Welcome to The Discovered Country, the successor to Redwood Dragon.

In the process of becoming a Quaker, I gradually realized that the persona of Redwood Dragon no longer reflected my beliefs and attitudes. But a kind of psychic inertia made me loathe to change until my Movable Type blog suddenly stopped allowing posting, and my hosting provider would not respond to my emails and calls requesting support. I decided to move my site to Laughing Squid. I’d also gotten tired of the increasingly byzantine structure of Movable Type, and decided that WordPress was not only simpler, but had a feature set that suited me better. But it proved very difficult to move my posts from MT to WP.

All these factors finally came together last week, and I decided to make a fresh start and leave Redwood Dragon behind. I will be posting some content from Redwood Dragon here over the next few months, especially those reporting my spiritual journey, as religion and spirituality (and their impact on life here and now) will be the primary focus of this blog.

About the Image

The banner image was scanned from a print I’ve owned for about twenty years, which my first wife and I found in an antique shop in Temecula, California. I cannot read the artist’s name (it looks like Rostakantis, but Google reveals nothing for that name); the print is dated either 1907 or 1917. I’ve always called it “The Three Seekers,” and for me it epitomizes the experience of reading Scripture, or any religious or spiritual texts, or even blogs! The three seekers can see something sublime that I cannot, and no matter what they say about it, they will be able to convey only a shadow of the power that holds them transfixed on that high ridge among the clouds.

About the Name

The name The Discovered Country arose from reflection on four texts that came together in my mind once I decided on that image for my banner.

The title is, of course, an inverted reference to Hamlet’s description of death in his soliloquy:

Who would fardels [burdens] bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

The quotation in the banner is from George Fox, the founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers):

It is a strange life to you to come to be silent, you must come into a new world. Now you must die in the silence, die from the wisdom, die from the knowledge, die from the reason, and die from the understanding.

Of course, as a devout Christian, Fox had a richer understanding of death than that expressed by the Danish prince. For he knew, as Jesus said:

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.

And it is the false self, the ego, the idol that would be God, that Fox was insisting must die. For Quakers who practice expectant worship, that death is to be found in the silence, the cloud of unknowing, in which one encounters God and, eventually, one’s true self. Too often, though, we would rather bear “those ills we have” than step into the unknown that waits for us there.

The fourth text is a comment by a Friend, Ole Olden, in 1955:

I should like to change the name `seekers’ to `explorers’. There is a considerable difference there: we do not seek the Atlantic, we explore it. The whole field of religious experience has to be explored, and has to be described in a language understandable to modern men and women.

So, then, this is the blog of an explorer, not a seeker. I’ve found what I was looking for all my life, and in what time remains to me I intend to explore it to the limits of my heart, mind, and soul. I invite you to join me.