Goines On: “Oh God!”

Click image for more vignettes

For almost a week after Goines’ reflections on Maslow’s plateaus and peaks, he felt as though he needed to, or should, abstain from climbing peaks. He wasn’t sure why he felt that way, but he supposed he would come to understand it at some point. In any case, a few days later, he felt released from the injunction and decided to test the feeling by sneaking a piece of chocolate before the evening hour during which he and Mrs. Goines routinely had a couple of rectangles from a giant bar of Hershey’s milk chocolate. He was relieved to discover that he seemed to be up again to scaling the peak that chocolate had come to represent for him.

Goines On: Lowlands

Click image for more vignettes

Goines was struck by another point psychologist Maslow made, that a person can learn to enjoy sacral experiences almost at will. Goines’ own experience seemed to confirm or validate that. A person could obviously choose to listen to “Clare de Lune” whenever he wanted to. A person capable of compassion could open the faucet of his compassion rather than keep it closed. (Goines realized he was “thinking faucets” because he put away the garden hoses that morning and turned off the water to the outside faucets in preparation for the freezing nights ahead. And, now that he thought about it, that simple, seasonal chore had had its sacral aspect. How many seasons had Planet Earth experienced in its eons of rotating and revolving about the Sun?)