From Up On Frederick's Stone

So: I have more to say.

I have been quiet, even silent, on this page for a while. There have been reasons, and they are almost all social. First it was an old love interest who scorned my thoughts that discouraged me from writing. I wished to hide my words. Then it was an ex-girlfriend stalking my blog, trying to redeem a feeling of dominance and success well after the love failed and I wanted nothing to do with her. I thought of changing my blog title so as to ultimately hide my soul from the perceived, intuited, and imagined influences such people had on me, I thought of never writing again, I thought of waiting until I had so much confidence that I could overcome any fear. These yielded to the convulsions of performance-based fear. I writhed about in a stammering confusion, for the sanctitude in my mind to return. I don’t have some resolute epiphany to save the day. I do have some complaints.

April 16, it was a pretty clear day, windy and a little hazy, not much rain in the second half of spring, enough for the roadside flowers and hillside meadows. I was driving up the 1, I was going to the New Camaldoli service later that afternoon. I got up to around Big Creek and idled around the piney brushy ferric-soiled turnouts there. It’s an especially lush and wild section of Big Sur, on that north slope of Cone Peak’s scalloped arm. At one point driving, dark birds up above I glanced and stopped. Two condors move over the slope slowly twisting and turning with the various invisible rivers of air. I was gathering plants for my dear friend Wyatt to send him dried flora samples of California to allure him out for a visit. I drove back down Limekiln-ways, and took the road up on the east end of Lucia to the hermitage. Pulled over around where that road ridges over the west fork of the Limekiln and the bench that overlooks the Pacific Valley. Three condors way up high over Stony Ridge, a name I didn’t know. Mother, father, child. The brethren of monks began their hymns and mantras, a severely grave homily after the reading of Isaiah 53. In Big Sur, sunlight is either bright tan, glowing sherbet, or quicksilver. The brethren of monks were wearing their bright tan garb.

It’s darker than night, the dense purplish black blanket of coastal fog. The road is weaving through the mountains, up in the cloud layer. There is no one else on the highway. Blaring at 75mph with 25ft of visibility, particles of mist uneventfully obliviate into the windshield, condensing and amassing a blur that the wipers and defroster struggle to clear. Forest canopies occasionally darken the road even further, their unseen canopies only known by their shapeless shadow and a momentary gray trunk. If it were not for the occasional deer that crosses the road, this would not be terribly unsafe.

I have finally decided that I am going to publicly (somewhat) and systematically address the error in Arthur Schopenhauer’s thinking, as it is also at the heart of my own personal problems. I’m going to try to not focus on editing my thought, to keep this as live a discussion as possible, to publish pieces extemporaneously, impromptu.

Hello World.

I have several essays in progress. One of them is an essay about my intentions to write. But that has become an essay of its own. Today, I want to say something about dualism.

Something I’m realizing while living here in Big Sur: an intimacy with the spirit of the west. Not only is this literally the continent’s end, the terminus of westward expansion where man’s devices can go no further, in a deeper sense Big Sur is thus the existential limit of manifest destiny and the exploits of human consciousness. I’m experiencing many impressions of the American West in a way that I’ve only dreamed of in hints and glimpses before. What I’ve experienced previously as ideals, in a Platonic sense, emergent qualities characteristic to various places and combinations of things, I’m now experiencing in a much more direct manner. At times, the spirit of the west is nearer to me than it ever has been. It seems to be stabilizing. Dreams and visions of western aspects. The bright youthfulness of gold California, the universal individuality. The great expansive enchantment of the sandstone desert stars. Mountains of rocky aspen glens and brooks. Moon over sea of plains. Kantian metaphysics. French phenomenology. Western natural handbooks, trees, herptiles, flowers, insects, geology. Histories and poetries. Music of John Berry, Aaron Copeland. Films of Malick, writings of Steinbeck, American epics, Dances with Wolves, A River Runs Through It, Napoleon Dynamite. The things I’ve valued as objects—that which is in them that is part of me I’ve not let be within me, I’ve maintained it’s external in its entirety, but it is not! I’m married to that which I value. The grand staircase dawn is always with me. The great east wind of Joseph’s burning night grains lifts me on condor’s wings soaring over painted desert skies. I’ve been rediscovering an American aesthetic, a genuinely western aesthetic. Where did it go? Who am I? For years I’ve been in a daze searching for, searching for… What have I seen? What have I seen? What I have seen! Who I have been being! Visionary!—western visionary! My lost soul searching has been craving a unified identity of person, place, time. I’ve resented my Californian identity thanks to the rampant industrialized consumer mentality that selfies Big Sur, shits on it, then lights it on fire and leaves it to die. Undertoned to all my bitterness and loneliness has been a real affection for the glory of California, for the voice of the west. An openness living from the heart of the Rocky Mountains, the heart of the red waste deserts, heart of the granite Sierra spine, of the greengold rolling hills, the misty sequoia ocean, great beyond imagining time and space.

These are not things that must be accessed by a duality of possessing and not-possessing.

Emptiness is form, form is emptiness.


Gorda, California
Wednesday April 6th, 2022
Lucas Dodd

Fortuitously, the urge to learn from some myths has surged within me. In an age where rulers of the world seek trophies of human history—Bush sought to conquer cradle of civilization, the Levant; Putin is now invading the birthplains of the Proto-Indo-European culture, the homeland of the Aryans; Soviets and Americans tried and failed to possess Afghanistan, the royal stag of mountains—perhaps my interest in ancient cultures of Eurasia is quite timely. Who knows the depths behind the motives of rulers?

In my searching, I will take some footnotes, for myself and for others. Mostly to summarize and record interesting areas of mythology and history.

A (somewhat) quick aside on the importance of mythology. Our behavior comes from our mind-body complex (which for convenience and historical efficiency I call a “soul” or a “life”), and myths are among the most direct means to understanding, accessing, and altering the structure of our souls, especially when we’re looking at broad strokes of humankind. It is much easier to address a wide audience through a mythic story than a personal narrative. I do not buy into the empiricism of many, in which actions are real and myths/stories/dreams are not real. My mother, for one, told me growing up that my dreams were not real. Whenever I’d have a nightmare as a young child and looked to her for consolation, she would assert “It’s not real.” The problem with that line of thinking is that dreams are in fact real. Dreams portray what is real to an individual person. Yes, they’re internal realities, but they are often the imaginative recombinations of what affects us outside in waking life. Dreams are what we gather from the day and sort through at night. Such are myths and stories of any kind. Rather than being unreal for being stories, they can be super-real for connecting many parts of life together.

This is a good way of onboarding people into the importance of spirituality and fiction. Some people run to religion or fantasy as an escape from the empirical world. That’s not what I’m advocating here. I’m advocating a turn to mythology as a way to access reality better than going through day-to-day life without reflecting on it. Spirituality is not the realm of the unnatural, the immaterial. Spirituality is the realm of the meta-natural, the meta-material. This is the truest meaning of “supernatural.” Supernatural should not be used to mean that which is not physical, but rather that which is beyond a moment-to-moment depiction of nature. Along these lines, supernatural can be used to refer to what is beyond perception, but in this context, I want to focus on super-natural as a word for a heightened experience of the world, a rich, reflective experience of life. In this manner, a powerful meaning of the word “spirit” becomes apparent. Rather than existing in some other realm, “spirits” can be understood as the entities that exist diffusely in our world, spread out across moments in time and points in space. Spirits are patterns that seem to exist on their own right. Spirits have gravity in the world like themes do in a story. Spirits are characteristic features of life that have a weight of meaning which is hard-to-remove.

Interestingly, there is something powerful about the etymology of words. Sometimes nearly identical words with identical meanings pop up in totally distinct languages/people groups, called false cognates. I think that the form of a word itself can connect concepts related by means of etymology. Just the other day, my girlfriend connected baleen whales to mystics without realizing that baleen whales are given the taxa name mysticeti. For me, that strikes me as too strong a correlation to be mere coincidence.

And so now I will begin documenting the spirit world in myths. I’ll be beginning with Mesopotamian myths and maybe some tie-ins to Judaism, the Greek pantheon, and others.


St Patrick’s Day
Big Sur

Hello, World!—and what on Earth am I doing here?

I return to you from a period of some distance. Something was lying dormant in winter soil. Now it is high time to bring the sunshine of my blog back. In this post, I hope to give you some context for what to expect from me here.

As you may have noticed, the name of my blog is From Up On Frederick’s Stone. If you haven’t read Frederick the Mouse, you should—it’s a lovely children’s story. I named my page after Frederick for three main reasons: (1) I love Frederick the mouse, and I emulate with him; (2) I lived on top of a hill with a street named Frederick Street; (3) it sounded fitting for the vibe I was going for.

As to the first point, I’ll give you a recap of why I started this blog. It was March of 2020. COVID was kicking off, and my life was going well. All of my depression and isolation and existential angst had prepared me for global unrest. The chaos of the world gave me comfort, because for once in my life a consumerist society’s bickering over mediocrities was hushed, bickerings which had in large part driven me into isolation and depression through grad school. I felt vindicated, resilient, alive, free. I had fallen in love with a woman, and, at the time, it was a wonderful relationship, a period of tremendous joy, a sense of triumph. I was ready to share the joy within my heart with the world.

COVID dragged on. My prediction since the summer of 2020 was that the pandemic (at least in the mass-mask-wearing) would go through April 2022. Go figure. COVID dragged on, and my life dragged back down into the pit. The romance soured in a frog-in-slow-boiling-water kind of way. My values were being dragged away from me through a loving partner’s incessant condemnations that only occasionally broke through silent lips. So much for that.

And yet, I was learning great lessons. (And I was holding on in that relationship for increasingly inertial reasons). I was keeping myself alive on scraps of money. The thrill of being motivated by survival instincts was at once lifegiving and stressful. Discovering how to deal with work schedules and not be a slave. Learning how to live off the land. Learning to fish. Learning how to face other people imposing their will. How to spend a weekend cheaply. Customer service taught me a lot. I had fun at the same time as I was bogged down. My ex-girlfriend gave me diversion from my internalization of depressive forces. She taught me how people who are inverses of my disposition work. For the first time in my life, I was up close and personal with people shutting off and controlling stimuli. It can be summed up as the difference between one person who tightly restrains their sneezes and another who just sneezes.

In that vice, I was trying to finish my master’s thesis—a monumental work. “Cultivating Creativity in Aerospace Systems Engineering to Manage Complexity.” From the outside, it sounds unique, an interesting attempt at bringing together different topics, like engineering, psychology, and organizational science. From the inside, I was trying to heal the juncture between myself and the world. I found that we (the world and I) shared in common a form of depression. We were being hurt by the same forces. We were wrestling with the same forces. The things that hurt the world hurt me, the things that hurt me were the kinds of things that hurt the world.

At stake in my day-to-day concerns was: how do we stabilize a state of consciousness that resolves the tension between blind industrialism—controlling, divisive, warlike, greedy, unempathetic—and natural harmony? To bring together aerospace weapon design with creative spirituality is a sort of nuclear reaction. Those forces are intense opposites in many regards. Every moment I was striving to hold that state of mind together in myself, in hopes that I could connect the existing data points together with theory and methods. I was trying to hybridize those forces. By facilitating creative behavior in specific areas, I argued, large aerospace organizations could actually save a bunch of money (like billions of dollars) and get way more efficient (on the order of years faster). And I didn’t leave the reader with a suggestion. I actually offered practical steps. It was a grand experiment in human consciousness. And it worked. Nature and industry are not inherently opposed. After much toil, I passed with flying colors.

Immediately thereafter, I found my consciousness streaming into the Santa Lucia mountains. I was enamored with them. Several friends and I took trips up Highway 1 to visit areas in Big Sur’s backcountry. Aesthetic arrest (however partial) allowed me to separate from my girlfriend, after a year or so of dating. I took our relationship into the border of sea and sand and left it there. That was the only way I, being such an affectionately attached person (the relationship was classically codependent, i.e., one insensitive user and one sensitive giver), could separate from a person who harbored black-and-white thinking. Otherwise, she would have taken charge over my motives, and I would have never felt respect and resolution. I went into the gray so that there would be a healthy and lasting separation in the long run.

After that ensued a period of intense internal darkness. I think a lot of people aren’t as reflective, and as such they can tolerate greater amounts of internal suffering than I can. How lost from myself I felt compared to how connected I felt previously was hellish. I lost my desires. I was plotting a dramatic suicide that would definitively catch the attention of millions and send a powerful message to all California, America, the world. (Btw, I had no intention of harming anyone other than myself. I don’t believe in projecting suffering outwardly.)

Glossing over details, fast forward to today. I live in Big Sur now, I have a loving girlfriend, I quit a shitty job, etc. What am I doing here?

As the world is dipping into another unusual low (notwithstanding COVID and climate change), I have the fragrant gift of living in Big Sur. The literal end of a continent, the literal end of westward expansion. No matter how many tourists come here, there is still the backcountry, and the mountains shrug off one of the planet’s busiest highways and vacation-stops like a dust mote. I live here singing for triumphant joy, for life. This is a rich garden.

Not everything I write you will like. At moments, I’m of a scientific, meticulous style. At other moments, I’m calling someone pathetic. At some moments, I’m appealing to Christians. At other moments, I’m musing on how octopuses are the best buddhists. At some moments, I’m talking about the imports of mathematical ontologies. At other moments, the language is immersive, rich, insightful, relatable, profound. There is something for everyone here, but I’m not going to spend time catering to keep a coherent image. This is going to be a pretty wild garden of thoughts, as it has been and always will be. My views might change. I might even explore tendrils for a while, even if they’re hard to follow. If you can’t tolerate me presenting imperfection, then go look in a mirror.

I will refrain from designating a purpose or reason for this blog. That’s a stressful discussion.

I enjoy creating good works, and so I’m going to do that. You are welcome to enjoy it too. The best fruits are somewhere in the fringe between wild and cultivated.

And now I resume.


Big Sur, California
March 10, 2022

Why do people do things? What does it mean to do something for something else? Why do I have this blog, and why I am I writing on it? Why have I designed it this way? What am I doing this for?