“He who without the Muse’s madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.”-Plato.

“If you are interested in that there is a group meeting tonight you should check out,” said the girl to whom I gave my money at a used book sale. The book I had bought was on extra sensory perception.

“May i speak with you,” I said to the woman who had introduced herself as Dr. Winifred Barton.

“Yes,” she said.

“I saw a man sitting by the exit door while you spoke. When he caught my eye on him, he faded from view. I saw him three times before you broke for intermission.”

“Wait here,” she said as she left to return with a photograph. She said, “Is this the man?” I said, “Yes.”

She said, “That is the caretaker. He died yesterday. Where you saw him was his favourite place to sit during our meetings. You belong here.”

I spent a year there studying ESP. I saw auras, had out of body experiences and more but one day I realised that by working on developing these gifts I was making myself into a spiritual bodybuilder. The end result might look impressive but as physical body builders become muscle bound so too become spiritual ones.

I realised the key is to trust that what we need will be there when we need it.

Many balk at the word faith however all of us live by faith whether we believe in Allah, the Buddha, Krishna, GOD or whatever.

Faith means allowing something to happen to us that we may learn.

Faith, to me, does not mean joining a church.

It means trusting myself as part of a community that stretches back through time to the dawn of all things.

Asked where he found the centre of the universe the Sioux Shaman Black Elk said, “On Haney’s Peak in The Black Hills however in truth the centre of the universe is in each person.”

In 1968, the year I met Dr. Winifred Barton in Ottawa, I met a young man who asked if he could sleep in a park. I said, “You could be arrested for vagrancy. It is supposed to rain. Why?”

“My father said, ‘My way or the highway,'” he replied.

“You made the right choice. Come with me,” I told him.

He took me to a party where I saw a fellow reading the then newly published Wilhelm/Baynes edition of THE I CHING.

I bought the first of many copies. I kept giving it to people.

THE I CHING teaches that inferior people try to create order out of what they see as chaos while superior people see the order in inherent in what the world sees as chaos.

That same month Jane Jacobs, author of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES, came into my life.

Jane wrote, ” Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them…. for really new ideas of any kind–no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be–there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings…

“Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow.

“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”

The last echoes THE I CHING.

Our cities, our governments are run by people who impose what they see as order on a world they are born blind to.

THE I CHING states that learning and doing must be one otherwise both are dead.

In 1968 I learned Judith Merril, the mother of modern SF (Science/Speculative Fiction) was at Rochdale College in Toronto. I went over to meet her. I was pre-punk Punk dressed head to toe in Black. Years later Judy said, “You scared the shit out of me when I first met you.” It helped that I had copies of landmark motion pictures like THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS(1927) and more.

Judy explained to me that at Rochdale College (the very rare new building in which new ideas were found) there were no teachers. Each Rochdalian was to be their own teacher.

“I had wonderful teachers in the first and second grades who taught me everything I know. After that, I’m afraid, the teachers were nice, but they were dopes…I have a lack of ideology, and not because I have an animus against any particular ideology; it’s just that they don’t make sense to me…they get in the way of thinking. I don’t see what use they are…University and uniformity, as ideals, have subtly influenced how people thought about education, politics, economics, government, everything…We are misled by universities and other intellectual institutions to believe that there are separate fields of knowledge. But it’s clear there are no separate fields of knowledge. It is a seamless web.”-Jane Jacobs.

“Most teachers say you should go to school to get your degree to have something to fall back on. Aside from being a huge lie, that also creates a very high level of mediocrity, because nobody who really believes that is going to take the leap of faith required to be a serious artist. Stay out of school.”–Ellis Marsalis to his sons Branford, Delfeayo and Wynton.

We are here to walk on water.

University and uniformity will cause those who trust it to drown.

For years I worked on a free verse re-telling of the Sumerian EPIC OF GILGAMESH.

Then in 1992 through the damnedest set of coincidences Peter Sumadh came into my life.

Peter enabled me to get the thing down.

Today is his birthday.

Asked what is the difference between inviting friends over to see a movie and what Reg Hartt does a City of Toronto official said, “Reg Hartt is inviting strangers, people he may not know, into his home.”

Yes, I am.

That is terrible, isn’t it?

No, it is not.

I welcome strangers.

–Reg Hartt 2026–06-15.