Richard

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.

Today, I am one year sober after 52 years of drinking. I was pretty good at drinking. Here’s a brief history of my life with the bottle. Drinking started for me at age 19. For the first few years, it started as a weekend thing, or whenever I got together with friends, we’d have a few beers. When I became a professional musician, it was part of the lifestyle. We worked a lot, and we drank a lot. My heroes were musicians, and the better you got, the more you drank. I remember many nights with the band when we’d split a bottle of Jack Daniels between our second and third sets in just 20 minutes. Our performance was sloppy, but the crowds loved it. Being drunk and playing music seemed like the way to go. In the mid-1970s, I lived in Boulder, Colorado. It was a musician’s hot spot, with plenty of work available. We were the house band at Peggy’s Hi-Lo on the diagonal between Boulder and Longmont. My band backed up a singer who wanted to be Elvis or Waylon Jennings, and we played 4 sets a night, 5 nights a week, Sunday through Thursday. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played Good Hearted Woman. Drinks were free for the band, and I became a professional at consuming. It was a cowboy bar in Boulder in the 70s, a pretty wild place. I was riding home with the other guitar player one night, about 3:15 in his perfect 1963 blue and white Chevy Pickup. All of a sudden, there was a huge bang, and the truck came to a stop. We had hit a cow and thrown him about 40 feet. The animal was dead; the truck was ruined. Did we learn anything? Don’t hit cows. Working 5 nights a week and getting well paid, $100.00 a night per member, was great for 1975, and it gave me the weekends to work with a group that was more serious about music. We’d rehearse in the afternoon and drink, a real proving ground for success. In 1980, I moved to New York City and went to work for Hit Factory. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Hoboken, NJ. On the second floor above Maxwell’s Punk club. My bed was above the stage, the bands played till 3 am, and I drank myself to sleep many nights. I stayed in the music industry as an engineer and post-production mixer until I left in 1988 to pursue my personal photography. A drink was never far out of reach. When I was 15 and 16, I hurt both knees and had the cartilage removed, which was the treatment at that time. I’ve been bone on bone since then, alcohol became my pain reliever, and I turned to it when I was in pain. In 1992, I was the victim of a violent armed takedown in a retail camera store by three people with automatic weapons. For some reason, I was singled out and beaten and threatened with my life if I didn’t give over their money. I had no idea where it was. There were 15 people in the store. I could hear a couple of the women weeping for their lives as I lay face down on the carpet. I had nightmares for years afterward. Drinking would kill the mental pain and put me to a very troubled sleep. It took a brilliant psychologist to treat me for PTSD in 1996 to bring me back to the real world. Fast forward through the next 30 years, and a drink was my go-to for any pain relief. I had total knee replacements of both of my knees. Alcohol would calm my nerves before surgery and act as a pain reliever after surgery during recovery. I have a hard time with any opiates; they upset my stomach to the point where even 5 mg can cause me to throw up. Not good if you are in severe pain. Fast-forward again to losing Woody. As I recount in the book, I drank a lot, way too much. I was losing communication with my wife. I couldn’t work; I’d sit in my chair and stare. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, a bell would start to ring in my head, and I had to have a drink or three. As my work with Ophilia deepened, significant changes began to occur within me. I was sitting in my music studio at three one afternoon with a drink poured. I looked at it and said, “This isn’t my path anymore”. I stopped and poured it out. I will not say that quitting cold turkey after 52 years was easy. My body revolted. I kept in touch with my GP and told him what was going on. I felt awful; I’d lie on the bed under a blanket and shake. I couldn’t eat. My GP stayed in touch and would encourage me to go one more day. It lasted three weeks, but I came out the other side. In no way am I advocating for the way I stopped; I could have died, but I’m still here. I have no attraction to alcohol – I can be around it with no feeling of wanting it. I know it’s hard for my friends when I don’t indulge. Today, I am 1 year down the new path of sobriety. It takes courage.

Continuity 2.7 It Comes in Threes, overcoming my family violences When I started this blog, my intention was to continue from where I left off after finishing Woody, My Journey. As I honor that intention, I find that the profound changes that have happened and are still happening to me continue, and I need to address them by writing about them now. One thing I’ve learned about intentions is that if you honor them, they often grow into something quite different than where they started. Change #1 I don’t know much about astrology; Ophilia is a disciple and deeply involved in this sacred knowledge. As I recount in the book, on November 24, she told me that the stars and planets were predicting a huge change for me late in the month when Pluto moved out of a 247-year rotation. We were poor when I was growing up. My father was a janitor at my junior high School who never wore his false teeth. I took a lot of brutal comments about being “mush mouths kid”. I had a job from when I was 13, but I kept up my grades, even made the honor roll. I was a good kid. When I moved out of my house on my 19th birthday, my mother gave me a 12-page letter telling me not to get arrested, not to do drugs, not to get a girl pregnant, 12 pages of her guilt loaded onto me. That night when I moved into my first apartment with a friend, we had a party, and it was the first time I ever got drunk. I carried that letter from my mother, being the janitor’s kid and all that guilt and meanness, for 52 years; it shaped a lot of my life and decisions that I made. As predicted by Ophilia, I woke up on the morning of November 18 after a very violent dream. When I talked it through with my wife, I realized that I was a good kid, that it was my mother’s guilt and pain that I felt about not being good enough. In 15 minutes, 52 years of pain was gone, and it remains gone to this day. The freedom from this thought is simply wonderful. I don’t know the mechanics of how the healing worked, but it did. Change #2 At the end of January 2025, I had a battery failure, and I found myself at an auto parts store as the sun went down. The installer had never installed a battery in an older Prius before, and he was struggling with the flashlight in his mouth. I asked him if I could help him hold it. As he handed it to me, I was transported to the driveway of the house I grew up in. My father was yelling at me that I was a stupid kid because I was shining this flashlight in his eyes. He kept telling me how stupid I was, using a lot of colorful language, until he got to the point where he gave up. Then he would beat me. Standing in this parking lot as the sun went down, I was in full flashback meltdown. One way to calm my total panic was to try talking it out. I’m sure the installer was nervous as heck, but we finished the job, and I went home to dinner. I discussed this with my wife, and I began to realize maybe that wasn’t my fault. Two days later, at 6 in the morning, as I was checking my mail, I glanced at Facebook, and this meme was at the top of the page: I looked at Wendi, showed it to her in total amazement. The universe works in strange and wondrous ways if we only let it. Change #3 This happened just 2 weeks ago, and I’m still processing it. I had the same dream for six nights in a row. I was walking down the street where I grew up, and I walked up to a yellow house with stairs. It looked like the house I grew up in, but ours had gray asbestos shingles on the outside, which made it pretty ugly. I told Wendi about it on the morning of the 7th, and she suggested that I try to go inside. When I went to sleep that night, I welcomed my dream allies for some clarity, be it good or bad. Sure enough, I had the same dream where I was walking down the street, and I walked up to the stairs of the yellow house. I decided to try to go inside. As I went up the stairs, Woody showed up next to me, about the size of a Macy’s day balloon. He had appeared to me before in this form. We walked up the stairs together, and when we got to the porch, he disappeared. I went inside. It was my old house, and I could see everything as clear as day. The house was small. I looked ahead into the kitchen, and at the table sat a board that my parents had taken in, I suppose for the money, because we certainly didn’t have any rooms to spare. His name was Ben; he was deaf. I hadn’t thought about him in close to 60 years. As I looked at him, he leered at me, and I realized on the spot, in my dream, that he had abused me, and I had suppressed the memory for over 60 years. As I said, I’m still processing this. Ophilia tells me that dreaming the same dream for 7 nights in a row is very potent dream medicine. I know this to be true. When I look back at what I have learned about myself in just the last year, it takes my breath away. I’ve carried this damage for so long, and it’s been such a part of the fabric of my life, I feel free. I know that as I

One of the reasons that I wrote “Woody. My Journey through Joy, Grief and Healing with a dog” was to help me through the intense grief. Fact is I would find myself sitting in the car or at my desk and staring, sometimes crying. At times it was as if I couldn’t breathe. I was falling apart, I was drinking way too much and I couldn’t sleep. I had never felt so lost. I was having the same dream every night of a large flat gray expanse, the floor slightly tilting. If I did get an hour of sleep, I’d wake up with the same dream and sense of being out of my body. Today, I’ve been crying most of the morning, it’s 19 months after his passing and I got hit with a freight train today. I could feel his breath on my face when I woke up this morning. I’m seeing him out of the corner of my eye; I see a brown and white flash heading for another room. When I was first talking to my doctor about my feelings he told me,” Greif comes like waves, at the beginning the waves just pummel you, and with time the get farther apart but they never go away”. So, my grief is different now. My dreams have shape and form thanks to my work with Ophilia. Woody shows up from time to time and I know him as an ally and he helps me understand my current path. I’m almost a year sober and I’m not masking the emotions with alcohol. From time to time it feels as if that would help but then I realize I’m so much better without it. I’ve been stuck in the house for 6 weeks recovering from ankle reconstruction which is far different than knee replacements. I’ve had to be on my back with my foot above my heart to keep the swelling down. With my knees my doctor wanted me up and walking as soon as I could. So different with an ankle. Now that I’m out of the boot and off my back I wonder where my motivator will come from. I reach for a ghost that’s not there. As Woody’s story gets deeper into the world, I realize how many more people he is helping. That gives me strength, and when I get hit by a wave, I allow myself to become a part of it, to feel the healing energy that is there for me to accept. It takes courage.