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Bruno “Buzz” Weckerle.

The day he left I felt his passing.

In 2004 I went with friends to see SPIDER-MAN 2. The movie had barely started when I felt myself overwhelmed by the banality of it. I had to leave the theater immediately and at once.

I came home not knowing what to expect. Nothing was out of place. But something had changed in my universe. I could feel it.

The next day the phone rang. “Bruno died yesterday,” his sister told me.

I had first met him in 1968 after midnight in Queen’s Park. I was walking home drunk from the bars. I had sat down to recover my bearings. He had come along. He asked, “Can you sleep in the park?”

I said, “Why?” He said, “My father said, ‘My way or the highway.’”

“Come with me,” I said.

I was sleeping on the balcony of a one bedroom apartment filled with a ton of other people waiting to move into a house.

Later, alone, he said, “I have never done this before.” I said, “As far as I know you are not doing it now.” He said, “You do not understand. I want to.” One day while he was with me before he’d gone home he took me to a party. There on the floor I saw a fellow sitting with a copy of the Wilhelm/Baynes edition of THE I CHING in his lap. I asked, “What’s that?” The next day I bought the first of many copies. THE I CHING teaches we can not separate learning from doing for if we do both are dead. Shortly after I became part of Rochdale College where each Rochdalian was called to be their own teacher.

He spent a couple of weeks with me. Then he went home. He began to tour with a band named LEIGH ASHFORD.  I saw little of him after that. When I did see him it was always good.

We saw each other increasingly less as the years passed. I went to visit him at the Funeral Home. His sister said, “When he was dying he said the most important person he had met in his life was you.”

I told her, “He was impossible not to love.”

He was easily the most strikingly beautiful man in the band. They knew it. We see in their faces the envy, the anger. The man behind him with his hand on his shoulder saying silently, “He’s mine.” He was never anyone’s. He was completely his own person.

THE I CHING changed my life for the better. So, too, did Buzz. I owe him my life. He remains the most important person in my life for without him I would not have had a life. Always welcome the stranger, the lost. Sometimes they are gods in disguise. That’s not why we should do it. It is just that sometimes they are. Many gods and goddesses have been made welcome in my home. That’s why I keep the door open.—Reg Hartt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Ashford         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CumYUnDiN7A

Until One Is Committed

Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. —W. H. Murray, THE
SCOTTISH HIMALAYAN EXPEDITION.

This is true. Providence is another name for God.

 

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