Your body isn't anymore, doesn't ask for much. A little music and a soft touch. Why don't you let it out to play?

Your heart isn't a birdcage, singing in your chest. You want to shut it up and give it a rest. You're gonna die one day.

I died one day in 1989. You may have heard me tell the story before I've told it on a podcast called Risk, which you can hear either at their site or on, I think there's a link to it on my site, Chris Ryan, PhD.com. It's on the homepage.

You can hear the story there. I'm gonna tell the story again today in a slightly different way because I found a paper, I mentioned in the last episode that I was going through a box of papers in Spain that I hadn't looked at in years.

I found a paper I wrote in 1994 for a class I was taking at CIIS in San Francisco, the California Institute of Integral Studies, which is where I thought I was gonna be doing my PhD.

But I ended up taking a few classes there and then transferring to Sabrook, largely because at Sabrook I could get the PhD but also live in Spain. So I was sort of happy to find that. But that's another story.

Anyhow, I wrote this paper. It's called Death Among the Ruins. It was a final paper for a class on living, dying and grieving that I took at CIIS.

And I thought I would read the paper. I'll skip the parts that refer to classroom readings or discussion or whatever that would just be boring for you.

But I thought it might be interesting both because it's an interesting story and because like the last episode where I was reading something I'd written before, it's interesting.

And maybe this is very egocentric, maybe it's not interesting to you. But to me it's interesting to see how someone's voice changes over time and written voice.

And make a couple comments about writing. A lot of you have written to me and asked me to get into the writing process, talk about creative process and all that kind of thing.

I shy away from that because again it just seems egotistical. I mean, I've written one fucking book. It makes me an expert.

But since you're asking for it and this whole thing is kind of strangely egotistical in some ways, I might as well surrender to it I guess.

In for a penny and for a pound right. Anyway, so yeah, start reading the paper. It begins with a line I really like I have to say.

And this is one of the things somebody I don't remember who it was, but some famous author said I hate writing but I love having written.

But I think that pretty much sums up my experience. Actually sitting down and writing is like for me it's like it's like mining.

It's like you get you have to take you a long time to get to the place where the actual work has to happen. You go down you crawl through the dirt and the darkness and the blah blah blah.

And you finally get there and you're already tired and you don't want to do it and it's a pain in the ass and it's it's your sweaty and your cramped it's I mean this is all metaphorical of course.

And yeah, there's nothing good about it. But then you come back up to the surface and you bring things with you.

You know these opals that you found down there and you can't even tell in the darkness if they're any good but when you get back up to the sunlight and you see the way these things glitter in the light sometime in the and the color that's hidden in them and the miracle of the stuff that happens in the subconscious when you're in a creative process.

That's pretty fucking cool and and again one of the reasons you hear me sort of whining about not wanting to get ego involved in this is I think that ego stops that process from happening.

And so there there's got to be an insistence on humility for that to continue somehow.

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