This is the second year we have been privileged to cover the festival. I simultaneously am skeptical of and welcome to approaches to reality and healing arts outside the dominant paradigm for such matters in our society. This contradictory attitude reflects splits of other types inherent in human thought and existence.  I had the opportunity, in 1976, to talk with Ken Kesey, who wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Sometimes a Great Notion,” and was the central figure og the Merry Pranksters, themselves central to Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test.” I asked him about what we perceive as Western approaches to life and Eastern approaches. He said to embrace the two world views is like trying to ride two horses, one going East, the other West; sometimes we must ride on, sometimes the other, and yet at other times we must learn to ride both at the same time.
   The same may be said of the beliefs and approaches of the Body, Mind, Spirit festival and its exhibitors.
   If you attend the festival, you will encounter different mind-sets about healing the body, nutrition, spirituality, philosophy, religion, and other disciplines and areas of thought too numerous to recite here.
   We were at the Festival last year. The experience was a gas. Please consider attending. If you cannot, then listen to “Civil Discourse Now on Saturday from 11 am to 1 pm.