I loved to run free, football and baseball barefoot at the beach, loved the vertical world of climbing trees, the land meets water world of scampering out on the docks, the mystery world of taking bait and fishing, the joyous moving our body world of swimming in the bay, and the magical ease after movement world of lying in the sand after swimming.
The friendship world of lying in the sand, five or six or ten guys in a circle, talking and giggling together.
Growing up in a place where there were always five to eight friends within unsupervised walking distance.
At school, tetherball, 4 square, marbles.
After school, Monopoly, basketball, baseball, football, hanging around, flying kites, yo yos.
After dark, books came in handy.
Life went on, and I discovered many things: women and wars (as in Vietnam), and more books, and more people, and this amazing form of not really therapy called Gestalt.
About being present. What a way to live!
College came. College went. I survived, had various experiences, of the 60's sort: sitting in the college President's office (as if that would stop The War, but what did we know) and listening to various The Who, Janis kind of stuff.
Oh, well.
Community organizing as my real education, or a beginning of one, in the Puerto Rican and black sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx, and somehow California was where I ended up learning organic gardening and having two children.
Northern California, the heaven of almost seasons and smarter people and cool evenings and brilliant people and some sense of life as having meaning or at least that possibility.
Spiritual work beakoned. My wife and I and many other Berkeley souls followed. First in the goody goody world of pristine meditation and vegetarian purity, and then in the raunchy earthiness of some bad boy Gurdjieff teachers from the East coast.
There were years in there of fullness: children, a day life as a carpenter/ deisgner, a night life as a teacher/ student in the Gurdjieff work, learning landscape gardening, docenting at the U.C. Botanic Garden, studying Milton Erickson, and NLP, and hypnosis, and Tibetan Buddhism, and having this idea: to "remember oneself."
Not a bad idea.
A move from the city of Berkeley to the countryside of Sonoma came about around 1996.
Almost becoming a farmer, I did get off the ground the Sonoma Garden Park,
a three acre Public Garden of grape arbor, and fruit tree rings (planted in two big circles), and vegies, and flowers, and even a straw bale barn that came to life before I arrived. It's still around, and beautiful.
In Sonoma, I learned the Work of Byron Katie, took up yoga, fell in love with a fellow gardener, rediscovered Feldenkrais, which after taking a weekend workshop where I felt like I was ten again, I decided to get trained in.
I did.
A four year training under the guidance of Dennis Leri. His website Semiophysics.com shows his brilliance. A grand time. Everyone could have a great time and radically upgrade their life if they were to spend 4 years of 8 weeks a year rolling around and learning how amazing it is to have a body, and a brain, and the awareness thing, there it is again, the fulcrum for not just fun, but real change.
This work was so amazing, I had to deepen my learning, and discovered Anat Baniel. She is a genius and the best in the world, in my opinion, at this work that wakes us up to the possibilities of new thought, feeling and action.
I have worked to integrate in life and in my teaching, writing and service
the Anat Baniel and Feldenkrais work,
the work of Byron Katie,
high grade nutrition via Weston Price, some animal food eating raw food nonsense, and green smoothies,
permaculture gardening clothes lines bicycles as the fun of living ecologically
and being
awake
to now,
in all of this.
Does love have something to do with all this?
Yes.
Plenty of hints about all these at the weekly blog: 1001 Thoughts on Love
or the weekly blog Life Potency blog postings on Wednesday.
