Conversion, a memoir.

 In "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis the author states "Christianity begins in dismay..." I couldn't have been in more agreement a year ago this month. July fourth two thousand and ten I woke up in the psychiatric ward of the Behavioral Health Resource center in Olympia, Washington in a state of complete devastation and hopelessness. It was my 43rd birthday and that was the icing on the cake of this crawl of despair and aforementioned dismay that was and had been my life for the last seven months. My first thought was the same it had been on previous mornings for as long as I cared to remember...'only twelve more hours to go and I can take my sleeping pill and go to back to sleep...' No joke, waking life was a torment to say the least and sleep was like bathing in a pool of narcotic bliss, such that I never wanted it to end. Awaking and being awake was such an ever constantly dawning nightmare that it was truly unbelievable to me at the time. The rest of the day progressed in maddening redundancy. The monotonous cycle of internal dialogue of despair ground it's way ever deeper. Along with the self hate and horror of my situation was the awful depth of clarity it gave to my entire life and the moment it had been leading up to, this moment. All my best thinking I'd ever done amounted to nothing more than a day filled with groaning, Biblical groaning "For I know nothing good dwells within me..." Romans 7-18. Eternity used to be this novel concept I read about in books I'd bought on the spiritual pursuits previously up to the beginning of last year. A perpetual spring of fluffy, fuzzy ambrosia that we could all bathe in endlessly and ponder the great limitless mystery of ourselves and life. To never grow old once we acquired the appropriate level of selflessness and virtue, the right yoga pose and mantra, etc. was what they all seemed to be alluding to in my opinion. Maybe I wasn't buying and reading the right books but nothing prepared me for the true emptiness I was experiencing then. Eternity on your own is pure hell. A whole day with nothing and no one but yourself and just yourself to look forward to the next day and the next is a truly awful, empty feeling when you realize your true state and when you subsist on nothing more than yourself. Some people have and are currently experiencing this state of being and I truly love and care about them so much it makes me want to cry and break in half. One positive thing from those experiences I'm writing about is the empathy I feel for the afflicted, the so-called insane, psychologically and physiologically challenged in this world.
 I was wearing the same clothes I'd had on since my last shower which was a few days ago. There is nothing so daunting and empty as practicing good hygiene to the mentally afflicted. Brushing my teeth meant the possibility of seeing myself in the mirror and that was beyond my strength and bearing honestly speaking from the truth of the matter. Daily showering meant taking off my clothes and they were an insubstantial layer of armor I wore to block my complete utter painful nakedness from within and without. I was an anathema to myself...and then there was the medication I was on. Outside of the trazodone that I absolutely, short of death could not sleep without, it was a daily dose of nightmares. paxil for the obessive compulsive disorder and anxiety and depression, depakote for the bi-polar, aripiprazole for the auditory and visual hallucinations. lorazepam for the anxiety that the paxil barely alleviated, and tegretol for the mood swings the depakote kind of band-aided so to speak. Not to mention the previous medications that I'd been prescribed before hand and stopped taking when the side effects started to outweigh the direct effects they were created for. Like gabapentin, lithium, lamictal, wellbutrin, and celexa. Outside of the long term side effects of some of these medications, (like a premature death, immunosuppression, spontaneous uncontrolled bleeding) I was and had been on, the short term reactions were barely tolerable. There was a constant ringing in my ears like that of a pa system on feedback, muscle cramps and spasms in my neck and face and limbs that would last from a few seconds to almost a minute. My arms would jerk and twitch on their own volition alarmingly sometimes and with increasing fervor and regularity. Also there was a constant ache throughout my whole musculature system, a feeling like I'd been hollowed out and filled with concrete. Some medications caused this shock like a light sabre was being turned on and off inside my skull intermittently. Other times my head and just my head from the neck up felt like a huge sheet of tinfoil charged with a low dose of electric current tied to a clothes line on a nice soft breezy day in hell. And then there was the drooling. I would wake up sometimes in a literal pool of saliva, rubber sheets and pillows don't absorb much and added to that, I had night sweats so that in the morning it was like waking up on top of a giant water gorged sponge. All this was met each morning with this strange empty moaning keen I would hear and think 'where is that awful sound coming from?' then I would remember it was me. In tandem were the constant sensations of being about to puke my guts completely out of my body in one hurl over and over again and a constant feeling of the feeling I get when I think about the scene I saw once in a slaughter house on HBO of a pig farmer grabbing piglets by the feet and slamming them repeatedly to the concrete floor till they stopped moving, like breaking up a bag of ice, because the mother pig had over produced on the livestock quota. I truly apologize to sensitive readers for that one but I'm trying to create/convey a sense of the constant reality I was living in at the time. Over the last year I've started eating bacon again, that's how hard I've gotten. A less disturbing way to describe it to the layperson would be by staying up on NOT ONE IOATA OF SLEEP AT ALL for about a week straight on a diet of pure coffee and wonder bread including frequent ninja stealth attacks and blood curdling death screams from a trusted friend (to portray the brutalized sense of betrayed trust I felt towards my therapists and doctors) with a cattle prod and sleeping and loitering on a regular basis for long hours at the local grey hound bus depot days at a time in your pajamas. PS. and the security and station personnel unlock the bathrooms to let you use the toilet when They feel like it. Ditto with the exit doors. These were the conditions I was under during my latest hospitalization of about two weeks. In the last seven months since the initial catalyst that set this living personal horror film rolling I'd been hospitalized about eight times or so in different psychiatric wards between Olympia and Seattle. My first initial stay lasted a month and a half and ironically, or not so in retrospect, started in the exact ward I was currently residing in. Other stays lasted from around two to four weeks at a time. I really got to know the ins and outs of psychiatric life short of the fabled Hilton of funny farms, Western State Hospital. About which I and some of my fellow patients/vacation from lifers would whisper about conspiratorially with dread and reverence together before bed check, in the common area.
It wasn't all bad though, the food tasted like total dirt and was shipped from a prison in eastern Washington and prepared and cooked by culinary inmates there, God bless them. (I'm speaking specifically of B.H.R. in Olympia.) There was absolutely nothing to do all day long outside of the scheduled group therapy during which disenchanted, disgruntled group therapists pried sullenly at my psyche, my current mood, to find out what my goals were and my expectations for the rest of my life. They asked questions I was completely baffled by like "What if you could be anything you wanted right now, what would it be?" My answers to these questions orbited more often than not on the subject of BEING COMPLETELY NONEXISTENT ten times out of ten. To have never have occurred ever in the entire wholeness of time and the infinite span of the universe was my ultimate fantasy and the ever constant bobbing carrot from the string on the stick that was hovering ever out of reach before my eyes metaphor for my life at the time. The next question of course was " Why do you feel this way James?" and before I learned to start lying to them so as to avoid further 'managing and prying' along with a new slew of medications and the ever looming possible long term stay at the happy Hilton which I simultaneously feared and hoped for, I told them this...
 Late January of 2010 I passed a kidney stone that I was hospitalized for during which I was given a few liquid pain killers intravenously that caused a drug induced psychosis. I was living in a town outside of Olympia, Washington of about twenty miles or so and renting a recreational vehicle from a friend that had it parked in his driveway. I had been working at a theme water-park/hotel establishment a mile or so down the street where they owned a Starbucks franchise. Working as a barista there I pumped out endless amounts of drip coffee, lattes, espressos and other highly priced hot beverages in short, tall, grande and venti amounts. As the case was I had endless opportunities throughout the hours between rushes to concoct my own inventions from the near endless array of flavored syrups and sugars and dairy products that were available to choose from. It was a virtual science lab of kidney crystallizing cornucopia that I indulged in with childlike wonder and abandon. I drank about a glass or two of water a day, on a good day. So one night after a late shift at the coffee shop I was lying in my bed in the trailer I rented. I'd had so much espresso that day my eyes were vibrating in my sockets and this pain was beginning in my lower back. Standing in one spot all day and lifting semi heavy objects without bending the knees is bad for you and that's what I contributed the growing pain too. A pulled muscle, strained tendon etc. and basically bad posture were my diagnoses at the time. For those not informed coffee, carbonated drinks and caffeinated teas, etc. are diuretics. They pull moisture from the body and without an ample supply of water as backup they cause the kidneys to overwork and gather minerals, sugars, etc. which eventually form stones. Lying there I was suddenly wracked with this immense throbbing pain like a drill bit boring into the small of my back on my right side. Immediately following was a incredible urge to urinate immediately in my pants. I struggled up and in a walking fetal position I got to the bathroom which was fortunately about five feet away. I tried to pee and nothing happened and continued to not happen. As I stood there swaying over the commode, pain mounted to excruciating waves and I started to panic, reality was dawning. I'd been through this same experience before when I'd passed a stone five years earlier in Austin, TX. Completely similar circumstances, lots of espresso shots on little or no water and long bike rides in the hundred plus degree weather and summer sun. I had been under the impression at the time that I was made out of bullets.After which a week long gestation period for the 'Birth' to transpire left my sense of body confidence, not to mention the rest of me, completely ravaged and humbled. 'Maybe this won't be as bad' I hoped and tried to buckle myself down mentally to wait out the storm. In a flash of genius I grabbed a jar from the sink, created my own version of the 'Trucker Bomb' and rolled back into bed. Hoping all the while I'd fall asleep and the stone would pass in the night so to speak and I'd wake in the morning fresh and dandy and much more the wiser. After about five minutes or so I got up and got into the house, woke up John, my longtime friend and rentee at the time and we headed to the hospital.
 It was all formula for a dark comedy routine, it seemed like we hit every red light on the way during which the eons and "oceans of time" (from F.F. Coppola's 'Dracula', I've always loved that phrase) we traversed, I would writhe and moan in the passenger seat on the way to the ER. There was completely nothing like it and in some remote area of my conscience I watched myself impassively with a sort of morbid fascination. This was a state of mind I would find myself in more frequently as the future unseen agonies of mind, body and spirit rolled out to enfold me in their chilling embrace. A foreshadowing of the forming ranks of trials and tribulations to come.
 Once at the hospital and waiting in the emergency room, more moaning and writhing occurred. I mentally chanted a mantra I'd been using for about a decade or so as I'd been a practicing Buddhist during the last ten years. I'd repeated it often during moments of informal prayer here and there to help me sleep and as a general fall back plan when my internal dialog started to render me insensible at times when caffeine levels hit critical mass. It was something for my thoughts to focus on and in a masochistic way I thought of it as an opportunity to build some high caliber virtue and personal character. With tears in my eyes and under the amused hidden glances of other emergency room patrons I did the funky chicken on a plastic spoon shaped seat waiting for a doctor.
 "For we are not contending with flesh and blood but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." EPHESIANS 6-12. Okay, just take a breath. Cause I could, barely. Under observation at last and poked and prodded and pumped up on Dilaudid, liquid Tylenol and an anti- inflammatory, I continued to dance the night away in a hospital gown under the fluorescent retina scarring lights of the ER in St. Peter's Hospital. Talk about foreshadowing. You'll see.
 "THE PAIN!!!" (Paul Muad' Dib in DUNE) It's the toughest riddle according to the late D. Boone but it was no riddle to me at all, just clean, straight up, ice pick in your back honest pain, no holds barred. Nothing compared to it, ever, in my entire life...except that time before in Texas. My house mate John kind of hovered around my gurney wanting to help somehow but completely powerless....in an attempt at humor I told him to go on without me, to save himself, like in the movies. I got more dilaudid and more liquid tylenol.The anti inflammatory wasn't really kicking in yet....It's purpose was to dilate the microscopic tube between my kidney and bladder that the urine waste ran through to eventually be released out the pee hole. At the moment that tube was wrapped like a lover around a stone about the size of a period, literally, once passed and under inspection a few hours later. In Texas after I'd passed my first stone I put it under a microscope and gazed in awe and mute face prickling disgust at the ridges and valleys, spires and crevices of this downright sinister object. It had this suspicious light coffee colored brown hue with chunks of red like deposits(my blood) marbled through it. At the present moment in the hospital I could feel every ridge and spire and crevice gouging it's way along my urethra like a box of razor blades going through a soda straw. At one point I remember dreaming and being awake at the same time because I was sure the doctor had just told me they were going to put me in a tub of water and electrocute me till the stones (yes, there were more than one of them, one in the tube and two more on the way) disintegrated. I wasn't dreaming and truly the only thing that stopped me from that fore-mentioned baptismal shake-n- bake was that the doctor told me that that procedure would number up in the thousands on my upcoming hospital bill, (apparently hospital electricity is more expensive than regular everyday electricity) that he kept bringing up. Like "Man, the street cost on that dilaudid runs about 600$ a gram and that's the third one we've given you..." He seemed excited. We're talking grams, peeps...mega doses of opioids streaking through my neural synaptics and firing off serotonin re-uptake inhibitors like the proverbial pin ball machine.I WAS REALLY HIGH!!!...and if I hadn't been in the pain I was in I would have been dancing through the hallways, chasing nurses and babbling castenadian metaphysics at the interns. It's a point I want to make about the drugs that they were causing hallucinations, like a shimmering in my peripherals and a three dimensional cartoon like cast to my surroundings and this general goofy tortured sense of well being. Maybe some of you have been there. I was fading in and out at times on the hospital bed, a captive audience to John Wayne cowboy and indian fever dreams mixed with harsh doses of reality in maddening chinese water torture IV drip intervals. Long periods of waiting for urine test results, blood test results, "Would you like us to get you something to drink?", trick question test results, etc. Things started to ease off finally, like a long slow sigh of relief just around the corner and I could breathe almost normally again. The liquid inflammatory was starting to kick in and the nurses were getting prettier by the moment. I felt like I'd been underwater for the last several hours and was starting to rise to the surface so to speak. There was a dull muted throb of knife stabs from my lower back but that dog was on a leash for the moment. I started contemplating life without pain again. The doctor mentioned that this might be a temporary lull of numbness due to the effects of the anti inflammatory and that I possibly might find myself right back in the game again if the stone didn't pass while the medication lasted. I opted for getting up and out of there and going home while I was able to. The effects of the pain killers were starting to slip into a descent and I suspected a crash would soon envelop from previous experiences during the years of childlike/young-adulthood binge drinking and self medicating forays of my twenties. It had been awhile but the dull helicopter whup, whup, whup, thumping drone of an approaching burnout and bail on waking life for about a week sounded like ice cream. The doctor had prescribed me some oral pain killers, percocet, more opioids. These induced a dream like slightly feverish tone to my senses when taken and really worked for diluting the pain in my lower back. Back at the house and on the couch and floating in a nimbus of minor aftershock from the earlier festivities I sort of semi patiently waited. It was four in the morning and exactly twenty four hours preceding the same moment of the next day that I would walk into the house from the trailer outside and tell John. "I need to see a priest!" I fell asleep for about an hour or so....and then something gave...there was this rush of heat along my lower back and I felt the wonderful sensation of painlessness. In this halleluja chorus of rapture like release I passed water for the first time since this whole thing started above a commode in the house bathroom. There was this sharp skipping tinge of pain from the center of my groin and out my ... and with a musical 'ploop' and a 'tink' the stone sat at the bottom of the toilet bowl. A little black period at the end of this long night's ordeal. I don't care about what that stupid TV commercial I grew up with says, Relief is spelled just like it sounds and from that moment on I was a new man, no more coffee! I was going to drink water like no tomorrow, write the great american novel, kiss babies and run for president as soon as I got up the next morning. There was some after pain like the doctor had warned but nothing like previously at the hospital. I popped a few more percocet and in a sort of delicious 'It's all over' dream like haze I stumbled wearily to my trailer and into bed and passed out.
 The following morning wake up call, to kids playing and dogs barking in the  cul de sac just outside the town I fondly referred to as 'The Butt Hole of The Known Universe', was sort of rough understandably. I was pretty raw and loopy to say the least. The neighbors dog about two houses down yelped out in machine gun like staccato bursts every two or three minutes just when you thought he was going to stop, over and over again. They kept him in the yard morning noon and night through ice rain snow and heat all year round and he was utterly miserable and neurotic. The times I would pass by their yard on the way to work he would lunge out at me, straining at the end of his leash in whimpering lonely desperation, then pressing himself into me full bodily with upturned sad velvet painting puppy dog eyes. It was like he wanted to physically morph himself into my being through osmosis and just stay there, never parting ways again. Abandoned, and alone, right out there in the front yard while his owners sat locked into the television set, growing more despondent and fatter by the second.
 On the other end of the block, four houses down was a meth lab disguised as a house. An amazing assembly of dilapidated cars and trucks stranded in the driveway and about the lawn were a testimony to their owners complete lack of concern and awareness for their own surroundings and for the sensibilities of their neighbor's, whom were likewise obliviously strapped into their armchairs and rapt in servitude unto the day's allotted NFL game, 'Call of Duty' first person shooter bang ups and one dollar red box DvD rentals of numbing visual gluttony for the evening. The woman who owns this local stronghold of 'Methatopia' rents out each of the four bedrooms separately on a nightly/daily basis. All the windows are covered from the inside with dark sheets and blankets. In the driveway are several garbage cans and recycling bins compressed and brimming over with rotting refuse. The garbage that doesn't fit in the cans is stuffed into black hefty trash bags, piled all over the property and shoved to bursting into some of the cars and vans so full already that the doors and windows wont close. People from all walks of life traverse constantly two and fro through those doors at all hours .They all have this common trait, in varying degrees of severity from just noticeable to full blown consumption. They all look like they are collapsing in on themselves, dying of slow starvation spiritually, emotionally and physically. Women and men in their twenties and thirties going on sixty with no front teeth, drag on cigarettes, gnaw their fingernails to stubs and sit in the yard and on the porch and in their cars round the clock, shaking, shucking and jiving a sad diseased beat into nothingness and nowhere. They've sold their houses, lost their jobs, their families and their lives to this blind sucking empty abysmal vacuum that is literally sweeping through the outskirts and byways of the pnw and other parts of the country.
 The house right next door in virginal contrast stands immaculately kept and cared for. Lawn trim and at regulation height. Garden hose neatly wrapped and stored. Front porch and drive way swept and pristine. Trash and recycling bins standing at full attention on garbage day and neatly and quietly rolled out of site on others. Along the chain link waist high fence encompassing the yard are a garden variety of rose bushes, shrubberies (Ni) and other eye pleasing flora in healthy eye comforting arrangements. Though the house is considerably smaller than it's neighbor, it holds in its womb a large family of children and adults. The patriarch I often greet in passing as he sits on his porch surveying his small kingdom. "Commo est das?...Bein. Du?...Bein, Gracias Senior, Buenes Noches!, etc. My Spanish isn't what it used to be when I lived in Texas but I'm grateful for the exchange of simple pleasantries in a foreign tongue, the novelty never wears off.
 "And lean not upon thine own understanding." PROVERBS 3-5. The first part of that proverb says to "Trust in the Lord with all thy heart", but at the time I had no true concept of that kind of trust in Him or myself or anyone for that matter. I trusted in the way things were, at the moment.... If I was stressed out I trusted that. If I was at peace, I trusted that, and If I was in pain, I trusted that as well. I trusted that "The universe is unfolding as it should..." Spock in 'Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country'. It was a loose, go with the flow sort of modus operandi that I had been following for as long as I cared to think about it.
 As that certain day progressed into evening I sort of hobbled to and from my trailer and into the house intermittently. I was house bound out of exhaustion and detoxing from all the painkillers, anti-inflammatory, etc and craving (believe it or not) a great big cup of 'Jo'. The one paradox of pain is that it is so convicting when it is present and when it's gone it leaves no trace of itself other than a memory of pain, giving the recipient a false sense of confidence; that it's gone forever and won't be as bad the next time it rears it's awful gorgon head into unsuspecting view, and in retrospect had it really been that bad? Yes! it was awful, not that much time had passed. Ok, cut to the chase. Around midnight or so in the trailer I gave up on reading, watching TV. listening to the radio, etc. and whatever else activities I'd been distracting myself with all day and tried to go to sleep. I'd had yet another percocet before retiring...all under prescribed doctors orders mind you. 'Take as needed for pain, but not exceeding four pills every twelve hours'. I was floating in this quasi waking dream state and the percocet was fueling these pleasant sensations of floating. I was reciting the buddhist mantra I'd been using for years during times like this, outside of actual prayer time, to sort of focus my thought energy and fall asleep, eventually. I was semi conscious of my surroundings, night sounds from outside, I-5 corridor rumbling with semi traffic in the distance and my brookestone laboratories sound machine next to my bed.( I only lately after a year and a half or so, since that night been able to actually plug it in again and listen to it, after months of sheer aversion to the subjects I associate it with.) I had it on the 'Ocean Waves' setting and was floating off on my raft of 'narcotic bliss' into the aforementioned 'woolly fluffyness...'
 My mantra was a series of sounds, group of words, syllables believed, in buddhist, tibetan, hindu and other eastern religions, spiritual belief systems, etc. to create spiritual transformation. Through constant repetition of the mantra, one slowly loses attachment to the internal dialog, the chatter box in our head, and if persistent and under no certain set of circumstances or period of time past, one might experience the cessation of, or the dropping off of aforementioned internal dialog and arrive to a state of non-judgement. That would then allow the one practicing an experience of one's true state of being. True Self. Oneness with all things, Atman, Zen, Nirvana (not the band) Satori, etc. The buddha stated (maybe not the exact words because I don't have my 'Teachings of the Buddha' copy any more, I burned it in the back yard in a barrel with all the other eastern spiritual paraphernalia I'd been collecting over the years in a genuine christian old school book burning revival, yehaw, can I get a witness? can I get an amen? Hallelujah brothers and sisters...etc...don't worry, don't run away, really...'and don't judge' most of all with complete disdain my own personal religious (according to some) regression back into the spiritual dark ages, not so long ago in this country mind you...at least not until you've read the whole story. or do...( I burnt, exorcised those remnants of my past for a sense of closure and rebirth into my current standing as a Roman Catholic in The Roman Catholic Church, the first and only church created by Jesus Christ, that many sects of other Christian denominations that have since sprung off that original vine will argue and deny with mouth foaming vehemence and persecution till Judgement days arrives...whew, hope some of you are still with me.)          
 The buddha stated that "The world is full of suffering." and "Desire is the root of all suffering." In loose buddhist terms people suffer from a sense of desire for things they don't have or for things that are unattainable to them. Good health, financial security, food, shelter, clothing, undying love from a cherished one are not guarantees simply because one is experiencing them at the present moment. In so forth people suffer for want of these things to simply last forever and never cease... The buddha states that, in loose terms again, "we suffer from an incorrect way of thinking about things." Through meditation with perseverance and along with the practice of other virtue building habits concerning food, clothing, daily activities, we might one day arrive upon this right way of thinking about things and end our personal suffering somewhat in the revelation and enlightenment of true self awareness and live in freedom. After a decade or so of practicing buddhism and zen meditation this was the gist of my understanding of it, so to speak. In half sleep/awake mode I recited my mantra and stared off into the dreamy abyss behind my closed eyes (does that remind anyone of anything?) This 'weird' thing started to happen that I contributed to the effects of the percocet...as I watched, my mantra started to form (for lack of a better word) into a tube that extended off into the space of darkness before me from a point just in front of my right eye. There was this depth of field starting to grow and at the other end of my mantra, tube, distortion I saw this light about ten feet away or so from my bed if I'd had my eyes open. Like the light at the end of the tunnel but not so cathartic. I remember thinking 'That's weird' and kept on humming along anyway with a sort of detached fascination. A face began to form or had been there the whole time, I wasn't sure, and the light was emitting from it's mouth, and the mantra as well, I suddenly realized. It was reciting the mantra and I was listening to it. The face was very much like one of those laughing buddha statues I've seen in chinese restaurants, except this one wasn't laughing or smiling good naturedly. The look or expression on it's face was one of focused intent...like that of a fisherman poised to jerk the line at the moment of a bite. This sort of unease started to build in my abdomen just where the stomach and diaphragm meet and continued to grow into a feeling of mild dread and I reflexively fully awoke to my present everyday surroundings but not before the face contorted into an expression of irritation and slightly concealed coughing sputtering rage, like one might imagine seeing when jerking a lollipop from the mouth of a rather ugly, unpleasant and somewhat sinister baby. I was fully awake and creeped out . It was about one thirty in the morning. I tried to wrap my mind literally around what I'd just experienced. In all my previous drug experiences, specifically hallucinogenic ones from back in the day I'd 'seen a few things' had a few "woo woo" moments (thanks Jordan) with the "inscrutable immutable" ('Dispatches' by Michael Herr) yet nothing so profoundly 'Organic' is the term that comes close to describing it. I had felt a sense of sentience from that face, a self conscious awareness it had seemed to have, let alone the fact that it had seemed highly aware of and focused on me. There was no getting around it. But at the same time I'd never truly been as doped up before on opiates as I'd been the last twenty four hours or so. I attributed it to the dilauted, percocet, etc. and tried to leave it at that. This is like that part in the movie we all experience frustratingly with delicious dread as the victim upon hearing a scratching noise or the slide/shuffle of something dark and chilling on the other side of the door or in the basement, unsuspectingly and trustingly investigates.... I, out of a complete sense of tiredness and resignation in spite of the recent events, felt I had no other real choice. I went back to sleep or something like it but sort of on my guard so to speak sans mantra this time. I had actually fallen asleep I think for a few moments or had been for awhile because I couldn't remember when I'd arrived at the current point of the dream I was having. I was looking down from a vantage point of what I estimated to be about ten to twelve feet. I was in or looking into a cavern. In front of me and at a distance were two ornate posts about six feet high with large metal cisterns at the top. In each of these cisterns fire was burning. In the background I could see columns extending off in regimented spaces into the black. It was similar to the Mines of Moria scene right before Gandalf's confrontation with the balrog in P. Jackson's 'Lord of The Rings', but other than that all similarity ceased. This place was gross, and painful. There was an inky green black haze enveloping everything and distorting the view the farther back I tried to see into the distance. The posts that the burning cisterns were mounted on were carved in a very strange and once again gross, painful design. Forms of bodies, animals, faces all wrapped and twisted around and among one another formed the body of each post. Whatever deep symbology my id had dredged up from the nether regions of my subconscious in dreams previously, paled starkly in comparison to this evening's current opus. I was looking into a realm completely undiscovered before in my then 43 years of experience in the land of Nod. The point I really want to make is that there was no dreaminess to the 'dream' I was currently having. In regular normal everyday/night dreams of the past, I walked about them, was carried along in this sort of temporary amnesia state, I'd always been in the dream, was the dream and never had there been anything else but the dream...or an idea of it being a dream till upon awaking I would think, "oh, I was dreaming." An then I would go about my day. In this current situation I felt like I was somewhere and had a sense of being myself apart from the experience, self conscious so to speak during the whole experience, not like watching a movie but knowing it was a movie and being in it. Kind of like every day life.
 Next to the burning posts were these statues. Each of the two cisterns had it's own matching statue so to speak standing a few feet away and to the left side or right side of that specific cistern. These statues were pretty much formed of the same ropy like crush of a multitude of faces bodies and arms, legs, etc.. They had these Giger/Dante'esque totem like bird of prey heads atop them. Each statue I would say was about twelve feet tall from the perspective I was viewing them from. The craziest part, for lack of a better word, were the eyes of the vulture death heads from hell. You know how birds to get a good look at you will turn one good eye fully towards you to get a gander, so to speak. Both of these statues were turned or facing me, my position from the perch on the wall I was viewing them from on the opposite side of the room, cavern, cave etc. I had a full view of one's left side face and the other's right side face or beak. The eyes were these deep green black red pupiless amethyst like hue and you could look into them and see depth and distance and chillingly so, sentience. There's a line out of the previously mentioned book by Michael Herr, called 'Dispatches' where the author tries to convey the sense of utter devastation and complete loss and hate he feels coming from this war torn veteran soldier during the Vietnam war at a bar in Saigon. Something like "looking into his eyes was like looking at the bottom of the ocean..." This was the exact feeling I was experiencing but magnified many times more so. There was such a completely alien otherworldly tone to those eyes I truly could not fathom it. And then one of the statues took a step towards me. I sort of reeled back in a state of true sudden horror..up to the moment I had been a bystander, observing a very novel, somewhat uncomfortable view and suddenly I was the center piece. There was no doubt whatsoever in my mind that I had become an object of attention. With the same look of hungry intent I'd seen during my previous encounter, this 'being' slowly approached my position, my vantage point, there was such a look and feel of anticipation burning in those eyes I felt truly stalked and hunted. In an panic stricken moment and blur I struggled to wake up from this truly living nightmare, it was like being in a tunnel and swimming upstream against a strong current. I felt like I was being pulled at and sucked back into the place I'd just left and at the same time the feeling of rising to the surface of real world was simultaneous. I was awake suddenly and my eyes were open but something was wrong. The acid sense of dread was still with me and rising as every hair follicle and nerve went on full alert. I was fully awake on my bed and in a sense of truly not knowing what to do I just laid there. It was about three thirty am. a very conspicuous hour in the days, weeks and months to come. In the past, the distant past during 'bad trips' on drugs I would just stonewall the experience and wait it out. "you will come down, your ok, breathe..."I told myself as my heart hammered away into the quiet of late night and early morning. I promised myself I would never, ever, take drugs, any drugs, every again. I truly did not want to think about what had just happened and truly could not stop thinking about it at the same time and I was completely terrified of closing my eyes and going back to sleep. It felt like there was a layer of ice between the inside of my skin and the surface of my muscles. Like a layer of ice fat I wanted to thaw out as quickly as possible. I closed my eyes with a feeling like stepping into a pool of opaque swamp water full of vipers, razor fish and vampire clowns waiting out of site just below the surface. There was this swirl of color from the right side of my vision, a sickening blend of neon puke green and peptobismal pink undulating and forming and unforming. With a sickening feeling of the acid dread that would become my constant companion for the next seven to eight months or so, I Witnessed. Sort of like looking into an oil slick in the street on a rainy day things rose to the surface and sunk down again. With a redundant mounting horror I realized I was completely awake and I could see these disturbances eyes closed or open if I kept my vision centered and still long enough. Dragons, demonic faces, twisted fucked-up-ness like I'd never seen before right there in front of me and absolutely nothing I could do to deny, escape or evade it. It was a transparent tapestry permanently entrenched in my field of vision. At the center of it all and at the same depth of the previous face I'd first encountered was a shadowy circle like pit of complete absolute darkness, like the center of a spider web or in my current state, a nightmare version of a dream catcher. And out of this utter pit of complete abysmal inky blackness, a face started to form that was even darker and blacker...like in the movies, right before the moment of truth, in the background was a symphony of a slowly building psycho music that rose to a shrieking crescendo as the face came fully into being right there before me in all its sickening devastating splendor. I cannot describe in words the utter desolate mind numbing marrow leadening incredible HATE! this face, this true demon from the underworld truly felt for me and the utter perverse pleasure it was taking at the complete shock, realization and disbelief that I felt as it literally raped and ripped everything I thought I knew was absolutely true about myself and the world I lived in completely from me. In a gibbering hitching moan of pure mortal terror I got up from my bed, out of my trailer through the four am morning chill and into the house where I found John at the kitchen table quietly nursing a cup of tea and reading The Holy Bible.
 "Count it all joy, my brethren, when you meet various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." The letter of Saint James 1, 2-4. IGNATIUS Catholic Study Bible New Testament.
 I had a moment of such pure divine bliss that put the previous weeks of sleepless demonic torment momentarily to complete shame and obscurity. We were driving up the coast of the Olympic Peninsula to Ft. Warden for a Catholic healing retreat that transpired yearly that month of February 2010. I was reciting 'The Lords Prayer' internally over and over again and had been for the last week and a half or so. Only God can pull good out of evil and this prayer had become my lifeline, so to speak, in an otherwise arduous mental onslaught that yanked and shook me back and forth helplessly each and every second non-stop during waking hours. It was a divine Holy mantra and I clung to it like the proverbial life raft. In the last week and a half since my first demonic experience in the trailer I had literally slept about four hours collectively here and there out of complete exhaustion. These bits and snatches of rest were interwoven with a constant harassment of visual, mental and auditory bombardments induced to shock. A constant rape of my sensibilities that made 'The Exorcist' starring Linda Blair and Max Von Sydow seem like a 'My little pony' ride through Wonka land. Every time, right at the edge of sleep when I could just feel myself slipping away into true rest at last, a face of pure nightmare would lunge out at me from the abyss behind my closed eyes. This was demonic guerrilla warfare at it's finest. It was meant to torment and torture to the last, rendering it's victim to a state of a complete blubbering horrified mess and it was working. (I've had arguments in the last year off and on with goody goody woolly fluffers here and there about the term 'Demonic'. Most suggested that these manifestations were a subconscious creation of my own making. That through years of unresolved childhood trauma and suppressed rage I gave birth to these Freudian nightmare children of my Id. Although well meant the complete audacity of these suggestions was comedic and heartrending. To me it was like telling a rape victim secretly, after the horror and atrocity of their ordeal and the lifelong restructuring and mending ahead with no real assurance of full recovery ever, that they'd subconsciously wanted it to happen. These are the same type of people in my opinion who tell cancer victims that they "wanted to have cancer" on some sort of spiritual goo goo level. All I can say is please stick your fingers back in your ears, squint your eyes closed shut and waggle your tongues all the way back to foo foo la la land. I live in a world of absolutes, of extreme light and darkness with all the grey areas in between that albeit are not as self affirming as yours,are much more realistic. It is my blog, remember, and I'm prone to ranting, lol.
  In my entire previous decade of practicing buddhism not once had I ever experienced the complete total bliss of the moment I'm about to describe. I was riding shotgun with my housemate John in his car in pure pesonal darkness, mentally reciting "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name..." staring out the passenger window in despair at the most beautiful blue sky late winter early spring day. The Puget Sound was chopping away lazily at itself along a rolling shoreline of old growth evergreens and oyster beds...the Cascades lined the eastern horizon like a row of chocolate sundaes brimming with marshmallow clouds. I had never been more miserable, truly, in my entire life. 'Our Father...' and Whoom! there was this explosion of white heat-less fire inside my mind and body. It was like being inside the sun but with no burning, just pure complete joy. Every fiber and cell of my being was rejoicing at once. For fifteen to twenty seconds I was truly and blissfully aware that I had never ever in my life felt such peace and tranquility. It was possibly, under the conditions, the best and worst thing that could have ever have happened to me in my life so far. The complete polar opposite of pure evil is love, truly. I didn't know what to do or say or think and then like the sun sinking over the horizon it began to fade and the horror slowly crept back in and a minute later it was like it had never happened. I was devastated, I felt like I had found something, an end to it, it was finally over, the torment, and that I had ruined it somehow by trying to hold on to it, cling to it and inadvertently caused it's cessation. In retrospect I look back and I think that at the time it was some sort of promise of the future joy and glories of the life to come, a baptism of The Holy Spirit at a moment of total despair when someone up there cut me a little slack so to speak and gave me a taste. I just had to keep holding and be held up by my cross and witness and be patient and breathe.
 My initial experience with a Catholic Mass was one of joyless expectation. It had been a few days after the first encounter with the demonic and I was in no way shape or form up for any sort of persecution, eye rolling and mock sympathy from anyone. I absolutely could not believe what was happening to me and my true life stephen king story lot in time right now. I wasn't really sure how or what was going to happen,- I had visions, memories of church from late childhood. My stay with relatives for a year in the bible belt town of Utica, Ohio. I'd been a free love hair down to my bum commune child of the seventies raised from the grass roots up on a land Co-op just outside of Tallahassee, Florida with my sister. We had the choice of attending class or roaming in feral packs across the country side with other like minded/raised hippy chilluns, killing snakes with sticks or throwing rocks at the seven foot alligator that lurked in the local swimming hole just down from the free-school we all went to. My mom thought a little change of scenery and environment would do me well as I was chomping and pulling at the bit so to speak around the house and with her hands full with me and my sister and the adult/child peter pan syndrome boyfriend she catered too, one less adolescent in the house must have seemed like a great opportunity. The first thing my aunt did upon my arriving at the airport in Ohio was to take me to a barber and cull the extraordinary mop of hair on my head and along my back down to the quick so to speak. I got 'buzzed'. Then she threw away all the clothes I'd packed with me. I went to Buster Brown's and got Church shoes, Church pants and Church shirts. All brown and black. Then in due course we went to Church. The 'Church of God' Pentecostal Parish of Utica, Ohio. There within about 72 hours of my arriving in the aforementioned bible belt, I got saved! All of my child like life up to that point I'd been living in a state of complete abandon and utter sin, I'd had no idea. As my aunt took me up to the front of the pews and to the alter I could hear my cousins bobby and chris snickering and simpering back and forth together from their seats in the back, at my predicament. I was instructed to kneel and plant my forehead on the first step and the preacher laid his large sweaty palm against the back of my head and with growing fervor and frothing called upon the Holy Spirit to come down upon this young heathen sinner and impart His blessing and salvation upon me, cleansing me of all my transgressions with one fell swoop and a few knocks against the wood floor as he accentuated each syllable with a thrust for emphasis to the back of my head from the top step of the alter. I felt nothing but embarrassment, shame and a sense of already growing rage and frustration at my cousins, my aunt, my mother and at myself for having let myself be talked into this whole journey from the beginning. I missed my friends. I missed Florida. I missed my hair. It was with a sense of mild dread that I was finally led back to our pew freshly scourged and shriven. The dread intensified as the evenings festivities progressed. I was given witness to all sorts of revelations about the outside world and it's ongoing headlong stumbling tumble of woe and retribution that would finally find its resting place of torment in the hate filled soul searing arms of Hell. In my previous twelve years of existence on this planet I'd never had an inkling as to this reality I'd found myself a witness too and was now an accomplice too. Did anyone back in Florida know about this? Did my family? Why hadn't anyone told me? It didn't seem real but here it was and people were literally rolling in their pews in eccleasiastical agony and ecstasy, the preacher jumping and hollering from the proverbial mountain top and then began the speaking in tongues. Imagine a scene out of Laurence of Arabia, or of a victorious war party of devout extremist Islamic women just fresh from Jihad!!!...take all those sounds of whooping and trilling tribulation and cram it all into a really small twenty pew one room church with about twice as many people dressed to the nines in polyester wide lapel flair bottom finery,  and you've got it all, plus some really crappy tinny music from a turn of the century altoona combine organ and you've got the gist of it. It was hell as far as I was concerned and I was in for it, a year of it apparently and no refuge or escape in site.
  -I was feeling all the feelings of dread I'd had as a youth but in adult proportions during this moment. It was all pretty simple and sort of anti-climactic. Throughout the whole Mass there were several moments of standing and then sitting and then standing again, a round thin wafer was held up and prayed over ceremoniously -The Eucharist- some more prayers were said and then people in single file got up from the pews, walked to the altar, knelt and rose, took the wafer by hand or by mouth from the priest crossed themselves moved once again single file to the cup of wine proffered and in similar fashion took a sip and crossed themselves and in single file proceeded back to their pew where they stood and or knelt till everyone had taken the Body and Blood of Our Beloved Lord and Savoir Jesus Christ. All during this hour my oppression was at it's mind slaying tormentive height. My guts were crawling with anxiety. I wanted to run, scream, explode and disappear all at the same moment. Everyone seemed so happy and at peace and here I was on my absolute last thread of sanity and an unknown six or seven months of bleak hate fear filled days and nights of demonic joy ahead. I thought about how incredibly insane it all was. I was being attacked by demons. Real Demons, not metaphors, not symbolic manifestations of my subconscious, not analogys for a state of addiction to a drug or alcohol or another person, fetish, place or thing. Demons. Look it up in the Dictionary. "Demon-is a supernatural being from various religions, occultisms, literatures, and folklores that is described as something that IS NOT HUMAN and in ordinary (almost universal) usage, MALEVOLENT!"
 "Imagine if you will..." Everything you've ever read about your worst nightmares from a comfortable distance of fiction suddenly becoming non-fiction, right there in front of you and in you. Everything else is just as real and comfortable as it seems. The sun is shining, people are going about their day. The earth is turning on it's axis around the sun likes it's been doing for the last several billion years or so. There are dinosaur bones in museums that give testament to their reign a few hundred million years ago. There are stars at night reaching out as far as the eye can see traveling at phenomenal light year speeds per second explosively outwards from a certain point of origin and time in the universe that we are a mere spec of a spec of a spec in. We've traveled to the moon and back, to the bottom of the ocean. We fly in planes. We surf/travel a pseudo artificial reality world/ocean of fiction daily for work, fun and whatever. It's the twenty first century and I'm being attacked/oppressed by Demons. After Mass my housemate John took me aside and told me he thought I should share my story with Father ... whom had just finished the ceremonies and that maybe it would help. I was gripped with a sense of shrinking back and lunging forward at the idea, all in the same moment. In one sense I hoped maybe in some sort of divine miracle the priest would wave his robed arms and in earth shaking tones command the demons to flee from me like a pack of New York rats running from the light and on the other hand I was afraid of that knowing, sort of flinching look of aversion one has for the afflicted crazy person you feel yourself giving on the city bus or street corner and then a conversation about family psychiatric history, etc.
 The last of the parishioners were filing out into the night, to their cars and too their homes, televisions, beds and sensible comfortable lives and I approached Father ... in a sense of morbid anticipation. He was/is taller than me, no great feat but at the same time assuring. I glanced up at him and started to mumble something about the events of the last few days, my kidney stone, the hospital trip and the pain meds and the following harrowing ordeal with the "Hallucinations" and looked up into his eyes expecting them to sort of glaze over and maybe he would take a step back and kind of give me the run around about seeing a psychotherapist, getting on some meds and getting some sleep, etc. I looked into his eyes and Father ... looked into me, into my soul...and in the most loving kind and compassionate voice of reason said "Deliver us, Lord from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ." and "Jesus, Be My Peace." All the while he had, with a light affirming touch placed his hand on the left side of my forehead in a gesture of blessing that I absolutely in no way shape or form ever wanted to end. How did he know how to say exactly what I needed and was downright starving to hear? I could have stood like that for the rest of eternity, just like that under Father ....'s cool-warm-calm-soothing-sobering strength like standing under your favorite tree on the most beautiful summer day and all the cares and woes of the world the most simple and easy of tasks ahead.
 The weekend of the Catholic healing retreat the weekend of February 17th 2010 was an affirming and at the same time completely disheartning experience for me so far. I had been entertaining thoughts for the last two weeks or so that all this was just some long term residual side effects of the pain meds I'd been prescribed and as soon as they left my system I would return to normal. In later conversations down the road with doctors in the psychiatric wards there was a lot of puzzlement on their part on my reactions to the drugs I had been given...because they (the percoset and dillauted) don't remain in the system for more than a few days and the initial "hallucinations" they caused, and were continuously manifesting long after I'd stopped imbibing them were going full strength. In my logic the attacks should have stopped when I'd detoxed from the drugs. This seemed rational but here I was two weeks into my current physiological spiritual personal exodus from all previous known reality, on about maybe four to six hours of sleep since the passing of the kidney stone. Fort Worden is a beautiful place and it was a perfect weekend. For three days the sun shone, the wind blew lightly and warmly from the puget sound...the nights were a chilly just above freezing refreshing interludes. We had lodgings in the old soldiers barracks and the actual events took place in the convention common area about a block or two away from the barracks. I don't know what was worse, the absolutely beautiful blue sky and early spring warmth filled three days or the torture filled nights of sleepless horror and dread upon laying down and waiting for the first assaults to begin as soon as my eyes closed. I wanted it to be all bad or all good and not this in-between heaven and hell real life drama episode I could absolutely not escape in any way shape or form. It was a spiritual, mental, physiological, visual, auditory, emotional and out of control 24/7 true battle of epic proportions all the time. I couldn't stand being around people and at the same time I could not, absolutely not, be alone for more than a few seconds at a time. I would glom onto people and every conversation looking for some sort of hint or sign of release, every conversation on the spiritual, the biblical brought on a feeling of complete aversion and at the same time immersion for me in my hope that there was some single scriptural anecdote, remedy that would once and for all pull me out of the dark and into the light. Along with the Lord's Prayer that I was reciting over and over again endlessly in the forefront of my mind and thoughts was, in the right side of my body and vision, a veil...I could feel and see a distortion in my body, like I was splitting down the middle. Through my right eye was a cellophane like looking glass view into the twisting fluidic turmoil of faces and forms all writhing for attention at all times... It was a stain in my soul and I couldn't escape it eyes closed or open. On the left side of my body and head every thing was normal, peaceful, vision and thoughts all normal...and every once in awhile, when the demonic harassment would escalate to monumental proportions where I wanted to just start screaming endlessly, a voice I think I've heard and trusted all my life and had been guided by from a young age, would calmly say "patience" or "trust" and just like that the demonic would back off and a semi-uncomfortable state of instability would return for a few moments, repeat..all day long, all night long, all two weeks long... months...continue, ad nauseum. The most affirming part and the most disheartening part so far were the conversations I would have when I finally started to open up about what I was going through with the other members of the retreat...all Catholic...from different walks of life, mothers and fathers, men and women young and old, confirming to me that what I was going through was altogether real. These were everyday people that you would see at the grocery store, the bank, the movies, next door... everyday people. All sharing a reality with me and promising me prayer and support and that it would get better. I hung on each and every conversation with them in desperation hoping for that instant cure, and at the same time, I felt a complete abhorrence to them and what they were saying because there was absolutely no way in the universe that any of this was really happening.
 The first night of that weekend was the worst attack I'd had so far. I was in the dorm/barracks in my room. I had a roommate who had fallen asleep hours before and I was in the grind. "Our Father",...hate kill death despair hell $%^#@%&!!!!, "who art in heaven"...your mine you little  son of a #%&@&**%##@!!! I own you and I'm going to eat and shred your effing  soul like rotting flesh for eternity you worthless piece of &%@@@$$$##&&**!!! "hallowed be they name"...#@#$!!! you, you little son of a@#$%&!!!, son of a #%@@#!!!! "thy kingdom come, thy will be done", God hates you that's why he's torturing you for all your sins you are never going to make it through this alive..."on earth as it is in heaven"...etc...etc...etc...repeat...all night long...all day long... Every horrible awful thing I'd ever done or said to myself and anyone and everyone else my entire life was constantly being paraded before my minds eye in a continuous cycling horror-go-round of morbid accusation and condemning guilt. Along with the faces of hell that would jump out at me just as I would arrive at some semblance of sleep, or at least start to approach it.
  It was somewhere between 2:45ish to 3-am, that auspicious hour. I was laying on my stomach when something fell down from the ceiling and landed on my back crushing all the air out of my lungs...I was frozen...couldn't move...could barely breathe...and this...thing...rode my back like a bull rider and started raking its claws, feet, talons, along either side of my rib-cage, causing these electric shocks to course and flow through my entire mind body spirit soul...I couldn't believe what was happening. It was beyond anything I'd ever experienced before so far since this whole ordeal began. I was awake and asleep at the same time...I remember making a colossal effort to scream to my roommate in the other bed a few feet away and all that came out was a tortured whisper, "help..help...help" like a barely audible sigh. And my roommate heard me and he got up and came over and laid on top of me..I could feel his weight on my body and the demonic cowboy ride ended and at the same time in this quasi waking dream state I could see that my roommate hadn't really gotten up at all and was still asleep in his bed...during the whole encounter. The complete normalcy of everyday life and the complete beyond my understanding and just as real unreality of the spiritual divine and demonic tug of war was starting to pull me apart at the root.
 -One year later...Febuary 17th 2011...Same annual Catholic healing retreat at Fort Worden. Same unbelievably beautiful late winter early spring weekend. An all encompassing turquoise blue sky, livid green grass trembling in the soft warm hush of wind rolling in from the puget sound. I'm in the same barracks, though not the same room that'd I'd stayed in the year before. I've been reading a book "Christ, the life of the soul" by Columbia Marmion and sitting in my dorm room...at the window...completely at peace. Mass is gong to start at the gathering space in a few minutes and I finish the latest chapter I'm on and grab my coat and head out for Mass. In the upcoming month of April, specifically Easter day I will have my Confirmation and Baptism into the Roman Catholic Church. I've been involved in a class at St. Joseph's for the last six months called 'Right's of Christian Initiation for Adults' thats required for anyone interested in becoming Roman Catholic. In the year since my first time here at Ft. Worden and all the horror and trials and tribulations I look back wonderingly with a sense of complete gratitude for EVERYTHING that happened and has happened so far. I still get attacks here and there and the creepy crawlys but nothing compared with the mind/soul crushing devastation of those early days.
 One of the options for my baptism is coming up with a Catholic surname for myself...for example Pope John Paul the second...his birth name is Karol Wojtyla, but upon confirmation into the church he had the option to pick a Catholic name of a previous saint, pope, martyr...etc.
  For the last month or so I've been playing around with a few...and the one that I keep coming back to is Benedict - St. Benedict was an Italian monk who started the traditional monastic order of the early church years. I feel an affinity and a draw towards this/his name but haven't made any real decision as of yet and am just playing it by ear. I've got a month or so to decide.
  I step out of the dorm into the beautiful bright winter day and head down the road to the convention center and on a whim I decide to cut across a large field that stands in-between the road and the building where Mass in going to begin in about five minutes or so. I'm walking through the grass...it's about the length of a football field...it's really quiet...that full peaceful sunny day with the wind blowing through the trees great american novel kind of quiet. As I draw closer to the other end of the field I notice to my left a little card on the edge of the grass perched against a concrete parking lot brick. I meander over....pick it up...and turn it over...it says...

- Prayer to Saint Benedict-

" Glorious Saint Benedict,
sublime model of virtue,
pure vessel of God's grace!
Behold me humbly kneeling
at your feet.
I implore you in you loving
kindness,
to pray for me before the
throne of God.
To you I have recourse in
the dangers that daily
surround me.
Shield me against my
selfishness and my
indifference to God
and to my neighbor.
Inspire me to imitate
you in all things.
May your blessing
be with me always,
so that I may see
and serve Christ in
others and work
for His kingdom."
Amen.
.....................................................
You can't make this kind of stuff up.