I write this account as an ongoing magical narrative, a perhaps, useful example of everyday magic.

My intent is to build a Nath temple. At this point I am talking about it to everybody all the time, even quite inappropriately. I am extracting myself from usual household activities. I have people in place to cover for me in the mundane world. I am building the magical improbability quotient by going on improbable quests, by acting and thinking improbably. I am consistently re-arranging cause and effect in my mind. I encourage synchronicity and all kinds of magical thinking. I am gathering my magical tools by magical means.
I find it very hard to operate in such isolation. At least in India or Thailand everyone expects magic. Here I need to manufacture the strangeness all by myself and try to maintain it. But I can’t complain. The plan is going fantastically well.
I feel I need to get my kit together and energise it by concentration and creativity …. embroidering and fringing and lining with patterned silk. I am sewing a leather drum bag for my old powwow drum. The leather, the pattern, the designs I use are personal and meaningful to me. I sew and decorate my clothes with an eye to nomad life, just one set of clothes for all circumstances. Soon every object I carry will be deeply embedded with meaning and personal significance. I will have my energized and powerful objects sewn into little bags matched up with three other oddities each in a velvet or leather bag, cleverly worked somehow. Sweetgrass I grow in my garden and the frankincense that I had brought from Saudi, honey from the valley where I camped in the cottonwood grove, sage from the roadside near Grand Forks all these sweet offerings are also in the bag. My malas and tridents, my crystals and meteor fragments, my wand, my banners, my power objects and amulets and talismans, my teddy bear:), Dadaji’s poetry, all travel with me now.
The archetypal dhuni, the essence of dhuni that carries from fire to fire, never losing energy or stability…this eludes me still. It is hard to find a new dhuni spot day after day and use it well. For me nomadism is essential to strangeness but many of the skills a nomadic magician needs elude me still.

It was the end of May 2006. Nando said, “If you want to manifest the Nath Temple you have to start materializing your idea. Do some drawings, decide how many rooms, where things should go.”
Inspired by these words I began to visualize what I wanted to build. I enlisted the help of Omranath, an experienced builder and former slum lord. I have the building rather well visualized by now. It will be a three storey structure with balconies and roof for each storey, in the old Nepali/Himalayan style but without the refined wood carving and exquisite detail. This will be close to what Matsyendranath saw in the Kathmandu Valley, 1400 years ago. Nonetheless it will have thick, thick walls and a cave feeling will be what I most want to achieve on the ground floor. The central shrine will be a large patch of sand surrounded by rocks to make a firepit dhuni. There may be wood benches, for sitting and sleeping, built into the floor about three tiers high surrounding the dhuni. In the walls of this more or less circular room there will be large niches and each will be dedicated to one of the Nine Naths. The central niche would probably be Dattatreya or perhaps Matsyendranath. At least three of the niches will extend into the hill into which the ground floor of the temple has been embedded. The entry at the ground floor will have a rather forbidding Tibetan vibe. Big doors all embellished with ironwork. Painted wooden columns, some guardian statues. It will be the first temple of Nath magic.
Obviously this temple must be manifested magically, no canvassing for dollar bills and no cake sales and temple fundraisers.

On a website that deals with magical objects and magical knowledge I read about bezoar stones and that some are to be gotten from the nagas in the etheric realms. These stones, which presumably magically materialise for the successful seeker are called dragon bezoars. The very well informed Greek gentleman described the geological signs of naga homes….caves near rivers, copper and gold, magnetic fields.
I wrote that Texada Island, just off the west coast, filled the bill to perfection as it had the rivers, copper, gold, and it was full of magnetite which becomes lodestone when hit with lightning. He responded that it sounded good to him.
I went to Texada in the middle of June. I packed my tent and more paraphenalia than I usually travel with. I took the full size trident, 2 drums, staff, chimtah, conch, kamundal plus a wonderful array of incense and other offerings. It was a very hard long drive but eventually after lots of running around in the wrong direction, I pitched my tent in splendid solitude on a small rise above an empty and wild west coast beach. I spread out my elk skin inside the tent and promptly fell asleep. I gathered wood and cooked a meal in the early evening. At sunset, around 9:30 that night a curious parade made its way toward my tent. Three elderly ladies, each with the same tight perm and the same kind of cane and sensible shoes were lead by the very small-headed but amiable young man, a son, I had met when arriving at the site. He had waved me on when I had asked where the beach was. The women also had two dogs, a little lap dog with bows and a larger dog that ran with the man. The little dog was pooping very close to my tent. The lady and I made eye contact. I felt like saying nothing. She had a slyly challenging expression. (I shovelled it up after they went down to the beach… no big deal the poop of a little toy dog)
” We have come to view the bateaux..how do you say? The cruise boats?”
They said it was a colourful sight. They were 3 elderly french sisters. They said they came here to camp every year.
After an hour sitting on the beach in elegant poses they climbed with great agility, despite the canes, back up the rough hill from the beach. My proffered hand was rejected with disdain.
The most elderly of the three sisters looked at me and said with a tremble in her voice,
“You do not have the …. panique?”
Her sisters gave her sharp disapproving looks and we all said together,
“Oh there is nothing dangerous on this island. Its perfectly safe here.”
Later that night I blew the conch and announced my presence to the invisible world and and offered incense and stuff but made no dhuni. The internal dialogue was deep and informative. I slept again, through the night, too tired to make an inspired show that first night. The next morning I was awoken by the most outrageous noise. Eventually I realized that there were upwards of 10 ravens having a caucus of the birds in the tree next to my tent. I could not stay awake, I felt compelled to sleep, pushed down into unconciousness.
I walked the beach for a few miles back and forth between the forest, the shore and the ocean.
In my drive the day before, completely lost, around the edges of the island I had come across the enormous hydro electric generating stations that stretched huge pylons and lines across the waist of the island. Resource extraction had been vigourously practiced since the 1850’s. According to what I had read on the internet and what I had seen 25 years before on my first visit, Texada was barely inhabited except around the village where the main mine operated a huge open pit operation. Now I found homes, mining, logging going on all around me. The map is not the territory.
I found, despite the intense beauty of my location and the rare solitude of the empty beach that I needed to leave NOW. I packed up quickly. I walked over to get some water and saw that the 3 sisters drove huge matching white SUV’s and they lived in a large superb campsite full of obscuring hangings and low shadow giving tarps. It sounded like they were all singing a pretty little witch song. I waved as I drove away.

The next trip was 10 days later to far south-eastern BC, a twelve hour drive to a small town in the Rockie mountains. The event was the Wolf Clan gathering which is a group of native, metis and white folks that follow native spiritual patterns. The Wolf clan, like Raven and Bear spreads around the entire trans polar region of the world among the reindeer herders, the Mongolians, the Siberians, Canadian and Russian far-northers. I am a foreigner among these people, from a distant and alien tradition, but I am also related to the leader. The wolf clan that gathers every year, that I know, does sweatlodge, medicine wheel and giveaway. Many are pipe carriers and sundancers. This particular group is mostly Blackfoot Sioux traditions, but is not exclusively any one tribal path.
This is spirit stuff. Spirits accomplish helpful work for the people that pray to them and depend on them. Very close and personal.. “Please help me set up this tipi all by myself. Please make the roadways safe for our people here to travel. Please share our food with us”. To those with eyes to see, spirit manifestations appear in the darkened sweatlodge. The heat and dark and intensity drive us to sing and pray for our very lives. Grey Wolf is our guru, now in spirit form. Red Cloud, another one of our spirit patrons, appeared in the dream of a young girl. The tipi stands steady and dry in the stormy wind and rain. Thunderbeings are also patrons of the group and thunder was constant for the first days, circling our clearing in the lodgepole pine forest. Wind played games among the trees and eagles flew by for a good look at the smoke and the feast.
In the sweatlodge Robin tells a story while we loll around during a break, cooling off and steaming hot. She had been at a sweat when an otter had appeared out of the steaming rocks. First he cavorted as otters will do. He slithered around on his back on the blazing hot rocks, the hot rocks we call grandfathers and grandmothers. He walked over to Robin and shook his coat, covering her in cold water. She laughed and he disappeared back into the glowing steaming rocks. Weeks later she heard that a spirit otter had been seen travelling from sweat to sweat.
The day I arrived I told Robin, leader of the clan, about my search for a bezoar stone. She said,” I have one of those. Jeremiah, my son, gave it to me and Donovan, a sundancer and pipe carrier gave it to him. It came to Donovan from a man who prays with rocks.” She walked over to her shrine and picked it off a little heap of small rocks. “Here it is. It came from the head of a whale. It is how the whale steers, he said.”
The rock is small, metallic sheen in parts, heavy, reddish brown, a tetrahedron like a fluorite crystal, 8 triangles and 6 points that meet with some distortion through the central axis. I held it. I kept it with me constantly after that. It appeared to quickly wake up. It wanted to be suspended in a net, preferably of sinew. I made one with help and directions from a friend. I asked Robin to gift it to me and she did. I dream of travel through deep waters. I wonder about the thoughts of whales.
The gathering is four intense and delightful days. I am very glad to see some old friends and to finally meet the elder, Grandmother Eva. She is a Blackfoot elder, in a fancifully decorated straw bonnet and churchgoing dress, who has a spiritual presence that fills the gathering. She says Blackfoot never knock on the door, they just come in. Long ago she asked her dad why the Blackfoot had this tradition and he replied, “‘Cause if you hear knockin’, it’s spooks!” A group of daughters, nieces, and adopted young women, fashionable in heels and short skirts and hair do’s, cluster around her and help her to live and travel comfortably.
At the Medicine Wheel we each speak as the totem stick of the clan is passed from person to person. I explain that I come from an ancient Asian tradition and that I seek willingness and permission to set up shop here in Canada. As India goes through its time of modernisation the ancient ways need to shelter here. I promise to learn the ways of the local people, to share their pilgrimage sites with respect and good manners, to treat their spirits with respect and good offerings. I imagine I hear a wolf howling in the distance. Grandmother Eva is smiling.
A month earlier I had idly used a pendulum and a map to help pinpoint the location of the temple. Up til this point I had pretty much assumed I would build it in Madoc in Ontario, eastern central Canada. My family has land there and the place is rural, geologically significant, beautiful, full of wildlife and fairly dangerous to the health. It has attracted crackpot cults for years and has a full array of the most charming and looney people with deep interest in occult subjects. I was shocked when the pendulum strongly insisted that the temple needed to be built at Dawson Creek. This is a place at least 4 days hard drive straight north and a bit east of Vancouver. It is mile zero of the Alaska Hwy and is the center of the massive new oilsands development on the BC Alberta border. I had visions of Gurdjieff in Baku. I had decided that I would drive up there and take a look around. However, many of the people at the gathering, mostly women, are from Grande Prairie and Peace River. I know these are tough cowgirls, metis ranchers and mothers of strong wild boys. I listen to tales of raging fires, bugs so bad you’d rather shoot yourself than be their food source for long, and the intense heat of the 20 hour summer days that far north. Robin’s husband flat out tells me I’m too old to homestead in the north. Those women are his relatives. I feel that at least now I have no idea at all about location of the temple. This is good cleared ground for the bezoar steering stone.
When Grandmother Eva left, the gathering was over and the spirits all went home happy.
I stayed a few more days camped in the woods and then I travelled west towards the coast and camped for two days by the Kettle river and watched the magpies playing in the cottonwood trees.
All my relations.