Be Light, Light, Light -

I Can Watch Elephants (and Elephants Alone) For Hours At A Time, For Sooner Or Later The Elephant Will Do Something Very Strange... There Is Mystery Behind That Masked Gray Visage, And Ancient Life Force, Delicate And Mighty, Awesome And Enchanted, Commanding The Silence Ordinarily Reserved For Mountain Peaks, Great Fires, And The Sea.

In The Clearness Of This Himalayan Air, Mountains Draw Near, And In Such Splendor, Tears Come Quietly To My Eyes And Cool On My Sunburned Cheeks. This Is Not Mere Soft-mindedness, Nor Am I All That Silly With The Altitude. My Head Has Cleared In These Weeks Free Of Intrusions- Mail, Telephones, People And Their Needs- And I Respond To Things Spontaneously, Without Defensive Or Self-conscious Screens. Still, All This Feeling Is Astonishing: Not So Long Ago I Could Say Truthfully That I Had Not Shed A Tear In Twenty Years.

You See ... A Man Like Me, A Cautious Man, Has His Life All Figured Out According To A Pattern, And Then The Pattern Flies Apart. You Run Around For Quite A While Trying To Repair It, Until One Day You Straighten Up Again With An Armful Of Broken Pieces, And You See That The World Has Gone On Without You And You Can Never Catch Up With Your Old Life, And You Must Begin All Over Again.

And Only The Enlightened Can Recall Their Former Lives; For The Rest Of Us, The Memories Of Past Existences Are But Glints Of Light, Twinges Of Longing, Passing Shadows, Disturbingly Familiar, That Are Gone Before They Can Be Grasped, Like The Passage Of That Silver Bird On Dhaulagiri.

I Like To Hear And Smell The Countryside, The Land That My Characters Inhabit. I Don’t Want These Characters To Step Off The Page, I Want Them To Step Out Of The Landscape.