EAST DUMMERSTON-Peter Westgate Thurrell has penned Badji's Tales: Living with Faith in the Invisible (Green Writers Press), a series of 72 short vignettes. In turn poignant, teeth-clenching, daring, loving, elucidating, and inspiring, the memoir is like a travelogue of a long journey to self-awareness and spiritual awakening.
Of the title, Thurrell explains, "Badji" is what his 2-year-old grandson had dubbed him, with "ji" a commonly used suffix in India which indicates respect.
Thurrell, now of East Dummerston, moved to Vermont in 1982 after marrying his first wife in California.
"I had this great idea that we would get to know each other better if we went somewhere where none of us knew anybody," he tells The Commons. "So I got a pickup truck and a camper cab, and we spent six months traveling around Mexico together" with his wife's three children on board. "It was an amazing adventure."
The new family then wended across the U.S. Driving up the East Coast in the summer, they felt the need to settle and find schools.
A friend had highly recommended Putney as a place to live, "so we came up to Putney," he says, first landing outside the Putney School and "had a first moment of really loving it here."
The family never ended up living in Putney - instead, Thurrell bought a fixer-upper in Brattleboro.
"It was trash, but I knew how to do all the work to fix it up," he said, and so he did, when he wasn't working days as an independent carpenter. "I'd designed and built several award-winning solar houses in California in the '70s," he explains, so the task wasn't daunting.
Thurrell's stories span a range from sublime experiences to nuts-and-bolts situations; they document a peripatetic ride with zany adventures - both geographic and psychic. Throughout, one finds threads of seeking self-esteem, navigating tough relationships, taking on the mantle of parenthood, and more.
Elaborating on the impetus to write the book, Thurrell recalls childhood summers spent at a family camp on Lake Winnipesaukee.
On a closet shelf in a cabin where his grandmother lived was a box with a "thick stack of stories my grandfather had written when he was in Alaska, in the Alaskan War [the Aleutian Islands campaign of World War II in 1942–1943]," he says. Over time, that box disappeared.
Thurrell says he has "had a bunch of pretty amazing things happen in the course of this life," so he didn't want his own stories to see the same fate as his grandfather's. He wanted to share them with next generations.
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Some of Thurrell's tales draw on his direct experience from suffering abuse as a child with an alcoholic, polio-stricken mother and an overbearing, often-cruel father (a petroleum engineer who moved his family back and forth between Washington, D.C., and Colorado, sometimes elsewhere).
Some tales come from his three "horrible" years at Exeter Academy, others from 12 years spent at Auroville, an experimental township in India. Some find him hitchhiking across the country to California and up to Washington, others at a Buddhist center in England or at a Sufi center.
Some are backgrounded by his majoring in biology at Oberlin College; by earning a master's in environmental studies at Antioch/New England; by his founding of Soveren, a community solar energy enterprise.
And they're all interwoven with you-can't-make-this-stuff-up type accounts of rock-climbing, car fixing, whitewater rafting, playing music, conjuring forces, traveling to the unknown. From trauma-inducing leaps into a quarry from 75 feet to delivering his daughter, Maria, it's a string of close calls and serendipity, replete with miracles and wonders, mistakes, revelation, regret, and perpetual learning.
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"I realized that two arcs to my life are reflected in the book," Thurrell says.
One is that his work with psychedelic spirituality - journeys, both coached and freewheeling, that woke him up - lifted his awareness.
"As I followed a psychedelic awakening over years, it became clear that there was trauma," he says. "I didn't know what to do. I just knew that I couldn't live in harmony with what I'd seen."
Thus, the second arc of the book is the healing of trauma.
"I found that I was - and maybe everybody else is - suffering from a nervous system that'd been constrained by a need to handle overwhelming intensity," Thurrell says. "In my case, that started with a traumatic birth and inability to bond with my mother, then continued through my formative teenage years."
Thurrell's spiritual practice has taken him into Sufism and Buddhism, through psychedelic therapy, into rituals with ayahuasca, a South American psychedelic plant-based brew that is part of Indigenous cultures' traditional medicine and spiritual practices.
"Definitely the psychedelics combined with therapy helped a lot," Thurrell says. "A couple of stories in the book are of specific psychedelic experiences I had where I went back and relived my birth and I relived a traumatic event with my father."
Early on, Thurrell notes, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was "all talking about veterans in wars having had specific, horrible, overwhelming encounters."
"But I realized that I could see the symptoms of PTSD in my own life," he says. "And then I began to see them in the lives of the people around me."
In 1988 the term "complex PTSD" was coined to name "the PTSD that didn't happen from a single event or a series of short events, but from a kind of continuously inappropriate environment in early childhood," Thurrell says. "I was tracking that [...], trying to get informed about how our nervous system works in the face of overwhelming intensity.
"In the beginning, it wasn't really a search for healing. It was a search for awakening," he says.
And that is what he experienced when using LSD for the first time his senior year in college.
"There was the sense of having tasted awakening in the psychedelic experience [...], the real possibility of awakening from the sleepwalking we're all doing," Thurrell recalls.
Summing up the ride, he adds, "The tagline for my life was, 'Make a sail of your soul and unfurl it in the winds of the divine.'"
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Thurrell, now in his mid-70s, still meditates, works with psychedelic medicine, and guides sessions. "But my practice has really become a practice of simply showing up in the present moment - being here and being delighted with the joy and the wonder of life," he says.
So many of Thurrell's happy endings seem nothing short of miraculous.
"I've had miracles happen over and over again," he says, noting the quote attributed to Albert Einstein that he includes as a chapter epigraph: "You can live as if nothing's a miracle or everything is." He believes the latter.
"I lived the life that I chose to live from my own soul's perspective," he says. "I didn't live somebody else's life. I never bought into the notion that the purpose of life is to get a job to have money to buy things."
He believes that "if the book could inspire anybody else to live their own life, to find out what their spark is inside and to go with it, I would say miracles can happen. I'm nothing special."
"Everybody has stories," he adds. "If the book inspires some people to write down their stories and make them available for other people, that would be great.
"Especially with all the AI coming - there aren't going to be a whole lot of true stories left out there," he says.
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Peter Thurrell will read from Badji's Tales on Tuesday, Oct. 28, at 7 p.m. at the Brooks Memorial Library, 224 Main St., Brattleboro. The book is available from bookstores or directly from the publisher, Green Writers Press.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This Arts column by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.