2009-10-19T22:56:00.001-07:00

Here I sit, certifiably insane. Fifty-six years of painful experience, culminating in the joy of being in the field. You know, that field “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing”that Mawlānā speaks of. But I wasn’t always in the field, oh no… though we are all born in it, a life time of death and loss had thrown me into the swirling rapids of Samsara Tanha Samadhi, where I, had to swim for my life and rapidly learn... not to hate… the river.

I was born in the projects of Lockwood Gardens Oakland California at 1:15 am on a stormy, rainy, night in the beginning of March. A Piscean child born to a Scorpio mother. My father a Leo said "I couldn’t have picked a worst day or hour.", blamed before even exiting the womb.

To make matters worst I was born with Celiac disease, an infant allergic reaction to grain… but they didn’t know that in the Fifties. The disease was treated with a restrictive diet of Bananas and unflavored, unsweetened, vitamin enriched, gelatin. For the first three years of my life, this was my diet. My first Birthday cake was mashed bananas with a candle stuck in it.

By the time I was old enough to walk and go outside, my parents hung a cardboard placard around my neck that read, “Please DO NOT FEED this child ANYTHING!” This restrictive diet caused severe constipation and my father would repeatedly ask later in life “You really don’t remember me sticking my fingers up your ass to dig out your poop? Your shit was as hard as a rock and I had to use my finger nails to break it up and oh god you would wail like a banshee.”

The only thing I do remember and it is one of my earliest memories, I must have been three, is… that there was a beautiful lady who once a week would hand out candy to the kids in the projects. I never got any and one day I figured out, it was because of the placard. With this new knowledge I waited and the next candy giving I was ready.

The beautiful, mythical, fairytale lady appeared at her front door and all the children like Pied Pipers boys and girls lined up waiting to be handed their reward. I removed the placard from around my neck and put it under a bush. I got in the back of the line and I waited cautiously, inconspicuously for my turn. Today she was handing out suckers and I could see the bright reds and yellows… and greens and purples… as the children ahead of me got their suckers and ran off gleefully with there prize.

The line inched forward, child at a time and I wondered if she would run out before I got to the front of the line.

Finally there I stood before the fairytale woman, she wore a white lace apron trimmed with cherry’s, her basket full of suckers and I reached out my hand to receive my first gift. The beautiful, mythical, fairytale lady bent low and looked me in the eye with such love... and in and angels voice spoke “I am sorry Geoffrey I would love to give you a sucker but you know I can’t give you anything.”

Later around the age of sixteen I read in a medical book that the children of the fifties diagnosed with Celiac disease and raised on the restrictive diet usually were smaller in size than their siblings (I am 5’10” my three brothers 6’6’’ 6’2”and 6’1”) and that these children had a tendency to be morose in later life. Well... if you had spent the first three years of your life watching other people eat, wearing a placard and having someone stick a finger up your ass… you might be morose to.

Impermanence a life’s story