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PAINTING AGAIN After leaving graduate school, I immediately began teaching at Happy Valley School, and after that, worked full-time at the Scripps Clinic.  Painting was essentially out.  During that year and a half, I had no time or energy to paint.  On top of that, my energy was focused on learning about life rather than thinking about painting. However, after returning to Ojai, with my part-time odd jobs and limited hours working for Beatrice Wood, there was time to paint once more...and to think about painting... WHERE TO GO FROM HERE...? After Jon moved to San Francisco, I cleaned up and ordered a two-room, cabin-like outbuilding on the Dieges property and it became my studio.  In painting again, I started where I had left off in graduate school... ...continuing my abstract TAKO (kite) paintings.  This time, however, rather than continue the series in watercolor, I switched to oil, using a painting knife to pile on the paint in rich textures...and my range of co

RAPT ON THE LAWN OF THE OJAI PUBLIC LIBRARY Richard and I soon became fast friends and constant companions, often ending a hot Ojai afternoon lying on the grass surrounded by the Ojai Public Library and rapt in conversation. We thoroughly enjoyed each other's company... Hot afternoon after hot afternoon we would spend together in the shade of the library lawn, conversing endlessly, often about spiritual matters...Richard about Ramakrishna and Vedanta, I about Krishnamurti and his teachings...or we would talk about Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching, or about the many strange, ironic, funny, and enlightening stories about Zen masters from Paul Reps' little book, or perhaps something about Saint Francis or some other saint and how all of these insights affect, or might affect our lives. Inevitably the conversation eventually would get around to questions of creativity and the creative process. One day, I found in the library a wonderful and concise little volume entit

THE MAGIC PEN It happened that everything changed one day when I dropped into the local Ojai Village Drug store and surveyed a shiny glass counter case full of pens.  My eye landed on a fancy box with a beautiful blue fountain pen inside!  It was a Sheaffer Snorkel pen (so named because it had a retractable metal snorkel in the nib through which the pen could be filled with ink). It was one of the most beautiful pens I'd ever seen...and it was glistening in a delectable rich blue with which I could not do without...and the fact that it was a fountain pen in an age of ballpoints made it all the more enticing. And the drug store itself was of a different era and definitely in a different time zone...the Twilight Zone.  To give you an idea of how fast merchandise moved in this display case...this pen was brand new...but Sheaffer had stopped manufacturing the model ten years before.  It had been waiting for years for me to come in and find it! The pen was a