Full Circle Vol. 1-A Long Forgotten Path Remembered

A memoir—I have felt my life is a series of scenes in a 1930s black-and-white silent film. Where the guy is not paying attention and walks off the top of the building, only to step onto a girder being carried by a crane. When I was young, I thought it was blind luck. When I did start paying attention to the details I discovered that the seemingly coincidental events were signposts along the path; taking me where I needed to be, not where I thought I should be. Just as how the most stupid thing I ever did—mounting a horse with an attitude problem one morning in Mexico, and then getting thrown from said horse—ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me.
But it took twenty years of debilitating pain for me to find that nugget of truth.
I chased the moments in between the signposts. The instances where I knew, I was in exactly the right place at the right time. They felt almost magical—perfect moments. They were fun and made me feel alive. You know, those crystal-clear instances when time downshifts into slow motion, and all of your senses become hyper-acute. When thinking comes to a standstill and colors become more vibrant. Sounds fine-tune to a pin drop, leaving me feeling comfortable inside my skin and one with life.
These happen in those few seconds when conscious awareness aligns with the moment, in the tiny spaces between thoughts when words just don't work. We all experience such moments, even if we don’t notice, some while scaling a mountain or making music, others, watching the sunset or a child’s face grinning with delight. They are as diverse as we are, revealing themselves uniquely to each of us. They leave us wondering: What just happened? What exactly was that?
My perfect moments happened consistently while skiing, surfing and being in nature. I followed the signposts, sometimes knowingly and occasionally without a clue, from the beaches of Southern California to the jungles of Venezuela and the back country of India and Thailand before ending up in the Himalayas. It was there that the how and why of those perfect moments became self-evident.
When I stepped into the Buddhist Kingdom of Ladakh, in the Himalayas of India, it marked the beginning of the end of a far longer journey along the path, one whose origin was not months, but eons and countless lifetimes back. It became apparent to me that to live and feel life in its entirety I must first be willing to feel it fully in the present moment. To do that, I had to heal myself of emotional hurts suffered not only in this lifetime but from other lifetimes as well. The burden was on me to clean up my past and be accountable for my actions. In this lifetime, as well as others, lost loves called for reuniting, shattered relationships needed mending, wounds wanting to heal, and broken promises demanded honoring. Simply put, I had unfinished business to tend to.
While what you read may seem like fiction, it’s a genuine tale. It’s my story, but it's not about me. It’s about universal and timeless lessons, learned through experience, our greatest teacher. By living through them, we uncover the gems of wisdom scattered like diamonds along the path—the insights that transform our lives. It’s about remembering who we are through our humanity and learning that things may appear one way on the surface, but be different underneath. It’s about things that were never part of the American Dream of the 1960s when grew up.
When the signposts led me back to sea level on the island of Bali, I secretly hoped the experiences initiated during those cracks in my perceptions would end, so that I could blame this whole series of thoughts and feelings on the altitude.
They didn't and I couldn't, and I realized the story had to be told.
It is my hope that when you read my tale, it will help you remember some forgotten feelings concerning your true nature, and perhaps inspire a long overdue revisit. So, I invite you to come along and enjoy my journey—a story about what’s possible.