Woke up to a cloudy, misty August morning here in Missouri … looking out my office window at 4 AM … getting a deja vu of a similar early Spring morning back in SO CAL when I was a teenager reading an Alan Watts book while sitting in front of the glass doors that opened out onto the patio where the parties in my book THE MUSE took place. You might say that the mid-1960’s was when my spiritual journey began. I didn’t just read art books, I poured through all of the popular philosophy books of that age as well. Alan Watts was just one of the characters I checked out back then; not as much as some of the others, though. Kierkegaard was big to me, so were Camus, Kerouac, Merton and Sartre. I also read Lao Tzu, Confucius, and about a ton of other “hip, in and groovy” pop-mystics of the time. I’m not sure what triggered this morning’s little Oriental moment. Perhaps it was the mist itself reminding me of the Guo Hua, the traditional Chinese ink and water paintings that seemed to be the favorite subjects for the covers of many of the books I read back then. Or maybe it was just some genetic “memory of a moment” that popped into my head just for the heck of it. Regardless, it was a very pleasant little feeling that will no doubt revisit me throughout this day.