FIRST MUTATION
Ten years ago I found a book called "Yoga for Americans" in the garbage in Montreal: a 13 week introduction to Yoga featuring Gloria Swanson...
That week I set off on a hitchhiking trip.
For three months I circled the Gaspe peninsula,through NewBrunswick, to Newfoundland, down through Nova Scotia to New York and back up to Montreal, camping and hiking, meditating and writing a film script called "Inside the Watermelon" with a little Tandy 100 laptop computer.
Every day I spent four hours intensively following the phyical and mental yoga excercises of my tattered copy of Yoga For Americans (by Indra Devi).
One of the mind exercises involved imagining a cloud floating in the sky, then rising up to become that cloud, drifting over a beautiful landscape...
Then in Newfoundland I got a job doing aerial photography, flying to the spectacular out ports, filming fish packing plants.
Unfortunately I had camera problems, and everything I shot whilst in the air came back messed up.
From that day on, whenever I tried to do the cloud meditation, as soon as I started to rise into the sky I would again be up in that plane, the camera messing up, twisted and tangled in waves of regret and embarrassment.
I tried all of my newly acquired yogic mind control powers to no avail.
The mock visualization prose piece "SCARED SACRED" came out of that, ten years ago, typed into my Radioshack laptop on a blueberry bluff in Newfoundland.