{"id":3735,"date":"2014-01-17T05:44:26","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T05:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/?page_id=3735"},"modified":"2014-10-14T07:35:26","modified_gmt":"2014-10-14T07:35:26","slug":"welcome-please-enter-here-mahalo-shalom-namaste","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/michaelwinn.org\/tu-maltido-amor\/welcome-please-enter-here-mahalo-shalom-namaste\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bear<\/a>
Bear near Caspar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

WANTED: DIGITAL VIDEOGRAPHER
\nSend resume and cover letter to:\u00a0michael@showmearose.com<\/p>\n

Rachel advised me to tell the story of my shift from not having a future to discovering my future was always there, waiting: to be known for who and what I am in this universe.<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, when I left Del Mar in financial and emotional ruin, I had no future and the only direction was, north. I traveled for four years mostly near the coast to Federal Way and turned back, when I realized that my future\u00a0isn’t out there because it didn’t exist. In the meantime, my Pomeranian companion, Bear, died and so did the royal cat I inherited from a mother I loved dearly and I found myself alone with myself and I sort of, wasn’t there but I knew that logically, he must exist somewhere, posing the question proves this.<\/p>\n

\"StMariaTrailerPark2\"<\/a>
Highway RV Park, Santa Maria, CA 2011<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I squeaked by on a pension of $964 per month by living in an ancient motorhome. I could park free in parks, industrial streets and Walmart parking lots when I needed money for fuel and when I hung around a place, I could park in RV parks and avail myself of local food banks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"IMG_0388\"<\/a> \"StMariaTrailerPark1\"<\/a> I\u00a0lived around field workers, displaced factory workers and retired government employees\u00a0and they all viewed me as a strange, unrecognizable kind of\u00a0man. I was comfortable, I slept well in my modest home, a city boy from Philadelphia and a Jewish intellectual. \u00a0Middle class types were frightened, the alcoholics among them, terrified. Always curious, as I\u00a0imagine a indigenous people in what is now called,\u00a0Florida,\u00a0might have been, when Albert Nu\u00f1ex Cabesa de Vaca dropped in.<\/p>\n

One night, when I was working as the campground host in Jackson State Forest, miles from civilization, parked in a clearing in a redwood grove beside a tributary fork of the Noyo River, Bear died in my arms of Lymes disease.<\/p>\n

When I awakened in the morning, I felt stunned that the world was still there. How could that be? My world died last night. But\u00a0I\u00a0awakened because I distinctly heard a voice say, “I love you, Michael” and the \u00a0commitment expressed by that voice made me glad to be alive. And awakening to Bear’s absence reminded me immediately that I had nothing for which to live. Then I also realized that it was my voice that I had heard, that I had said it aloud. And then I realized that I’d never before even thought to say, “I love you, Michael” and that I had always felt guilty about loving myself.<\/p>\n

\"Fishing<\/a>
Fishing Boat Noyo Harbor<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For a couple months, I hung around Fort Bragg, walking, taking pictures, playing my guitar. Early one Monday morning, I retraced a path that I’d previously followed with Bear in the neighborhood of Caspar, a few miles south of Fort Bragg. I began to photograph\u00a0a full scale carving of a redwood log of a Bear holding a cub.<\/p>\n

\"Redwood<\/a>
Redwood Bear, Caspar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The homeowner’s idea was probably meant to communicate,\u00a0don’t mess with female bear’s cubs but it looks like a Russian bear or a big Steiff toy, I couldn’t\u00a0take it seriously. Besides, I\u00a0had nothing to lose.<\/p>\n

A large, stout man appeared. Broad around the torso, blue eyes, greying hair, white skin, trimmed beard, firm demeanor.<\/p>\n

I asked him if he was\u00a0concerned about burglars and vagrants and \u00a0explained who I am and the nature of my visit.\u00a0He must have detected that\u00a0acute grief had captured\u00a0me. Out of the blue, he began telling me that, at\u00a0a low point in his life he found Jesus and life has smiled on him ever since. I in turn explained that I am a practicing Jewish rationalist and although I’ve experienced the supernatural in \u00a0forms of yoga, when he says he found Jesus, it sounds to me\u00a0rationalizing a decision and yet I know that’s not what he meant.<\/p>\n

I started capturing\u00a0images\u00a0of an unusually designed redwood house, which had attracted my attention to the place and when I turned around, he was gone. Things like this happen all the time in Fort Bragg and I gave it no further thought. \u00a0Hungry, I drove my 1980 6-cylinder F150 four miles across town\u00a0to the Redwood Senior Center to catch the noon lunch. (RSC and Cotton Auditorium are adjacent parts of the elementary school in Fort Bragg and the most\u00a0unique of all expressions of Mendocino County’s current culture. ) Most of RSC is the former community dining hall of the company town, the company being, Union Lumber. Both it and the auditorium have redwood walls and ceilings and they are nearly\u00a0the same volume. The dining room has oak floors and the redwood panels are sealed to keep their natural colors and the panels in the moldings in the auditorium are fine-grained, polished and sealed to a dusty rose.<\/p>\n

The dining room contains about 40 circular tables, each on seating 12 to 20 \u00a0people at a time. The meals, which cost $4 or a donation that fits your budget, are served to people at the tables by women who are generally over sixty. Maybe they are volunteers, maybe not. The tables are communities. People don’t move from table to table except for important reasons, otherwise, a regular participant would lose his or her place with people they get to know each day. I was invited to join a table, which I did but I wasn’t a constant guest.<\/p>\n

After talking to the man who had found Jesus by the redwood Russian bear and her cub, I found myself seated with some people I hadn’t met before, one of whom was an attractive woman of 60 or so. Her hair was graying blond, her eyes blue, prominent nose and a form fitting black ribbed sweater was stretched across he ample bosom. In the course of conversation, she told me that she is getting a master’s degree in art at the Art Academy University but that she was taking courses online and she is painting everyday.<\/p>\n

The next day, after determining that I wanted more than anything else in the world to master the art of music composition, I found that this very school had a music for film curriculum, which, because of my professional experience as a filmmaker and my bachelor’s degree in radio and television production, I could qualify to enroll by passing \u00a0a test in music theory, notation and history. Music had been an\u00a0avocation\u00a0forever, I could read for flute, bass and guitar.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Hearing this\u00a0seems pretentious but it’s a simple truth; deliberately hidden from me by my family until last year, when I finally learned about my father, Samuel Myrow and it’s very likely that I’m the last male Romanov, a bastard but then, so are we all, everyone of us else we’d all turn out like Juan Carlos or George Bush and that’s close enough to the truth in places in the midwest.<\/p>\n

My father, Samuel, was the youngest son of Dora whose grandparents were Jews in Petersberg during the reign of the last Tsar, Nicholas II. Samuel hinted to me about this, the one time I met him but his words were meaningless since I couldn’t imagine this.<\/p>\n

Rachel suggested that I tell you the story of my not finding Jesus in Fort Bragg in 2011 and how\u00a0what I found instead of Jesus turned out to be as good as finding Jesus. Romanov is more a by-product\u00a0of the whole thing. Relevant but not the most important aspect. As Joseph Goebbels might\u00a0say (assuming he didn’t), truth is a person\u00a0convinced of a\u00a0story. For instance, the law of gravity is a probability curve\u00a0between\u00a0everything going up\u00a0coming down again and nothing.<\/p>\n

What it takes to convince someone about this story relates to this, so, here’s the story Rachel told me people would like to hear:<\/p>\n

Seventeen years ago, I was living in Del Mar comfortably an apparent bourgeois success but my happiness was disturbed by a kind of envy and disdain. I’d written a book called, Architectronics,\u00a0<\/em>because I always knew I would be a published author and I had some ideas about life I wanted to see in print. I’d rewrite it now for emphasis, not for accuracy. I\u00a0think of the Del Mar period as Michael the Creator. I’d been living in a little house near the beach for 15 years, comfortable, not wealthy but I had enough.<\/p>\n

I was running on the beach one morning when this thing happened. All my life doctors had mentioned to me a genetic heart defect that used to end our lives at 50 but I didn’t realize\u00a0that the defect is triggered if we are\u00a0athletic. My genes are suited to intellectual pursuits but I am gifted with a love of dance and movement. I fell unconscious into the sea while running on the beach.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how long I was unconscious in the water. The next thing I recall is observing the sand and pebbles. Then a force I don’t own changed this, it felt involuntary, and water was draining from my nose and mouth and then cold air filling my lungs and flowing through my sinuses. My head lifted because my eyes refocused on the bluffs of Del Mar and the beach below it and the blue blue sky. And it was good! A seagull flew by and it was beautiful. A neighbor’s window\u00a0reminded me of the neighbor who reminded me of all the rest of my life, a sort of palpable nightmare of inauthenticity.<\/p>\n

\"Michael<\/a>
Michael Winn c. 1975<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Michael<\/a>
Michael Winn c. 1962<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My survival may have resulted from qualities of\u00a0character but I beat\u00a0the odds, which favored drowning. How? Why? \u00a0Who am I?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Tsar of Russia or technically, Tsar of all the Russias.<\/p>\n

During most of my life I haven’t known I am the last male heir to the Romanov dynasty, nor anything at all about my connection with my surviving cousins otherwise \u00a0known as\u00a0the dynasty.<\/p>\n

My mother and her family determined to hide my identity from everyone, but, especially, from me. They did this from compassion, of course, the typical reason. They may infer that\u00a0I’m the crazy one, not them. \u00a0Tsar? Tsar? That’s a laugh. What knowledge was passed on through successive generations in the construction of our brains? \u00a0A Russian Jew. No one alive a this times is not descended from a child produced in a\u00a0union outside a existing sanctioned relationship.<\/p>\n

In a hospital in Oklahoma City, I met Ron Elkins, a surgeon\u00a0who, with his team of masked men and women, sawed open my chest, took out my heart and put a cadaver tissue flapper where the pulmonic valve was and grafted the pulmonic valve in place of the calcified aortic valve. I met Ron in his office, checked into the hospital and saw him a couple times more before I returned to San Diego a few days later. He asked me if I wanted to take my dead aortic valve home with me to California. I declined. The experience had affected me emotionally, I was traumatized. Why was I living now? What future?<\/p>\n

I’d like to \u00a0forget and would if I could drink a lot. My writing is a survival tactic as well as\u00a0a quest for having a future, permanently. But writing\u00a0requires that I see\u00a0things as they are or imagine them in a way consistent with some intention. It helps me \u00a0to understand who it is that is observing. We have no closer observer than we are ourselves, if we can only tell the truth. \u00a0Life is\u00a0a laboratory for consciousness, a\u00a0paradox\u00a0when you’re doing the experiment.\u00a0\u00a0When I look now at \u00a0images of the persona I’d identified with since the age of 16, I see a chrysalis from which I’ve recently\u00a0emerged. The person I’d thought\u00a0of as “myself” could not have predicted\u00a0my present self. My reactions were not conscious choices yet my expectations\u00a0are a\u00a0consequence of personal history\u00a0I’d never\u00a0carefully researched.<\/p>\n

It happened that following the surgery, it took about seven years for the picture you might have taken before the surgery was shattered to smithereens. My mother died, I’d lost my job, my girlfriends, then my house, my money, everything gone. I wasn’t suicidal, however, because I had the cymbalta and modafinol if I got drowsy. \u00a0And I had the dog and my mother’s cat and my camera. I was good as we say.<\/p>\n

I bought an ancient motorhome and went\u00a0from town\u00a0to town along the Pacific coast and staying\u00a0for\u00a0months\u00a0at a time in beautiful places, in\u00a0affordable RV parks and state parks. The cat died of Lymnes disease and a month or two later, so did the dog. In my arms in a redwood grove where I was camping several miles from Ft. Bragg. Darkness descended. For a few months, I hung around Ft. Bragg and then I went up the coast and stayed in towns in Oregon and Washington, turned around in Seattle–lost interest in the search.<\/p>\n

The contradictions are all apparent. The ballad of Nicky and Mikey.<\/p>\n

When I learned the truth, I was of course suspicious. Now that I’ve been convinced of it, I’m not moved to claim prerogatives of my position. I wouldn’t turn down a Faberg\u00e9 egg or Winter Palace or white princess if they are offered to me but I don’t expect it. It is only important to me that I give expression to\u00a0something inside me.<\/p>\n

Inside my head is the myth of Russia. Russia is a euphemism for “everything”. You are Russian, most likely, a freed serf and I am Tsar. Tsar of all the Russias, for one very simple reason that no one can disprove. I am responsible to God. To God alone. Yet the burden of this responsibility is that I must be as God in my acts and words. My predecessor, Nicholas II, was unfortunately for everyone, knew the \u00a0value of life but was no more able to stop powermad police and entrepreneurs from \u00a0firing guns into a crowd of peacefully protesting people. For this weakness, a\u00a0mob of idiots, lacking the natural instinct of reptiles,\u00a0sought to destroy the very idea of Tsar and Russia together.. They couldn’t kill Russia without extinguishing themselves, which in fact, is what they accomplished. They would be upset today to know that I survived. They, however, are dead. They are dead Russians. They also failed. Three survived.<\/p>\n

I’m\u00a0writing a symphony now, using this computer with a software program called a Digital Audio Workstation with which I am able to\u00a0produce and hear orchestrations that took Rimsky-Korsakov so long to write that he never got to hear much of the music he scored. And look at the other differences in our experience.<\/p>\n

Rimsky-Korsakov lived in St. Petersburg, a contemporary of my great grandfather, Tsar Nicholas II, who was murdered by a motley gang of Bolshevik fools in the cellar of a house in Ekaterinberg, along with my great grandmother\u00a0and two young woman who were aunts.<\/p>\n

Nowadays, \u00a0like in San Diego, California. Every other day, regardless of weather, \u00a0I paddle a kayak out into the ocean to Ballast Point. In the days, when my family’s celebrated balls were described on the front pages of newspapers in every major capital of the world, sailing ships would anchor off Ballast Point to stow rock collected at the base of the cliffs as ballast after emptying their holds of cargo. \u00a0The trip for me is about 6 miles each way. I do this for \u00a0a breath of fresher air and an imagined escape from my self-imprisonment within this military base called, San Diego, where I feel safe. On my way out of the harbor yesterday, I was intercepted\u00a0in the channel by a navy patrol boat. From behind a cannon, a sailor politely asked me to paddle across the channel, nearly a mile out of my way, while a submarine with nuclear warheads aboard, maneuvered from it’s berth, out into the harbor and out to sea. As it passed me, 300 yards I thought about the nuclear weapon inside its thin black metal skin, \u00a0that would end all life on this planet. What must they be thinking? Like the thugs who murdered my great aunts, they are not thinking.<\/p>\n