about gordon
a creative pro
Gordon is retired from a career as a professional writer, video cameraman/editor, educational television producer/director and elearning specialist project manager. He has lived across Canada, in China and in Australia.
In his career, gordon led the development of numerous educational resources, including a national tv series on managing Canada's water; CD-ROM and web-based training tools for classrooms and worksites; as well as adult learning websites, including the first web-based exam preparation tool for overseas-trained nurses seeking Canadian accredition.
Many of these projects included supporting print materials, from textbooks to utilization guides. Gordon was the writer and/or content editor on more than 20 of these publications.
Gordon's work in educational television was honoured with 7 awards and another 9 nominations for excellence. He was personally honoured with the Edgar Dale Award for best educational writing at the Columbus International Film and Television Festival.
Gordon was fortunate to be the first cameraman in the first-ever foreign television news bureau allowed in the People's Republic of China.
Gordon's writing career started in poetry, where he achieved a poetic century of more than 100 poems published in magazines and anthologies in Canada and Australia. Other publications include short stories and magazine articles. And he is the 'author' of the (itself channeled) comic spiritual-adventure novel tHe PoEt & i*.
Gordon was the 5th of 7 boys in his birth family. He is father to two daughters, and grandfather to two girls.
acknowledgements
gordon wants to acknowledge. . .
No person is an island. No life is ever lived in isolation. No accomplishment is ever made without the support of many people. But, like any award winner in their acceptance speech, there is not the time to acknowledge the many people who have contributed directly or indirectly to the story told in this archive. So just a few:
the meditation
Gordon wants to billboard the critical role of 'the meditation' in this entire experience.
Several very long stories only partially told here, it was the self-awareness teachings of Practical Meditation and his supervisors Les and Marcia that blew away the "tired chore" of gordon's ego, and opened his sight to the nature and functioning of the universal energies behind it.
Which in turn opened his psyche to the song energies and this entire experience. While it could be said the songs would not exist without the preparation of the meditation, it could also be said that it was the song energies that pushed gordon's life to Australia via China, and then into the meditation.
How do you like your eggs? First or second?
Gordon especially wants to acknowledge the burden that Les has carried all these years. Channeling is not easy. You pay a physical and emotional price for the experience. For gordon, a major price was a burnout breakdown at the end of the first phase that left a years-long residual panic disorder. For Les — the primary channel for the far-larger burden of the meditation itself — the price was an even more devastating breakdown. It took him many years to recover.
The meditation still exists and is still taught, but now under the name The Sacred Path. It's based on universal energies so the path can be done with a supervisor in person or (even before the Internet age) at any distance. While Gordon endorses the path, he cautions that it is not for the faint of heart, nor the feint of heart. If you start and manage to stick with it, 'you' will be changed.
Whether you like it or not. Whether you like the changes or not.
karma partners & significant others
Gordon sees karma as an active agent in his life, and accepts what the 38th karosong calls the karma dance, the notion that many of the people we meet are 'karma partners' we have already encountered in multiple other lives.
and we don't know how many lifetimes
we'll be lovers, friends or family
how many lives strangers in the night
or even less as we dance with other partners
— from Never-ending sunset 3.2 with Into the Dark by Jesse Cook
Gordon considers the popular notion of 'eternally-bonded-only-to-each-other' soul mates to be fragrant hookum, but he recognizes many 'fated' karma partners in his life, including his two (now ex) wives Leanne and Ellen. While both marriages ended, he does not consider them failures. Can't. He learned and grew from both. Learned and grew from their endings.
and we don't know what the lessons will be
until as we proceed
but we can be sure they will be
as needed and as agreed
Learned and grew as well from the songs that came for each: Proposal and Bluebirds 1.0 / 2.0 for Leanne; It was a gift 1.1 / 2.3 and The rain must fall 3.2 for Ellen.
One of the foundational principles of self-awareness is that there are lessons for all parties in any given relationship or situation. But the lessons are not necessarily the same, or even reciprocal. Each party gets the lessons they need.
Gordon thanks both ex-i (the proper latin plural of ex) for the lessons he learned with each.
Gordon wants to acknowledge and thank a third 'sigificant other' karma partner — Margaret, who gordon lived with before moving overseas, marrying Leanne in China and starting the meditation in Australia. Gordon created much karma with Margaret at the time, and then again some years later.
They had no contact for more than twenty years until reconnecting through text-based social media in the later 3.1 period. Since then, Margaret has had the forebearance to listen to the songs, and the patience to let gordon blather on about his experience of the music. Some of the content in this version of the website was first articulated in that text conversation.
As well, Margaret opened her Vancouver-area home to gordon for his 'rootless' winter of 2022/23 following the sale of his Sunday Lake property. The recording sessions there were important milestones in the last stages of the whole/full/on karo coming forward.
Gordon wants to acknowledge and thank his friends Zeger and Penny. They were kind enough to let Gordon stay with them during the pandemic lockdown winters of 2020/21 and 2021/22. Much of the work of writing and building this website was done in those periods.
early collaborators
Gordon wants to acknowledge and thank his first two actual, not virtual, 'collaborators'.
Sandy Middleton turned gordon's badly played & sang 'demo' of Away is no longer there into a real demo, and then a beautiful song with Wilf Kozub on keyboards and Dawn Fraser as the main singer. That was in the later first phase.
At the very end of the 1.0 phase, gordon's good friend Jeremy Sagar arranged gordon's by-then-somewhat-better demos of Bluebirds and Better run boy, and then recorded them in his own home studio, coaching gordon's singing, while adding his own musical and comedic touches. Jeremy contributed so much to Better run boy gordon considers it a co-creation with him.
Gordon thanks both because 'they heard the song and not the singer' and both accepted gordon as a musical partner despite his myriad limitations.
Good thing too. While the rest of the 1.0 songs slowly faded from gordon's memory, the physical existence of those songs on cassette was gordon's anchor during the long years between the first and second phases. They were facts-on-the-ground assuring gordon that whatever the first phase experience had been about, it had been real.
Gordon's virtual or asynchronous collaborators are acknowledged elsewhere, in dear collaborators and in the async tour.
The various recordings on this website are not for download or release. They are just low resolution demos of the songs gordon has channeled into this existence. They long for a real singer to release them from their idiot musant prison. Interested parties can contact gordon @ this website.
