Tony,

I hope the bombs stop blasting in your head and you get a little peace and quiet.

By the way, have you heard of the campaign to create a Department of Peace? Check out dopcampaign.org

I think you're aware that HR1673 was co-sponsored by presidential candidate Dennish Kucinich, who Tina and I are busy working for in AZ.

We'll be in Vallejo for Christmas, but don't know if we'll have time to make it to Ukiah. Are you around in case we do? Otherwise, we can plan for March when we hope to linger in northern California a bit longer.

The January trip to Thailand and Burma is on, but we've added a brief jaunt back to Cambodia and Vietnam. We leave Jan 13.

Peace,
Randy and Tina

God, Tony, you're making me wrestle a lot with voices inside me. How exactly does one who has no direct experience with war reply to someone who actually went out there and saw it firsthand? That's not to say that I believe one has to actually experience war to understand that it is wrong or terrible. I've listened to enough stories from both my parents and grandparents in Germany and the Philippines to have a pretty good picture of how awful it is. And I was beaten up enough during my younger days to know the effects of violence. But still.

So much of people's anguish plays in the mind, an ocean of feelings and images and reactions plunging around in your skull, beyond the ability of your fingers to grab them and still them. I recently went through an excrutiating catharsis regarding my lifelong, violent relationship to my father, during which I weathered an awful mental storm last year, fighting demons. It is like an explosion in your brain, a swelling of the lobes, until you feel that somewhere it is going to spit open and fire will rage forth. I would wake up drenched in sweat, screaming at the ceiling, and pounding the pillow till feathers flew.

Then an amazing thing took place. I was reading Pema Chodron's "When Things Fall Apart", a book recommended to me by my mother, in which the author charges the reader, when faced with the sense that the world is falling apart, to turn around and walk through the fire. I was terrified at first, but when I actually tried it I was utterly amazed by the transformation in my mind and heart. During the nightly episodes of fury at my father I willfully forced myself to face the awful feelings and images and then embrace them. I allowed myself to feel the hate and anger and violence, to accept them as natural and right, instead of fighting against them and feeling that these things ought not to be inside me. I came out of it all in a state of stillness, as if both sides of myself had cancelled each other out.

I'm wondering if that is something you can do. You have both sides of the whirlwind inside you, a place of peace, and one of war. You have beauty and horror. And perhaps that is the reason all these things have returned to you these days, the quietude evokes its opposite. Is there some way you can embrace the horror inside you and forgive yourself the guilt and fear you must be feeling? For surely it is because you are a decent and peace-loving person that the horrors of Viet Nam messed up your heart and soul.

That is the heart of Buddhism, I guess... to learn how to forgive yourself and the world and cancel out the tempest inside you by embracing it. I don't know if this can help you at all... but there has to be a start somewhere, no?