the resolute kindness

Readers
Friends
Family
Comrades

I wish you all a bright season, and thank you for camaraderie and for showing interest in my work. For the first time in many years, since 2005 to be exact, I will be spending this holiday with family. I am excited. It was a long and painful separation, yet in that empty space my family once filled,  I developed a lot --what Jung would call individuation -- and, up against the painful silence of a careless world, I drew close to the warmth of the fire in my heart, and somewhere there located the elements of my survival. You may have noticed my tools. Writing. Running. Counseling. Reading. Mindfulness and meditation. Guitar. Your life can be what you make of it. Isn't that freedom? I feel fortunate for my small freedoms in our world of power struggles and abuses. Yet the resolute kindness had to be gifted to myself, and still does. There was a time when I was a child then an adolescent and a teenager, and the many kindnesses were insinuated toward me. I believe the most kind among them, lovers and family and lifetime friends, were the ones who knew me best. And I felt insulted. For I knew they knew I was some walking contradiction, that somehow I was an act, and could betray myself in an instant! The ones who knew me, knew I was not kind to myself at all. I treated them poorly and almost as poorly as I experienced myself. I was a classless example on a long and endless tour. I was Keith Richards meets Brian Jones for a swim. I was a party of one, divisible by all. I had to be alone, in order to patiently await the resolute kindness within me. Otherwise, I risked the endless incinerations, and being reduced to a fraction of myself.

2016 K 

This is my confession to you. I know my writings tend to give only a glimpse of who I am and what I have been through. It is only through the greater whole of this website, and through the books that I write (yes, I am a novelist), you may know me more intimately. And you may also see my play and foreplay with the resolute kindness, within and without. I am the filter, and I attempt to surface and demystify the demons, to spin them around like a top and turn them. Turn them into friends and allies, within and without. I consider it some kinda alchemical process going on. I don't create it, I just reflect it. When I am lucky, coal turns to silver and wine, into water. But I want to be honest with the process, and if all that turns up out the topsoil is a demon, well, there you have it, I will share a demon with the world and let the world handle it... I love it more when I can grow the kindness and press it out to you like a flower! This is (and was) my dream in twenty sixteen. And I will exercise a lien on twenty seventeen, and release more of this lovely, tangy stuff to you when i can, so we can share the resolute kindness.