geoffoelsner.com

Joanna Harcourt-Smith interviewed me this week around the time of the publication of my new memoir, A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive.

Here’s the link, and below it, I’ve included a brief synopsis of the book’s contents:

http://www.futureprimitive.org/2012/01/geoff-oelsner-a-country-where-all-colors-are-sacred-and-alive/

Of course, even simpler would just be to google
www.futureprimitive.com and find my podcast, dated
January 28,2012 Mazeltov! G.O.

Synopsis of

A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir
of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature

by Geoffrey Oelsner, Lorian Press, 2012

Many of us have experiences that point toward a more holistic, interconnected Reality than we normally perceive. Episodes of telepathy, spontaneous healings, confirmed intuions, precognition, profound communion with the natural world, attunement to nonphysical beings, or nonlocal awareness of a distant place which proves to be accurate–all these can expand our understanding of what is possible for us and remind us of an undivided spiritual dimension of ourselves.

This memoir in prose and poetry is an account of my continuing education in such experiences, which can make us more aware of that dimension of oneness, and empower us to step forward into more conscious, collaborative relationships with the sentient energies of Nature. These sacred relationships can contribute to environmental harmony right now, and may help downscale our climatic predicament in days to come.

Lorian Press has just published my new book,

A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature

I’d like to share with you some appreciations by some leading authors and spiritual teachers from 4 distinctly different circles of people that I’m very much a part of, then a brief synopsis of its contents with you.
So, here goes:

Appreciations of

A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir
of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collboration with Nature

by Geoffrey Oelsner, Lorian Press, 2012

“”One of the challenges of our time is to discover how to
recognize in new ways the spiritual worlds that are all around us that we might have a co-creative partnership with the beings who inhabit them. Geoff Oelsner is one who has met this challenge and writt en this excellent book as a record of his discoveries. His stories take us into the heart of the world and help us open our eyes that we, too, may fi nd the country where all colors are sacred and alive. I heartily recommend it.”
— David Spangler, author of Apprenticed to Spirit and Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Guide

“No ordinary memoir, this is a chronicle of how one man’s
life and growth are propelled by his openness to and welcoming of anomalous experiences. A deceptively simple compilation, this book touches very deep places in the reader because of Oelsner’s humility, eloquence and willingness to share from his vast reservoir of spiritual experiences. Oelsner is a quiet mystic whose book will hopefully find a wide audience.“
— Eric Leskowitz, MD, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard
Medical School; Editor, Transpersonal Hypnosis

“What a marvel of a book! Geoff Oelsner is himself such
an empathic embodiment of the ‘ordinary mysteries’ he sings
praises to throughout this remarkable … I don’t know what to call it…A shamanic memoir? A poetic ‘Starry Night,’ its electric golden energies shimmering through words instead of colors? An ancient mystic physician’s bag of healing unguents, wrapped in straightforward recollections of his everyday life of serene, deep amazements? Thank you, Geoff, for this simple, sweet American Gaia Sutra.”
– Saniel Bonder, founder of Waking Down in Mutuality, cofounder of Human Sun Institute, author, Ultimaya 1.0 and Healing the Spirit/Matter Split

“Everyone has times of transcendent and sacred experience, but most of us do not fully notice them. It is noticing and honoring that allows us to live the sacred as we journey through our lives. Geoff Oelsner takes us along on his kaleidescopic travels in a way that heightens our awareness so that we may better perceive our own such experiences. A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive is a delightful vehicle of sacred wisdom of
remarkable depth.”
– Anna Cox, Founder of Compassion Works for All, which offers Dharma Friends newsletter for prisoners. Author of Just As The Breeze Blows Through Moonlight, and Dharma Friends: No One Forgotten, No One Abandoned, No One Discarded

Synopsis of

A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive, A Memoir
of Non-Ordinary Experience and Collaboration with Nature

by Geoffrey Oelsner, Lorian Press, 2012

Many of us have experiences that point toward a more holistic, interconnected Reality than we normally perceive. Episodes of telepathy, spontaneous healings, receiving an intuition which is then objectively confirmed, precognition, profound communion with the natural world, attunement to nonphysical beings, or nonlocal awareness of a distant place which proves to be accurate–all these can
expand our understanding of what is possible for us and remind us of an undivided spiritual dimension of ourselves.

This memoir in prose and poetry is an account of my continuing education in such experiences, which can make us more aware of that dimension of oneness, and empower us to step forward into more conscious, collaborative relationships with the sentient energies of Nature. These sacred relationships can contribute to environmental harmony right now, and may help downscale our
climatic predicament in days to come.

Ox Cart Productions and the Music on the Mountain singer/songwriter series presents:

A Free December 6 concert by Geoff Oelsner and Harmonia.

There’s a lot to listen to and like as Geoff takes the stage with original songs, singalongs, and covers. As a special musical bonus, he’ll be accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Kelly Mulhollan and bassist John Johnston.

In addition to singing with Geoff, Leslie Oelsner and the much-loved women’s vocal group

Harmonia will perform some songs of their own.

Geoff will also share a short story or two from his new book, A Country Where All Colors Are Sacred and Alive.

The concert will be presented in Parker Hall at the Mount Sequoyah Conference and Retreat Center

Tuesday, December 6, 7-9 pm.

CHANGING HANDS

Heading past Green Giant corn mills on Hwy 13
Toward Wahpeton, he squints at the sun and says:

Nope, I don’t think they do anything these days
With hogs or cattle. No prize pheasants either.

The big barn with its ribbed roof and steel braces
Slouches now beside the silo that has a rusted cap—

One summer night I climbed halfway up and fell off,
Landing right smack on top of a manure wagon!

Long hours, days into night, combining corn and wheat
To fill dust-cloudy bins and put food on the table;

Year after year, grappling with rain-soaked bales
To bed down heifers and raise a fortress against winter;

Acres of electric fences, feeders, and grain augurs—
Uncle Kenny and I built all that up over forty years

And now it sets there empty and neglected.
Son, it’s hard sometimes to have to change hands.

Jeff Jentz, Jan 2011

WISHBONE FOR THOMAS MCGRATH

Tom, windy-eyed Thoreau boy,
Sitting alone tonight in your Minneapolis apartment.

Build a log cabin in your head.

Or else a farm! More places to discover
Beyond the power lines and dark smoky sugar beet mills
And those missile silos dreaming under the frozen prairie sod.

Better yet, invoke an army of savvy organic farmers
With their boots firmly planted in the humus of the future—
Seizing the hour at such a time
To raise aloft the green standard of Universal Peace and Justice.

Meanwhile, your resistless spirit haunts Dakota.
And the streetlamps of Fargo keep vigil in the starry night
Where your breath is blowing still. Words you sowed
Await now, like winter wheat, to leaven the souls of artists.

Poet, go on furiously scribbling your vision into the dawn,
Seeking to reclaim both worlds,

in your writing shack
out along
the Red River…

Jeff Jentz 12/15/10
CANDLE PRAYER

Our smoky errands here are like the candle
Glow of a child’s beside prayer.

Precarious angels and demons are whipped
Around the room by the chilly breeze
Coming through the fluttering curtains.

The flame, too, feels strong on its wick
Until the bright saber cools
And cannot cut what is only fear.

We give off the same wax, vapors, oily clouds
That stain the roses on the wallpaper.
Our shadows climb the walls
Or embrace the blazing log on the hearth.

The night table spins farther away into the dark
As we trace the mist on the windowpane,
Wrapped in midnight questions and doubts . . .

And the stars drifting above and beyond,
Always just out of reach in the blue,
Elude the halo of our fitful lights,
Here sending a signal so ardently upward.

“Conserve on all except light,” He said.

Only tilt the candle, Abdu’l-Baha, closer.
Closer, Abdu’l-Baha, closer!
Jeff Jentz

Note: Originally I wrote this poem in fall 1973 after I discovered the Baha’i Faith at a fireside through the words and teachings of Abdu’l-Baha, the son of the Prophet-Founder.

Ox Cart productions and the Music on the Mountain monthly singer/songwriter series rolls into December with a concert by Geoff Oelsner and Friends

in Parker Hall at the Mount Sequoyah Conference and Retreat Center, on Tuesday, December 6, 7-9 pm.

This event is free of charge. Parking’s also free.

There’s a lot to listen to & like as Geoff takes the stage with original songs, singalongs, & covers. He’ll also perform a few poems and it is possible that he’ll tell a story or two from his new book, What is Possible.

Geoff will be accompanied by LESLIE BERMAN OELSNER
AND the women of HARMONIA (who will also treat us to some tunes of their own)

Along with special guest, that multi-instrumental musical maestro, KELLY MULHOLLAN

Hi friends. I’ve been reading a wonderful recent book by Rob Young, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. Singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega described it as being “about the mythic roots of folk music originating in the UK.” Anyway, reading in Young’s book about well-known and loved artists like the Incredible String Band, and about musicians I hadn’t heard of before like Vashti Bunyan, has gotten me remembering some of my own visionary moments while living and traveling in the UK. Here’s one such memory:
1975. I fall into a heavy, buzzy afternoon slumber in the spiritually-charged realm of Glastonbury, England, after Leslie and I visit the Chalice Well, the lofty Tor, and the ancient abbey (itself purportedly re-discovered and excavated in part thanks to information mediumistically provided by a long-deceased monk attendant upon the place). I find myself witness to a lucid dream-vision of reverent, venerable hands pausing and passing over rectangular shapes draped by white linens fringed with intricate lacework. This vision is completely enigmatic to me, but it carries the felt sense of some archaic, repetitive, numinous activity. Something sacred has been inscribed on silence in this place.

Less than a month later, we land on the holy Isle of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. While Leslie rests at our bed and breakfast there, I attend a Communion at the Iona Abbey.
I’m curious to witness what is described in a brochure as an old-fashioned, historically authentic traditional Communion.
Expecting a tray of thin eucharistic wafers to be brought in, I am surprised to see rectangular loaves of fresh-baked bread draped by white linens with fine lace fringe borne in and placed upon the altar. The priest’s hands lift the lacey linens, and my puzzling Glastonbury vision makes intense sense as we break the body of the fragrant loaf, and taste.

This kind of visionary window seems to open on the collective soul-life of the country as we continue along our way. I try to write about what I see, albeit uncertain of the degree to which true vision is alloyed by the workings of my lively imagination:

There’s More “When” Here

They lovingly maintain their thatched and oak-beamed cottages, where the dense energy of generations amasses.

The fields here are often very seen. In certain valleys even shadows seem more deeply sentient, somehow wakened under the gaze of ages of eyes from those of Pict to Celt to
centurion to Saxon to those of the village lout or poet.

The country fairly froths with contemplation and plumes of Being that rise from churchyards with their giant yews and gray, lichened graves.

Astral temples stand in many groves and glens, tall bastions of Druidic attention and intention reinforced by later prayers and workings of the rural faithful and their elemental and angelic
co-workers.

Telluric currents of elven, gnomish, and faerie consciousness run under the earth, gathering in reservoirs or vortices in subterranean caves; emerging on moors, near barrows and
megalithic stones.

Communion with the countryside looms up like an aesthetic cumulous from the otherwise rather flat, repressed English sensibility, arising tumescent in the form of rowdy festivals and
rustic fairs, gnarly balladry, wild convoluted poems and plays and dances, and the sublime viney curvilinear meanderings of Celtic art and instrumental music.

The tangled profusion of Celtic design: lines fold back on themselves in interknit geometries wherein nest birds and bears and men. Our eyes exhaust themselves, after trying to
attend to these unwinding lines. Then the Mind’s Eye opens.

The landscape’s stacked and stratified with layers of history
and ancient heartfelt awareness striates the “inscape” with enduring ley lines that link sacred sites. There’s more “when” here.

More true stories of experiences which point toward the possibilities of Spirit and connectedness…(from a book-in-progress)

“Christic Cup” (2010)

I visit my devout Christian friend Gloria Okes Perkins in Springdale to discuss and appreciate poems from her new book After Eden, and also to request her to pray with me that I might receive the spirit of Christ more deeply.

During our period of silent prayer, Gloria “hears” a message she feels is meant for me, ” Take of this cup and drink to your heart’s content” or similar Biblical words.

Without knowing this yet, I see a tall grail cup overflowing with white light, which is also Christ’s body of Light, its arms outstretched downward in blessing. I take the cup and drink its contents down, and prayer light shines inside me.

“Button, Button” (2011)

I’m home, cleaning feverishly, after finally getting over a hell of a fever, which turned into a systemic infection and got me hospitalized for five days.

Now, as I scour out a drawer in our bathroom, I automatically toss a little black button into the already burgeoning waste basket, immediately after doing which I remember the way the Irish offer coins and buttons to the faery folk in wild places, or at sacred sites or springs.

I regret letting that button go, and think to begin a reconnaisance mission to pick through all the stuff in the stuffed waste basket and find it. But the task looks daunting, and results uncertain, so I abandon the search and forge ahead with my drawer-clearing project.

Several days later, Kathleen comes on her weekly visit to clean our house. After she’s left, having emptied the waste baskets and swept and mopped, I walk back into our bathroom and spy the same black button sitting solo on the tile floor a few feet from that very drawer.

No other item of the hundreds of small scraps and bits of trash from my fast cleaning foray remain, but somehow, the button has turned up again, and I take it outside right away and offer it to the fay folk of this part of Fayetteville in a part of our garden devoted to their presence and pleasure, shaking my head in wonder and wondering, “Now what were the chances of that happening?”

“ Finding Rings” (1983 and 2011)

My golden wedding band ’s been lost and found two times. First, at our old house, where I somehow lose it in the grass of the large yard. I can’t find it myself, and after a month or so,
I just give up the search. A short time later, after reading about ‘geopathic earth zones’ in Tompkins’ and Bird’s book Secrets of the Soil, I ask the master dowser and healer Harold
McCoy (featured prominently in Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s wonderful book Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind, 2007) to come over and check our home and land for any unhealthy or noxious subterranean influences.

Harold cruises the yard with his dowsing rods. First he passes a big cluster of bushes near our house, where a few years previously I had invited the local nature spirits to hang out. I don’t tell Harold of this prior invitation, but as he passes the bushes, he exclaims, “Oh, the nature spirits love it right here. They’re just sparkling in there.”

Next he dowses several veins of underground water, one or two of which flow under our home and which may be unsettling or less than optimal for our health, according to the findings of
dowsers and others experienced with this rather esoteric field of healing lore. Harold “treats” the underground streams like an acupuncturist would a human patient, inserting long copper
needles into two specific spots in the body of the earth close to our house. As he’s strolling from one of these insertion points to the next, he suddenly says, “What’s this?” in surprise, and I watch his hand plunge down into the tawny grass and grasp and pull something up. He hasn’t picked a flower; it’s my lost, wandering ring!

The ring wears well on my left hand from that moment to a day in 2011 when, having lost quite a bit of weight during a recent
illness, it fits so loosely on my finger that I inadvertantly fling it off while tossing clumps of autumn-fallen leaves from off the path outside the front door of our second home.

Again I search and search, to no avail. I ask the nature spirits of the area to help me, and envision them somehow returning the ring from wherever it lies hidden under leaves and greening
ground cover to an easy-to-see place on the concrete pad directly fronting our front steps.

No miracles occur at first, but about a week after this visualization-invitation for assistance, the gutter-screen replacement crew I’d hired comes to do its work, and Richard, the head guy on the crew, walks through a plant-tangled part of the yard to the side of the concrete pad. He sees a swift metallic blur, and hears a “ping,” then sees he’s somehow kicked a ring out from under the groundcover while walking, and there it lies, right on the spot where I’d recently envisioned it being magically returned!

Richard rings our doorbell, my ring in hand, and Leslie comes out the front door and receives it and the story of its sudden reappearance. She can hardly wait to show me, and when I come downstairs a few minutes later, she holds it in her closed
fist, says, “I have a surprise for you,” and then reveals my twice-found ring. I tell her about my request for assistance a week earlier, and we marvel together, “Now what
were the chances of that happening?”

“We Think Along the Same Green Lines” (2011)

One evening in early Spring, after planting kale and mixed mesclan greens seeds in our cold frame, I lie abed a-dreaming while awake of green vegetables– the look, the sleek new
greens, the taste of moist, rain-fattened leaves on my imaginal tongue.

I’m loving all this complex, conscious, beckoning, beautiful green soul-food, when Leslie enters the half-darkened, waking-dream-drenched room. I tell her I’ve been thinking of Spring greens, and she exclaims in amazement that she’s just been engaged in the same exact spontaneous contemplation. We feel that flash of deep connective joy that comes when
oneness suddenly reveals itself, and we feel held by what is always holding us, the seeds, the greens-to-be, the whole sweet seamless dreamlike scene.

It’s early April, and I drive up to Kansas City through the gathering greens to attend a family financial pow-wow. Before leaving, I go through my mail and leave just a very short stack of items to be given further attention on return. One of these items is an invitation to a Buddhist Dzogchen meditation retreat led by my old teacher, Lama Surya Das. I’d done a month of silent retreats with him over a four year period, ending in 2000, for the last two years of which I was also his massage therapist. We developed a fairly close connection, which I was very grateful for, and I had corresponded with him occasionally over the almost eleven years since I’d last seen him, but hadn’t actually been quite moved to sign up for another retreat. I saved the invitation to consider later, not sure yet whether I wanted to actually scratch that recurrent itch to do another retreat with Lama Surya Das.

So… I’m staying on the tenth floor of the Plaza Sheraton Hotel in Kansas City, right across the street from the Unity Temple. After two days of financial meetings, I wake one morning and stroll to the elevator to ride it down to the lobby prior to attending a last conference. The elevator doors slide open, and a tall man stands there alone – ohmygod it’s Lama Surya Das! I’m absolutely mind-boggled by the synchronicity! He recognizes me quickly, and during our our conversation, he invites me to attend a talk he’s going to give that night at the Unity Temple across the street, then to come as his guest to a daylong meditation retreat to be held there tomorrow.

As we walk through the hotel lobby together, and I exclaim to L.S.D., “This is deeply dreamlike.” It’s a real Buddhist situation
comedy, a joyful and improbable reconnection. I do attend both the lecture and the daylong retreat, and depart delighted with the peace and silence and the spiritual company of the
Lama , after touching foreheads in deep meeting with him in the wonderful old Tibetan fashion.

My wish for one more retreat with Lama Surya has been fulfilled; my persistent itch scratched!

Every so often, I have to find a way to laugh at/off some crap that’s stinking up the U.S. political environment…either that or cry. I was thinking about Bob Dylan’s magnificent love song “Sara” from his 17th studio LP, “Desire,” which came out early in 1976. Well, perhaps because of the nefarious influence of the great political and social satirist Roy Zimmerman who was just recently here for the hilariously inspiring “Banjos Not Bombs” concert organized by Kelly Mulhollan and Donna Stjerna, Bob’s song “Sara” brought to mind another Sara(h), who is polluting our country with her toxic turds…oops, I mean words. So…for you curious birds who have landed on this shaky cyber-branch, here is:
SARA(H)

1. I laid on a dune, I looked at the sky, the country was bushed, its morals were beached.

You came with McCain, we hated that guy, but if he got elected and later impeached, WE’D HAVE…

Sara(h), Sara(h), Alaskan czarina, snow-flakey ice queen
Sara(h), Sara(h), the thought of you leading us makes me turn green.

2. I can still hear them playing that old “Stars and Stripes,” see the posters and bunting all red, white, and blue

I can hear the crowd roar at your soccer mom hype; I can hear that pit bull growling inside of you.

Sara(h), Sara(h), since you left that convention you’ve roamed around rogue.
Sara(h), Sara(h), you’ve roved about outlying even Karl Christian Rove.

3. Yes I still hear the clang of those dang Baptist bells– you’re mistaken to think they’re not tolling for you.

Your God of love shoves all who sin into Hell– if Jesus returns, you’ll be totally screwed.

Sara(h), Sara(h), it’s all so clear I could never forget.
Sara(h), Sara(h), your political presence I’ll always regret.

4. Now the beach is deserted except for Michelle…Bachman and Boehner tea-partying hard.

You’re back in Alaska, trying to resell yourself…to the Republican party’s old guard.

Sara(h), Sara(h), grim grinning gramma with a license to kill.
Sara(h), Sara(h), you’re loaded for elk, oh your ilk makes me ill.

Geoff Oelsner 3/31/11
(After Bob Dylan’s “Sara.”)

On March 17 from 7-9 pm, Leslie and I will present a combined concert & workshop at the Fayetteville 2011 Goddess Festival, entitled “Sacred Exchanges with Nature” Mother Earth continually showers & snows us with Her grace & beauty; this participatory event is intended to empower us to offer nurturing love & blessings back to Her. We’ll perform original songs & singalongs to honor Gaia. I will share some miraculous true stories of Communion with Her. Together we will explore practices of group “Attunement” to natural aspects of the Ozarks, as taught by Findhorn Community co-founder Dorothy Maclean. Join us to celebrate our natural capacity to make “sacred exchanges with nature.” [The 2011 Goddess Festival will be held March 10-27, at 637 East Joyce Blvd.in Fayetteville, next to CiCi's Pizza & in front of Home Depot. For the complete schedule of Festival events, go to www.goddessfestival.com]