Member Profile

I was born in St. Paul, MN to a working class, single mother.  For most of my young life I imagined myself to be some kind of counter-cultural artist type engaged in a psychic battle with the established order.  In my early twenties, my friends and I started a collectively owned and operated café in Minneapolis that was home to hippies, gutter-punks, radicals and outlaws of all sorts.  In those days, I did a weekly anti-establishmentarian radio show called “Nation of Chumps” wherein I’d mix punk rock, hip-hop, satirical social commentary and some kind of neo-dadaist audio-collage into a sort of nightmare soundtrack for paranoid bad acid trips. 

Later I moved to Seattle where I played music, got some written pieces published in Adbusters magazine and elsewhere, and got involved in some guerilla art projects involving illegal parades through downtown with anarchist marching bands, nonsensical protest signs and burning effigies.  Eventually, some friends and I developed a troupe of angry, drunken clowns that would disturb people in bars, strip clubs, dance clubs and on the street, for reasons none of us could fully explain.  In an attempt to somehow justify this behavior, I wrote a monthly column in a local Seattle rag espousing a sort of clown-centered socio-political philosophy, while also MC-ing our troupe’s serialized vaudeville/burlesque show wherein we portrayed a horrifying, demented caricature of American life during the post-9-11 era. 

Our schtick was so chaotic that, even when we tried to script it out, it ended up being mostly improvised, so I decided to move to Chicago to study the actual art of “improv.”  I met my wife at around this time and, shockingly, she moved to Chicago with me.  Improv was actually kind of a letdown after everything that had gone before, so rather than continue trying to remain interested in it, my wife and I decided to have kids and buy a house instead.  After decades of living like a sex-crazed, psychedelic supervillain, I’ve spent the last several years trying my hand at being an ordinary, middle-aged, white, suburban dad.

Also, I meditate.

What is your spiritual practice?

Well, my goal is to meditate for twenty minutes twice a day, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually managed to do that, except on the days I come down to the center.  But what’s happening when you meditate is that you’re just letting yourself be instead of getting all caught up in the melodrama of your personal narrative at any given moment.  The melodrama still bubbles up in your mind, but you recognize it, you let it go, you breathe and you go back to just being.  Rinse and repeat.  

Even if you can’t carve twenty to forty minutes out of a day to sit, this is something you can do while walking your dog, or working, or rushing to get your kids ready for school.  I think the chitter-chatter in our minds tends to dominate our awareness, and that cuts us off from each other and the universe at large, making us less compassionate, less efficient and less happy.  So the ability to recognize it and let it go when that’s happening is a fantastic skill that benefits all areas of life.  It doesn’t mean I no longer have melodrama; it just means I don’t take it so seriously. 

How long have you been practicing with us?  What drew you to ZLMC and how has it helped?

I took the Primer course in the summer of 2012, I believe, and then became an advanced member that fall, so nearly five years now.

When I was young, I had an experience that changed my life.  Without going into detail about it, let’s just say that pretty much every description of a religious or enlightenment experience I’ve ever read sounds like someone describing something very similar to what happened to me.  Most major religious texts, especially Buddhist, Taoist and Vedic texts, look to me like they must’ve been written by someone in much the same state of mind as I was, and to this day, when I read something like the Heart Sutra, it looks less like a philosophical perspective and more like someone describing that experience. 

When it was over, I eventually went back to being a regular person with the same petty obsessions, fears and desires that make up the general human predicament.  The problem this presented me with was that it set up a dichotomy between that one time when I had the pure, unmediated experience of union with the perfection of everything, and regular life where you have to work, and suffer, and get irritated about being stuck in traffic, and have fights with your girlfriend, and just generally be disturbed by the horror and monotony that occurs because things aren’t the way you imagine they should be. 

I felt like I had been shown the view from the mountaintop, then stuffed back into a tiny mental prison, except that now I knew it was a prison, whereas before I’d been mostly oblivious.  From then on, the mildly desperate desire to get back out of that cage was a form of constant psychic background noise for me.  I now think that most of the art projects and other shenanigans I got up to in my younger life were an attempt to reconcile this schism by attacking what I perceived to be the borders between the mundane and the sublime in any way I could.

In the Zen tradition, it’s pretty normal for someone to experience kensho, and then seek out a master to ask if they’ve become Enlightened or what, only to have that master tell them that what happened to them is just the beginning of real practice.  I didn’t know that at the time though, and I had no cultural frame of reference for such a thing, so it was about twenty-five years later that I, on what seemed to be a spontaneous whim, looked up local Zen centers on the internet, thinking that I might find someone who had at least a passing familiarity with my situation. 

I’m happy to say that years of meditation and koan study at the ZLMC have helped me to recognize that the irritating dichotomy between being in the mental cage and being out of it is itself a mental construct that can be let go of, and that the desire to get out of the cage is, in a sense, what the cage is made of in the first place. 

Through a regular practice of unclenching the mind, I’ve been able to be less attached to ideas about some exalted state in the past that I hope to achieve again in the future, and am instead more able to live in the here and now where The Experience is actually occurring.  During one of the classes I’ve taken here, Robert asked if it was possible for us to say, “I’m on my way to Enlightenment, but for now I’m enjoying being an idiot.”  I’m extremely grateful for the ZLMC’s role in helping me enjoy being an idiot.