by Dr. David Fialk, Editor / Publisher

In 1979, I lived in a beautiful valley by the sea, an hour and a half north of San Francisco. Coleman Valley was a short distance north of and inland from Bodega Bay, where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds. Coming from the other direction, the east, as we almost always did, starting from the picturesque village of Occidental, Coleman Valley Road goes up a very large hill then drops into the small valley. A couple of miles later, where the valley ends, the road rises up onto a plateau and carries on, a few miles more, to the Pacific Ocean.

At the end of the Sixties, the Summer of Love already a distant memory, many hippies fled Amerika, getting back to the land, trying to find their way "back to the Garden." A friend on a commune in Vermont told me, "We got the hell out of Dodge." Communes and individual, long-haired "homesteaders" became a phenomenon around the world. Part of this trend, the San Francisco escapees who bought land along the south, shadier, side of Coleman Valley became known as the Coleman Valley Hillbillies.

I moved to Coleman Valley to attend a college of naturopathic medicine started in a former Catholic girls' summer camp, under the Redwoods, along the nearby Russian River. Think what you will about natural healing, we had some amazing teachers; at that time there were a lot of PhDs in the Bay Area driving cabs. I lived in one of the first dwelling the hillbillies built, a small geodesic dome, with outdoor plumbing, a five-minute walk down the path from the main house where a group of fellow students lived.

Mira, the wife of my buddy Neil, was also resident. She wasn't a student. She worked cleaning houses, eating her lunch while driving between jobs. Mira went to see a doctor of Chinese Medicine, one of the professors teaching at our school, about something that was bothering her. As part of his prescription, this doctor, Michael Brofman, who had a wildly successful practice in Marin, and probably still does, told Mira that she must not eat behind the wheel. His non-materialistic health advice was for her to pull the car over in some pretty spot, get out and have a picnic.

I don't remember which supermodel it was, but back in the early Seventies, she spent three weeks on a shoot in the Sahara, Nubia. No water for bathing, she went three weeks without taking a shower. She reported that her skin had never been healthier. The Europeans make fun of Americans for many reasons, one being our habit of bathing so frequently, a habit which I don't have.

Generally, I shower twice a week. In between these I perform what my mother called a "whoore's bath." (She said who, not hor.) I wash under my arms, around my neck and wherever else needs it with a cloth. If I return overheated, from some unavoidable midday errand on my bicycle, I've been known to jump in the shower to cool off.

Before Atención closed, this didn't happen that frequently. I led a more monastic life. These days I'm venturing out more. Today, I had two meetings, one in the government offices off the Jardin, and one with a very cultured Mexican woman who is interested in working with me on Lokkal. Inspired by my new social obligations, when I woke up today, uncharacteristically I jumped in the shower.

There, shampooing my hair, it dawned on me that cleanliness, if not "next to godliness," is at least a spiritual state. The frequent bathing that we engage in is not explicable by physical necessity; we are not that dirty. It has a non-materialistic, ritualistic side to it. Around the world believers use water as part of their religion. Bathing is a rite, an ablution, a meditation.

Usually, I bathe in the late afternoon, sometime after I've taken my daily bicycle ride and am in for the day. Afterwards I feel refreshed, not just physically so, but psychically energized, perked up the way, I imagine, people feel after a cup of coffee.

Chomsky says that what constituted the revolution of the Scientific Revolution was the ability to be amazed by things that were once taken for granted. Apples do not fall from trees because, as it was previously thought, it was in their nature to return to the earth, their home. They fall because of gravity (a still entirely mysterious force). Leibnitz, marveling at the fact that light necessarily takes the most direct, the simplest route from its source to its destination, wrote about the principle of Necessary Simplicity. Einstein, following Leibnitz, characterizing the perfection present at all levels of nature: the arch of your foot, the flipper of a whale, cellular membranes, the laws and forces of physics... referred to a Miracle Creed. That everything is so perfectly engineered is what drives scientists to consider the divine. The precision required to start and maintain it all, from the moment of the Big Bang onward, speaks of a plan and a Planner.

Yes, it's easy to dismiss the Sunday School God or the creation myth of the Hopi, but that type of atheism is cheap, straw-manning. Rather consider that in the hundred years since the prize was first given (1901), 95% of Nobel laureates in physics believed in God. They believed, based on their study, that there is some spiritual network directing it all.

Today's cult-like social movements: anti-racism, transgenderism, communism... demonstrate that you can take the boy out of the religion, but you cannot take the religion out of the boy. The zeal and intolerance of dissenting opinions that is evident in such movements is only generated by religious beliefs. It has been rightly observed that when you stop believing in God, you'll believe in anything.

My God is the God of Leibnitz, the God of Einstein, and the God of the Hopis, a unity, a wholeness, a connectedness of it all. There is a direction, a teleology, a purpose to things. It's not all the result of random processes. Mathematically existence, as we know it, could not have happened by chance.

My faith shows in the way I eat my food. Instead of gobbling it down on the way to somewhere else, I pull over and have a picnic. Showering is also a religious experience for me; and, yea, I am renewed. We are all believers. It's just that some beliefs are healthier than others.

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