This open letter and touching memoir was written by my friend Washington Sean after listening to my recent ramblings about Trichotomy and anticipated territorial skirmishes over an imagined inter-dimensional bridge where piles of soul bound tokens might be held in the future, inert digital golems awaiting the spirits of inbound travelers. My birthday is later this week and this offering feels like a special gift. It was a delight to picture myself a bit in that magical place beyond the looming gate of St. Thomas Aquinas. And I didn’t have to carry 40 pounds of gear up a mountain!
I’ve been thinking a lot about multiverses and portals and one’s life work. After I finished the trichotomy stream, Washington Sean and I exchanged a few emails about consciousness and shipping companies – waves, you know. I brought up W.R. Grace and J. Peter Grace Jr. of the Grace Line, devout Catholics with ties to the Trappist Abbey in Spencer, MA outside Worcester. RFK Jr.’s dad Joseph was a fellow-Catholic colleague with the Maritime Commission. I sense that standardized contemplative prayer is a key element in the B-Corp social impact “moral economy,” a game where focused spiritualized attention will be used to fuel the Web3 global brain platform.
Below is the stream, I’ll put a screenshot of that map with a link in case you wish to explore where the Grace empire intersects with the Vatican and Zen Buddhist brownie bakeries staffed by former-felons. My friend is a talented photographer. Enjoy his windows into a time before the fire.
Dear Alison,
Ok — so I am having a hard time with this last email you sent me. In the email you addressed the concept of a trichotomy as a means of explaining the differences between the mind/spirit, the body and the soul. And you also mentioned Thomas Aquinas and pointed to J Peter Grace and his role as a past Governor (Board of Directors) for a school called Thomas Aquinas College.
Peter Grace, “whose wife was a key player in Vatican II” was also mentioned in your email. This wasn’t unexpected as we had been discussing shipping magnates Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis and their connection to the Negroponte brothers (another typical conversation with Alison, right?) and somehow Peter Grace was mixed in, someone I’d never heard of before. And so, with all of these topics thrown into an email is nothing too out of the ordinary, as our correspondences are often filled with different threads and rabbit holes. But unknowingly on your part, you had sent something else that was embedded in your email — something else that caused a peculiar epiphany – a sort of unsettling realization about our research endeavors that led to an interesting reevaluation of my own past – my own lived experience.
Specifically, it was your mention of how Thomas Aquinas College was fitting into this mix. I know I’ve mentioned I grew up in Ventura County, but I’ve never told you about the significance of the College in my own life. Nor would I have ever had a reason to until now… So, this is another ‘bizarre’ coincidence — or perhaps more evidence of our ability to tap into the magical realism of our lived experiences – perhaps sharing a mutual ‘frequency’ or a least being signaled to look at certain topics, certain ideas, within a common bandwidth, listening for concepts and symbols that resonate with me, with us, right now.
Thomas Aquinas College now has two locations – and they did not open the Massachusetts location until 2019. But — and here is why this is weird and personal — the California campus is in Ventura County where I grew up. But not just that — the campus sits at the entrance of a popular trail head where I literally ‘grew up’ — as in — where I slowly turned into a man; and where I formed a relationship with God and nature; where I battled my place in the world and contemplated my existence in the future.
The CA campus is located in Santa Paula canyon along state Highway 150 between the communities of Santa Paula and Ojai. It was near the campus that the ‘Thomas Fire’ of 2017 started. The Thomas Fire was, for a brief period, California’s largest wildfire in total burned acreage, scorching over 280,000 acres, but it’s place at the top of the charts was quickly usurped by another raging firestorm in the following season. Several of my close friends lost their homes in that fire including my two best friends. A great effort was made by the local fire department to protect the college a few days after the east winds event was over and when the winds changed, and the fire began to burn back the way it had come. The college experienced only minor physical damage, but the traumatic impact of the fire still lives on in that part of Ventura County.
Ironically, even though I have called the Pacific Northwest home for many years, I was visiting a friend for his birthday in 2017 (on November 30th — surely just another coincidence that November 30th is the same day you sent this perplexing email) who was battling cancer for the 3rd bout. A couple days later his sister’s home in the Ventura foothills, where the birthday party was hosted, was completely obliterated. I looked online at the drone shots that were available and I could pick their house out – a pile of ashes with only a gun safe standing in what used to be the garage.
I was in town for only two nights, so the day after the birthday party in Ventura I visited my best friend’s home in upper Santa Paula whose house was very close to the origin of the fire that would erupt two days later, and it was among the first to burn down. Of the few things they had time to grab before they left, was the wedding plaque that we had commissioned to be carved in leather commemorating the year of their union (2012). My friend’s wife tells a great story of how she ran back into the house and had to use a stick to knock it off the wall since she could not reach it.
Their home was not far as the crow flies from the campus grounds, and it is odd in fact, that I can still remember driving down Highway 150 after my visit with them as I was on my way back home to my parents’ house where I’d soon bum a ride from my father and get dropped at the Burbank airport and catch the last flight back to Portland. But on that drive home that night I passed by the campus, and I can recall how raw and powerful the winds were already blowing. Call it a premonition, or a hunch, but the thought of fire entered my mind that night, right as I drove by the Thomas Aquinas College campus. Two days later, the winds would grow even more ferocious and would knock down an electrical wire, sparking the fire. By that Tuesday I had learned what had happened. And it was on a Wednesday morning that I would be delivering opening remarks for the small non-profit I was president of at the time. It was our annual awards breakfast and while I kept a cheery face for our sponsors and guests, inside I was solemn and grieving, and I couldn’t help but feel a tad guilty for having a premonition, not having the knowledge or intuitive sense of how to act on it, and then learning how many of my friends were now burned out of their homes, their lives forever altered.
The Thomas Aquinas College campus sits above the Santa Paula creek on a small bluff nestled between hilly terrain at the mouth of Santa Paula canyon. This is not a ‘mighty river’ or a mountain river that one might see or think of as imagined in one of the more pristine national parks of the Sierra Nevada. The Santa Paula creek is a typical river of the Los Padres National Forest. Much of the time, rivers in southern California run at a low flow rate and often they can barely muster a trickle or even dry up completely, running ephemerally for long stretches before entering the myriad of pathways into the greater water table. However, during periods of heavy rain, these same little creeks can turn into flood channels of immense power and geological change – deluges capable of swallowing huge swaths of land and altering the landscape in a matter of days or hours. The clay soils have poor drainage and cannot absorb the water fast enough. And after intense fires, the sage, manzanita, and scrub brush of the chapparal can leave a layer of plant derived oil that coats the surface with a thin, impermeable layer, further exacerbating the drainage issues. Thus, the Los Padres National Forest, and the terrain around the Santa Paula canyon are areas that have been experiencing rapid geological transformation – occurring in faster cycles than more stout or solid mountain ranges.
There is a sulphur spring near the mouth of the Santa Paula canyon. The smell is thick, and the pronounced stench of rotten eggs is hard to miss on the highway, as it just before the main trailhead parking areas. Up until very recently, by grant of an old easement with the Thomas Aquinas College, the National Forest Service, and the other ranch and property owners, the first mile of the trail actually cut through the campus property, ascending a few hundred feet in elevation along an asphalt road. The road crests by the Ferndale Ranch (home to a meandering flock of peacocks for many years) then drops down and heads around a bend. The last point on private property was just past the oil wells where the road ended, and a dirt trail formally began. It was only a few years ago that the campus was finally successful in obtaining new easement rights along the creek directly to the parking lots so that the official trail no longer goes through the campus property at all. But from the time I was a child and even through my 20’s and late 30’s the trail always involved that long, winding road.
My first trip into Santa Paula canyon was in 4th grade – as part of a day long field trip through my public elementary school. In fact, now that I think of it, lots of the public school kids in took day trips to the Ferndale Ranch (located just beyond the College campus) and hiked in to Punch Bowls — about 2 1/2 miles of hiking with a fairly steep and laborious slug up a hill at the end to climb for nine and ten year olds. The cliffs near the punch bowls were really dangerous — and the water could easily kill drown a child or adult during the non-drought years – as a series of cascading pools with increasingly large cliff jumps was more the stuff of adventurers and high school kids, not elementary or middle schoolers. I did not do the jumps until in my early twenties.
The year after I did the ‘outdoor education’ through my public elementary school, it would have been 1992 or 1993, the district discontinued the program as a tragic drowning occurred with another school — a 12-year-old boy passed away when he got sucked over the falls. But even though the schools stopped taking kids there, the popularity of the spot has only grown and my mother kept taking us there through our adolescence. In fact, she used to call it ‘church’ and on more than one occasion she called in sick for us and took us hiking so that we could “go to church.” Raised catholic, but never practicing, my mom considered it more important to be in nature than in a giant building when it came to praising God and his creation.
But it was later in my life that the East Fork trail and Santa Paula Canyon became even more important. One of my best friends, the one who would later lose his home near the origin of the Thomas Fire, was the one who introduced me and another friend to the camp. He had been there as a boy with his father, and he had sort of rediscovered it. Through the Thomas Aquinas college campus, up the Santa Paula Canyon trail and then past the popular ‘Punch Bowls’ (we always called them the moon rocks) hiking spot, was the old and in some spots, quite non-existent trail that went up the East Fork that led to the secret camp. Truth be told, it wasn’t really ‘secret’, and it was more like ‘rediscovered’. The camp, that we endearingly called ‘the land of one hundred waters’, was shown on some older maps, not on newer ones. But Santa Paula Peak, situated prominently above the valley where the camp was located, was listed on the Sierra Clubs’ Top 50 Peaks in California. And other prominent hikers knew of the camp and old trails. So, while it was sort of hard to get to and somewhat forgotten, the idea of it being a true secret was more romanticized than reality. The camp actually use to have a wagon trail to it (supposedly) in the late 19th century, where pioneer families would take extended vacations, but our ascent was always along the worn and mostly faded away and long neglected trail.
After the 2004-2005 floods, most of even the old trail washed away and it became more like boulder scrambling until the very last bit. Despite the technical difficulty and the lack of stable ground, the destination made it worth it. The camp was ‘a secret camp’ partly because it had some improvements that were added by a generation of hikers and campers that came before us. My friend’s father was a member of these hikers, part of a group of friends comprising an informal fraternity of sorts. The camp they built for themselves in the late 70’s and early 80’s included improvements that most camps do not have – especially those that are a full day’s hard walk through arduous terrain. The camp featured a twenty-foot long picnic table built out of a large fir tree that had been cut down and milled on site. There was also an asadero style bbq grill and an assortment of cast iron pots, skillets and other cookware. Nearby springs flowed year-round amidst a flat parcel of ground submerged beneath the deep shade of canyon live oaks that were hundreds of years old. Chumash griding bowls and mortars have been found in the area while exploring off the trails. About another thousand feet in elevation, above the camp, and along another worn and overgrown trail, there was located another camp sitting in huge boulders and cliffs comprised of sandstone and siltstone. The cliffs had this reddish tinge or hue to them that when hit with the last rays of sunlight, they’d turn the most amazing color before our eyes.
When we first started our hikes, the trail began by going through the large green cast iron gates at the entrance to the campus by the highway. On the weekends, the gates were locked and hikers were instructed by a sign to use the non-vehicle entrance. Strict instructions marked on signs all along the part of the road through the campus were hard to miss and the security guard was largely dedicated to making sure the hikers never wandered off the route. It almost felt intentional – the way the trailhead made the route so much longer. Surely, as we had tried on more than one occasion, there was a quicker, more efficient way through the campus. But on the weekends, hundreds, sometimes even over a thousand people on a real hot spell, would use the trailhead in search of the reliable swimming holes further up the canyon.
All in all, I have spent over a year of my life sleeping in this place. Starting at nineteen and through a lot of my twenties, I needed to be there, up the East Fork, at the secret camp, at the headwaters, near the eternal springs, nestled amidst the oaks and old growth firs, above the dominion of the Thomas Aquinas Campus. I wasn’t the only one. I shared this experience with my best friends. Even my wife has spent a few weeks camping up in this place and would know the college if mentioned. I could tell stories for hours of this place.
Five nights here, three or four days there – the days turned into weeks and the weeks piled into months. I soon realized that I was spending much of my free time going to this place. When I wasn’t working or on another adventure, I made my best effort to get my bag packed and get up the mountain. When I was faced with either getting a new roommate or moving into my van to save money, I chose my van. I was already spending so much time at camp – it was an easy choice and it helped me save money even quicker for the big trip to New Zealand I had been planning.
Quickly however, it became apparent that Thomas Aquinas College with its big cast iron gates and zealous security guards was a barrier to our adventures up the mountain. Eventually, even parking on the highway at the trailhead would become too risky as more than one of us had our windows smashed. So, finding a cut-through, or a quicker path to the get to camp was a matter of circumstance, not choice. The impedance of the college and its long and winding road became cumbersome and annoying. For most people, the hike ended at around the 3 ½ mile mark – when they got to moon rocks. But for us, that was only about a quarter of the way, and the biggest nuisance was always going through the gates and walking up the long and winding road around the campus water reclamation pond (fancy for on-site sewage treatment). It took at least thirty or forty-five minutes to walk that first section – getting past the oil wells and onto the rock and dirt track always offered a sigh of relief. A mile is not that far, but it is a noticeable distance that was hard to ignore with 40-50lbs of rations and gear stuffed in a backpack. Clearly, we were hindered and greatly bothered with what seemed extra or unnecessary labor put in front of us by the College.
So, we got bikes. We would use our bikes and ride up the hill along the asphalt path in extra low gear. Still physically difficult, but much quicker. And even better – on the way back we would really shave off the drag and droll of finishing a weekend of backpacking by plopping relentlessly along a hot, stinky asphalt path back to civilization. What better way than to whizz through the campus and down the hill in a mere instant – or about 25 mph. The security guard actually scolded us one time when we were riding our bikes too fast as even the cars were expected to observe a 15 mph speed limit.
Truth be told – there was actually another way to get to our secret camp – from an entirely different direction. So, in a sense, we could escape the dominion and the gates of Thomas Aquinas if we absolutely wanted to. We had found a way to our paradise that circumnavigated the more obvious and conventional path. But the other route featured its own drawbacks. First, it required an access code through a locked gate – so only certain people knew how to acquire the code (another easement battle from a forlorn era). But with the code, we could travel up the mouth of Timber canyon and ascend up the face of Santa Paula Peak. Like the Santa Paula Canyon trail, part of this felt redundant as there was, feasibly, a dirt road that would allow us to start closer to the actual forest (reserved public lands) lands. But we did not have permission to drive on the dirt roads. And this trail, being on an exposed and very sunny south face of a prominent 5,000 foot peak (the peak used to house a fire lookout tower and it was confirmed that a double-wide trail suitable for dirt bike travel used to exist all the way to the summit), was hard to climb during the day, and even in the winter months depending on the weather. We’d typically hike up the peak trail when cooler weather was around. On more than a few occasions we hiked up the peak at night. While better maintained and easier to navigate (up until 2021 washouts on the backside) this trail required more climbing and had a long descent into camp.
Weigh points along the peak trail last comprised of the following spots: ‘the house’ (burned in Thomas Fire but was the old trailhead start), the gate, the oaks (now known as ‘cow shit camp’, Kenny’s hill, the switchbacks, lunch rock, orange peel, soda pop, the peak spur, the saddle, the grassy spot, the last turn.
Weigh points along the canyon trail and the East Fork were last comprised of the following spots: The Gates (start of trail at highway), Ferndale, Noel’s place, the Oil well, the washout (aka ‘hell hill’), big cone, moon rocks, first crossing, log jam, poison oak camp, land of the milky white rocks, the witches portal, the flats, the spring trail, the meadow.
As I already mentioned, most hikers going up the canyon stopped just past big cone or the moon rocks (popularly known as the Punch Bowls), but our journey was always much longer. During the summer months we’d stash extra beers in the creek near the moon rocks for the last stop on our return hike home. Before retrieving our bikes (also stashed nearby) we would drink, swim and eat whatever last rations we had managed to save. Our adventures ended with riding the rest of the trail in a slightly altered state of consciousness, gleefully blowing past the other hikers.
Eventually we learned the cycle of the big weekend hikers and campers could occasionally yield substantial gleanings of food, clothes and an assortment of abandoned camping gear. Descending the trail after a big summer weekend filled with tourists came with the feeling of returning to civilization in phases – the moon rocks and surrounding camping areas functioned as a sort of open-air dumpster or secondhand store. Any valuable gear we found we would stash for our next hike up. But discarded food stuffs such as ultra-processed and flavor enhanced cheese chips or a bag (opened or not it wouldn’t matter) of fortified and enriched chocolate chip cookies was always a welcome addition to our favorite end of hike snack – the ‘tuna boat’ – a green bell pepper stuffed with chunk tuna and chopped onions, cilantro and jalapeno or serrano, and finished with a few dallops of hot sauce from a fast food condiment packet.
Groups of people would come to the moon rocks from the nearby towns of Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo and Port Hueneme for day hikes. Sometimes even people from Los Angeles County would hike in the canyon near the popular swimming spots. In my lifetime, the canyon acquired great popularity and many young people found it a particularly cool place to ‘camp out and party’. The drinking and revelry often combined with a lack of experience in many of the camping basics –concepts that we took for granted like what to bring and how to stay nourished and hydrated were not taught in the limited curriculum of field trips and ‘outdoor education’ available in elementary school. This resulted in a great number of hang overs and many of the inexperienced campers simply abandoning leftover food, dirty clothes, and even perfectly good gear that just looked too heavy to carry to a nineteen-year-old with a throbbing headache. Their discarded leftovers were always our miraculous discoveries.
So much of my life, my energy field, the imprint of who I am (and who I am still to become) is in relation to that magical place. I have hundreds (probably thousands) of photos of my time in the East Fork canyon and Los Padres National Forest. I hope you can appreciate the significance of the coincidence and the elements of magical realism that present here.
Thomas Aquinas College was always a gatekeeper – not just a ‘way’ point, on our trail, but also, a ‘weigh’ point, a spot on the trail that weighed both our packs and our worthiness as we traveled through its dominion. After passing through the gates, it taxed us appropriately on our travels into higher realms.
The important work that I would do up in the camps and bluffs above the dominion of the college, beyond the realm of the material world, was spiritual work. True, our materialist trappings of fine cuts of meat, malted ales and other liquors, legumes, potatoes and assorted vegetables, they always traveled with us, as they served to literally weigh us down all along the chosen route. But the majority of the work done at camp was always spiritual work. In fact, one of my best friends, (not the one who lived right next to the fire, but who also lost his home(s) to the fire), worked for several years to construct his very own cabin, hidden away from camp up in the bluffs, nestled in its own little nook. It was a beautiful little forest cabin before it burned down in the Thomas Fire. It was comprised of a variety of native stone and hand-hewn lumber, and also some building materials he had carried in. It had taken him months of accumulated time to build it, almost all by his own hand. Before it burned down, he used to refer to it as ‘his life’s work.’
What is this notion of our ‘life’s work’? The time that I craved to be there – and the amount of time I spent there – for some it was perceived as escaping from work or escaping from responsibility – from existence in the material realm. But it never felt like that for me. It was a place of great importance, and learning. Of experiments and mysteries.
I didn’t understand it in this way then – but the important barrier (or bridge) that Thomas Aquinas College served in my travels isn’t just an inconvenience. It was a physical burden to have to pass through the gates of Thomas Aquinas College and walk the extra mile. But now, now I see that it was also a spiritual bridge that they controlled – or, more precisely, closely monitored.
At first, I used to believe that the college was not receptive of the hikers, and that they’d rather not have us there. The stern nature of the signs and security guards keeping everyone on the right path seemed bothersome to the pristine and peaceful environment that was cultivated on the campus grounds. But now, re-thinking the role not as an inconvenience to the college, but instead, as a chosen duty, or a higher calling, a sort of self-endowed guardianship over a gateway and control of the bridge, or the portal, from one dimension to the next. The college watched over my travels as I left material world and prepared to ascend into the spiritual world. They were monitoring my travel into and out of Gods splendor – now I see that it was not an accident that the college situated itself in this manner. The perceived hacks and different techniques my friends and I learned to get around the expectation and presumed relationship with the College as gate keeper and pathway enforcer were beneficial to us, but that did not diminish the college’s dominion over the bridge or the majority of other hikers. In fact, it was only because of our desire to return to the higher realms over and over again that the important role the college served became noticeable. Had I only hiked into the canyon on occasion, it would be easy to overlook. But having made this special place my literal second home, the college was always the first weigh point on the longer journey.
Thomas Aquinas College is not far from several other notable institutions of learning and foundations of spiritual significance. The Ojai Valley has been a center of new thought for well over a century now (and quite longer if considering indigenous cosmology). Just over four miles from the college campus as the crow flies, there is the Ojai Valley School, an alternative education school for children founded in 1911. And not far off, perhaps another mile or so further west is the Thacher School, established even earlier in 1887. Situated close to the Thacher school is the Krishnamurti Foundation for America, another well-known institution. It was in 1922, in Ojai, where Jiddu Krishnamurti is said to have had a “life changing experience.” Directly to the west of Thomas Aquinas College, about five miles away and sitting atop the summit of Sulphur Mountain is Meher Mount – a spiritual retreat center first established in 1946 and dedicated to the Avatar Baba Meher. A little further west and centrally located in the small town of Ojai is the Krotona Theosopical Society – first founded in Hollywood in 1912, and later relocated in Ojai in 1922. Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda was known to visit the area and helped found his spiritual sanctuary in 1950 as part of his self-realization fellowship. No doubt there are more places of spiritual and cultural significance in and around Thomas Aquinas College. The reputation of the area precedes itself.
However, in taking a step back and thinking about the college’s place differently, and in general contemplating what it is about this area that has drawn so many to the area in search of enlightenment, I could not help but wonder – where the energy is coming from? Is it inherent in the land, as if by a magical grid or ley lines? Or is this energy coming in from somewhere else?
Just south of the campus and the sulphur springs, about two miles away, is another site of importance that has reemerged as important – perhaps the most significant and important site of all – that suggests broadening my horizons even further – and asking, or perhaps, doing the work to begin to formulate new questions, better questions, that stretch my understanding of the intelligent forces at work in our world.
COMSAT, a global satellite communications company, established its teleport site in Santa Paula in 1975. The site is shown on the COMSAT webpage under its ‘commercial’ heading. But, as of November 1, 2023, COMSAT, and SatCom Direct, are now part of Goonhilly. The technical components at the site and the capabilities of the site far exceed mere commercial endeavors.
For many years I just assumed that the satellite dishes and arrays that are visible from the highway, just south of the gates at Thomas Aquinas, were nothing special – just more telecommunications equipment for the burgeoning cellular telephone industry. Now I understand that the array there is unique – and possesses capabilities to look farther into space – into a cosmic void where one day we might discover the true meaning of intelligence.
Goonhilly “is one of the world’s premier space communication gateways providing control and uplinks for satellites and deep space missions.” With the recent acquisition of COMSAT Teleports, including the Santa Paula site, Goonhilly is expanding “all communication service offerings from LEO (Low Earth Orbit) right through commercial GEO to lunar and deep space.”
Goonhilly’s first site was located at Goonhilly Downs, near Helston on the Lizard Pennisula in Cornwall, England. Under a 999-year lease from British Telecom (BT Inc.) it was one of the largest stations in the world at its inception and still possesses some of the most advanced capabilities on the planet. Its parabolic dish, nicknamed ‘Arthur,’ was one of the first of its kind. Its current largest dish, called ‘Merlin’ is equally impressive in the modern era.
Now, connected to the Santa Paula site next to the Thomas Aquinas College (and others around the earth), Goonhilly has positioned itself in many ways as its own kind of keeper, or guardian, of our ability to move from one dimension to the next. Goonhilly maintains the flow of information as it is transformed from the physical experience into digitized atoms and bits that are parceled and scattered into the heavens. As the information slowly coalesces and comes back together again, it is Goonhilly that is now positioned to monitor and carefully watch over our access to intelligence and information as we pursue our rightful place in existence and amongst the higher realms.
Space signaling, and earth-based radar as a form of communication and wayfinding from one dimension to the next, is a technologically complex subject that I don’t ever think I will fully understand. Nor should I have to. As long as I am alive, I will keep my eyes (and my heart) open to discovering new ways around the barriers or tolled bridges or locked gates that slow me down and impede my journey. As long as I am alive, I will look for ways to lighten my pack and quicken my journey as I pass by the weigh points.
By Washington Sean – December 2023
Great share! I could almost smell the fresh mountain air as my eyes scrolled the words. Loved the photos. Thank You!