Category Archives: Events

Poetry Night at Lincoln High~

09 Saturday Apr 2011

Posted by in A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad, Events, Poetry, Untold

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Poetry Night at the Black Box Theater

Last night Rachel and I drove to San Jose. I’d been invited to read six minutes of Spoken Word poems at the Black Box Theater at Lincoln High School. Jael and Anthony invited me back in January, when I read at Willow Glen Library. I said YES! without hesitation.

Tamam and Jael Cruz, the host

Some of the SJ Poetry Center folks were reading there: Pushpa, Dennis, and a couple others. The rest of the poets were students from Lincoln. This may have been the inaugural Poetry Night – benefiting the center for the arts. I donated 11 CDs with poetry and spoken word to be sold for $5. with proceeds going to Lincoln High Arts!

The Black Box Theater is a well designed space and I guess there were more than 60 students there, Gimo was the MC, and the event began a short while after the “sound check” and earlier than the announced time. There was a camera crew, and we signed release forms, but there was no mic. Didn’t need one.

I was lucky to go early in the evening, after 4 or 5 students, and announced as the first “special guest.” I told them “I like history and I do spoken word, so I’m putting them together tonight. About your own history –– once it may have been heartache and pain. Later it became something to talk about!” I introduced “Uncle Waraka”  and shouted it out, talking about Muhammad as “the Propheci’d Man.” Next came “Aisha and the Battle of the Camel.” This poem begins : “Hey Euphrates, I’m your tigress! I don’t digress but I risk speaking of the year 656….”

The audience was asked to click their fingers instead of clapping, so the recording people didn’t have to deal with  bursts of sound.  Pushpa read some good poems. One line of hers was: “I’d rather have poetry than oatmeal for breakfast.”

I felt it was an honor to read there. I hope this becomes a regular event. Thanks Jael and Anthony. Lets hear it for Lincoln High poets!<>

CDs for sale, "The Women with Muhammad"

Untold & the Book Awards

03 Thursday Mar 2011

Posted by in A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad, Announcements, book awards, Events, Poetry, Untold

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the author on a camel in the Moroccan Sahara

I am curious to find an award category for my book: Untold. Never mind actually winning, I’m just looking for a match.  In the words of the late Ogden Nash, the book is a churkendoose – chicken, turkey, duck and goose. It is poetry, but it’s not a poetry book. It is biography and academic history, and yes, women’s studies. The alchemy is powerful and forges it into a what? Non-fiction  women’s historical biography.

The words “Prophet Muhammad” are in the title. That makes it  a bit edgy like Black History, only Martin Luther King is more PC with many Americans.

I love this book because it moves toward easing tension between the Islamic world and the USA. Is there a slot for that important job in the arena of awards? Then there is the chapter on the Jewish wives. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone acknowledged that Prophet Muhammad had two Jewish wives? Israel, for instance? You can  see how this book may be sitting alone somewhere.

California first lady Maria Shriver introduces Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning poet Mary Oliver (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

There’s always big American prizes for literature and poetry, with Mary Oliver hugging Maria Shriver on the right. Here are some less well known acknowledgements:

FAB Book Award (Burntwood Secondary school award – winner chosen by the students). I love the name of the award and wish I could talk to them.

Brass Crescent Award (this promotes the best writing of the Muslim Webblogs). That’s good, but then there’s The Frederick J. Streng Book Award, limited to Buddhist – Christian books.

The esteemed Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize…”understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures…” But I’ll bet you need to be a person of color to even be considered for that.

Here’s one that I’m sure has never been won by a woman: The Sheik Zayed Book Award, “one of the most prestigious and well-funded prizes in the Arab world,” named after the deceased ruler of Abu Dhabi. Last year’s literature winner was  Dr. Ibrahim al-Kawni, Libyan author of The Call of What Was Far.

The Humbolt Research Award is for an academic. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA from University of Arizona) listed more than thirty books on topics that seemed similar to Untold, but every single book had a University Press behind the title, like the poetry prizes awarded only to MFA graduates. Forget it.

For The Arab American Book Award you need to be an Arab – it’s not books on Arab themes in America.

The only possible thing I found was IBA International Book Awards, “Honoring Knowledge, Creativity, Wisdom  & Global Cooperation through the Written Word.”  That sounds good. The deadline is April 30, 2011.

Sometimes it feels good to dare to dream.  <>

dedicated to four little girls

21 Monday Feb 2011

Posted by in 1963, 4 little girls, Events, Poetry

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Tags

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This morning I snapped pictures of a sculptural installation in the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The sculpture is composed of strangely beautiful pieces of burned wood hanging on colorless string. The window light and the spotlights increase the magnetism. Each photo taken with my small phone-camera was strangely evocative, of what? Some sadness I’ve been carrying lately, perhaps.

for Denise McNair

A tall, African American guard in a dark suit came up to me briskly, but his face was open, vulnerable even. It used to be against the rules to photograph in museums, but now that is a useless effort, especially with discrete cell-phone pics. He asked if I knew what these hanging fragments were. I said I did not. Maybe it was my dreadlocks that drew him into my artistic reverie with the sculpture.

He began. “It is the church, the Baptist Church in Birmingham Mississippi that was bombed in sixty-three.”  Spike Lee’s images flooded my head. I felt a jolt of rawness I’ve come to know in the vulnerable moments since my husband was in the hospital a couple weeks ago.  I looked at him. “Four  young girls died that day.

Spike Lee's film

Is this the remains of the building? God.” He nodded. Spike Lee’s documentary 4 Little Girls released in 1997 hurt my heart. I could hardly watch it after the moment of the bomb.

The press carried words something like this: On a quiet Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, four little black girls prepared their Sunday School lessons in the basement of the church. In the same basement sat a bomb placed by segregationists, designed to kill and maim in protest of the forced integration of Birmingham’s public schools….

for Addie McCollins

 

These photos are dedicated to Denise McNair (11), Addie McCollins (14), Carole Robinson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14), the four young girls whose death marked a turning point for Civil Rights in America.  Never forgotten.

From: Birmingham Sunday by Langston Hughes

Four little girls

Who went to Sunday School that day

And never came back home at all—

for Carole Robinson

… Four little girls

Might be awakened someday soon

By songs upon the breeze

As yet unfelt among

Magnolia trees.

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dedicated to Cynthia Wesley

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Sally Magdy Zahran ~ 1988-2011

10 Thursday Feb 2011

Posted by in Announcements, Events, Naomi Shihab Nye, Poetry, Sally Magdy Zahran, Uncategorized

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Sally Magdy Zahran

…I would smooth your life in my hands,

Pull you back. Had I stayed in your land,

I might have been dead too

For something simple like staring

Or shouting what was true….

Words from  a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye “For the Five-Hundredth Dead Palestinean, Ibtisam Bozieh”

It’s one thing to see videos of the square in Cairo, but another to put a face to the violence which flashes like a lightning storm here and there, taking precious human life.

There is just one letter in Arabic that separates the words “witness” and “martyr.” Let’s imagine Egypt as a country of witness for democratic change instead one whose streets splash red with the blood of martyrs!  ~May it be so.

I stared at the vibrant photo – the face of Sally Zahran, age 23, smashed on the back of the head with a baseball bat in Egypt on Friday evening, January 28th by political thugs. That would be Friday morning California time, during the time I drove to the hospital to visit my husband who was recovering from surgery. Or maybe I’d arrived and bent down to kiss my living, breathing beloved (who grows stronger every day.)  My attention was not in Egypt.

Sally grew up in Cairo and was working as a translator there. During the unrest she had traveled far south to Sohag, where her father is a university professor. The small city on the west side of the Nile gets 3,804 hours of sunshine a year according to Wikipedia.

She was never an activist, and had not taken part in political protest. Sohag has both Coptic Christians and Muslims. Magdy may be a Coptic name, connecting Sally to this tradition which links to Prophet Muhammad  by means of his beloved Mariya, the Copt, mother of his son, Ibraham.

“She felt it would be safe to join the protests. So many others were going out on Friday,” said her friend Aly Sobhy.  “She was loved by all who knew her.”

some who have died in Egypt

See “Egypt Remembers” page on line:  <http://1000memories.com/egypt> shows photos and a word or 2 about the dead – nearly all under the age of 30, now martyrs to the cause of democratic change in Egypt.

May this terrible situation be resolved soon.

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Daisy Khan meets Roshi Joan Halifx

19 Wednesday Jan 2011

Posted by in Daisy Khan, Events, Roshi Joan Halifax

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January 17, 2011 Daisy Khan and Roshi Joan Halifax met for a Muslim-Buddhist dialog at the Unitarian Church in San Francisco.  There were two occasions when they reached across a small table that stood between them to clasp hands. These are women who work to make the world a kinder more compassionate place.

Roshi Joan and Daisy

Karim Baer, moderator, and Director of Public Programs for CIIS, stated that he hoped to have more than just interfaith conversation; that this discussion was meant to look at places where prejudice and fear evoke some hard questions, social issues swept under the carpet.

After the women spoke about themselves and their relationship to religious issues,  Daisy mentioned that religious differences tearing people apart was nothing new.  Joan replied: “Can we drop into values that tolerate and appreciate differences? The extremist world is trying to make us a monotheistic religion.” Daisy: “There’s a verse from the Qur’an that goes: If we (God) wanted, we would have made you all the same.” Diversity is part of the Divine plan. If I do not see myself in you the differences can be endless: black/white, male/female, immigrant/local, etc.”

As for her endless job speaking for the Muslim communities in America and  addressing press propaganda referring to Muslims as “terrorists,” Daisy said: “If I don’t do anything about it who will?” She and her husband, Imam Faisal Rauf, have been doing their work in NYC for more than 25 years. They came up with the idea for the New York Intercultural Center known as The Cordoba Initiative. “When we started the CI,” she continued, “we wanted to prove pluralism is always in Islam. It goes into decline in nation-states, but at the time of the Golden Age in Cordoba, Spain, the cultures co-existed –– Christian, Jew, and Muslim. But the multi-faith center was distorted into a 13 story mosque at Ground Zero.”

During the last 6 months in the crisis (of CI) I was made to feel like an outsider. People told me, “Leave our country.” The Father of a firefighter who died in 9/11 said, “If you just move this site it will make me happy.” Daisy replied, “Will you allow me to accept this tragedy? You don’t know what it was like to be a Muslim after 9/11. For me it’s an enormous tragedy –– my country and religion attacked.”  The man said, “I never imagined what you are saying.”

A woman named Alice, who lost a son in one of the flights of 9/11 stood up in the audience to ask Daisy, “Why are you doing this so close to the site?” It was a moving and tender moment, with Alice gazing at Daisy, saying she respected her but not the decision.

Daisy told us all that she and her husband, Imam Faisal, were listening to what people said so they can make a good decision. “What we, the American audience see is just part of an enormous picture involving Muslims world-wide, who are watching to see how this plays out.”
And Joan seemed to emanate a calm and kind attention, witnessing Daisy’s words. She said: “Buddhism has 84,000 Dharma doors. I think extremism is a Dharma door. I need to listen to individuals who polarize and bridge that gap inside my heart. The question for me is: How can I create a situation where extremism does not lead to destruction? “Fight” extremism may not be the right word. I don’t know how to do this. I think we need to look deeper into the peacemaking process.”

For Daisy Khan there is an unexpected gift in this work as a speaker. Mainstream media spent months last summer attacking her and her husband, never looking to them for an answer. Recently, as she travels and address audiences, the local news media are turning up to interview her and asking her to tell her side of  Muslim issues. And they are listening.

Here is inspiration for this!

April 15, 2006 His Holiness Dalai Lama met with Muslim leaders in San Francisco and said, ”I want to be known as the defender of Islam.”

Brenda Hillman and Bob Haas @ Toby’s Feed Barn

02 Tuesday Nov 2010

Posted by in Brenda Hillman + Bob Haas, Events, Poetry, Untold, word-dancing

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Way back in September, Brenda Hillman and her husband, one time Poet Laureate of the USA, Robert Haas, read at a favorite local venue – Toby’s Feed Barn. Bob and Brenda are two of my favorite poets. It was a spirited occasion celebrating and fundraising for the local bookstore, Point Reyes Books. Add a hundred or so poetry lovers, plenty of chairs, books for sale, an old milk can or two, and bales and bales of straw – and you have it. I bought tickets ahead of time and brought my husband, Shabda, and friend, Kyra, with me. The Barn was cozy and smelled sweet and dry. I gave a copy of my new book, Untold, to Brenda, with the message that I didn’t need anything from her, just wanted her to have it. I’m a fan and have several of her wonderful books of poetry. Practical Water is her newest. You can catch something of the subtlety and originality of her thinking and poetry here.

From Practical Water

What does it mean to live a moral life

It is nearly impossible to think about this

We went down to the creek

the sides were filled

with tiny watery activities…                                                 

An ethics occurs at the edge

of what we know

The creek goes underground about here

The spirits offer us a world of origins

Owl takes its call from the drawer of the sky…

It’s hard to be water

to fall from faucets with fangs

to lie under trawlers as horizons

but you must

Your species can’t say it

you have to do spells & tag them

uncomfortable & act like you mean it

Go to the world

Where is it

Go there  ~

Bob read “Poem for Brenda,” with the line  “..kissing, our eyes squinched up like bats…” and told the story of how he un-invited poet Robert Pinsky and his wife (after planning to dine with them) when Brenda spontaneously agreed to come over for their first date – years back. I came home with Bob’s 2007 book Now and Then, The Poet’s Choice Columns 1997-2000, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley. For those of us that love poetry, this is a great read. It consists of columns he wrote as Poet Laureate, and I have a marker at every 3 or so of more than 100 small essays for the Washington Post as a column called, “Post’s Book World.” It was syndicated all over and went continued four years. Here’s a sample:

July 19 “Postmodern –experimental poetry– has been for the last fifteen years or so trying to figure out how to wriggle out from the sort of direct, personal poetry that the generation of Allen Ginsberg and Adrienne Rich made… it was time to do something else.” (The new poetry he describes as…) “an effort to subvert narrative, undermine the first person singular, and foreground the textures and surprises in language rather than the drama of content.” His example is Susan Wheeler. Haas writes, “Sometimes it seems that Wheeler is trying to marry The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense to Victorian nonsense verse.” From “Shanked on the Red Bed,” The perch was on the roof, and the puck was in the air./ The diffident were driving, and the daunted didn’t care. <>

[I’m glad to be back writing this blog again, with hopes that those looking for information on my book Untold can find the right buttons above.]

Bookstores and Radio Interview

04 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by in Events, Monkfish Books, Poetry, Untold, Updates

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The month of August is here. That means UNTOLD, the new paperback publication from Monkfish Books, is on its way to bookstores. Publisher’s Weekly releases a good review on Monday August 9. From the review: The unorthodox devise [the prosimetrum – narrative with poems] becomes, as only poetry can, an illustrative window into early Islam and everyday Arabian life 1,400 years ago. Kahn points out that many of Muhammad’s reforms were unique for their time and benefited women…

Caroline Casey will interview me on KPFA radio August 19 at 2 pm. I begin what my publisher calls, “the Bookstore Tour.” It would be wonderful to see familiar faces and meet my friends from cyberspace.

Book Passage in Corte Madera starts things off on Sunday, August 22 at 4pm.

Copperfields in Sebastapol is hosting me Tuesday, September 9 at 7pm.

Later on, October brings an evening at Books Inc. on Fourth Street in Berkeley on Tuesday, 7pm October 19; and Fields Bookstore on Polk Street in San Francisco 8pm on October 21. I’ll be in Seattle September 16-21, Denver on October 28, and North Carolina in November (see tab above that says: BOOKSTORE TOUR): New York and Portland in the spring. Info on those bookstores will follow. Thank you for your good will and hope to see you in book-book land.

Thanks for bearing with the blog billboard. I’ll return to articles of interest soon. ~

Poet Kazim Ali reads in San Francisco

17 Saturday Jul 2010

Posted by in Events, Kazim Ali, Lucille Clifton, Poetry, Shams-i-Tabriz

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Tonight was the annual Fundraiser for the Squaw Valley Poetry Conference. The two hour reading takes place at The Starr King Room of the Unitarian Church in San Francisco.  The poets were Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, Evie Schockley and Dean Young. Also Kazim Ali, whom I wanted to meet. Last year I got his book, The Far Mosque, and liked some of the poems there. He was born in 1971, which makes him almost forty, and his manner is easy and relaxed, with  poetic presence that makes me sense he will continue to shine. After he read the poem Dear Shams –which appeared on the back page of APR Volume 39 – I shouted, YES!   (Oh yes!) Here it is: my favorite poem of the evening.

Dear Shams

There’s no answer to winter
watching the sun set over water

it falls so quickly
you have not been lost

branches, oligarchs of  the sky
everybody listening for silence

where and where did you go
twelve-stringed music, rejoin me

in the sun-year I swelled long shadows
in the moon-year the valley folded itself up

Poet Kazim Ali

you are the beloved I would not love
at the fountain witless and still

a stream pours over rocks making music
could the water rush over me

the sun drops so quickly into its banishment
could I please forget to breathe and drown

will the ocean rejoin me
you have not been lost

can I be reborn as a guitar
will you be reborn as music and hum inside me

one day you stopped looking at me
and I knew

the last note is lingering in the box
of my body

you did not vanish in the marketplace
I still imagine you in me as my breath

broken in thirds
corded to sound

I took your name when the sun came up
sun of winter, sun windless and wistful

come down across the water
undone sun give me the drunk go-ahead

last time I searched for you
this time I become wooden and resonant

prepare yourself in pure sound
last time I raved without senses

oh pluck me my angel my paper-maker
I want to feel you hum inside me

pluck me pluck me
and hum

<>    <>              …and he read the poem, Dear Rumi with the lines:

…At the fountain in the village square,/ the books are still sinking, bereft of your hands.

Even the mountains are bending down trying to save them...     [This guy is amazing!]

But there were other poets and poems.

Last time I went to this event, Lucille Clifton read.  Tonight was a series of tributes and remembrances by the featured poets. Brenda Hillman read a couple of fox poems, both hers and Lucille’s poem:

one year later

what if,

then,

entering my room,

brushing against the shadows,

lapping them into rust,

Lucille Clifton 1936-2010

her soft paw extended,

she had called me out?

what if,

then,

i had reared up baying,

and followed her off

into vixen country?

what then of the moon,

the room, the bed, the poetry

of regret?

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A wonderful evening of poetry from excellent poets! Lucille, you are missed!

Azar Nafisi: Literature ~ imagination with no boundries

30 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Azar Nafisi, Events, Iran

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Azar Nafisi

A while ago I went to hear a talk by Iran’s foremost woman writer living in the US today. Azar Nafisi. She is author of the international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, and professor and the executive director of Cultural Conversations at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

Her book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, has spent over 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.  It has been translated in 32 languages, and has won diverse literary awards… It mixes a book group studying literary masters and invasive  Iranian politics. It shows  a sophisticated, educated people who find themselves surrounded by strict Islamic laws; it brings the reader into women’s dizzying shift from wearing European dress to  a chador. Reading authors such as Nabokov become an expression of inner freedom. Azar has an on-line reading list: The Thousand and One Arabian Nights are there, along with Nabokov, Austen, Flaubert and Fitzgerald.

Marin Academy, where my sons attended high school, invited Azar Nafisi to speak in the Thatcher Lecture series on April 20. She talks quickly with a kind of urgency that is born in someone who understands how very fast one’s reality can shift; she is a speaker who wants to impress the audience with the preciousness of the freedom to share your truth, as you know it. She addressed a crowd of the students and their parents. The reading of literature was the vehicle of her message that night.

“One of the best things about books,” she said, “is the connections they make… readers and writers share the trait of curiosity.” She quotes Nabokov, “Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.” She continues: “Insubordination is an everyday business. It’s posing yourself as a question mark. A good education strives to make us more restless about our world. Curiosity is the basis of this restlessness. Nothing in life is ordinary! Art, music, and poetry give us curiosity. Fiction gives us the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes…. Literature brings us together. The novel is about the shock of recognition… how much we have in common!  The villain in fiction is the one who doesn’t listen, see, or be willing to change. Blindness is bad. Literature is always an act of discovery. We need to investigate. We live in a world that’s intellectually timid. Discover something that you don’t know! You need imagination in order to imagine a future that doesn’t exist.” Her subtext for me was to stay awake, and beware of how fast the powers-that-be can take away the freedom of an unaware people; keep your mind keen, practice intellectual bravery.

"Curiouser and Curiouser...." Alice

“Iran was ethnically diverse with many different religions and all of a sudden we had a Muslim world! Bereft of individuality, culture and religion. Iran is 3,000 years old and half of that time it was Zoroastrian, after the seventh century it changed to Islam. But we still celebrate the first day of spring, a Zoroastrian Holiday.”

I have been reading her new book, a brave memoir called, Things I’ve Been Silent About.  It grabbed me right away. She offers beautiful writing and the scenes of family life in Teheran during the time of the Shah. The book begins with: “Most men cheat on their wives to have mistresses.  My father cheated on my mother to have a happy family life” It is a deeply personal reflection and exploration of a young girl’s pain over family secrets and a mother’s lost life. The first half of the book is a wonderful fresh Alice-in-wonderland look at growing up. Then the political realities replace family life – as it did for many Iranians – and the book shifts gears. For those who have read Reading Lolita in Tehran, this is a very good next read. If you love books– you’ll savor Reading Lolita…<>

ResearchChannel – 2004 National Book Festival – Azar Nafisi. Click on this. It is a powerful video from of Azar speaking at the National Book Festival, 2004

Caroline Casey’s Trickster Training Tea Party

21 Monday Jun 2010

Posted by in Announcements, Events, Untold, Updates

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...on the way to Point Reyes Station, Sunday afternoon

Today I got a computer message from Caroline Casey, my favorite visionary activist, inviting me to her Trickster Training Tea Party at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station. She writes in her invitation (white on purple):

Calling all Compassionate Tricksters 
to convene in pre-Solstice back-stage Council at this cataclysmic time, to be guided by the sky story of now, that our grief may fuel our deeper dedication to a culture of reverent

Caroline Casey

ingenuity.
 The word “culture” primarily means what we grow or cultivate in the soil and, by analogy—in our souls.
 So—let all natural facts be social strategy metaphors. Let’s slow down to speed up. The more we slow water down,
 the faster it infiltrates. We gather in just that manner. So bring natural facts, and we will tease them into trickster strategy….

She shared the afternoon with David L Grimes who describes himself as Alaskan bard, musician, songwriter, storyteller, mariner, environmental activist, wilderness guide, former commercial fisherman and wandering fool. “I have howled with wolves, run from bears and co-habitated with killer whales…” You get the picture – a “Mr. Natural” trickster. David had experienced the Exon oil spill firsthand and had calming wisdom to share concerning the terrible BP disaster which it seems all of us carry these nearly 60 days, oily blotches of sorrow. He mentions that the Exon spill stopped deforestation of parts of Alaska by the timber agency, by means of Exon’s clean-up funds. He sang us a beautiful ancient-sounding ballad. He told us  to look from the earth’s perspective with long vision.

Caroline spoke. Ah, the s-l-o-w water. The slower it goes, the cleaner it gets before it reaches the ocean. We need to borrow from the intelligence of nature and slow down our lives… find a sacred cow and milk it. Let Bagwans be Bagwans.

Solstice. All solstices have traditionally been weddings, Ms. Casey tells us. This one concerns “…all that has been falsely estranged coming back together” for healing and uniting, environmentally, politically, and in ourselves as well.  [This paraphrasing from my notes is so stiff, compared to the stunningly brilliant, fluid and funny words that Caroline speaks, how she names our cultural angst, then brings in the positive, or has someone sing a song to get us away from thought, into our positive feeling places.] The audience just looks lit up, and that’s fun because when you listen to her on the car radio on the Thursday Afternoon Visionary Activist show you can’t see the faces of the other people listening. Yes, the radio show! I was there because she wrote me that she wants me to do a show with her on my book, Untold, and talk about the Prophet’s wives. We decided that August before my Bay Area Bookstore readings would be best. Stay tuned. I drove awaythinking about this: “Suck the G out of “kingdom” and blow it back out, what have you got? KIN-DOM. That’s what we want… We are all kin.

As I drove through upper Nicasio I did a bold thing. Caroline had awakened the anything-is-possible state of mind. I drove up the Nicasio driveway where I lived in a tent in 1968 in Bob and Diane Emory’s yard, just up from Lucas Valley road in the redwoods. I snapped a picture of the place where my tent was, felt that place on the earth where, years ago

tent spot, 1968

I had lived. Felt it. Then carefully turned around at the top of the steep dirt road and drove down, remembering driving down the driveway on those nights where the destination was the Avalon Ballroom, or Winterland, or the Fillmore. I heard that music all the way home.

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