The J-Spot

A druid’s window on the past… I had been really excited about finally seeing real magic! Venturing into a cave and reciting an old Welsh spell of making, made me realize that there was more to life than meets the eye. After that one genuine experience, I was hungry for more truth. So I thought, ‘Why not blow the doors right off the Otherworld and go for the Dragon calling?’ Yet, my mentor put the brakes on my noble ambitions before I could head out for the endeavor. He warned against unwelcome results if I went too far too fast. A younger me may have ignored his caution, but luckily, I learned the extremely important skill of listening about ten years prior. “Okay, okay,” my old friend Woody would say, “just slow down!” At that point I would be interrupting his dialogue with my own, assuming I knew where his advice was headed. “You need to learn to listen!” he said, soundly. I paused and remembered something I read about people subconsciously waiting for an opportunity to speak ra...

  What is true fear? I sat outside of a cave, its dark throat beckoning with the tiny voice of cave crickets. My challenge, assigned to me by the Arch Druid, to enter alone. Once inside, I was to find the deepest recess of the cavern and read ‘There were Giants’ from the first of the Druidic Chronicles, aided only by the light of a pale Fire globe of blue light. Since childhood, I have long imagined what, if anything, may happen if ever I were to dare the Druidic initiation. The tradition has, for time immemorial, been the first step in achieving any real authority over the shades of stone and sea. The shades of stone and sea? Beings? Giants, fabled to inhabit Britain before its colonization? The Druid Chronicle offered only one vague clue to the results of the endeavor. “For an out of this world experience, read There Were Giants in a cave by the light of your Palen Tan, and as an extra measure try reciting the first ancient Welsh Spell of Making.” My son, fourteen, accompan...

It’s just a little further One morning, after a twenty-four hour shift, I strapped sneakers on and set out for the year’s first half-marathon. I’d plotted a course that started right near the back of Fire Station number Two in Palmetto, FL and wound through Emerson Point along the Gulf of Mexico. The first mile was a shaded concrete footpath. A ditch, barely alive with the trickle of non-recent rainfall was on my left. Chain link fence edged the wooded track on my right. Brief swaths of land would occasionally interrupt the running chain link, those were strategically marked with outdoor exercise equipment. A wooden lean-to, designated for sit-ups, a push-up bar, a pull-up station. The apparatus served as a nice warm-up; one final procrastination for the coming three-hour crawl. As the obstacles came to an end over one last culvert, I pushed on between two white poles preventing vehicles mistaking the concrete trail for a left hand turn. A definite possibil...