COINCIDENCE IN CRESTONE

 
I’m sitting in the Crestone Artisans Gallery, doing my ‘co-op’ shift, there are several new people visiting town and I make them feel comfortable , and welcome.
 
There’s a cool breeze here, wafting into the house…so inviting after the oppressive heat, snowing cottonwood fuzz, yellow green pollen from the all the budding pinon trees covering everything inside and out and the voracious swarming mosquitoes.
 
Some older, white haired gentleman walks in and it’s just the two of us in the store while he’s perusing all the artwork, scrutinizing it actually. I ask him if he’s an artist and he tells me he’s thinking of moving here and would like to get into the gallery. He said he’s partially indigenous and that Hannae Strong told him he should move here, to come up from Taos where he resides now. I ask him if he’s familiar with Encaustics, I explain it and he looks at my works and says, ‘Futral’ ‘Futral’ that sounds awfully familiar, ‘Stephen Futral.’ I tell him my friends call me Ish, short for Ishwara. He immediately says, ‘did you know Swami Satchidananda?’ and there we went running off with one intertwined story after another, our paths never met but ran parallel. Friends with Peter Max, taking acid with Timothy Leary, student of Ram Das and taught Krishna Das the Bhakti Yoga chanting that he is known for now. Our paths even crossed with the Enlightenment Intensives taken place in the desert in California.
 
It wasn’t so much a reminiscing as it was a new discovering, a friendship of knowing of each other. His name was Surya Das, one I’d heard for many years back in the 60s and 70s.
 
The likeliness of me being on shift at the gallery just as he walks in is part of that ‘auspicious coincidence’ that seems to run rampart here. We connected on FB…
 
© stephen.futral / 25.june.2016