks over the course of the 15th century and became popular with the Samurai society, royalty and Japan’s upper class. The teachings of the monk Sen-no Rikyu were the most influential, basing Sadō on the four principles of harmony, purity, tranquility and respect. DōMatcha was created to honor this sacred tradition.

Domatcha—The Way of Matcha

Today Japan only exports about 4% of its precious matcha. By partnering with Shohokuen, one of the oldest and most established Matcha suppliers in Japan, we are able to bring DōMatcha to you directly from Kyoto, the place where Matcha originated.

DōMatcha contains only the youngest and finest, shade-grown, top 2 leaves and unopened buds of the tea plant. The leaves are de-stemmed and de-veined and finally stone-ground to a very fine, talk-like powder of vibrant green. The simple fact that you consume the entire tea-leaves makes Matcha one of the healthiest beverages on earth, providing you with approximately 10 times more of the health-promoting nutrients of steeped green tea.

The Matcha powder is so fine that it is absorbed instantly and completely so your body will get the full health benefits quickly. This potent powdered green tea is charged with antioxidants and chlorophyll. It is a powerful detoxifier and an extremely healthy energizer that will change your journey through life!

A brief history
Legend has it that the ancient Chinese emperor and inventor of Chinese medicine, Shennong, was the first to discover the pleasant flavor and medicinal properties of green tea. One day, as he was boiling water over a fire, a breeze swept a few leaves of a nearby tea bush into his kettle. Shennong not only enjoyed the newly ‘invented’ beverage, but would also go on to studying the health promoting properties of his accidental discovery. This legend reflects what has been part of the Chinese culture for almost 5000 years: Tea is so precious that it can only be of royal origins and it promotes health in mind and body.

A new powdered form of tea emerged during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The freshly picked tea-leaves were steamed to preserve color and freshness, then dried and ground into a fine powder called ‘tea mud’. The tea mud was placed in moulds, then pressed and left to harden. Later it was dried in the sun and then baked to prevent rotting. These ‘tea cakes’ were easy to store and transport, as tea became more and more popular. To make a cup of tea one would brake of a little piece of the tea-cake and then whisk the tea powder up in a drinking bowl.

This way of processing and preparing tea was eventually abandoned in China. But in the early 8th century traveling Zen monks from Japan had begun to bring tea and tea seeds back with them and started growing tea plants in Japan. Soon the Japanese Zen priests started their own tradition of cultivating, processing and preparing powdered green tea – and so Matcha was born.

The birthplace of Matcha was Kyoto and the surrounding Uji region, where to this date the most premium Matcha is cultivated and manufactured. Matcha became the tea to be used exclusively in the highly regarded practice of the Japanese Tea Ceremony (Sadō). ‘The Way of Tea’ (Sadō) in its current form was established by the end of the 16th century and deeply rooted in the tradition of Zen Buddhism. The serene and austere setting soon became one of the favorite pastimes for Japan’s upper class and Samurai society.

Today, Matcha is not only a highly treasured specialty green tea, but also used frequently in Japanese cooking and baking, in health foods and western style beverage creations, like Matcha lattes and smoothies.

What is Matcha
Matcha means ‘Rubbed or Ground Tea’ and is the Japanese term for the precious powdered green tea, traditionally reserved for the Japanese Tea Ceremony (Sadō).

The process of manufacturing premium Matcha begins with choosing the right place for the cultivation of the tea plants (Camellia sinensis). The soil and climatic conditions play a key role in the final flavor and nutritional value of the tea. The very best Matcha is said to be that from the Uji region of Kyoto. The mountainous region provides the perfect high altitude climate and the morning mists of the 2 rivers of the region add just the right amount of moisture needed for the cultivation of tea. Kyoto is a city with a rich history and culture. It is the place where ‘The Way of Tea’ (Sadō) was formed and refined and where it is still, to this day, an integral part of the culture.

The Matcha tea plants are shaded from direct sunlight for about 8 weeks before harvest. The results are higher chlorophyll and L-Theanine contents and a richer, greener color. L-Theanine is an amino acid specific to green tea that provides unique health benefits and sweetness in flavor. It is the main reason why high quality green teas taste less astringent and bitter and are more pleasant to the pallet. It also helps to reduce stress and induce a state of calm, relaxed alertness.

The different types of Japanese tea are commonly graded depending on the quality and the parts of the plant used. High quality Matcha is always hand-picked to assure that only the unopened tea bud and the accompanying finest, top two leaves are chosen. The tea-leaves selected to become Matcha are called Tencha. The leaves are then carefully steamed to prevent the nutrients from oxidation and keep the tea fresh and green. After that, all the rough fiber, such as stems and veins, are removed to assure the fine powdery consistency and the sweet flavor typical for a great Matcha. The Tencha leaves are then slowly ground up in traditional granite stone-grinders to a very fine, talc-like powder – Matcha!
Since Matcha is extremely prone to loosing nutrients, color and freshness by being exposed to light or air, proper storage and packaging is crucial to assure highest quality.

Quality Matcha
You can tell the quality and freshness of Matcha by the color, the flavor and by how well it mixes.

The higher the quality
- the greener and more vibrant is the color (for both the powder and the prepared cup)
- the sweeter it will taste
- the fuller the flavor
- the ‘greener’ the flavor
- the better it froths up when whisked with a traditional bamboo whisk

Originally published in Domatcha. Reproduced here with permission. Accompanying photos are courtesy of Domatcha.com

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There is pleasure when a sore is scratched,
But to be without sores is more pleasurable still.
Just so, there are pleasures in worldly desires,
But to be without desires is more pleasurable still.
—Nagarjuna

If you catch hold of the cat by its tail, it will bite you. The world will do the same. Live in the world like water on a lotus leaf.
—Yogaswami

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