Yeah, A Tunnel

Don't change the names.  Lennon was his.  He was seeking transport to Los Angeles and he was willing to pay for gas, so why the hell wouldn't I take him?  To be honest, the farther I drove up the road winding into the wood north of Soquel, the more I began to question that principle.  I turned off onto a dirt driveway and coasted to a stop in front of one of the two adobe buildings on the property.  They were situated next to each other and across the driveway there was a quaint garden.  Farther up the driveway, on a higher ground there was a hippy fountain surprisingly lacking in terms of mountain-hippy-living flair.  It was awkwardly more in fashion with cheap, gaudy early 1990s imitation stone (probably plaster) middle-class suburban lawn fountain.  Such a strange ornament to have overlooking the complex.

I should tell you now, the place was not a hippy commune.  Merely a Hare-Krishna commune, and it's inhabitants were a bunch of steady-paced soft-speakers high on their own self-imposed forest bliss.  And it carried through in their speech, in the way they offered freshly prepared food for my journey in that flowy, far-away focused rhetoric of theirs.  Hare-Krishnas.  Of all the places to find myself before the drive to LA.  These people were absolutely fascinating.  Over time and through meditation and such things many of them had learned to block out, disengage, and avoid all the negativity in life.  Nothing was sad to these enlightened folk, no one was angry and everyone wore their blissful compassion in toga sleeve or bald scalp like a point of pride.  They live in perfect harmony in their isolated forest paradise shut out from the rest of the world.  But that's not really living, is it.  What's life if not the experiences that define it.  They are one symbiotically with nature and the existence they have carved out for themselves.  They never have too much, and they never have too little.  It's a relationship of constant routine, shrouded and sugar-coated in chronic bliss.  And so their days pass, ignorantly indifferent to anything but their compassionate fix of bliss.  They grow old and wise in the institutions and capacity of their beliefs.

And the world passes them by.

Lennon was not an inhabitant of this place.  He was a roaming traveler, and he was a wizard.

[stop]