Max Reif's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-wake-up-man"

This has been a big week. Two projects on which I've labored for years have resulted in the publication of a book of short stories title Toward an Interior Sun" and a CD of songs called The Wake-Up Man, within a few days of one another.

Now what, I ask, chuckling? Time will tell. But I want to say a few words about the process that led to this book, in particular, because I think the story is kind of instructive.

All my spiritual understanding from Meher Baba and other great sages can be summarized in one sentence: "Do your best and leave the results to God."

But that motto has not kept me from huge and sometimes prolonged feelings of discouragement. As a writer, one of my models has been Hermann Hesse, a bright light who shone in the darkness of the first half of the 20th century, and who dramatized many of his own crises and subsequent breakthroughs as enduring fictional narratives.

Hesse's little books like Journey to the East, Siddhartha, and Demian are dazzling jewels, glimpses of possible worlds that most prose writers of the time seemed to not even suspect. Hesse's work went hand in hand with another mentor of mine, Carl Jung, and with Meher Baba, whom I regard as a Master of masters.

And so, in my mid-twenties, emerging from a period of travail, as do many of Hesse's characters, into the bright mystical light of my own spiritual honeymoon, I felt inspired, and released that inspiration in poetry, prose, painting and music. I had no training in music, except for piano lessons that I was forced to take as a kid, and a few guitar chords. But a song "came out of me," and then another one—almost like a woman giving birth twice without even knowing she was pregnant! I truly learned, during these heady times that, as Avatar Jesus said, "all things are possible!"

I read a biography of Hesse and found that publishers began discovering him in his twenties. Where were mine? I scanned the horizon...none on their way. Here and there, a poem published, a short piece in a Meher Baba journal. That was all.

I kept on, because no one who is made to write can suppress the need to do so.
Around five years ago I received an email from a lady named Jane Olivier. She had seen a few poems of mine on a website at which I had once been active, and asked whether The Mindful Word, the online journal she published with her "collective," might print a few of them.

Naturally, I said yes. Not long after, I tentatively wondered whether they might be able to use a story I'd written; then a book review; then a piece of humor about a young man sitting next to me at Starbucks who thought I was "Too Old for Facebook!""

All in all, I now have more than seventy pieces on my Author Page at The Mindful Word. Among them are the 11 short stories, mostly taken from my own experiences—as was much "fiction" by novelists like Thomas Wolfe and Henry Miller—which became Toward an Interior Sun. This, by the way, is the first original book ever published by TMW, which next month will be releasing two more, picture book stories written by my friend Kathy Roberts.

So, the big eagle of a full-blown book grew from the little sparrow of an email request for a couple of poems. That is the manner in which many of spiritual gifts have entered my life. You, too, may have some "little thing" that has already arrived in your world, which will eventually turn out to be a "big thing" in the vast tapestry of life.

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