The eighteenth green at Silvertip

Attended the World Omphalos Cafe Conference in Majestic Canmore Alberta, the other day. Just my brother, Xenon and I, but I have high hopes for it in the coming years.

Played a round of golf at the Silvertip Resort. They’ve carved the course into the side of a mountain and the views are a staggering kaleidoscope of beauty. My brother shot a respectable 88, while I clocked in at 98, and Xenon carded a 1, as befits him.

Decadent? Absolutely, but when in Rome…. And not to be too tiresome, the analogy is not altogether inappropriate. But that’s stuff to be ruminated over back in the quiet stillness of the Cafe.

At Silvertip there’s another order of quiet stillness. The odd cawing of a raven, the angry chirruping of a red squirrel, that was the gallery as we wove our way through the forested tracks.

The smell of money is all over golf. It’s a little unsettling. One fella I played with today had a remote control motorized golf cart, like R2D2 with clubs out the dome and a dangling towel. $900 for that nifty gizmo. What his clubs cost I can only speculate.

Back home and back to work. Back to the Cafe for balance, for meaning, for integrity.

As I sit here Chomsky is at my elbow. ( I once killed a mouse in the closet of my bedroom with ‘What We Say Goes.’) There’s a biography of Che Guevara, ‘A Revolutionary Life’, Krishnamurti’s ‘You Are The World,’ and Joyce Cary’s hilarious ‘The Horse’s Mouth’.

I glance to my left, there’s ‘The Complete Works of Rabelais,’ Baudelaire’s ‘Flowers of Evil,’ several volumes of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy’s two great works, plus short stories.

Another glance: ‘The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh’ and ‘Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals’, Hermann Hesse’s ‘Demian’ and Somerset Maugham’s ‘Of Human Bondage.’

The weekend is over. Golf was fun and exhausting. But it’s nice to be home.