From Up On Frederick's Stone

At the turning of the New Age, after WWII and before the hippie era, Joseph Campbell authored The Hero With A Thousand Faces, a book chronicling many of the world’s mythic heroes and illustrating parallel truths between them. Myths, he asserted, often share a fundamental structure, that of “the hero’s journey.” For instance, a young knight might go out to fight a monster to protect a virgin princess and save the town. Or little hobbits, with the help of brave allies and mentors, might have to travel far and wide to fight the evil armies of Mordor and destroy the ring of power for the sake of all Middle Earth. Although I have not myself yet read through the book, I’ve listened to a fair number of Campbell’s recorded lectures, especially when they were free on Spotify—he is a delightfully eloquent and jovial speaker, by the way—and this is the gist of it. There is a sort of archetypal hero lurking in the shadows of most powerful stories, and it grips our attention, even if we’ve heard different versions of the same narrative structure over and over. It’s as if there is one big story that humans have been telling each other for all time.

It has been three years since I last wrote about the spring wildflowers. My lips have been sealed in a loud silence. I have been tumbling through the dreams of California. Words have been far away, changing quickly, they slip past my lips before I speak them. There were dreams then I wished to utter, and I still desire to pronounce them. But I struggle in this golden darkness. The seasons lift me up and humble me. A great riptide keeps me in its powerful gyre, and I do not find the will to escape. I envy the exultant jubilance of green-gold on the jetstreaming sky. Why, and what words form in me here?

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