Chief Willy's Book of Wisdom - Chapter 4

    "Chief, there's a village up ahead." I heard Jackson say from across the narrow road.  I glanced over at him and smiled.  He looked like G.I. Joe from the comic books that we read as kids.  He was thick muscled.  Rolled up sleeves revealed powerful, hairy arms that cradled a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle).  A stub of a dead cigar stuck out from a dirty face that hadn't seen a razor in at least a week.  His camouflaged helmet rode low on his forehead.  An ammo belt was slung over each of his shoulders.
    "Yeah.  I see it, Jackson."  I said.  I raised my hand in the air, which brought the columns of men on either side of the road to a silent halt.
    Jackson walked across the road and lit the cigar stub with a Zippo, then turned and studied the village and terrain with me.
    "Looks too quiet."  I said.
    "Maybe the Great Spirit is there.  Then what will you do?"
    Confusion rattled my brain.  "What?  What the hell are you talking about?"
    "Wake up, Sarge."  Jackson said, turning and looking at me.
    "Wake up!"  I heard again, but it wasn't Jackson's voice.  I opened my eyes, and realized that I had been dreaming.  Across the small beach an Alaskan river flowed lazily to the sea.  Two men stood in front of me, one leaning down, shaking my shoulder as he kept saying, "Wake up".
    "I'm wake.  I'm awake."  I said, coming to my feet.
    "Are you okay?"  He asked.
    "Yeah.  I'm fine."  I looked from him to the other guy and back to him.  They wore the yellow helmets and thick clothes of firefighters.  I recognized both of them from the fire camp, which was the temporary home of hundreds of men.
    "What are you guys doing out here?"  I asked him.
    "Looking for you.  What the hell do you think we're doing out here?"
    "What for?  Willy, here - - " I turned to where Willy had been sleeping against the tree next to me, but he wasn't there.  I looked around the beach and then back at the firefighter who had a very confused expression on his face.
    "Willy - you mean, Chief Willy?" the guy said.
    "Yeah.  He was right here."  I said, turning and pointing at the base of the tree.
    "I think you hit your head and don't remember it.  Willy was never here.  He couldn't have been.  He's been with us the whole time.  He's up on the main trail right now."
    "We're talking about an old guy with real white hair.  Right?" I asked.
    The guy standing off a little bit started snickering.  We both looked at him.
    "Hey; Joe, don't you remember what Willy said when we started the search?"
    "What's that?'  Joe asked.
    "Willy - when we started the search.  He walked around that burn hole, sniffing the air, looking up and chanting, and then he said, "We go this way." and started down the trail.  I asked him how he knew where to go, and he said that he was already here and the Great Spirit would guide us."
    "Oh, yeah, I remember that." Joe snickered with him.  "Crazy old fart, but he's a damned good tracker."
    I looked at both of them with astonishment.  "Man, you guys are really st - - " I stopped, knowing better than to call them "stupid shits", as I would need to be rescued from my rescuers if I did.  Instead I stumbled on the word and managed to say, "stupendously great guys for saving me."
    "College kid, huh?"  The guy other than Joe said with a hint of sarcasm.  "Nobody uses a word like, stupendously."
    "I'm a writer." I said.  "Sometimes words pop out when I'm not looking."  I gave him a friendly grin.
    He nodded acceptance of my excuse.
    When we climbed back up to the main trail, Willy was waiting for us.  He looked exactly as I had seen him all morning long.  When our eyes met, he smiled slightly and his eyes twinkled. 
    "Did you learn anything by getting lost?"  he asked. 
    "Yes, I did, Willy.  I learned a lot."  He nodded, turned up the trail and silently led us single file back to the fire camp.


   










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Chief Willy-Chapter 2

Chapter 2


    "You must be the lost firefighter."  The voice came from behind me, shattering the silent world of nature in which I had been so completely engrossed.  I jumped, startled by a human voice.  Turning, I saw a man standing at the end of the trail where the forest came to an abrupt halt at the large flat rock upon which I stood.  He looked very old, but the brutal weather of Alaska can age a man if he spends a lot of time outside.  He had long white hair that almost glowed.  In contrast, his skin was dark as leather and as creased as an unmade bed  The hint of a smile gathered his face in even more creases.  He wore a yellow helmet just like mine and was dressed in the heavy clothing of a firefighter.
    "I'm a firefighter, but I didn't know I was lost."  I responded.
    He chuckled.  "If the fire boss sends me looking for you, then you had better be lost."
    He pointed towards the eagle, which was now just a black dot on the rising sun.  "You have been touched by eagle spirit."
    "Oh."  I responded, glancing at the eagle.  "You saw that, huh?"
    "Yes.  I did not want to intrude.  Such a moment is rare in a persons life.
    "Are you ready?"  He asked, turning towards the trail behind him.
    "Yeah.  Just a second."  I said, glancing over the precipice of the cliff.  The bear and the moose were gone.  "Yeah, I guess I'm ready."
    He led the way, moving with a graceful agility of a deer and easy quickness one would not expect from a person who appeared to be so old. 
    "What's your name?"  I said to his back as we walked up the trail.
    "Willy."  He tossed the word over his shoulder.  Still looking forward he said,  "White people call me Chief Willy."
    "Are you a Chief, Willy?"
    "I am to white people.",  He said, making me chuckle.
    "Apparently you're a tracker too."  I said.
    "I have done a lot of things, and some of them I'm good at.  Tracking is one of them."  He responded.  "Plus - ", he added, "You were easy to track.  I figured out what happened by following your footprints from the hollow where the flare up started.  You got caught in the fire, found the trail and figured it would lead to water, which was the right thing to do."
    "Man, you're good."  I said, impressed.
    "Been doing it a long time."  He said, and then suddenly turned off the trail and started walking through the thick of the forest.  As I followed him in silence, I looked down and saw a trickle of a trail etching its way between the trees.  Branches of fir trees dangled in front of us which we swept aside as we followed the trail about a hundred yards before coming to a clearing of white sand that spilled out from the trees and slipped into a crystal clear river.  Across the river was a matching sandy beach that stopped at the forests edge.  The forest climbed majestically up a mountain that snuggled up to another larger mountain.  The mountains seemed endless, clothed in forests and rivers it looked as if they strived to touch the sky.
    "So, what are you doing in Alaska?"  He asked me as he studied the clearing from the edge of the forest where we had stopped.
    "Well, like a lot of the guys here, I just got out of the service a short time ago.  This is my way of winding down."
    "Fighting forest fires is your idea of winding down?"  He asked with a tone of surprise.
    "Huh!  You should have seen what I was doing  before this."  I paused, listening to the mesmerizing water bubble gently in front of us, thinking about what I was doing in Alaska.
    "I guess I'm looking for my place again.  I'm not sure where I belong or what I'm even doing here.  Out here, in the wilderness, it seems to have kind of a healing effect on me. 
    "You know, it's a place where I can clear my head  and figure out what I'm suppose to do."
    "What do you want to do?"  He asked as he started to walk across the sand, satisfied from his survey that there was no other animals to intrude upon.  I followed behind him, thinking about what I would like to do.
    "Well, I really like to write and do art work, but I don't see how I could make a living at that.  I read a lot of philosophy - always have.  I guess I'm trying to find myself in those books."
    "Books are good."  Willy said simply as he bent down at the rivers edge, scooped water into his hands and drank from them.  He stood and said,  "I'm reading all the time."
    "Oh, really."  I said with interest.  "Do you carry any with you?"  I asked looking at his back pack.
    "Don't have to - you're standing in it."
    I looked down at my feet thinking I might have stepped in a wild animal surprise.  "What am I standing in?"  I asked dancing around.
    A slight grin crossed Willy's face.  "You're standing in my book."  He said, sweeping the horizon with his hand.  "This is my book of philosophy.  Every thing you can learn about what life is and who you are is in my book.  You just have to know the language of the forest spirit  - how to read it."
    At that moment I realized that when you are searching for something, something that you want desperately, circumstances, or fate, or maybe just a shot of the dice, will present it to you, and it may come in the most unexpected ways and in the most unlikely places.  It can be abstract or hit you like a train, but you have to be paying attention, be in the right frame of mind to see it when it presents itself.
    This day was already most remarkable for me.  I had beat deaths calling flames.  I had a spiritual communion with a bear, a moose and her calf, and a most powerful one with a bald eagle. 
    Now, I found myself sitting at a rivers edge in a forest that wasn't even on a map, listening to an old man who spoke to me in a way that nearly shocked a revelation from me, because I could feel the truth in what he said, even if I could not articulate it very well in my mind.  I knew what he met.  I could feel the essence of truth in what he said.  I wanted to know the language of the forest spirit.  I wanted to be able to read Willy's book.
   

   














All content - poems, posts & images - are ©2010 by John Evans. No permission is given to post, share, copy, print, e-mail, reproduce, distribute or link to. All Rights Reserved. Please contact John Evans at JohnEvansPoet.Com for licensing inquiries.

Chief Willy's Book of Wisdom-Chapter 1

Chapter 1

    When I awoke I wasn't sure where I was, but when I tried to move my body felt like rams had used it for butting practice.  I was laying on a large flat rock at the edge of a cliff that dropped about twenty feet.  I raised my head enough to look over the cliff and saw the river for which I had so desperately ran throughout the night as the forest fire chased me down the animal trail.
    I remembered hearing the water running lazily down stream and the wet smell permeating the odor of the soot that covered me as I had fallen at the cliffs edge, exhausted.  I hadn't bothered looking for a trail down to the water when I reached the cliff, as I thought I would have to do.  My plan was to break a reed at the waters edge and use its hollow tube to breath through if I had to go under water to keep from frying to death in the fire, but the wind had ushered the fire into another direction before I reached the river.  I hadn't stopped running, though.  The wind is a fickled traveller, and I knew it could easily change directions again, and I had to be far ahead of the fire to survive. 
    Now, as I looked down at the river in the early morning light, I could see its turqoise color, which implied that it was a glacier fed river, barely above freezing.  Had I been forced to go into the river I probably would have died from hypothermia.  My two choices would have been death by fire or death by freezing.
    Forest fires don't burn in a steady line through the forest.  The flames engulf and roar to the top of the trees, tossing glowing embers into the wind that it creates, bombarding the pristine forest for hundreds of feet like an artillery barrage.  Where ever the embers touch a new fire begins.  A fire can easily over take a person running from it, and actually get in front of you and block your escape.
    I thought back to my escape.  I was lucky.  I could see the trail clearly in the light of the fire that blazed around me as I ran through the night, feeding itself so greedily on the surrounding air that I could feel it being sucked away from me.
    Tendrils of tree roots, half buried in the trail and half submerged rocks offered leg breaking obstacles as I ran for my life, but I felt oddly light as I ran, barely touching the earth, hardly paying attention to the dangers that I flew over.  It was as if I could sense the protrusions on the trail more than see them.  Somewhere before my there had to be a river and I would not stop running until I found it.
    Now, the fire lingering only in my nostrils, I could see in the first dim breath of morning light a black bear sitting on a sandy alcove across the river from where I lay prone on the flat rock.  He sat on his butt, his legs straight out in front of him with his paws folded in his lap.  He gazed at the river with half closed eyes as if he was meditating.  The river was about thirty feet across and the cliff upon which I sat at the edge of was about twenty feet above the river.  The bear did not notice my presence, or didn't care
      In another sandy alcove next to the one where the bear sat was a cow moose and her calf.  They grazed with their noses submerged in the waters edge, oblivious of its freezing temperature.  Large boulders with trees growing from their cracks separated the bear and the moose, giving each a peaceful seclusion and an unawareness of the others presence.
    The scene had almost a spiritual effect on me.  Perhaps it was the contrast of serenity I was looking at to the one of desperate flight for survival in which I had spent the night before that struck me as it did at that moment.  I lay as still as I could, not wanting to disturb the animals below me, not wanting the scene to change to anything else other than what I saw.
    Suddenly from the corner of my eye I saw a bald eagle appear around the bend of the river.  He glided inches above the water as he followed its rushing surface.  Suddenly his legs lowered and his talons spread as he dipped down and snapped a large salmon from the rivers surface.  The eagle stroked the wind with his large wings and rose into the air, the salmon wrestling against the eagles grip, drops of water flying from the fish like sparkling diamonds in the first light of the rising sun.  As the eagle rose and came level to where I lay on the flat rocked precipice of the cliff, he glided over to me and hovered on the updraft.  He was so close I could have reached out and touched the tip of his wing.  We gazed into each others eyes until he started to lose the updraft, and then he stroked the air and flew into the morning, becoming a diminishing silhouette against the rising sun.
    I rose to my feet as I watched the eagle disappear, no longer noticing the soreness that I felt upon awakening.  I could not explain why, but the experience I had just had with the eagle overwhelmed me.  I could feel tears coming to my eyes and a sense of belonging within this timeless setting filled my being.  I felt that I could spend the rest of my life right here within this moment and never question my existence again.














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Who I am, What I've done

I'm new to this type of exposure - the Internet, but I've made my living as a poet and artist for 30 years.  I could not have done that had I followed the conventional style of marketing, which is a very weak publishing industry for poetry.  Also being an artist, I displayed my poems in artistic forms and produced my own books.  I literally built my business by hand.  To print my first books, I rented a print shop at night and printed 500 copies.  I made the plates, ran the sheets, collated each book and cropped them.  For art shows I had to produce an incredible amount of work just to display plus backup work, and then I made all the display cases and even made my own tent to offer shade in outside art shows.  I loved every minute of it.  I was creating my life as I wanted it.  This was the adventure of my choice.

The trouble with pursuing the adventure of your choice is that friends and family will discourage you - especially if you decide you are going to make your living as a poet and artist.  When they tell you that you are crazy as hell and you can't seriously be thinking of making your living as a poet, what they are really saying is that they could never do that, so how could you?  My response was, Maybe not, but I will never know if I don't try.  That ended up being my driving philosophy through my life.  If I have an idea, I have to at least give it a shot.  Sometimes they work - sometimes they don't, but they're all great adventures.  I don't believe in failures.  Failures are nothing more than trial runs to get the kinks out.  Okay, I'm drifting off subject.

I started selling my art work when I was 12.  That and mowing lawns made me the richest kid in school.  At 21 I was writing poems for an artsy late night show on TV in San Francisco called Evening Tide.  I put in my military time, and then went to Alaska where I published short stories in the Alaskan Vega about my adventures in wilderness.

Purely because there were hardly any women in Alaska, I moved to California.  Deciding on less dangerous pursuits, I started doing art shows, and then galleries and boutiques - anywhere that would display my work.  By the time my third book was completed I also had a number of independent book stores carrying my books.  By the completion of my fifth book I had won two awards and been quoted in psychological publications on self-esteem and publications on self-realization.  My mailing list was so large, I sold the entire first printing just through my mailing list.  Had I been selling them conventionally, I would have been a national best seller just by the volume sold.  But, I could care less about that.  I got seventy-five percent of the book sales and was comfortably supporting a family doing what I loved.  Life just doesn't get much better than that.

After 2000 art shows, I thought it might be worthwhile to try other avenues.  Times change and so do the things we do.  Art shows have been hurt by the times, and it seems I've been travelling all my life, as I did art shows across the country.  I've been called the gypsy poet a few times, which I'm not sure is an endearment.  I keep threatening to change that, but the road calls to me now and then.

I'm settled at the moment.  I'm even working a normal job, using what I actually went to school for.  I teach people with learning disabilities.  I'm dedicated to my job, but I miss the road - travelling with other artists and living our unique life style.  It was fun.

I have two books coming out on Amazon and Kindle.  We're just setting them up for Kindles unique type of publication.  They should be out before the end of  April.  One is inspirational - introspective.  A story of searching in poems and prose.  The other is a love story told in poems.  Both books contain some of the most popular poems from my previous books.  Both of these books, printed by me, have already sold in number that would make them best sellers in the field of poetry, which, actually doesn't take a lot of books.  I think it's something like 2000 copies.  But, it sounds good, doesn't it?

I'm writing a third book right now, which is quite a bit different than most of my books, at least in format. I'll talk about that when it gets more interesting.
Thanks for checking me out.











IAll content - poems, posts & images - are ©2010 by John Evans. No permission is given to post, share, copy, print, e-mail, reproduce, distribute or link to. All Rights Reserved. Please contact John Evans at JohnEvansPoet.Com for licensing inquiries.

Be Yourself

I've lived my life in accordance to who I am, which has been colored and formed by what I've done.  I am a dichotomy to people who know me.  I've written seven books that revolve around self-realization, self-esteem and love.  It sounds like I should look and act like I'm part of the crystal cruncher society with a look of constant bliss and "Peace be with you's", but that would be me trying to be like everybody else trying to come off as a Guru.  Even the Dali Lama shows his individuality.  You can be enlightened and still be who you are without fitting into a category.  You're not an ant or a sheep.  You're not a member of a flock or a herd.  You're a person with a unique background and a perspective.  Enlightenment can put a positive spin on the crap you go through in life, and it absolutely gives a person a depth of understanding that lightens the load you can potentially carry around with you.

If you were to meet me on the street you would never guess what I do, which is writer and artist.  I express the life I see and live through the soul that I am, but I look like a cop and talk like a construction worker.  I'm just as comfortable talking to a biker as I am talking to a Ph.D.  I see all people as the expression of living soul.  In fact, I see all of life as the expression of living soul.  We are intimately related to existence, and I am aware of that at all times and always have been.  That has been my birth gift.  That is every bodies birth gift.  Realizing it and coming to terms with it is the challenge.

Guru wantabe's are every where. They are easily stereotyped.  I've met many of them and I try not to let them irritate me with their group persona.  They, like religious fanatics, are out to save you in the image they have chosen for you, and for a fee, usually.  Let me give you a clue that none of them will share with you.  You have only one Master that you can call upon to interpret the meaning of life, and that is you.  Within you is the power of the wisdom that you seek.  You are the Master.  The rest of us - the people you meet and interact with - are the teachers, and only the Master can interpret the wisdom to be drawn from the teachings.  You don't need a Master or an entity to worship.  Within you is your point of wisdom.  Within you is the entity.  You simply have to pay attention and be open from your entire being to completely understand who you are and live from your point of truth - not somebody elses.  That knowledge is free and already inside of you.  It's a gift to you - a conscious soul.  Open the package.  Celebrate your individuality. 












All content - poems, posts & images - are ©2010 by John Evans. No permission is given to post, share, copy, print, e-mail, reproduce, distribute or link to. All Rights Reserved. Please contact John Evans at JohnEvansPoet.Com for licensing inquiries.