Transcript of the conversation, July 22, 2024

Nancy: Mike Wilson, it's been a long time since I've seen you! You just described yourself as a crusty mountain man from Evergreen, CO, now outside of your beautiful log cabin. I'm sitting here in Montana where we're pushing 100° and smoky as hell—I hear it’s smoky there as well. You’ve had a very full, rich life of career, family, all kinds of outdoor adventures—a lot of those with Dave McKenzie or Tex, as we know him. Now you're in a chapter of your life which has been extremely challenging, and I know you'll share that. But first I want you to talk about what you and I chatted and emailed about, which was a sort of soundtrack of your life with a few songs that you noted. I wanted you to start off with that.

Mike: It turns out our lives have been surrounded by poets and prophets singing rock'n'roll and I had maybe a special talent for remembering verses and had some records and tapes. Then I thought all that was lost. Along comes YouTube and we can find anything out there, so those strong songs are still with me. The song that came to mind after we talked the first time was the Who singing, “Who are you/Who are you/[who who who who who]/I really want to know/Who are you.” For me, there's who I used to be and then this cancer event and these drugs they're giving me and who am I now. So that's the context here and away we go! 

But there's a song for everything and they're all out there. The other song—it was really my song, the one that fit me—was The Rolling Stones song "Jumpin Jack Flash": “I was born in a crossfire hurricane/and I howled [at my ma] in the driving rain/But it's all right now/in fact it's a gas.” We had that album playing at Perry House in that fraternity room with stars on the ceiling and chairs all around and playing so loud it broke our hearing. We grew up with those songs. 

So that's the question: Who was I? I worked really hard reading psychology: I had a career as a geologist and two degrees and 30 years of work but I realized part way through I didn't understand people at all, so I went to the psychology books. My wife Anna went to a Myers Briggs personality testing exercise where she worked and she told me, “I finally understand you; you're an INTJ and you're 10 out of 10 on all.” She's this wonderful ski instructor and she typed out right in the middle and she communicate with lots [of people] but INTJ means introverted/intuitive/thinker/judger and I was a pretty extreme character. 

Then a couple of years ago these medical symptoms, my PSA number, prostate SA number, went up and then pokings and samples and cores and rib core and MRI scans. They diagnosed that I have prostate cancer that has spread into bone so it's up in my ribs also—metastatic—and put me on a hormone treatment that is horrible. They’re giving me pills and shots that have reduced my testosterone to zero and reduced my PSA to zero. The doctors say, “Hooray, that's great! Keep doing whatever you're doing!” but I say, “Look what you did to me!” because all the hair fell out of my legs and my personality is changed and I was whimpering and crying and having mood swings. The ladies are saying, “Oh-h-h, you know, this is male menopause,” but I'm a different person now and this is a different chapter. 

Nancy: You were sharing [in an earlier phone conversation] that this is what made you think about meaning and what is important. You shared a story of when you were working in Burma. Why don't you share that—I thought that was really intriguing.

Mike: Well, in that phone call you asked great leading questions, so I opened up a bit more. I don't want to talk about the real deep stuff but that was one life-changing experience along with maybe a dozen or so really profound experiences. 

I had joined a consulting firm based in Golden, CO. They had international projects and sent me and my buddy Larry, who was a crusty old Wyoming drilling engineer, over to Burma—which is now called Myanmar—to try to fix up an old oil field. We lived in a bungalow, and they had to cook for us, and there were bed bugs. The Burmese are mostly Buddhists. It gets real hot in the middle of the day, so they take a siesta. Larry and I would take a walk with our bodyguard, a young Burmese man named Lin Thun, who was supposed to keep an eye on us so we wouldn't get kidnapped by the bad guys and held for ransom. He was always looking around, but he was a funny guy, very jovial. 

We're walking out there in a dusty dirt road with pump jacks around and I asked him, like Socrates—this is a Socratic walk—"Lin, in your religion, what does this word ‘merit’ mean? Is it like collecting Boy Scout merit badges?” and he laughed. He'd gone to school in London and his language was really good. He said, “No no no no!” Then he said, “In my religion I am just a speck in the universe, and I have no political power or power to change things or fix things, so I'm powerless. But my behavior is very important. My behavior is being recorded somehow in a Book of Records,” and he's referring to what we New Agers call an Akashic Book of Records. He said, “My behavior will influence my next placement,” by which he means, translating Burmese into English, his next incarnation, the deep faith that he’s going to be reincarnated. Maybe it's a snake or a frog or a prince or a banker or a soldier or who knows what, but he thinks his behavior matters, and he said, “So I can't fix anything but I just go through everyday trying to be polite and nice and do little good deeds and help out and hold the umbrella over a little old lady with groceries during the monsoon rains and open the door and be nice to you and Larry.” 

I took a deep, deep breath—wow. Nobody had explained it like that. This is an old religion, older than Christianity, based on the insights of a mystic who used to go into trances and sit under trees, who said that behavior was important. I walked and thought about that because I'd gone to that Boston prep school with the tie and the blue blazer and the awards and I got the Williams College book award, was president of the Glee Club, Outing Club president, and Winter Carnival Chairman. We were really a bunch of achievers. Besides us geology majors, who were fairly humble, were the competitive pre-meds, all scrambling to get into the best med school. I’ve lived a life at corporations where they have performance reviews and raises and criticisms—but here’s a whole different way of living, to think that your day-to-day behavior matters. 

I married a wonderful woman who's been a great mother and very kind to our children and one of my children is a great grateful person and then my daughter is like me, only she has a math brain and she's wicked smart and she can be kind of difficult [momentary distraction]. But this was a different way. 

So, I went to the library and studied Buddhism and got all bogged down with their terms and their artwork, which was bizarre, but that was interesting. Then I found a book by a Vermont professor—what the hell is her name anyhow—but I discovered a very sophisticated cult called the Jungian Buddhists. It’s a mix of Jungian psychology and Buddhism and they merge beautifully. I guess that's what I am. Now I'm retired and I've broken my hip and sprained my ankle and come down with this exhausting medical regime. I am calling myself ‘half-day Mike.’ I run out of energy because this medication is exhausting, just exhausting. There's a war going on [inside] but this is a different way. I have been pulling up memories from long ago. It feels like what the near-death experience books call a life review. It's happening slowly, but early this morning I woke up from sleep in a dream where I was seeing a skinny little boy in a baggy bathing suit on the edge of a swimming pool and I was supposed to dive into the water, which was very cold, and swim and prove up and pass my swimming test so I could graduate from summer camp. But life has been that way all along: it's been a series of problems to solve and challenges and awards sometimes or criticisms but is this lesson that we've all had to learn: that if a problem comes up and you solve it well, it goes away for a while. If you don't solve it well, if you patch it up with BAND-AIDs and bailing wire, it comes right back. Problem solving, left and right. 

In the oil business where I worked, we'd had two oil shocks and oil prices... I did pretty well for a while but then I got in with a bunch of pirates. There is corruption and pirate behavior and people that are after the quick fix, the “let's get rich quick” fix. I wish they could walk on a dirt road with Lin. And here we are in a political contest between, on one side, our law-abiding DA, and on the other side—you can call him whatever you want, but he’s broken a lot. So, I’ve thought about behavior, and how do you want to end up. I spent a day or two at the libraries, investigating the question of conscience—what is conscience?—and getting all kinds of weird answers and nothing clear. But I trust that my comrade Lin out there had a really active conscience in the sense of what's right and wrong. I read about sociopaths who don't and people in prison who don't.

Nancy: I need to wrap this up now but I want to go back to your song list . The other song you mentioned was Tom Rush singing Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.”

Mike: We had a singer from New Hampshire with a deep rich voice—Tom Rush—who sang the “Circle Game,” a beautiful song. It went: “And the seasons they go round and round/[And the] painted ponies go up and down/We’re [captive] on the carousel of life/ We can’t [return] we can only look/Behind from where we came/And go round and round and round/In the circle game.” I'm finding a lot of things that are looping back.

Nancy: They are. Well, we need to wrap up, but I can't thank you enough, Mike. This has been excellent talking with you. I love hearing your perspective and I know other classmates will as well so many, many thanks and all the best on your difficult journey.

Mike: Thanks!