I met Patrick when he wandered into my house as the first arrival to a Potluck Dinner on the Sunday before Memorial Day. I had heard he was going to attend. For at least the last several months he had roamed the land in his van going where Spirit took him, telling his stories, selling a few crystals and bringing people together in the spirit of Love, Oneness and Spirit. He is led to a town and then led to seek out New Age or Spiritual people to meet. He will stay for a few days up to three weeks before Spirit tells him to move on again.

I had only a few minutes to speak with Patrick before the other guests began to show up. I was quite taken by his openness, loving nature and the light shining from his eyes. Before the evening was over he had enchanted us all with the story of the origination of laughter. I asked him where he got his stories. He said they come to him in various ways. Some come to him in meditation or when he is communing with nature. Some come to him in bits and pieces over time, as the laughter story did, over two years. Others come to him as he is telling the story. It just flows from him.

As I left for Chicago again the next day, I asked a friend of mine, Lauralei, to interview him and get the story of Patrick. His story follows as he spoke it. I was going to paraphrase it, but he spoke with such simple truth and power, I could not leave out a word of it.

I was in college before there was much of a real Spiritual consciousness, because there wasn't anyone really talking about Spirituality, but inside me there was someone talking about Spirituality. In fact it was even earlier than that. There was just something about hanging out with the guys, cruising for burgers and hanging out at the local Dairy Queen. The guys appeared to be having fun, but for me there seemed to be something missing. When I got to college, it was the same kind of
thing. There was something missing yet I didn't know what it was.

There was a time that I confused that and thought it was a woman who was missing. So every time I would go hiking I would be thinking what a waste of time it was being out there with my buddies since what I really wanted to be with was a woman. But even when I was with a woman there still seemed to be something missing. There are so many times we would wake up lying next to somebody and rather than being pleased about who we are with we are just reminded about what we are looking for. We might think it means another woman or man.

I came to learn much later that what I was really looking for was an aspect of myself, my female aspect, to really come into balance with it. It took a while to come to that understanding.

I had a good business career, having spent twelve years in marketing and advertising. I had all those things which people desire to be happy. I had a 1974 classic 3.0 CS BMW Coupe, of which there are only 1500 left in the country. It was about 99% restored. You can't get much hipper than that! I had thirty pairs of shoes, silk sports coats, my own tuxedo to wear to all the fund raiser events.

I worked in advertising and marketing, as a consultant to the Washington State Ferry System working transportation marketing for a time, as Director of Marketing for the Trade Association for the record industry, also for the video industry, Director of Marketing for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. But even in all of that, my happiness was still transient. When I got a new project my happiness was okay for a while. But within about a week or so it began to wane. I would then have to wait for my next project. So it was always going to be the next something. And in that I could never quite get to it. The closest I ever got to my happiness was a mile and a half.

When I would go out and run eight and a half to ten miles a day, it would take me a mile and a half to get to a place where I was in contentment. It would last for a while and then it would be gone again. That lasted for a long, long time. Then I would be just using the Spring and the Fall and go into real intense introspection which felt exactly like intense depression, an emptiness. A place where I really felt like a piece of Swiss cheese. I could feel the holes in me and I didn't know what it was that would fill them up. And again I would think it would be another job, or I would think that it would be the perfect woman in my life and all those things. There was twelve years of this being in a career and twice a year every year for a month or so going through this sort of funk, this Swiss cheese feeling.

One day I turned around and realized I hadn't been backpacking or hiking for nearly twelve years. And then I just began to cry. Not because I was sad that I hadn't gone, but because I was so happy that I could remember. And in that moment I remembered how it felt to go out in nature and just be. There is a place in the state of Washington, Cape de Laga (Sp?), which is a three mile hike to the ocean. I used to go in college every Thanksgiving and just sit on the rocks and just say, Hey, Patrick, what are you doing? Where are you going? What is it you want? Why aren't you happy? My mind went right to that point and I remembered how really important that was to me. So I thought, you know, I really do deserve the best life has to offer and that's what it really is and this is really moving me.

After that I read a few Spiritual books. In a few moments of reading, I learned so very much of a time before a time. After that I sold everything I owned, I bought a backpack and went on a great adventure. At first I thought I was searching for an aspect of myself. But I later found that I was simply searching for God. Which I found. And now I just live the discovery.

That was about three years ago. I became all my things. That was, for me , a process of letting them all go. I became my car. When my car was in the shop and I had a rental car, I had to tell people what kind of car I really had. When people came over to my home I would show them the things in the house, because there wasn't much in the home left of who I was. In that I came to a great emptiness within myself, which then allowed me to fill myself with something else; which was something very old, which was something called the Beginning, something called our Heritage, which is a remembering from the Heart of God.

I know Philadelphia because I lived there. I know Sedona, Arizona, I know Seattle, Washington, and I know the womb of my mother. But I had forgotten the Heart of God. This has been just a great remembering. Sometimes in a moment I remember so much. I had gone through much confusion and difficult times, and it has been a grand journey. And God has really taken care of me. I have learned lessons about trust. My story is one which everyone has lived or is living, maybe a thousand times, maybe ten thousand times.

We come in to spend as much time as we can bringing as much of heaven to earth as we can. Because when we came here we thought God said, Go to heaven on Earth. Then when we got here it was too noisy, too bright and we didn't feel good at all, it hurt; and we thought He turned his back on us and fooled us. But what He did say was, Won't you be of service. And we said, Of course, because we love you so dearly and there is nothing we wouldn't do for you. So He said, Would you go and take some heaven to this place called Earth. We forgot. So now we come into remembering. We are bringing some heaven out now. Things are changing.

God gave me such great freedom. The greatest freedom that I have ever experienced in this life isn't the way I am living now of traveling with no worries because I give everything to God. That is not my greatest freedom. My greatest freedom is going into a place that so imprisoned me that I stepped so far away from God. That was my greatest freedom because He gave me the freedom to do that. So now, after experiencing that level of freedom, I have come to this other place; which is to go back and just live God. I don't need to do that other thing any more.

Some people look at my life and see that I am so absolutely free, like a bird traveling. I see that I live my freedoms in other ways, which allow me now just to be. That is not in truth, not in prison, just an "is" place. I have come into a place where my life is a prayer. Now there is no differentiation between going to work and not going to work. What I do isn't work. When people were saying, What kind of work do you do, I could say I do healing arts work, I am a touch therapist, or I do channeling work. But for me it is not work. It is just living my life. In that there is no separation, there are no weekends or weekdays. There is no at work or not at work, there is just one thing. That is the understanding from a long time ago that there is no separation. I don't have to come and say this is my work because there is no separation, I just say, How can we live God together. How can we come together in any moment and live God together.

In that we don't have to differentiate our product, like they do in Social Consciousness. You have to differentiate your product to get your marketshare. In Spirituality now you see the same thing happening. Everyone is saying they are doing something different and making it different and in that there is no coming together. So this is what is on the way now, is that we are coming to say, How is it that we can come together and pray. It may look like a group gathering, a channeling, a storytelling, some people doing some hands on work, maybe people just holding one another. It may look like all sorts of things. We will just come together and live in prayer.

And the prayer is just living the love no matter what. No matter how hard it gets, we are going to love. And it is going to get hard, because I know in my life it is hard to love so much in so many places where love can't be seen, it can't be recognized, and love just isn't acknowledged. Not just that I am not acknowledged, but love isn't acknowledged. How much are you going to love? Can you love so much to make the bed so your spouse can lay down with another? If that is the most loving thing to do at the time? Can you do that? That's love.

What are we going to do in the name of love? For me, anything. I am going to be tested as I have been. I have had to really let go of a lot of things to know about love, because that is what I really desire to do. There is nothing in the world more worthy of our understanding than love. So there is a place where we have got to say that we have learned great things from great people, but what am I going to teach myself about love? So my commitment when I left marketing and advertising and began my journey was that I would be my own great teacher. And that is hard, because never having sat down to see what I might have to say to myself, I listened to mostly everybody else. Then I made another commitment to be a good student, which I really never was. The third and most difficult commitment was that I would respect what the Teacher had to teach me.

Then I went out in nature where everything is in harmony, where nothing will ever judge you, where everything is life and that is it. It was simply life flowing free, abundant life, love and beauty. A tree only knows how to grow. Someone will carve his initials in it, or hack it down, or climb over it, but it just knows how to grow. It just knows Spirit, it just knows life. So I went and asked a tree, What do you know? How is it that no matter what you keep growing? How is it that when someone tries to cut you down, you keep reaching for the sky? What do you know?

I saw birds singing in the rain, and I asked, What do you know? How is it that you can sing in the rain? What do you know that I don't know. I saw a fish swimming, not even knowing when the next time a fly would land on the pool of water so it might eat, but still swimming and sitting on the current it seemed to be in such great joy not knowing where its next meal might come from but knowing that it would just come. So I asked it, What do you know?

I saw salmon going upstream beating themselves against rocks, jumping over hurdles and waterfalls that were seemingly impossible, and try and try to find a way, and at times almost listless in the water, but to then pull in the strength from the heavens to allow them to jump over. I asked them, What do you know? How is it that you have such great strength to go to a place that you don't even remember, to go do this last dance, this most wonderful and sensuous embrace, and at that last moment have your Spirit ascend into the heavens. What do you know? I want to know.

And in that I learned great things. That has been my journey. Now it is about coming and loving. It's hard. Spiritual people are having a hard time right now, because they are getting down to bedrock issues, which are into the core of their being, and to move through them it is really shaking them, some are losing faith and barely holding on to hope. Some are getting discouraged.

So for me it is about traveling around being about the love, and being about an infusion. It would be much easier for me to sit in one place, but it is for me to travel, this I know. Every time I go into a place I love and I am loved. I touch and I am deeply touched. Wow! So many beautiful friends here! I think I could really stay in this place, maybe. But then it is time for me to go. There is also a way that the stories that are told, the energy that moves in these stories, the way that Spirit moves through these things, that really shakes some things up. It is for me to point out that in that shaking, these groups that are gathering can turn to one another for support.

There is a place where I have attempted to stay that they turn toward me. I would be out of integrity if I stayed. I would be doing a great disservice to myself and to others if I stay in one place. Therefore I have to go. For me, what it is really about is these groups that are gathering which I find as I travel around the country. They are getting to a certain level and then just stopping. What I find is my gift is to come in and to help facilitate and to participate and bring it to a new level. I embrace the entire group in the level that it has come to and that it can always come to this level and then when I go they can continue at that level. Then in another time, someone else will come in and bring it in to another level, a higher place. So it continues to grow. If I stay it will get stagnant. So I leave and I leave a pathway on which someone else will come.

Sometimes I can think of a hundred reasons why I must go. That is just personality trying to figure out Spirit. I can sit here all afternoon and tell you why I have to go. But I really don't know. There comes a time when I just know that I must go. So I go. Sometimes I stay for two days, sometimes for three weeks. I am in Kansas City a week. I never really know how long I will stay in a place. I don't have to know. That is the thing.

(What about your family life?)

I grew up in Seattle. My parents are wondrous. I have three brothers and a sister. Religion for our family was more an understanding of family. That gave me a really great foundation. My parents said to me, Whatever it is that makes you happy. There are things they don't quite understand because they have their own fear that things won't get taken care of, won't get paid for. They might like for me to be in one place and maybe to call more often and those kinds of things.

They said we just want you to be happy. We love you so much we want for you whatever it is that makes you happy. Sometimes people have to turn to the ones they really love and who love them and say that if you really love me you will allow me to be and do what I know I must. That is the loving no matter what. And they do, and it is great support. There is a wonderful unity and tie between my brothers and me and my sister. I really desire to extend that out.

Most people say they are going to come together as a family, a man and woman and child kind. But maybe family is not a good word to use yet. Because family experience for most people is not a great experience and much of what is in family in this time is kind of dysfunctional. Because even as loving as my family is, there were things that my parents kept from us. They kept from us their depression, their sorrow, the hard times. Because of that, I really didn't know much about depression. I really didn't know anything about hard times, about anxiety or stress because no one ever shared it with me. In that, I was left in my vulnerability because I didn't get a chance to embrace my parents in what would be my strength, saying it would be ok; we are here with you. There were times when it was shared, but also a lot of times when it wasn't shared.

So I'd like to say that we are coming in to understand friendship, and coming into intimate friendship. When we come to understand that, then we will really come to understand karma. And in that we will come together in family. In that will be great healing because in intimate friendship we can heal all the dysfunction we are still holding about family.

(Who taught you about God?)

God taught me about God. There is a place where no one really needs to teach us about God because we already know. Nature taught me to remember. God is undeniable in nature. So to go out and see the nature and to be so persistent to desire to know, the answers will come. You must trust that they will come. You might just start writing poetry, writing down thoughts that come. In every one of those thoughts is great wisdom. The things that I learned from a leaf falling from a tree, from a bird soaring, from looking at a mountain and absorbing its beauty and really be there with it move me to tears.

There are places where I just stepped upon the earth, and the earth just pulled me down to my knees in tears, where I just experienced the presence of the Holy Breath or Holy Spirit, of God, of Love. In that, also, is great healing. Nature is an incredible thing.

(What kind of direction or advice or wisdom would you impart to those looking for God.)

I would say to go some place in nature, a quiet place, and listen to your own heart beat, get that quiet. Move into a place in your own heart where you know your own sadness. Just contemplate any experience in your life where you experienced sadness, where you know that there has been judgment upon yourself. Then re-experience it and let it open up your heart. It is not so much the experience for which you are going, but rather to open up your heart. Once your heart is open, all sorts of things can happen. Nature just starts speaking to you in her grand way. You won't hear the voice of a tree go, I am a tree and I am here to talk to you. You will hear the voice of the tree in your own voice in your own thoughts. And in that there is much to learn and much to listen to. Go sit by a tree and ask the tree how is it you are so strong? How is that? Look at a tree that has been cut down and look at the years of its life and come to an understanding how it gained its great strength. Sit by a beautiful bush and contemplate your own beauty. Sit by a rock and contemplate your own strength. Sit by a tree and contemplate your own reaching up to the sky, grounded into the earth. Just find a comparison in nature, it is really a great place. That is where I have come to understand the most.

I try to forget everything I know and learn it again. That was my first great commitment in this teaching of myself, that I would forget everything I knew and see if there was another way to know. I would look at the way society thinks and I would swing to the other end of the continuum. I would say, How would God have it? If society thinks this, what is equally as ludicrous on the other end of the continuum and mostly I would find that very same thing, or I would find something in the middle.

Also, I want to say that there is a place, too, where, in this loneliness I talked about, going hiking and always wanting to be there with a woman, and thinking that my life was empty because there wasn't; there was a place one time where I went and sat out in nature and I said, You know, God wouldn't have it be this kind of loneliness. God just wouldn't have that. How would God have it? You know there is this understanding of Soulmates or Twin Flames or your Golden One, and I thought, that makes a great deal of sense to me. God would do that. God would take the essence of a being and split it in two and make one male and one female and have them come together in union as a whole in the most wondrous and divine light. That is a most beautiful understanding to me, and in that I understand truth because it shakes me a little bit. I get shivers or goose bumps.

So I sat looking at this mountain. I thought, God wouldn't have this person separate from me when I came into a physicality with it. God would have me always connected because otherwise I would be separate from God. But I am feeling so connected to God, so I also know that I must be connected to this wondrous being that is so much a part of my life. So I sat and looked at this mountain while I felt the essence of its beauty. I opened up my heart and spoke to this divine being, Soulmate, Twin Flame, Golden One, however you want to term it, and I said, I am experiencing great beauty right now and I want to share it with you. Then I felt the presence of this great love around me that filled every hole of my being. I knew that it was always with me, that I wasn't consciously aware of it. With that I created great sadness within myself. From that point I never really felt lonely again.

There are certain aspects within my body that still react in an old way, sometimes a feeling comes up that feels like an old loneliness, but then I remember to go sit quiet and call forth this energy, call forth God. There are lots of times when there isn't anybody to hold me. When I am traveling around, sometimes there just is not a place, and then I just ask God to hold me. Sometimes I just need to be held and I look around and there is no one who I really want to hold me. So I will go down by a creek, take off all my clothes, lay in the sun, let the sun touch me, let the wind touch me, and then jump in the creek, let the cold water touch me. And by that I am nurtured. So there are lots of places to look, and again in that place which I may call forth, that energy which is an aspect of me, which is a part of the wholeness of who I am.

We just hear an idea from one place and we go out to nature and contemplate it. In that the idea becomes expansive and we realize it. If it doesn't make you shiver, it if doesn't give you goose bumps, if it doesn't make you cry, then you don't have a right to talk about it; because then it is not truth, it is just a bunch of babbling. So if there are words to describe our experiences, then those experiences are from the level of social consciousness. If there are no words to describe the experiences we are having, then we are coming from a much higher place, called the heavens.

So in nature you are going to be out there and you are just going to cry, you are just going to shake, and there won't be words to describe it. In time you will attempt to describe it to your friends, but there truly is no way to describe it for it is a truth which is coming from a much higher place.

And in that I don't know that there is anything further to say, because you get to a place where there really isn't much to talk about.