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9x12" carbon abstraction

9x12" carbon abstraction

novel excerpt reworked

    Along the coastline of California you’ll notice the lower third changes direction, from running north-south to eastward—from Point Conception along Gaviota and to Ventura County before turning south again into Los Angeles County. Along that coastline is a coastal mountain range three thousand feet high, where ridges and canyons of chaparral in olive greens rise up, crowned with sandstone peaks and cliffs colored tan, orange, pink and red; veins of wave-rolled rock and fossilized shell rippling through them—ancient beaches lifted up and now overlooking ocean from which born. Below those peaks slope foothills of sage and tawny-colored grasses, studded with dark green oak, the sycamores turning gold in the fall, marking the creeks to the shore.

    A storm out of the Gulf of Alaska sweeps from the north, or a Pineapple Express system unloads from the Equator, and those rains spill boulders which spill out to the Pacific. The boulders settle and get groomed by swells, where today, the deposit juts out to sea in a geologic feature which creates waves that sweep across them. When conditions are right, at a point break, where a creek let’s out at the top of a cove, the waves form cylinders of water, which pitch and run down along the point into the beach. Of course for surfers, it’s as if these points were made for us, where the wave sections again and again, for weightless turn after weightless turn upon an open face of water.

    There are a number of point breaks along the California coast but two are superior to all others, known the world over by the finely shaped waves they provide—Republicans, near Santa Barbara, and Federals at Malibu. Comparing them wave to wave, Republicans is superior, getting hollower, tubing longer more readily. Federals has been altered more than once due to where the creek lets the lagoon out. There were whole decades where Federals would barrel, not so much the last decade.

    Growing up, my teens and twenties, I never surfed Federals or Republicans because point breaks are always crowded. You can get stoked on a wave, but how fun with people dropping in? Not fun at all, and younger I couldn’t stand it. Point breaks with a bunch of people in the line-up only re-produced what you were attempting to escape in the first place. I always surfed Zuma or up near Deer Creek, or some other wave breaking out of the way at the right tide. My twenties, thirties, and forties, the thought of surfing a point break with tons of people had me scowl in disgust. Then one night, almost fifty years old, I saw someone post something on social media saying they needed a writer. 

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neat book

chapter excerpt

 

    Purusha is the concept of a cosmic being whose sacrifice to engage in the material world gives rise to life and knowing; it’s the universal spirit present in everything and everyone all the time as a form neither male or female, but a supernal blend of both, which creates all consciousness, connecting all forms of life. Ancient writings have various names for Purusha’s forms, but first is Vishnu, who came forth from words spoken by Purusha. Vishnu is like the first fractal, where the outline of his form is made of smaller exact replicas, and the outline of them made of even smaller replicas, so that there are manifestations from Purusha all the way down to the human form. As above, so below, as one writing  says.

    The reason Purusha chose to manifest first as male is because humans, as part of an animal kingdom, need protection, and in our form of existence, in any dangerous situation the male is sent first simply because the male possesses additional physical might. Over the centuries many have come to worship Purusha under many names, as male or female, or a being that is both. The ancient writings set down all at once over four thousand years ago, are the words which transmit our origin story and precepts of spiritual knowledge, as an instruction manual for human life on Earth. The ancient writings as words and verses embody the moment Purusha sacrificed pure bliss for knowledge and understanding in a undefined universe.

    The ancient writings are in Sanskrit, a word that means together, positive, perfected, pure, polished, sacred. Sanskrit, like Cuneiform, spawned the majority of modern language, and the body of texts composed in Sanskrit set down in word the cosmology about Purusha are known as the Vedas. The Sanskrit word for Veda itself, as a noun, means knowledge/wisdom—derived from the root, to know. The Vedas are two-fold—what is heard and what is remembered—and have since their appearance been considered not of humans, impersonal and authoress sacred sound and text identified by mountain forrest-dwellers in what is now known as India, orally transmitted since two thousand years before Jesus Christ. The mantras, the oldest part of the Vedas, are recited in the modern age for their phonology, and are considered to be primordial frequencies of creation. According to the Vedas, in reciting them the cosmos is regenerated, enlivening and nourishing late forms of creation at their base.