Author Archives: Waldo Noesta

Everything You Probably Thought You Knew About Pantheism Is a Half-Truth…OK Maybe Two-Thirds.

The John Toland Ideological school of Pantheism needs to step off, sit down, and have a brief history lesson.

Not One, Not Two

The part is not the whole…but it also isn’t *not* the thing of which it is a part. As Alan Watts is so often quoted in pantheist circles as saying, “A wave is a function of what the entire ocean is doing,” and so is the feather of a duck. If you point at a duck’s feather, you are also pointing at the duck that grew it as part of its body. Your ability to isolate your attention on the feather does not remove it from its natural context of duckness. 

THE RESURRECTION OF “BIRDING”

In 2014, JP worked with a small local publisher to put out his debut novel, a semi-autobiographical tale called “Birding in the Face of Terror.” Let’s just say that no part of the publishing process went as planned, and by late 2016 their relationship had ended, their contract was voided, and JP’s urge to publish was crushed.

A Sort of Homecoming: Central Coast Revisited, 2010

Birding in the Face of Terror began as a short story completed a few months after 9/11/01, with little beyond a journalistic account of the events on and around the bus trip with the American Birders Association to the three sites we visited. Upon finishing it, I knew there was an avalanche of related material and many thousands of words left unsaid, so I started expanding it into a novel. But sometime in mid-2002, my efforts hit a major psychological wall, and the project went on the shelf, not to be picked up again until 2009.

Birding — From China with Love: The Landmark Tours

In Act IV of “Birding”, I spent a good deal of time describing Pedro’s bus trips with Chinese tourists to Yellowstone and many other national parks of the West in the summer of 2001. I’ve always wondered whether readers would assume this was one of the fictionalized elements of the novel, with a workload thatContinue reading “Birding — From China with Love: The Landmark Tours”

Pez King Teaser (Chapter 1)

Once, upon the timeless arc of the circle of time, there was a peasant. He lived in a small village in the heart of the Kingdom, near the towering, cloud-obscured mountains where the King was said to dwell. Ordinary in most ways, the young peasant was exceptionally passionate and devout in his worship of theContinue reading “Pez King Teaser (Chapter 1)”

The Four Evolutionary Stages of Human Consciousness

Note: the following material is grafted mostly word-for-word from a long section of monologue in Chapter IV of “The Peasant and the King.” I consider it more of an extract than an excerpt, for I did take out all the elements that put it in the context of the story with characters speaking and listeningContinue reading “The Four Evolutionary Stages of Human Consciousness”

The Peasant and the King

Fiction. Paperback, 334 pages, apx 65,000 words. $20 via ND Media Bookstore ($30 for author signed copy); $18.95 via Amazon or Barnes and Noble E-book, $2.99 via Apple Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, or Book Locker. Release date: April 15, 2022 “Be humble for you are made of stardust; be noble for you areContinue reading “The Peasant and the King”