Discover what lies just beyond the walls and fences.

Perhaps your New Year's resolution should be something unexpected.

Normally starting to write is easy. An idea chooses to meet up with me somewhere. Often its in a place I have named Cloudland. This place is real, but not in the sense you are probably thinking. Sometimes instead I go someplace near Cloudland. The nearby pine forest, but not always. I am not in charge of where I enter, so I just roll with it. Regardless of where I get deposited, the idea is there patiently waiting on me. When I arrive, it begins to move and I follow.

These places, Cloudland and the pine forest, are in between. Spaces near the reality we inhabit. Part of me extends just beyond the edge of this place we experience as real.

The words I type are the residue that I leave behind as I chase the idea through this space in between.

Sometimes we travel together. Me and the idea or the energy rather. And these words are the transcript of a dialogue between me and that idea.

What I am describing isn’t really an idea in the way you are thinking of it. It isn’t a thought inside my head that I conjured up or the assemblage of a notion taken from a notebook. Rather it’s energy. Higher frequency energy, which inhabits a slightly different place, near but apart from here.

This idea, or energy is tangible, often a formed thing sort of like an orb the size of a basketball or a beachball maybe. Sometimes the energy is less dense. A mist or even a soft rain. I just record what comes.

Rarely do I know where it will start until I get there. Where is ‘there’ you ask? This place, the pine forest or collection of white buildings on a hill just at the edge of that pine forest, called Cloudland?

It’s as close to you as it is to me, a razor’s width away from where you are right now. This place, only microns away from ‘here’ is where intention and possibility lie. It is where joy and peace, understanding, creativity and enlightenment all reside or originate. These things are all energies, vibrating at specific frequencies. Ones higher than we often experience here. In traffic or in the mall.

Yet these energies can and do bleed over into this space, our ‘here’. Where most of us are now. And on occasion, we experience these energies that make there way from ‘there’ to ‘here’ as we would a gentle summer breeze.

Have you ever felt a gentle breeze or perhaps early morning mist that carried with it certain sounds and scents? Perhaps the sharp and crisp pine or a gentle sweet whiff of floral? A blooming crabapple tree or nearby wildflowers. It’s real like that. You can’t see the breeze but you can sense it. It is there. You notice it as it passes over you.

This place is much the same thing.

On rare occasions, I can show up and the idea is late, so I wait. Not really waiting. More like experiencing. Call it meditation if you’d like but to me it is closer to experiencing. The idea always comes. I never have to wait too long.

The idea I am describing here for you isn’t the purpose of this article. Like I said, these transcripts are just the proof I’ve captured from being there. Or as it is for me right now, not ‘there’ but ‘here’.

Honestly, returning from here feels much like today.’s date on the calendar. Today is the day after Christmas.

Going to this place, ‘here’, is a lot like that short time when Christmas Eve slips into Christmas morning. Quiet and gentle, yet utterly profound. That short moment when you are alone or with someone you love and can feel the positive energy of the moment surrounding you. Washing over you. Reassuring and restorative yet also substantial. Almost purposeful. You sense only the edge of its profound expanse. When this happens, you are very close to ‘here’.

And for just a second, when you are near ‘here’, the world seems different, it is as if the universe is whispering, “this is my gift to you.” For that few ticks of the clock, something inside you shifts. Perhaps you have had such an experience. If you have, then you understand because you have touched the border of place. The ‘here’ I am describing to you.

But we always come back. To the place where we reside day in and day out. This place, where our five senses and the perceptions which are tethered to them have constructed the walls and fences which surround us. The place we live our lives. In the tangible and the seen. This place of great limitation.

It’s the day ofter Christmas. There are returns to be done and a messy house to clean. Christmas decorations sit in the exact same place as they were yesterday but shine with a little less luster than yesterday. Tired and maybe a little bloated, we sigh, get on with the day and march back into reality.

Today I came here to visit and this is the transcript of my time ‘here’. I know it can get a little confusing. I am ‘here’ as I type this. The idea I’ve met today is different. Less dense. More a mist and gentle rain in the trees.

What is it telling me? To document the place, which you’ve now read about, rather than the outcome, the ‘idea’.

I came here with a question today. Here it is.

Looking to the new year, what hope is there for change? For me, for all of us? For those of you who are reading this and for the multitudes who are not. For everyone who is asleep, trapped by the walls and fences without even knowing they are trapped.

For me, this 2024 has been an ugly year on the surface. If I were to assess it with. a perspective of only seeing inside the walls and fences, it has sucked. I got hit by a hit and run driver who left me for dead. I deal with the long tail of the TBI from that to this day. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. My wife contracted some unknown virus that attacked her lungs in October, her blood O2 plummeting to 68, spiraling into pneumonia and keeping her in the ICU with an oxygen mask for 5 days. My mother in law is dying from a terminal and progressive neurological disease. As summer slid into fall, I encountered more than my share of mean people. Selfish people. Angry people. Inflexible and shallow people. Things broke around the house in a seemingly endless succession. The whole thing was a grind.

On the surface, 2024 needs to go. How do you feel about this past year?

But then I step from ‘there’ to ‘here’. The place in between and it all looks different. Sure I got hit. I actually died for two minutes. Full stop on all vitals. During that two minutes I went past where I am ‘here’ to somewhere much, much further in, yet every bit as real.

I saw what was on the other side (which I outlined here). That place is profoundly beautiful. And, because of that experience, I am not scared to die.

My wife is recovering and has realized the importance of her own self care. She came pretty close to the edge in her own way and that has changed her perspective as well. Our daughter was accepted into a wonderful college. The oldest chartered school in America. New adventures and experiences await her, and us ahead.

As for the societal vibe I mentioned. That negative energy felt in lines at the grocery, gas pump, airport and on the freeway has taught me the importance of these writings and perhaps my purpose as a guide.

Perhaps part of my role ‘here’, or ‘there’, depending on where you are, is to help widen the door between these two places, allowing a breeze of better energy to flow further and touch on others further away from it. To help some climb out of the twilight or darkness they find themselves in, immersed in the sticky tar-like negative energies they attract and have collected over time. Or perhaps for the luckier few who are nearer ‘here’, those higher up in the energetic frequency field, find awakening from the shallow slumber and into this space which is nearer to them.

The more of us who find ‘here’, the more positive energy from ‘here’ we bring back to ‘there’. When this happens, we can start to break down all those walls and fences, which after all, aren’t even real.

This is my mission and purpose for 2025. What is yours? Perhaps you will join me here. I truly hope you do. "‘Here’ is a wonderful place.