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71 Witness I took some LSD once, by myself, on a spring day in the 1980s. After an hour or so, I decided to walk up to the grocery store. Bell’s in Fivepoints. I forget what I bought, but when I got to the checkout counter, a kind of miracle happened. The kid bagging groceries shakes out a papersack, two authoritative whips, and I see every lightning-shaped line of the unfolding sack as they crisscross, merge and release, like the shook foil of Hopkins’ Grandeur. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil. I clap softly, say nothing, and leave without looking back. People may attack me for recording this here, with good reason, because young people have taken LSD, then thought they could fly, and died. Young people die for lots of reasons. I just thought it should be noted that most educated people my age, a little younger than Ram Dass, have taken LSD, and most of us feel it is somewhat important to whatever sense of spirit we might have. I recall James Agee mentioning cocaine so sweetly and beside the point there at the end of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. They have been listening silently to foxes calling each other in the dark. Then it’s over, and the listeners begin to talk and give voice to the sometimes painful details of their separate days, and they feel that talking is “valuable and necessary beyond comparison of cocaine.” 72 Ed Hicks’ ex-wife Nancy has died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Two days before her death her neighbor, a close friend, says that she was up all night listening to Nancy singing in her garden. Suzanne, Ed’s daughter, says Nancy always sang while she was working in her garden. Some inner singing kept the neighbor awake, outside of time, pushed forward a bit, into spirit, or pushed back to when she was healthy out working in spring sunlight. It is real, that singing in the garden, though it can only be heard inside one other head, still real, and how we all want to approach the crossover, inside a natural working, outdoors. With reliable folks involved, reporting such inward experience does give a true witness, and a good listening, to the mystery, the beauty we live inside that is inside us, and has so many names, and no name. ...

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