April 7, 1997

Hello Carl,
     I like reading the various correspondence you participate in with the assorted personalities you have become familiar with through your past and present endeavors.  I am pleased that you share some of this with me.  I am especially grateful to you for remembering Brian during his present sufferings at the hands of the very cruel and heartless bureaucratic functionaries who act under a pretense of justice.  Each time he is moved we have to go through the charade of attaining warden approval before we can write to each other.  I did receive word concerning his well-being through the convict grapevine.  His cell-partner at Terre Haute used to be here at Lewisburg and still has a co-defendant here that he writes to.  He let me know that, in spite of the draconian treatment and living conditions which they must endure, he is still maintaining his herculean bravery and his blessed disposition.
     Pass on my regards to Cindy.  I remember Jake as such a young boy during the Arkansas adventure.  He's probably a teenager by now.  It's nice that you and your father can still converse honestly about life's dilemmas.  I know the frustration that you confront when he suggests these dead societal programs as a possible solution for your susceptibility to the trauma that besets you.  I'm sure he is genuinely concerned for your welfare and prescribes his remedies based on the limits of his knowledge in those realms.  I am confident that you will exercise your own formidable willpower and finally subdue your remaining spiritual enemies at the moment and at the time that you deem to be ready to do it.  I know that this is possible and, really, the only scenario that works.  You are far too cognizant of your own capabilities in this conflict not to determine this inevitability when you are ready to do so.  You will always have my support because my empathy is real and because I admire what I preceive to be a very unselfish motivation from you.  I also very much love your honesty of perception and your simple ability to subtly chastise some of the quasi-lore that continues to maintain a hypnotic headlock on many of our dear old friends, our spiritual siblings.
     Please allow me to make one more short attempt to explain my apparent vehemence with regard to the carnage of the Coptic experience, particularly my focus on the Keith-Wally diadem.  I do not, now would I, deny my own responsibility and lack of courage in failing to maintain the perfection of humility which I both witnessed and tasted of myself from Ivy.  My only hope and the basis of my motivation is that the sisters and the brothers will acknowledge the evil that managed to overcome us personally and collectively during that era.  We are the mistresses and the ministers of a ganja civilization and consciousness which was resurrected in Ivy and quickened each of us in an unique and holy manner.  Because we allowed Keith to direct the innocent enthusiasm of our awakening into a commercial venture that only reburdened us with the filthy garmets or lucre which we had so joyously cast off at our initial advent, we ended up condemning one another because of a variety of ganja-smuggling related offenses, the foolish rubbish of a carnal mind.  When we condemned, or allowed to be condemned, any of our beloved kindred minds, we inadvertently condemned ourselves and our consciousness of what it pure and what is holy became dull, morbid, insensitive.  As long as someone refuses to show mercy, denies forgiveness, ceases to share understanding, then those same vital nutrients of our spiritual existence are no longer available for our own sustenance in the Holy City of Mt. Zion where perfect love and friendship does reign, through all eternity.
     I have made no accusations against Keith or Wally.  I have only stated events and activities which I witnessed.  I have done this in a very superficial manner and referred to situations and cosmics in the most general terms.  When the brothers and the sisters begin to open their own books, relative to what they have seen, done, and thought under the auspices of godliness, a vast revelation will occur.  I haven't even uncovered the tip of the corruption iceberg.  I don't even care!  I only know that it is a step that must be taken, an awareness that must be acknowledged before we can proceed together to "a choice and happy place, adorned with wondrous grace."  This is the reason, primarily, I am only concerned with dumping my own corruption, the likes of which seems to engender revulsion of me from the time of the "Adventures in Arkansas" until now among many of my contemporary sojourners on this odyssey toward the perfect body of the Messiah, which is US.  There is no other.
     Obviously, to me at least, a movement is occurring.  I would relate many anecdotes which would lend, possibly, a semblance of credibility to this reconciliation of the temporarily estranged members of the body of Christ, but I am wary of further offending anyone by mentioning them in some context that may be interpreted by them as something less than flattering.  Eventually, each one will blab their own story with a fervor previously unknown.  I love a good story.  The Bible was only part of the story.  Remember, "not half of that wonderful story, to mortals has ever been told."  The really good stuff is yet to come.  Only a free spirit can declare that story with a boldness and confidence that results from a good bath in the blood of the Lamb.  Howie wasn't such a bad guy after all.  I know that he loved the sisters and the brothers.
     When you say "something has to change," you have spoken a truth.  We, the sisters and the brothers, must make that final transformation to the divine.  I love it and I love you all,
     Jim