Lindy and I are now in our eighties and moving back and forth between Portland and Bar Harbor. As I write this update, we are currently in Vermont, our first trip out of state in almost two years. We have come mainly for the Inner Traditions Fiftieth Anniversary..
I have been slow to update my website because I have put most of my attention into my substack account, which I share with Lindy and Ruslana Remennikova: https://operajupiter.substack.com/archive?sort=new.
Last August through October, I got COVID, which turned into pneumonia and then a stretch of brain fog during which I couldn’t drive or write,. I described that series of events in Health Freedom posts: https://operajupiter.substack.com/p/health-freedom-dfe for COVID and https://operajupiter.substack.com/p/health-freedom-f67 for pneumonia. Mostly on substack, however, I have been doing weekly podcast-like interviews on the site. You can join my subscriber list if you want.
My book on homeopathy, which started out as chapters in Planet Medicine, then was developed from those chapters as Homeopathy: An Introduction for Beginners and Skeptics and revised after 2000 as Homeopathy: Yhe Great Riddle, was repoublished in 2024 by Inner Traditions as Homeopathy as Energy Medicine: Information in the Nanodose: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Homeopathy-as-Energy-Medicine/Richard-Grossinger/9781644119662. My 2025 talk on homeopathy is in the Joviam Bricolage archive.
My nonfiction novels will finally be published by Inner Traditions: Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage in Spring 2026 and new editions of New Moon and Out of Babylon in teh spring and fall of 2027, respectively.
I want to reemphasize that I no longer have any connection to North Atlantic Books and haven’t since the day in 2020 when the self-enamored Left Wing Trumpians took away my key and kicked me out of the company that Lindy and I founded and developed over 55 years. I immediately began a mantra-like meditation to know nothing about the vandalization of North Atlantic Books on my own, hence to pay no attention to the mediocrization of our baby. At least our flesh-and-blood kids were doing well: Robin Grossinger with his eco-design company Second Nature and Miranda Grossinger being Miranda July, her legal name for the last 31 years.
Of course, a lifetime’s worth of Lindy’s and my curation and acquisitions still remains in Berkeley. However, my Mind Body Spirit curation going forward has been transferred to Inner Traditions. If you want to continue following vintage North Atlantic Books, do it there there. With only one exception that I know of, the most commercial psychospiritual authors have joined me at my Sacred Planet imprint. Some of their earlier books have been liberated and transferred by various legal maneuvers. The vandals also discarded successful authors like Patricia Cori, Bob Frissell, and Matthew Wood because they didn’t suit their virtue-signaling of a woke world-view, their preferred course to publishing original books. Unfortunately, as you probably know, Lindy and I donated enough money to allow them to continue doing it for a while.
The staff left, drank the Kool-Aid, or kept their true views to themselves–this by way of the grapevine. I urge friends, readers, and colleagues only to buy from Lindy’s and my backlist but certainly not to penalize any decent authors that they came up with since we left. I have no direct evaluation of their publishing under my imprint since I honor my report. I am reporting only what others tell me. It is lame New Agey flotsam with requisite woke overlay.
Don’t buy the North Atlantic imprint on the basis of my legacy—it wasn’t kept. Imitated maybe but not replicated, for who can replicate another’s vision? Telll your friends and colleagues that I am no longer affiliated and it has been taken over by enemies of my worldview ostensibly theirs . I have enough pride in my curation to be embarrassed by what has done, but the Trump specter has wrough far worse damage so immigrants and Government workers, so I am lucky. I got a better venue and job and more resources with which to publish.
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Things I am working on in my life process:
Breaking obsessive compulsions which means overcoming the temptation to break obsessive compulsions compulsively. Practicing death pictures–blowing them my interpretation of John Friedlander’s system (this has been easier since my two weeks of COVID took me through the underworld and I met spirits who guide mortal transitions).Psychically contacting the ancestors (the dead) not by séance-like exercises but at inspired necromancing moments: looking over my left shoulder for a glimpse or changing my vibration to what I intuit as theirs. Practicing a more positive world-view to pass on to those who must sustain our world through the darkness help convernt current shadow into the light it is trying to shine.
By scientific theory and the precepts of evolutionary biology, this planet is a needle in a haystack. Trillions of stars with planets make more such worlds likely, but we don’t know the coefficient, so we can’t set a decimal point. This may still be the only cosmic oasis. Either way, it is not a white crow; it is a deep, blue-green (fourth- and third-chakra) whirlpool (whorlpool given the underlying curvature of space time) in the void–the reason I called my imprint Sacred Planet Books. It is also possible that every planet, dwarf planet, and planetoid in this system is inhabited on astral, causal, buddhic, atmic, or monadic planes, and at vibrations outside our manifestation where other sets of planes continue in both directions.
I am trying harder not to kill insects, though at the same time I am not a vegan or vegeterian. The contradictions and paradoxes are endless. Here’s another: if I were really Richard Grossinger–that is, if Paul Grossinger was really my birth as well as my legal father—I probably wouldn’t write at all, and you might not like me very much. Lindy would not have married me. On the other hand, if I had been raised by my blood father, Bingo Brandt, I would probably be even more of an asshaole. Like getting kicked out of North Atlantic Books and ending up with Sacred Planet, I found the perfect balance.
I am also noticing how lines, particularly in songs, suggest repetitions of the same thing in life. A line can throw me back fifty years. I can’t think of an example now, but I will add them as I think of them.
- After posting on Facebook, a line from my childhood record of Pardon My Blooper came to mind. Because they forgot to cut the mike on a show for children, the host was heard throughout radioland saying, “That should hold the little bastards!”
- I was looking at Lindy thinking how we were joined at the hip for so long, though when we met we were from different backgrounds, different parts of the country, different temperments and experiences. Suddenly my high school (Horace Mann) alma mater began playing in my mind: “We were strangers met in friendship / Now we’re kin to one all.”
- As I wrote out a check without dating it, Lindy said, “Put a date on it.” I said, “It’s been so long since I’ve written a check that I’ve forgotten how to” and thought of my brother Jon sometime around 1980 arriving out of breath from running thirty block at lunch with his father (my stepfather) and me and Lindy and our then-young kids and eating the whole relish tray. My stepfather said, “What’s the matter, it’s been so long since you’ve eaten that you’ve forgotten your manners.
- When I see giant pipes laid for sewer projects, I think of senior of Amherst and the Phi Psi lawn where pipes were being laid for the Alumni House parking lot that would eliminate the glen where we held our October 1964 ceremony, and May 1966, the last month I would be single. I hear Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons, “Let’s Hang On to What We’ve Got.” (see New Moon)
- Sixty one years later, as I help Lindy with her cane over bumpy ground up the portable outhoiuse steps at the Inner Traditions 5oth Anniversary party, I hear Utah Phillips singing .”And Big Bill always loved Nevada Jane.”
- Back in the 1970s when Grossinger’s was in decline, most guests stopped coming, but the religious crowd, called “yarmules” didn’t. My Aunt Elaine “They used to come just for High Holy Days. Now they’re here year-round. But we need the money. How do you turn them away?”“You don’t,” declared general manager Howie Bern. “When I began working for your wonderful family years ago, I saw their crowd at Passover and my first thought was what do we do to discourage these people? But when I realize what they’re willing to pay for the kinds of rooms we put them in, I said god bless’m!” As the squirrels I was feeding fifty years later started coming in the sliding glass door to eat the cat kibble, I thought, “How do we discourage these people?” The rest of the parallel doesn’t fit because we don’t want the squirrels checking into rooms.
- On the other hand, I love the squirrels. There are 8 of them in the backyard, many of them babies. I put out peanuts and critter food everyday. Today I wondered why I didn’t feed them organic peanuts in the way I get Weruva salmon-tuna for our cat. Then I thought “a scented candle” in the South Korean serial Crash Landing on You: scented candles for the squirrels (BTW there are 4 or 5 of these a day, I realized, so I will only list occasional ones when I have time to catch them.)
- When feeding our cat Tawny her Weruva purée a month later, the only soft food she will currently eat, I said, “Here you go, your favorite purée, and shsin I thought of Crash Landing on You when Ri Jeong-hyeok holds up a candle for Yoon Se-ri as he comes looking for her at night in the crowded marketplace, then tells her he made sure that it was scented. I continued the theme in my imagination as two hours later I carried Lindy’s coffee canister up the stairs for her and held it aloft like Ri Jeong-hyeok with a scented candle.
- While hiking Kebo Mountain with Jesse Graham in Bar Harbor in the summer of 2025, not my first time ever but my first time in ten or so years, at a particular steep spot I thought, “So this is Kebo” and immediately heard the words of Jamaican reggae singer John Holt in my mind, “So this is Christmas.”
- While Paul Weiss was showing me a cave at Schooner Head, he said, “This is the only cave in Bar Harbor,” and my free association went: “Caves in Bar Harbor” to “Farms in Berkeley,” the embarrassingly silly bullet point our agent put on our last Berkeley house when advertising it for sale in 2014 because it had raised beds in the backyard and some fruit trees and there were rabbit hutches next door.
I am bowling for first time since high school when my high score was 164 but my average was around 110. It took a few weeks to hit 178 and then another month to hit 179 where it is now. I have not gotten better than 163 in the last 5 months, but I am averaging 130. A pin here or there can make the different of 20 or even points, so I am close.
I am still able to speedskate laps for a half hour each a few days a week at the public sessions at Troubh Arena when we are in Portland.
I am also playing an old childhood game of finding all the letters in order on billboards, vehicles, license plates, etc. Q is always the sticker. When I am driving to bowling, I use “Liquor” at Hannaford’s grocery, which gives me two shots because it is wrapped around a corner at Riverside Street. I recently discovered one closer to my house: Captain’s Quarters, pretty far-off, so it took a while to spot, and I have to get lucky after that to complete the alphabet before I get home. In the ice-skating direction, I need either license plates or “Equipment” on the entrance ramp or, after skating, on the “mosque” (Arabic-like letters a bit hard to reader, so I sometimes miss it even when needing it and readying myself) en route to Portland Co-op for groceries. I don’t want to have an accident looking for a letter. Bar Harbor is ruined for Q and the game because the town is filled with signs indicating tourists that a permit is required for parking.
The fun is in what word will yield a particular letter, especially after a wait, and in how one intuitively knows where a particular letter is likely. Getting from A to B is sometimes hard. C-E are easy. F can be a stumbling block. G-I is fairly easy. J is worth almost as much as X or maybe even as much in Scrabble, but Maine uses both on license plates because they are easy to read, not Q as much because it can look like O. K-P is easy; then after Q one pretty much can soar through the rest of the alphabet with very few bumps, especially on highways where Exits are frequent. Z can sometimes be a stumbling block, but there often is Pizza to the rescue. This game is good for writing, good for eye health (it has Bates Method elements), and good to keep interested in what is around one. You see and understand more when you look for how humans have marked the landscape.
I am particularly aware of early a.m. dreams and the fact that they carry information stored in the aura as well as the mind. The Freudian dreamwork fuses the two together with its usual unconscious brilliance.
Since I am in Vermont, I am noticing differences from Maine, though I love both places; here are some prayer flags around many porches; strangers say hello on the street; ruder (more Boston-like) driving; a particular repetition of house and street/wilderness layout; more natural, more micro, and just plain more micro-breweries, micro-creameries, micro-ice-creams (a la Ben-and Jerry’s), micro-bakeries; brick-oven pizzas, micro-kombuchas (Aqua Vitea my favorite), magnet-imbedded leggo letters spelling out word on convenient flat vertical metal surfaces (“bubble forever”), co-housing communities (our friends’ Andy and Carolyn’s one on White Rock Drive in the Montpelier hills); greater ecological awareness and social conscience (this was particularly evident at the concert we attended in Middlesex where people we talked to—friends of our friends—discussed both this year’s garden and their work with training dropout youth in carpentry and other technical skills); community compost and community gardens; the energy of Inner Traditions and re-forming Goddard (sometimes overlapping as in me and the Inner Traditions main acquisitions editor Jon Graham); there is nothing equivalent in Maine; College of the Atlantic is a different thing, more political and ground in old wealth); tie-dyed T-shirts, especially with spooky cats; easy trans looks (though both places rank high on the overall Blue State list).
In Maine, at least half the cars are driven in the daytime with their half-lights (parking lights) on, no matter the weather. Not so in Vermont. Driving with parking lights on is illegal in some states, though considered required by many in Maine
Maine is also coastal: a blue state along the coast, a red state inland (like California). Vermont is mountainous and homogenously blue. Both states have lots of maple trees and tap ripe ones for maple syrup, but Maple is a brand in Vermont, not so in Maine. The restaurant Maple Soul in Rochester expresses the underlying conceit, aslo their maple mocha milkshake and cream pie. The many green mountains make for the paradox of winding roads at 50 miles an hour interspersed with straightaways at 30 miles an hour because those are small villages where people make profound lives (as elsewhere, but more maple).
Both states are synchronicity prone. In our case, because we lived in Vermont for five years, the synchronicities are personal. Maine is a synchronicity sinkhole for all except the incurably inured.