BRISTOL — He is best known around town as the owner of Green Mountain Renewable Energy, but Bristol resident Peter Cassels-Brown has worn many hats. He has been a carpenter since the 1970s and has a graduate degree in meditation.
Now, he can add another occupation to the list — author.
His recently published first book, “The Key” is a slim, eloquent meditation on spirituality and nature, spiced up with adventure stories from Cassels-Brown’s life that led him to certain realizations. High points include his tale of sprinting across a frozen Lake Champlain one winter night as the ice melted behind him and another one of him falling hundreds of feet with an avalanche.
Equally important are his sparse, clearly phrased reflections on spirituality and human emotions.
“There were many facets to my pursuit and study of spirit, and I wanted to pull them together,” said Cassels-Brown. “They were all over the place and so I started writing them down. I just kept a notebook and just kept downloading stuff as it came.”
At a certain point, he began reading over his notes and was struck by the idea that he could make a book out of it. He went back and began making edits.
“By the end, my notebook was almost completely illegible,” Cassels-Brown said. “It was all scribbled and marked up and everything.”
He had never considered publishing a book and was less than sure about how to go about doing it. But on the day after he had completed a draft of a manuscript, he received an unsolicited email from iUniverse, a “supported self-publishing” company, which asked if recipients had a book they were interested in publishing. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
Cassels-Brown would like to get his book out as much as possible, though he is still trying to determine what the best market for it is. It is currently sold in local shops, and he will give a book signing and talk at Recycled Reading of Vermont at 25A Main St. in Bristol, on Saturday, Dec. 15, at 3 p.m.
One inspiration for writing the book, an the source of the book’s title, was a lyric that Cassels-Brown first heard in the seventies, from the Eagles song “Already Gone”:
“So many times it happens we live our lives in chains/And we never even know we have the key.”
Though it took Cassels-Brown himself a half-century of living, reading, meditating and thinking to form the thoughts he recorded in “The Key,” the book enables him to share his insights with anyone who needs it.
“It’s a good book for anyone who is feeling challenged or struggling, because it puts a positive spin on a way to move forward,” he said. “Sometimes we feel stuck, we feel trapped, and the intent of the book is ‘the key’ — to unlock that.”