Poet and Mystic or Hypomanic Neurotic? 

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I want my web page to be an invitation than anything else. I am interested in mysticism, poetry, movies, psychology, Native American culture (especially regarding Dakota, Lakota, Ojibwe and other Minnesotan bands) and in improving my life with my wife, Leslee, and my kids Sophia, Andie and our newest child, Griffin. I'm  interested in exchanging opinions and ideas with someone from a foreign country (and, yes, I realize Canada is a foreign country).

Here are a few things I think are important in relation to my first couple of statements:

• Mysticism is homegrown, difficult and a part of everyday life. I am not trying to use it as a buzzword or something New Age. Direct contact with God (Goddess, the Divine, the Universe or whatever word you need to use it to describe it) has been a part of human experience for thousands, if not millions, of years). It's as common as that feeling you get when you watch the sun set or when you see your daughter born and realize that you and she are a part of each other.
• I don't write rhymed poetry, but I like poetry by people like Shakespeare and Marvell. My favorites are Whitman, Dickinson, Roethke, Jeffers, Stafford and Rumi (all Americans except for Rumi the 13th century Sufi).
• I'm also very big on writers like Montaigne and Voltaire who seem to be steering us toward a rational and humane center.
• I'm beginning a very self-centered novel that I would like to publish bits of from time to time in order to gauge reactions. Would you be willing to react to such a thing?

An excerpt:

"10/14/97 Leslee was just sickened at seeing that, you could tell. She's usually less excitable than me, but this the way Andie looked had her face all scrunched up. And Andie's face was full of fear. And a kid's fear is not like an adult's fear. Adult fears always seem to have an existential base, Am I doing very well at work? Is my husband having an affair with someone younger? When I'm 52, am I going to die of colon cancer like my grandfather? Stuff like that that can only be proven or disproven by many days or even years of very nonscientific observation. With a kid who's just turned 3, like Andie had, the fear is more immediate and has no forseeable end. It's a state of being. I'm sure that it was the worst pain she'd felt since being squeezed through the birth canal and emerging into the freezing air, only to have her connection to her mother cut." (from Page 1)

The self-centered novel project:

The requisite few links: