Here’s a little more about the history and nature of the Eagle’s Nest.

OUR JOURNEY HERE
We moved here because the mountain called us. We wanted a place where we could help put into action the sustainability lifestyle we’d been pioneering and writing about in RAIN Magazine. But we had no clue how loudly nature would speak to get through to us.

We bought our land in 1976 and began to build in 1977, camping in a tent while we built our house totally by hand, without electricity or power tools (that was a long hard dig down to the road below). Seven months later, it was finished enough that we could move in. We brought the first load of our favorite things, put the last coat of oil on the floor, and went back to Portland to sleep and pick up the rest of our things. At 8 in the morning, the phone rang. Our house had burned down.

You can read details in my “What Is to Give Light Must Endure Burning.”  What really raised goose-bumps, though, was a friend’s wife from the East Coast telling us later she had dreamt months before the fire that our house would burn – on that date – and had written it down in her journal. She had not had precognitive dreams enough to call relative strangers with such a wild story.

This made it really, really clear to us there is a lot more going on in this world than we were taught in school.

A warning, or a test???? Later we heard of others’ “trials by fire” on the mountain. Neahkahnie is a “fire mountain”, created of molten lava, and in the domain of Pele. She doesn’t mess around. We stayed, and started to pay closer attention to “weird” things.

When we rebuilt (Round Two), lightning struck a 6’ diameter spruce near the house at the same point in construction. Recently we learned that this actually opened a kind of link into the energy realms. The mezuzah in the loft was a gift from a friend after the fire – from another house that had burned.

Anyhow, we stayed, and have lived as “in-true” as we could. And slowly, piece by piece, a whole new world and way of being in it has come together for us.

ENERGY PORTALS
The Nest was my office for 20 years, while we had kids growing up. Several books, many dozen articles, some interesting buildings, and other things came to fruition in and through it, as we learned and experienced and moved deeper and deeper into the “energy realms”. What started with teaching Non-Western Architectural History deepened into working with life-force energy in architectural design, as has long been standard practice in other cultures (feng-shui in China, vaastu in India). Many people, it turned out, can see that energy in a building or garden, or at least strongly feel its presence. Eventually it led to doing a DVD on the physics of “qi” energy.

One spring, I happened to look at the coast pine I’d planted by the driveway, and got goose-bumps. All the “leaders”, the new growth on the tree, were pointing horizontally at the building rather than vertically as is normal.

This was really weird. I looked around at other trees. None of the spruce were doing anything unusual, but the coast pine by the steps, and the other coast pine northwest of the building, were all doing the same thing. Pointing in very different directions, but always directly at the building. More goose-bumps.

Wow! Even the trees pointed fingers to let everyone know that a whole lot of energy was coming in and through this place, speaking words into my fingers, ideas into my mind, experiences into my spirit.

Once a door like that is open, it is open, and it is still open today. The Nest is a good place to listen, to dream, to connect, to open to new. Its door is open for you.

Other, wilder, energy doors have opened more recently around the mountain here.

SPIRIT GUIDES

I would have rolled my eyes, years ago, if someone mentioned such things. I don’t hear them often. (I’d be exhausted if I did.) But some “Capital Letter Dreams” have given me instructions on several important things I’ve done. My experience is that they often are part of our energetic selves, are probably responsible for most of the really creative stuff that comes through us, and definitely worth listening to.

Like our house fire, it took an unexpected event to open my eyes. Our psychic massage therapist was puzzled when this guy in a skirt showed up to her in one of our sessions, jumping up and down and giggling. I’d “happened” to have xeroxed and posted his picture on the wall while I was writing some “break-through” stuff on life-force energy in Khmer architecture. Turned out he was one of the builders of Angkor Wat. I’d thought I’d figured something out, but it was really him whispering in my mind.

BENDER’S BROTHEL BEDROOM
Yes, the bedroom is pretty intense. No, I didn’t paint it that color to look like a brothel. It was that color as the back room of my office, though then it was mostly covered up with bookcases, file cabinets, etc.

Both with leaving that color and adding the pictures, I’m following an intuition (or voices, or spirit guides) that the room can manifest something special. It’s snug, warm, and private; and protected from the wild blasts of weather that the loft puts you in the middle of.

But more than that, the bedroom has felt a powerful “inward” space, where passion and power and dreams and connection with spirit guides can break us loose from the walls and habits our minds have built up around us and between us.

So our guides have whispered that surrounding you with pictures of some spirit guides might open up some interesting experiences for you. You can just close your eyes, if you want, and ask them not to bother you!

Let us know, if you want, if anything interesting breaks through in that space! Or if we should redo it in quiet greys.

(By the way, the vibration you may feel during a storm is the whole mountain vibrating like a bell from the rhythmic pounding of waves on it.)

TANTRA?
Tantra is interesting stuff. The opposite of monastic meditative withdrawal from life has just as many possibilities. So passionate immersion in any and all of life’s pieces (not just sex) can give ecstatic spiritual connection. And can be more fun. If we haven’t loaned them out again, there are some of Margo Anand’s Skydance Tantra DVDs up in the loft. Wow, it’s been more than 47 years since I took the “couple-photo” on the wall, while at the Khajuraho Temple in India!

Life is a buffet. You don’t have to eat off of every plate, but the Nest may have some interesting things to nibble on if interested.

CUTTING CORNERS ON CARPET
No, we didn’t cut off the corner of the kitchen carpet so it would fit around the table leg. The carpet was like that when we got it from CartM, our recycle center. It was cheap, we liked it, and it just ended up working best in the kitchen. Another day, driving down near CartM, I decided it was about time for a dining table and chairs to show up for the Nest. Suddenly, a car turned onto the road in front of us with a table and four chairs perched precariously on top, obviously headed for CartM. I almost pulled them over and asked them to just deliver directly to our house, but I didn’t want to spook them. It’s amazing how quickly and directly “intention” manifests what we ask for these days!

IT’S A SPOOL TABLE, NOT A POOL TABLE
If your wife started an award-winning recycling/reuse center, “new” is only half of a hyphenated word (re-new). The table is half of a cable spool from the PUD. The other half is our dining room table, and its predecessor had been part of our Energy Office in Salem and our RAIN Magazine office in Portland.

THE POWER OF SILENCE
We’ve found through years here that silence has power. Getting free from media and urban-life brainwash-bombardment took us some time, with, of course, withdrawal symptoms.

The Coast has relatively frequent power outages. That can get old, after a week, but there is a magic in the silence without refrigerators, fans, and even (I didn’t expect it) the ‘noise” of electric lights. The silence of a candle can be enchanting. The quiet dripping of water on leaves, without the blasts of TV, is captivating. If you want, taste a sample of silence! Turn off the fridge and the lights, and light a candle or two. Crack open a window to hear the outside world. Breathe in the stillness or the power of the storm.

In the “old days”, before they upgraded the local electric system, we had power outages every Friday night. Weekenders would arrive, turn on the electric heat, put dinner in their electric ovens, hop into their electrically-heated showers, and !*#poof*#*! Locals had their woodstove cranked up, a pot of soup already warming on it, and candles ready to light.

NATURE SPEAKS LOUDLY
You don’t have to “do” something in the Nest. Just “be-ing” for a while brings surprises. Look at a cloud drift in over the mountain, and expand magically out of itself. Let your eyes soften and follow two, then five, then ten clouds – and see that they merely make visible huge rivers of air flowing past. Watch sunlight through quivering raindrops on the end of pine needles. Look at the moon.

I felt pretty stupid when I realized that we can always tell what time it is at night by the moon. The bright side of the moon always points towards the sun, so you can see what position the sun is in “beneath” us between sunset and sunrise.

BIG CHANGES ARE HAPPENING, AND BIGGER ONES COMING
One of the things you’ve connected with in the Nest is us, and what has come through to us through being in this place for many years. There are several of our own books and DVDs you can nibble on (next to the log chair, and yes, you can buy one). (And don’t try to absorb the Physics of Qi DVD in one sitting, or let the “Physics” title scare you!) We’ve also put in the Nest some of the book resources we’ve dug through and loved over the years. You can also google Tom Bender or Lane deMoll and link to our websites and tons of stuff on them, including Lane’s novel in progress about our community and its woo-woo development.

www.TomBender.org
www.WhatIfCanBe.com
www.LanedeMoll.com

But for here, I want to suggest that big shifts in the world can happen, do happen, and feel to us to be in process today. This visit to the Nest can maybe link you to some of those big pictures and help you become comfortable and even excited about them.

Big shifts in our understanding of the nature of our world are equally important and can happen “*boom-quick*”. Take a peek at “A Habit at Teatime” on page 13 of Rainbook, or open Catastrophe on the Columbia, on the bottom shelf of books to see how “unexplainable” things like the Channeled Scablands (an area of eastern Washington, not a disease), and house-sized erratic boulders near Salem can suddenly be brought together into an amazing new picture – here of repeated gigantic floods (eight cubic miles of water a minute!) coming down the Columbia River! I had a project up on the Columbia once, 300 feet above the river, where the soil was composed of round rocks. A sand bar from those floods, with two-foot diameter grains of sand! (See “Places Touching Spirit” on my website.) Getting a sense of big-shifts in geologic time and space can tune us in to other shifts occurring.

Neahkahnie Mountain is another example that can boggle our minds. The mountain is now known to be the old riverbed of the Columbia River(!). 12,000,000 years ago it was part of the offshore distributory delta of the river – the fan of sediments deposited on the bottom of the ocean. When the lava floods erupted in Eastern Oregon and poured down the river, they created wild steam explosions hitting the ocean, and burrowed down into these sediments. Layer after layer of lava. Sometimes these flows erupted up towards the surface, creating what we see now as offshore haystack rocks. Then as the land arose, the sediments on both sides eroded away, leaving the now-lava-filled old riverbed as the chain of mountains ending in Neahkahnie Mountain.
So……. here are some of the big changes we are seeing in process, and how they fit together:

• Acknowledgement of qi energy and integral psychic consciousness.
  Physics of Qi DVD, summary articles on it on my website, the beginnings of Building with the Breath of Life, or other books you’ll find in the Nest can give a hint. This “energy realm” appears to be where things “really happen”.
• Acknowledgement of the “electrical universe”.
  [www.thunderbolts.info, or the intro article on my website can give a glimpse. Hubble photos are revealing a whole new vision of the nature of our universe. The basis of the cosmos is coming to be seen as vast braided electromagnetic plasmas . . . and their origin may well be in the qi energy dimension.
• Replacement of materialistic corporate culture with wholistic spirit/community . . . .
  This may sound scary, but (wow!) the collapse is already in process, and what is emerging is way, way more fun and rewarding. Imagine a new paradigm of home ownership where the banks and energy companies don’t both end up with more of our $$$ than the homeowners. Real cost of housing reduced 80% or more!
• Achievement of 90% reduction in our demands for energy and materials, while improving our quality of life.
  This is what brought me to Oregon in ’74 during the First Oil Crisis, to do energy research in Gov. Tom McCall’s office. Seems like I was the only person making such outrageous claims. Google my “Quick and Simple Answers” for an overview of how we can do this in our homes, food, and transportation. It’s totally mind-boggling to me how wasteful we are, and how simple it really is to change.
• Achievement of real security, fulfilling work, viable community, enriching lives, reconnection with the rest of Creation.
  That’s what we’ve learned to experience, living here away from manipulative urban culture, and what the Nest, and the rich world it is part of, can give a little introduction to.

True sustainability is tied with knowing the rest of our world deeply and intimately enough, loving it deeply enough, that we hold it invoilable.  (Take a peek at Silence, Song and Shadows.) A life and community based on giving and sharing is breath-takingly wonderful.

-tb