Just looking for a home…
Born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1943, I had a conventional enough childhood, but from as far back as I can remember I felt a visceral detachment from the mainstream —music, sports, dating, politics, the whole package. None of this was rebellion; the culture around me simply never spoke to me. That early sense of being an outlier drew me toward Yoga and Buddhism as a teenager, and to the Tao Te Ching as a young man. If I believed in reincarnation, I’d think I had simply been reincarnated from East Asia.
Despite this Eastern leaning, I was rigorously pursuing a normal American life —night college, a steady job in electronics, even a nascent invention or two worth developing —when the Cuban Missile Crisis scrambled my plans and left me at loose ends at twenty. I immigrated to Australia instead and landed a job at a NASA tracking station in Western Australia.
From Australia I kept moving —working as a baker in Thailand, a surveyor in Vietnam, a postal worker in Sweden, a junkyard hand in England, and an English teacher in Tokyo. It was during those Tokyo years that I traded the physical discipline of Karate for the meditative practice of Suizen—blowing Zen. What was meant to be a year’s adventure in Australia turned into fifteen years of wandering, working, and wondering across East Asia, India, Europe, and Africa.
The fifty years since have been spent largely in one place, digging inward toward what I’ve always called the bottom line: the essence of what life actually is.
For a more detailed account of these years, see The Further One Goes