Back in the mid-to-late 1970s, when many people in the counterculture took themselves down spiritual paths, I was giving a good deal of agitated thought to issues of human susceptibility and how gurus establish their authority. Our whole generation was being influenced by psychedelic drugs; by the Beatles’ involvement with Transcendental Meditation; by the books of Carlos Castanedas, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Starhawk and others; by the splintering and suppression of progressive political movements following the end of the Vietnam War; and by the arrival on these shores of numerous Hindu and Vedic gurus. I had been raised as a scientific skeptic, however, and resisted the trend — but not without feeling my worldview deeply challenged by it.

One sabbath afternoon, some two thousand years ago, Rabbi Elisha ben Avuyah was studying Torah when he looked up and saw a man climbing a palm tree. The fellow had apparently spotted some birds’ nests and was breaking the sabbath law to raid them. He seized both a fledgling and its mother — another violation of halakha (Jewish law), which commands hunters to let mother birds go free — and then clambered down safely and hurried off with his prizes.

Hours later, after the sabbath had ended, Elisha again looked up to see another man approaching the same stand of trees. This man, too, climbed and took a young bird from its nest, but shooed the mother away. As he descended, he was bitten by a deadly snake, and by the time he reached the ground, the venom had done its work . . .

I was listening to a TED talk the other day by a woman attorney and activist who was complaining about how marriage is privileged by the legal, taxation, and cultural systems. However we choose to create “family,” she argued — mentioning same-sex partnerships, polyamorous relationships, platonic partnerships, and much more — we should all be entitled to the same supports, the same rights, the same opportunities. (I didn’t catch her name, and there are so many TED talks on the subject of “privilege” that I didn’t have the time to find out which was hers.)

Anyway, I agreed with her, fundamentally — until she began to explain, kind of vaguely, how capitalism was responsible for privileging heterosexual marriage. It’s true, of course, that capitalism did make normative the nuclear family, which was the most economical structure for keeping workers working. But as I listened, two thoughts that I found heretical and revelatory came into my head . . .

Some Thoughts about This Website

I waited many years, but I’ve now collaborated on the creation of a personal website, called “Babushkin’s Playhouse” (Babushkin being the family name from which my father’s older brothers carved out our name “Bush”). The site is a kind of museum of my creative work — books and other writings, artworks, and music — which I hope to grow into a theater of interactivity as well as a marketplace at which to sell my stuff.

There’s a degree of embarrassment involved in launching and promoting this site, because I know that my reputation as a writer and artist hovers precariously above the borderline separating people whose creative work is in demand (they have enthusiastic fans) from those who demand attention for their efforts (they have obliging friends). Embarrassed or not, however, this is how I spend many of my days: writing, creating visual art, composing and playing music, and seeking to share it all in hope that people will be moved and think well of me.