Biographical Highlights--Part 1

My first memories this life are of pain and love; the pain was getting my thumb caught in a cedar chest when I was three. The love was the memory of a young lady, the baby sitter, who periodically took good care of me. Being three I suppose, accounts for the fact that I've no conscious memory of face or voice, just a kind aura of love that enveloped me at that time, and which I associated with this kind caregiver. Back then, the grass in the front yard was amazingly tall, which should tell you something about my height at the time. This period taught me two meaningful facts about life: pain and love wake us up.

Zipping the time machine forward a few notches I see what I'm doing now. I collect seashells. Not just ones at the beach, but those along the roads. In Florida then, many of roads were paved with seashells and bits of related things dredged up from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Many shells get pushed to the side of the road rather than ground up in the traffic. The little boy is searching for something beautiful, a pattern, a color; the mystery of small forms used by tiny lives and discarded.

Now, I'll show you the back door of my house. You see, there by the edge of the cement walk, I've collected an array of small bottles full of colored water. They fascinate me-red, and blue, and green. I am child chemist you see, and its obvious to anyone with eyes that I'm on the verge of discovering the secrets of life! My dog King, one of those creatures from which we humans learn about devotion, thinks he has already discovered it.

A river runs by my house, and it is part of my great adventure. We build a log raft out of heavy oak, and when you stand on, it floats four inches under the water. There are alligators in the river where we swim and big prehistoric looking fish with heavy scales and long snouts that look like a cross between a regular fish and an alligator. They suggest to us that all is not entirely well with planet Earth; there must be other worlds where such things are no longer necessary.

There is sunshine in my life, a lot of it. I have an embarrassment of riches, not of money, but of mother and father and brother. They were normal good people who did a fine job of raising the quiet introspective adventurer that was "I" of the time.

There were exceptions to my reticence. In the 4th grade I became famous. The boys dared me to kiss that girl and I accepted the challenge. Smacked her with a good kiss as she approached the schoolyard. Probably this same daring streak is part of what moves me to tell this momentous tale to strangers.

I'm 13. The library is seven blocks from my house. I walk there in the early evenings. Along the way, I whistle and sing; softly on the singing because I don't know how and its strictly in-the-shower level vocalizations. I've never heard of meditation, or yoga, but I begin to do it anyway. I have no names or concepts for the inward seeking. I think during these meditative walks, but often the thinking stops, replaced by something else. The singing is breath and the sound is searching. Among the notes and thoughts of warm summer nights, my thoughts settle into a wonderful stillness. There are sacred words in the sounds of traffic and in the voices of people on the streets. I listen to these magical sounds; I attend to them with an inner stillness. I walk in the flow of something that I will much later call energy, or fire, or light. I read myself in the fire. But I do not call it by these names, for I have no name. I'm just a boy out for a walk. Decades later, I find the words in Edward Carpenter who writes: