Joan Watts has passed.

[NNadir]

3. I would imagine that if your dad was Alan Watts, you will have had a good chance of growing up being interesting...

...thoughtful and intellectual.

Thank you for reminding me of him; he played an important role my life.

I became acquainted with Alan Watts in a very difficult time, in the first and second year after my mother's death, about which I wrote here: I literally got to "carry the cross" this Good Friday.

He was dead by that time as well.

By the time I got back from California to take care of my mother, her mental decline was well underway, and all of the profound things we might have discussed about our difficulties became impossible to address. She'd become simple minded, a kind of child, albeit one with horrible physical symptoms.

My aunt - who was basically put in charge by my mother when she was well enough to make decisions - took me aside one morning to let me know that my mother had communicated a "last wish" for me to fulfill. My mother was apparently deeply upset that I seemed to be an atheist. My mother's last wish was that I believe in God, specifically I expect, her God, the God of Episcopalians of that time.

Of course, that was unreasonable, and impossible to fulfill; one cannot make oneself believe something one does not believe.

To put it briefly, I was psychologically all tore up by the whole affair, a real mess on a downward spiral, and to clear my head I went back to California because I could not do that last thing my mother asked.

In California, I came to know some people who were studying, albeit in an almost clinical way, spiritual issues around Buddhism and its relationship to Western thought; on reflection, they were mystics themselves. They introduced me to the writings of Alan Watts.

Anyway, Alan Watts was an ordained Episcopal Priest, and under the circumstances of my grief, this seemed like an entry point. I loved the breezy air of authority of his writings, the almost amused way he described things, a nonchalance that was somehow profound. Whether that was really Buddhism or not didn't matter. It gave me the in to explore the issues of God and not God.

If nothing else, it calmed me down, made me understand that the best answer was no answer.

Even to this day, I have a kind of fascination with Episcopalians who ask these probing questions about the origins of faith; I was a big time admirer of Elaine Pagels' writings as well.

It all helped me to put that all to bed; to have no religion other than a very naive sense of wonder that everything that is has existed at all. Watts helped me get there.

Thanks again for your post.