We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.This is true for the entire universe.

The Upanishads

What am I doing here? What is the meaning of my life? How can I make sense of anything? What does any of that have to do with my birthday?

I don’t know when I started to think about questions that have no answers and how it became a part of my internal chemistry. I was born May 29, 1945 and I have always felt different, kind of set apart, even when I was too young to have the vocabulary for the great riddles. I have written about my father dying when I was nine and how that experience is a birthmark carried forever. It propelled me forward, pushing into a world where questions rule, because there was so much I didn’t understand at the time.

As a young man, I got caught on the treadmill of predictability for quite a while. My initial brush with taking off involved a motorcycle, amongst other things. After graduating college and a brief involvement with the military, I found myself living in the East Village in the late Sixties. I even had a basset hound, Feinstein. I rode a black 250 cc Honda and it was all metal, no plastic. By day, I wore a suit and was a dutiful pawn, playing in the success game. I loved the idea of being a grown up in my early twenties and I would happily do exactly the same thing if this was my Groundhog’s Day movie.

When I bought my first suit, with matching shirt and tie, I had finally separated from my childhood and its fearful uncertainties, at least that is what I believed back then. It seems to have been a time of externals, the trappings of adulthood, too busy for those eternal questions. I stayed with the suit life, although I loved the cracked, black leather bomber jacket I wore on the bike.

My grown up life started developing cracks of its own and those questions began seeping into my consciousness. I was living on Long Island in a house I couldn’t afford, in a marriage that began turning to dust, pretending to enjoy my time in the broadcast advertising business. I loved my two little boys and felt enormous guilt as the marriage came apart. The cocoon of conformity had begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable.

My thirties were all about looking for answers. I had lost my footing and was thrust into a world that came apart. I took solace in therapy, trying to understand how I had gotten into my personal predicament. There were transitory moments of revelation and clarity. As the decade progressed, my old vocabulary didn’t seem adequate for a new language that was evolving. My compass no longer provided the direction I craved, the straight lines mutating into a circle, logic giving way to a faith in the unknown, questions without answers.

Gradually, I felt myself being pulled toward life’s mysteries. I spent my last several years in therapy focused much more on spirituality, rather than unresolved anger with my mother, etc. I slowly began to tip toe around Zen Buddhism. The Buddha devoted his life to sharing the gift of enlightenment, convinced all of us are born into that state, but hopelessly distracted because of our need to know, our need to make sense of everything, the cause of our suffering.

I turned a corner when I turned forty, realizing I had about as much time behind me as I now had in front of me and that was based on at least a little luck. Whatever was swirling around inside took on a greater degree of urgency. During this period, I was reading books about Zen, of which there are far too many, but that is for another time. Life was beginning to feel like a true journey and I needed to get started.

My last day of work at All American Television, a distributor of television shows, was on my birthday, Friday, May 29, 1987. On June 1^st, I left NYC in my Dodge Colt, a little roller skate of a car, headed for land just south of Santa Fe, NM. About six month earlier, I had visited for a week and bought a little adobe house, sitting on five acres, surrounded by thousands of acres of BLM land. I bulshitted myself into thinking I would eventually move when I could afford it. I bought it on total impulse, even unnerving the realtor and there was no way practical considerations would get in the way.

I wedged myself into the little Dodge Colt, putting on my NY Yankee baseball cap and pushing a cassette of Graceland into the ghetto blaster sitting on the passenger seat. I had decided to live with those questions and take them with me on the journey west to the Cerrillos Flats of NM.

My adobe womb is where I really felt I was giving birth to myself. I lived in the high desert country for around fifteen years and built a wonderful life for myself. Early on, I felt the need to reach outside for some kind of support. My affinity for Zen resulted in a relatively formal introduction to the practice and I guess I was a bit of a student during most of my time there.

Here I am, nearly thirty years after the decision to walk the high wire without a net. I felt that my time in New Mexico had come to an end. I had learned a kind of fearlessness about tomorrow, a direct result of the path I had chosen to follow. Those nagging questions are impossible to understand and I wrapped myself in them. They are now the fabric of my life, framing the canvas I get to paint with the gift of each new day.

At the moment, I am sitting in front of the screen, wearing an ugly white, hotel robe, with a cup of coffee sitting preciously close to the keyboard. Soon, I will get into the costume of a motorcycle rider and roll out to meet the Sons of Kauai. This little island, floating in the middle of nowhere has been my home for fourteen years, having arrived here several days before my fifty seventh birthday. It feels right for me to be here and I happily have no idea why that is so.