Author name: richard vendor

I just returned from London and the London Book Fair. It was a great experience to witness a revival of sorts in the published word. I’ve visited London several times for work but never took the time to explore on my own. This time, I visited places that are special and almost sacred to me. About 20 years ago, I discovered the story of Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton was the third officer of Robert Scott’s first voyage to Antarctica, the Nimrod Expedition. These voyages could last for upward of three years in harsh, brutal conditions. When these men were there, they were alone, with a slim chance of rescue if something went wrong. South Georgia Island was the last resupply stop with no communications, only the stars to guide them. Their bravery in these hostile conditions was unmatched. Shackleton returned from the voyage with Scott in 1909 and was knighted by King Edward VII. After Scott’s first expedition, Shackleton led a new journey as captain. He redesigned his ship with a deeper hull and copper plating to face the sea and ice, gathering a crew of 27 for the Endurance in 1914. In November 1915, their ship was trapped and crushed by ice. The hardships and Shackleton’s leadership, maintaining crew morale with events like Christmas and Easter, captivated me. After the ship’s loss, the crew hauled three 27-foot boats across the ice and salvaged all they could. Everything had value; nothing went to waste. Reaching the Weddell Sea, the crew lashed the boats together and began a 720-nautical-mile journey to a whaling station on Elephant Island. They fought towering seas, depression, starvation, and fear for three weeks before landing on the wrong island. Shackleton selected two men to seek help, leaving the rest sheltering in the remaining lifeboats. The rescue team landed on the far side, climbed a 10,000-foot mountain, and, too weak to descend, they lashed themselves together literally slid down the mountain thousands of feet into the camp. Malnourished and weak, they stunned those at the station. It took six weeks for the rest to be rescued. Now comes the good part. Despite three years of unimaginable hardships, the expedition lost not a single man. All 27 survived, along with the photographer’s glass plates and cameras. Their survival was due to courage. Humbled by this story, I have read it several times and encourage everyone to do the same. While in London, I visited All Hallows by the Tower and stood before the crow’s nest used on his third voyage. Overcome by the power of this relic, I wept openly and prayed for the same courage in my life. Alone in the church for over half an hour, I marveled at the barrel’s symbolism and felt its significance. I invite everyone to seek what gives them courage in our own times. Strength is within us all; seek your key to unlock it.

I cried through my shower yesterday. It’s the first time in over a year that I’ve done that. I didn’t sleep well and woke up at 4 am with the most dreadful feeling of loss. I dreamt of Woody that night. As I stood in the shower with the water as hot as it would get, I just couldn’t hold back the tears. The only thing to do was give in to the grief and then try to recover later in the day. As I prepare to travel to London for the London Book Fair next week, I have been in a period of intense self-examination. Being raised as I was, my parents gave me no belief in the goodness and strength of myself. I was repeatedly reminded of our poverty, and it felt as though my future was a closed door with no key in sight. With no guidance, I drifted without goals or the courage to chase them. When I discovered music and the guitar at age 13, it was a way for me to withdraw into my own world. I practiced hard and played in a few bands. I do remember the sheer joy of finding a groove and becoming a unit; it gave me hope that music would be my way out. We owned a 1954 Ford station wagon that my father had snagged from Army Surplus for a mere $15.00. At school, I vividly recall the mockery I faced as classmates flaunted their parents’ shiny, new cars while I trudged along in our old station wagon. When I was 11, I started delivering newspapers. One day, unexpectedly, my father offered to lend a hand. I was seated on the tailgate, facing backward with the rear window directly above me. Out of nowhere, my father accelerated to beat an oncoming car, taking a sharp turn into our driveway at high speed. The tailgate jolted, and the window unlatched, slamming down on my head. I tumbled off the tailgate, narrowly escaping a collision with another car. Dizzy, nauseous, and disoriented, I struggled to comprehend what had just happened. It wasn’t until later in the week, as my symptoms persisted, that my parents finally decided to take me to the doctor. He prescribed a spinal tap as a way to diagnose what was wrong with me. I can’t imagine any world where you would give a spinal tap to an 11-year-old growing boy. I still bear the physical scars of that experience, and I wonder what went through my father’s mind—or if he even thought at all. One day, when I was 15, my dad drove up in a new 1965 Ford Fastback Mustang. What in the hell? I remember a huge fight between my father and mother about how we couldn’t afford it and how it would send us to the “poorhouse”. Maybe the Mustang was my father’s only way to show the world he was successful, not just a janitor at a middle school. 6 months after it appeared, it disappeared just as suddenly. My guess is that it was repossessed. My father withdrew even more from our house. The fighting between my mother and father grew worse. As the last child left at home, it was a very lonely place. I moved my bed down to our damp basement so I could avoid my parents even more than I already did. So, where is the beauty underneath that this blog promises? It took me several hours to recover from the grief that I felt in the shower. As I explored my feelings, a light began to shine. The loss of Woody had been for a reason. Woody made people feel good when they saw him. It was my deepest desire that we would do therapy work with people who needed him. I know that since losing him and writing the book, he has helped more people than he ever could have in his short life. Woody was good Medicine, and his loss has given me marching orders to go out and spread that Medicine to people who need it. Sometimes I need that Medicine for myself, to help me process the pain of my family and go forward with strength. Woody’s Medicine has been my lesson over the past 2 years. And now Woody and I are ready to head across the ocean and spread his Love to the world in ways I never dreamed possible. London here we come…. all photographs ©Richard Newman 2026

I lost a friend last week. I’d like to say he was a close friend, but for the last 4 years, all he has done is push people away, and now he’s gone. I had just spoken with him on Saturday. Two days later, someone directed me to his estranged wife’s post at 9 in the evening. I was in total shock. He had sounded good on the phone 2 days earlier, even hopeful. Yes, he had cancer, but to me, that didn’t seem like a reason to give up. But that’s what he did. He pushed everyone away; he stopped participating in the guitar world, stopped answering emails and texts, and stopped answering his phone. When I would call and leave a message, it might take him a week or more to return my call. It was impossible to plan anything with him. When I asked him what he was doing, he said, “watching YouTube.” I watched for 4 years as his life spiraled out of control. I watched as he made one bad decision after another, and it hurt to watch this train wreck, but whenever I might bring something up, I was shut down pretty fast. I had a hard time drawing the line between minding my own business and trying to throw him a life preserver. It was frustrating; a lot of times, I told my wife he was hard to love. He did nothing but watch YouTube for 18 months before he passed. I often thought that if there were a finite end to the internet, he would find it. I did my best to engage him, but he completely shut me out. I encouraged him to get out of town and do something he had always wanted to do, but he didn’t make any effort. About two months ago, he told me he had made a reservation for a weekend in Big Sur for his birthday. Encouraged, I asked him about it a month later, and he had cancelled his stay. I asked him about his diet and if he was eating OK. He wasn’t, but he didn’t seem interested in any suggestions or ideas. When I found out he had passed, I was numb. I wasn’t sure about my feelings, so I checked in with Ophilia Mandara, who has been my guide since losing Woody. Ophilia is a powerful teacher, and her counsel has always been right for me. I told her the story and related my feelings of the loss, that he had just disappeared. Here is her counsel: “ It is extremely agonizing that so many lives are consumed by despair and suffering. Since it cannot be denied or controlled, this is the choice I see: if we can bear witness to this with great gentleness and love, perhaps even be inspired to live with more and more heart because of the pain that we see, then evolution is happening. The love we choose, despite the great temptation to fold forever into bitterness and isolation, will touch lives and inspire the proliferation of loving presence in unimaginable ways. This is where I return and place my trust.” She also recommended the Hawaiian prayer Ho’oponopono, which reads “I’m Sorry, Please Forgive Me, Thank You, and I love you.” I incorporated this into my daily meditation, chanting it and burning a candle for him several times a day. Her words brought about a huge change in my thoughts. I will work to spread love in place of his confusion and anger. I will wish him well on his journey into the great mystery. The gold for me in his death – not that I won’t miss him –  will be that: I will live better for him. I will hold my heart with gentleness and love. I will wait for the teachings to come, as the earth and my heart have much to teach me. It takes courage.

I have repetitive dreams. I believe they are a teaching dream, and I always wake up confused by the imagery and the subject’s repetitive nature. This has not been a one-time occurrence; it has happened several times since we lost Woody. I’ll describe a few. The first time I remember these repetitive dreams was in September of 2024. I had just met a Native American man in the parking lot of Santa Cruz Guitars. I don’t believe in coincidence; I just happened to drop by. We were supposed to meet. We were both excited and scheduled a sit-down a couple of weeks from then to discuss a film about his story. For two nights before the meeting, I dreamt of people or beings sitting around a circle with a fire in the middle. The same dream occurred both nights. On the day of the meeting, I was excited by his story and couldn’t wait to start scripting and shooting. That night, I had the dream for the third time, but this time the beings were leaving the circle around the fire; they were dissolving into the air. I woke up troubled that I had misread the meeting. I believe that, in reality, the opportunity was not available to me because I had more important things to focus on, like my healing over the loss of Woody. My dream was right. His project would have distracted me from the true healing that I needed. Without this distraction, I started writing Woody, My Journey through Joy, Grief, and Healing with a Dog. I also got sober a month later (15 months today, and I’m never going back.) For the past three weeks, I have been doing an Ancient Ancestors investigation with Ophilia Mandara, one of the co-writers of my book. I had a lot of second thoughts about participating because I couldn’t get past my feelings about my parents. My parents were mean, unloving, and not interested in me or my future. I believe they expected me to become a janitor in the school system where my father worked. I was having none of that.  During my high school years, I lived with the conviction that I would be nothing like my parents. I would be loving, non-hypocritical, and present for every situation in my life. I wasn’t sure that I would be able to let go of my feelings and go past them to my ancestors who worked so hard to survive. One week of the study with Ophilia was centered on free-form drawing from your dreams. The night before, I dreamt of the location of my parents’ graves. I have never been there. I wasn’t told of their deaths till weeks after it had happened, but in my dream, I could see the cemetery. As I began to draw, I started to draw this dream. Rather than the tombstones scattered about, my drawing focused on the fence that surrounded their graves. It was horribly overgrown with vines and briars. I looked at my drawing but couldn’t make the connection between my dream and my feelings of hatred for my parents and the way they lived their lives. Again, last week, I had a recurring dream. I had it three nights in a row, and when I woke up in the dream, I could re-enter it. I could see three circles in my dream. During the dream, my perspective would change: sometimes I was above them, sometimes on the ground, and sometimes I became part of the circles. Our ancestral session this time was centered on free-form writing from your dreams. I chose three of my allies: earth, water, and dreams. As the session ended, I realized that I had written the lyrics to three songs about these allies. I looked at my drawing of the fence from the previous session, which represented my parents’ ancestral baggage. I had now broken through the fence and was free of their smothering of my life. I felt lighter in spirit. I walked on the beach today for the 3rd time since my ankle surgery in July. In 2025, before surgery, I walked by the water every day. Today, I was hit with a “sneaker” wave because I wasn’t paying attention. As the rising water reached my knees, I wondered if I could withstand the force of the wave. In that moment, I was struck by how strong my legs really were. The wave, like a wave of grief, subsided. I was wet and recharged by the power of my water ally, and how life-changing love and courage can be.

The above title is powerful to me. There are so many things I could and should learn to let go of. I’m going to try to focus on letting go of the interpretation of my dreaming. I am an every-night dreamer, and during the night, I dream multiple times with different scenes. Right after we lost Woody, I was having the same dream every night. I was having it multiple times, and it got to the point where I didn’t want to go to sleep because I was in fear of the dream returning. I was drinking myself to sleep (15 months sober now), and my relationship with my wife was falling apart because of my behavior. In the repetitive dream, I would see Woody way out on the ocean, and he was very small. I could never reach him. He would disappear, and I’d wake up. I had hoped that someone would be able to explain it to me, as I was getting pretty desperate. This dream was the main reason that I started working with Ophilia Mandara.  I went through 12 very intense dream “sessions” that were an hour long. In these sessions, she would explore the dream, and we would establish “anchor points” in the dream that I would return to during meditations in the coming week. In the beginning, I hoped I’d understand it, but in reality, the anchor points would send me down a much different, deeper path. I continue this practice and work to this day. I’ve learned that before I go to sleep, I address my dream allies, be they good or not, and tell them that if they have some gifts to share with me after I fall asleep, I welcome those gifts, be they ones of lightness or darkness. It can make for some pretty interesting dreams for sure, and I am grateful for this gift of dreaming. So, my intention is to let go of trying to understand my dreams and to accept the experiential lessons and teachings I experience in them. One of the things that I see most often in my sleep is a timeless space. There is no horizon or floor, there is no sense of time. I feel as if I am floating between two worlds. That recurring visualization bothered me at first, but now I look forward to the undefined, floating backdrop. The bonus part of learning to let go is the realization that I don’t have to ask anybody except myself for permission to experience my dream wonderland.

I got up this morning and walked into my back yard. The waning moon was shining through a gap in the branches of my 300-year-old oak tree I stared up at it and said to myself, “I’m right where I should be right at this moment”.  I looked up in the tree and saw a family of finches, a seagull flew by, then a pair of crows. I marveled at the life around me. My clarity at 6:15 in the morning shocked me. I was right where I’m supposed to be in that moment and I realized that was truth in so many different aspects of my life. Woody used to steal a clear plastic cup I used for laundry soap. I’d take it away and hide it from him. He’d find it and I’d hear him chewing it. Last week, I was cleaning under a bookcase and I found it. I could see his very sharp teeth marks in the plastic. I fished it out from under the bookcase and held it in my hand.  I broke down on the floor and couldn’t stop crying. I could feel his energy in the cup and when I finally did stop crying, I felt bad about being overcome. It’s been close to 2 years since we lost him, and here I was, lost in grief. I remember my PCP and my therapist telling me that grief would come in waves, that the waves would come further apart but there would be sneaker waves that would feel like being swept off the rocks and into the boiling sea. They were right. As I reflect on the moment now, I can have some perspective on how I felt, and I realize that I can’t hurry the healing in my life. My time with Woody was short but so potent. I realize that if I accept my feelings, then I can climb out of the depression much faster. We live near a middle school (where Frank Zappa spent some time in his youth) where there is one crosswalk that is pretty dangerous. The school has taken to putting holders on each corner with flags in them. The purpose of that is that the children carry the flags across the street, wave them if they need to attract attention of the drivers and then they put them in the containers when they safely reach the other side. Right before we lost Woody, I was training him to carry one of the flags in his mouth until we reached the other side. He loved walking with the kids. When I walk past that corner it’s always a trigger for my sadness. Today, as I walked across that intersection, and I nearly made it across before I started to break down a little. I know this memory is a strong one, and that what I am feeling is exactly the right feeling for where I am today in this moment. It takes courage.

After Woody passed I started dreaming very intensely. I discussed it with my therapist and my PCP. They would listen quietly but could offer me no answers or meaning. At the time I thought that dreams could be interpretive, maybe they can but for me, I was living the dreams when I slept. It was torture. Three months after his passing I started to have the same dream every night. I was standing on a beach looking across the water. I could see Woody way out on the horizon; he never got closer in the dream. I would have the dream 3-4 times a night and wake up, sometimes in tears because I could see him in my dreams, but I couldn’t hug or hold him. Every day, I cried a lot in the morning after my wife left for work, I’d just sit in the chair in my office and look out the window. My therapist recommended I work with a “dream specialist”. Ophilia Mandara. I spoke to her on the phone and we set up 10 Zoom meetings. Before she would work with me, she asked me to define my intent for this work. I spent the next two weeks defining why I wanted to work with her, and what I came up with was this, “It is my intent to grow through this grief into a more powerful and loving life”. It was really hard for me to define how I wanted to begin healing, I went through several legal pads of ideas before I came to my intent. It became the beginning of a life changing experience. Ophilia began to guide me through my dreams. She asked me to accept the fact that when I was dreaming that I was out of my body, case in point, if I was in my body, I’d be dreaming about being in bed. That made perfect sense to me. She took me to the shore where I could see Woody way out on the horizon and helped me invite him to play with me. I can’t really describe what happened next, but he came to shore and allowed me to hug and hold him (or his essence). That night, the dream that I had been having for close to 3 months, vanished. As my study with Ophilia deepened, we went to some very dark places. When I became afraid, she would remind me that the darkest earth was the most fertile and allowed for the most growth. I won’t go deep into some of this dreamwork here because I covered it very well in the book, Woody, My Journey through Joy, Grief and Healing with a dog”. I dream almost nightly, some I understand, some scare me, and recently I’ve had another repetitive dream. In this dream I am standing in front of a never-ending box with divisions in it, like an old printing press shop would use for type, letters and symbols. I realized after the third night that I was dreaming that I was doing was sorting out feelings and emotions and putting them in the correct order. I have a lot of sorting dreams, and I feel they are now my guides and allies as I sort through my emotions and begin to understand what happened to me in my early life. I find so much peace and understanding through my dream life now. Ophilia writes a blog published here, but to stay current, I’d direct you to her Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/dreamyourselfwild/ I wish you all courage and peace.

October has been hard for me. I miss Woody every day, and it often brings me to tears, even though it’s been almost 2 years. It seems that the veil between different life forces merges together in this time of harvest and shortening days. We reap the bounty of our hard work over the summer, and the earth is entering shorter days and longer nights. I noticed this same thing last year during this month (2024). It was a year ago that I began to write “Woody, My Journey through joy, grief, and healing with a dog”. So much has happened during the past year. This past week, Woody has been very present. When Wendi had Faith at work last week, and I was alone in the house, I heard him bark several times. I see him out of the corner of my eye. Last night I saw him standing in the hall. You can choose to believe this or not, but for me, it’s so real, and I feel his presence constantly; I accept it. I’m reading a great book by the Irish Poet David Whyte called “Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words”. I can’t recommend it enough. One of the words he talks about is Haunted, here’s David’s words: “Haunted is a word that denotes an unresolved parallel, a presence that is not quite a presence, a visitation by the as yet unspeakable…..when we make a friend of what we previously could not face, what once haunted us no becomes an invisible, parallel ally, a beckoning hand to our future.” For the longest time, I couldn’t face the fact that I had lost him in such a sudden way; one minute, he was with me, the next, he was gone. I’m encouraged and comforted by David’s words and my work with Ophilia Mandara. Even though Woody has left the material plane, he is still there in my dreams, an ally who helps me understand what I don’t understand. He appears almost nightly in my dreams. A couple of weeks ago, I dislocated a finger on my right hand. The pain was intense. As I got to my doctor, I realized I was having a PTSD moment of when I was 19 and living in my parents’ basement. I was carrying a guitar amp up the stairs and smashed my little finger into the wall, breaking the knuckle. I went upstairs and showed it to my father, who said, “I’m not paying for that, put some tape on it.” Cruel. As my doctor was setting my finger this time, I was in full flashback, remembering the smashed knuckle. I got little sleep that night because of the pain. I talked with Ophilia about the flashback and my finger; here are her words of counsel, which I’ll share with you. “It makes me think once again of how much you’ve endured and the immense way that the body stores memories. I’m glad that there are no broken bones, but I do lament the painful way that your father interacted with you in this memory, and in so many others. It is so tragic—the degree to which some people never learned to be loving and compassionate. You deserve and deserved much better. Sometimes, when I engage a painful memory, one with a painful interaction or harmful behavior, I’ll ask myself what I would have wanted and needed to hear at that time, or what actions would have been supportive to receive. I spend a little time imagining the ideal words and actions that would have come from a loving and supportive presence. Then I say those words to myself, write them down, or print them out and keep them somewhere I can see regularly. I’m sure I’ve also shared about this before — but another practice I’ve done in the past is to call on the “loving, nurturing, and caring fathers and grandfathers” within my lineage, to show me what compassionate support from “the masculine” is like. I ask those who can show up in this way to support my days, my healing, and my work in the world. And then I tell all others —those ancestors who are still confused —to “get clear and align to love” before influencing my life. Essentially — if there are ancestors who are not yet in service to my love and wellness, they have to step back and make room for those who are.” Her words immediately found truth in my heart, and they brought me a lot of relief. When I went to sleep that night, I had a dream that I was walking in a very undefined space, almost as if I was walking in clouds. Suddenly, a gigantic set of stairs appeared before me; they stretched up into infinity. Suddenly, Woody was beside me, and we both lay down at the base of the steps. I knew at this moment that Woody was there as an ally to help me through this. I felt that I was lying at the feet of my ancestors, and I asked them to please leave me alone unless they could serve the loving life I am pursuing. When I woke up that morning, I felt calm, as if I had crossed a Rubicon that I had never ventured into before. Am I haunted? In some ways, yes, but I am not afraid to continue this incredible journey into a deeper understanding of my heart and my path; it takes courage.