Hugh Prather

October 9, 2016

Dear Hugh,

I'm writing this letter too late for you to read it, but nonetheless I start in a spirit of true dialogue. This is the first of a thousand conversations (each with a different person) which I plan to have in the next decade. While you were still alive, I read your published journal Notes to Myself. That book evokes how I remember you, and the time in your life which I feel a strong connection to — when you were a young man in the late 1960s. I felt a kinship with many of the feelings you later described when reflecting back on that time:

"I was plagued with questions of career, sexual expression, feelings of inadequacy, and especially a longing to know oneness with Gayle and all others. My childhood had not prepared me to function well in the world, and I was struggling with loyalty to our marriage, a need for friends, and a deep confusion as to which among the many voices within me was the truest guide."  (May 1989 Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition)

These are question which have plagued me, too. Back in my twenties (not so long ago) holding your book in my hands, with all the esteem conferred to a published author, I was struck by this: that someone successful — a man who had channeled his expressive powers, his fears and angst, and who made something singular and good for the world — was also a man familiar with insecurity and self-doubt.

While reading, I was charmed by little things in your book: the drawings of leaves throughout the text, and the absence of page numbers.

This week, I found a video you made for the website Attitudinal Healing International, which was posted about two months before you passed away:

In it, you talk about a serenity we can develop that allows us to be peacefully angry or peacefully  depressed. At the end, you state the aim of this inner peace as "above all, connection with other people."

Following those last words, I see a warmth and genuineness in your slight lift of the eyebrows and quick smile. I wish that we could have had one conversation face to face.

Preparing to write this letter, I could not find my copy of Notes to Myself. I looked at the digitized (and limited view) copy at Google Books and randomly chose Section 7 from the e-book's table of contents. After just a couple of pages, I realized that "random chance" had led me right back to the message of your video:

"… To deny my darker emotions can have serious consequences. When I disown a feeling I do not destroy it, I only forfeit my capacity to act it out as I wish. Even to think guiltily or irritatedly about a feeling merely strengths its hold on my mind. Yet regardless of the state I am in, I am always free to draw upon my reserves of stillness and peace, and whenever I do, the inner shift is subtle but profound: I become peacefully depressed, peacefully fearful, peacefully angry. And whereas the effect of my mood before was to pull others down with me, now I leave the world uncontaminated.

If love is at the core of us, we can add love to any misery we feel."

(I added the emphasis above. I should comment that I don't care for your word "uncontaminated", as it seems to perpetuate the judgment against these "darker" feelings, which are part of being human — individually and in our shared interactions.)

I have struggled with bouts of depression for many years. Anger, sadness, and self-hate also visit my internal landscape at times. I'm now trying to take a different view — these may not be states of mind to be vanquished, or mastered, or even "held at bay" — but I can walk through them with equanimity, finding some inner core of peacefulness which contains (envelops, or accepts) my feelings, while still changing their tone. Being "peacefully angry", I am not likely to do new harm to myself or others. So I can cease the continual layering of verbal cuts and darkening, weakening thoughts on top of a history I cannot change.

After taking in this message, I went to the book's introduction. I appreciate the background context you provided:

"I started putting Notes to Myself together in 1968. Gayle and I had been married just about four years… Notes to Myself was essentially a stack of yellow sheets (which I called my diary) where I went to sort things out, where I put down my pains and problems, and my very deep longing to break through to some truth. In many of the passages I was guessing, but because I was trying hard to be honest with myself, I sometimes guessed right…

In my spare time, I finished the manuscript and began the seemingly hopeless process of submitting it to publishers. Everything I had written in the two years I had been a writer — poems, short stories, humorous articles — had been rejected, and so when I received a letter back from Real People Press within a couple of days of mailing the manuscript, I knew it was a rejection slip. Obviously, they had not had time to read it. I found out later that after finishing the book late the night before, the publisher had gone straight to a mailbox with a letter of acceptance. John Stevens (now Steve Andreas) turned out to be the most honest publisher with whom I have ever had dealings…"

This led me to the next letter I'll be writing. Next week, I'll start a conversation with Steve Andreas through the books he has written (which I already have a vague familiarity with.)

Hugh, your deep longing for truth is another experience which I share with you (as do many others!)  I am taking to heart the advice from your video, recorded at the age of 72, and the book you published 46 years ago.

• Make a little improvement to how I feel and act right now.
• When I am depressed, try to be peacefully depressed.

I also hold in my mind these words of yours written in 1989:

"In many ways life is the process of cleaning the windows until finally we see with understanding what before was sensed only with childlike instinct. Maturity is wanting nothing but what we see with the purity of our heart.

I hope that this little book also echoes the truth of your own path. And please know, I walk with you."

— May 1989, Santa Cruz, California

It comforts me to read those words and believe that you walked a path like my own, right here and now.

 * * * 

A year after his passing, Hugh's wife Gayle wrote in a piece "There Is No Death":

I feel Hugh’s peaceful, happy, loving presence every hour of every day. I talk to him; he talks to me. Of course there are times when I cry because I miss his physical presence, but our oneness with each other is still there; it did not die; it cannot die. It is eternal…

And so what message does Hugh have for you? Simply this: Do not be afraid to love; forgive quickly and easily; trust your Self, the Holy Son of God. Never forget who you are. Don’t take the world so seriously; let it fade from your sight so that you behold Love’s splendor. And like Bill Thetford says, "Never forget to laugh."

Hugh Edmondson Prather III was born January 23, 1938, and died November 15, 2010.