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Opinion: What I learned from El Paso author Richard Parker [1]
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Date: 2025-03-17
By Riordan H. Regan
Richard Parker crossed over on March 6, 2025, but he was already well-acquainted with the other side. His tributes will call him a journalist, author, and war correspondent – but he was also a mystic.
Riordan H. Regan
Maybe this isn’t how others would describe him, but it’s a side I saw as I deepened my exploration of the subtle realms. We shared experiences of walking between worlds, living in the liminal; connecting to nature and other higher forces. There’s a timeline where instead of going to the front lines, he followed his spiritual calling. I wonder if that one would have been easier for him; if we still would have found each other.
He believed in me when no one else did, not only hiring me for my first professional writing gig but making me editorial director when I had no real experience, desperately trying to hack it as a freelancer. He had thought a political blog post I wrote showed promise, so he took me under his wing, as they do in lineages of mentorship. Indeed, in ancient esoteric traditions, storytellers held sacred roles.
It’s different in the capitalist system. Richard always said: “If you can be anything else, don’t be a writer. It’s a terrible way to try and make a living.” I would reply that I couldn’t be anything else; it turned out not to be true, but I had to do it first to know.
I never wanted to be a journalist, but I became one, working with Richard. He taught me how to use my words more economically and effectively, though I still struggle with it. Somehow, no matter how much I lost my own thread, he always knew what I was trying to say.
Being witnessed like that is really important, and it’s part of the shamanistic role. They’re meant to be a portal for energies to bring healing to those who most need it.
Words saved my life once; these jobs gave me autonomy, self-belief, and responsibility during a dark period of substance overuse, being closeted about my identity, and in an abusive relationship that I disguised so well, the ex and I are immortalized in Richard’s first book as a model Austin couple. But the best lesson he taught me was to let the words go.
I’ll never forget the first time Richard edited something I wrote, an article full of long, flowery prose. Instead of praise, he silently scanned the pages, turned on “track changes” – and eviscerated it. He filled the document so full of strikethroughs the words were barely visible as I cried: “No, not that line!”
“Sorry, kid,” he said. “This isn’t academic writing.” Attention spans were short online; you couldn’t get too attached to anything. “What are the fewest words you could use and still make your point?” he asked.
For a while, I stopped using all my words, retreating from the world outside the abusive relationship. When I finally left, I found community through food and beverage culture, becoming a freelance journalist covering it. Richard and I reconnected, and he quietly helped edit my first pieces.
During the pandemic, we found the space and time to explore broader narratives; I researched food and drink as a portal to spirituality while he worked on “The Crossing,” both stories about cultures coming together to transcend. Lockdown was a liminal space, part of shamanic initiation. Despite the pain, it was a period of creative expansion; he asked for my help editing the book proposal, and later the manuscript.
“The Crossing” literally started at the dawn of humanity, funny considering that he always told me not to tell the history of everything in each story. But it made sense to me, and if he helped me with over explaining, I helped him embrace the bigger picture. We made a good team: I helped him add, he helped me subtract. I helped him see the forest, and he reminded me it was made of trees.
Those with shamanic capabilities are intimate with the natural world, and when he could, Richard would disappear into the ochre canyons, sage-smattered hills, and rocky arroyos of the American Southwest. He called it hunting and fishing, but it was really communing with nature and animal familiars, sublimating into the landscapes he conjured to life with each brushstroke of a sentence, making the word image.
“The Crossing” is, in many ways, a shamanic text, casting spells to awaken our true nature, seeing the world ensouled. The word “shaman” means “one who knows,” referring to those who see below the surface and connect with realms of feeling and spirit.
We spoke after one of his communions with nature. I remember the peace he described coming over him when watching ducklings land on a glassy lake, recounted in such moving detail that I said, as we cried, “You should be a writer or something.”
He’s certainly the only one who ever could have made me see Texas as beautiful again.
You never know when it’s going to be your last words to someone. I missed his last phone call, but he sounded good on the voicemail. If I had known, I would have picked up the phone. I told him what he meant to me while he was alive, but I would have been more intentional. I would have told him how whenever a really poetic metaphor slips from me, I think: “That was a Richard line.”
I know we’ll speak again, in some other dimension. Still, I’d give anything to hear that drawl once more in this one.
We often use more words than needed because we’re desperate to be seen. The greatest teachers impart that you already have everything you need, they simply remember more often.
He saw a spark in me when nobody else did. It’s why I followed my own shamanic path that started with becoming a journalist, then walking away when it didn’t serve my calling. It might seem the way to honor him would be to keep writing, but letting go is more aligned.
Richard Parker was a shaman who cast spells with his words, enchanting public discourse; enlivening alternate timelines where we’re better than the record reflects. He re-ensouled landscapes others saw as barren.
Most importantly, he was the compassionate witness. He saw the shifting stratigraphic layers of centuries, sun-scorched landscapes shaped by whispering wind; how these changes impacted plants, animals, and people. His desire to believe shone through well-earned cynicism, seeing potential in everything.
Richard witnessed a lost kid who didn’t want to be alive, and gave them reasons to stay here. He called me “kid” until I was 40, and I fondly let him. He taught me the greatest spiritual lesson: to hold the contradictions of love and non-attachment. Cut 1,000 words, even your favorite sentence, if it doesn’t serve the narrative. That’s what the human experience is about, in the end.
Riordan H. Regan (a.k.a. Holly) is a seeker, artist, and Ph.D. student at the Transart Institute for Creative Research who explores the ways we connect, transcend, and heal ourselves and our communities through ancestral knowledge and direct experience. As a queer and trans person, they focus on underrepresented communities. A former journalist, their work appears in The New York Times, Vice, Good Beer Hunting, and Whetstone Magazine, among others; more at thequeerbard.com
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https://elpasomatters.org/2025/03/17/opinion-el-paso-author-richard-parker-mentor/
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