“The Working-Class Mystic,” as a title, persona or nom de plume, really has to be read with a wink and a grin. But there’s as much truth in it as wit (assuming there is, in fact, any wit). It’s a short-hand way of naming two of the most formative aspects of my character — working-class roots and a mystic temperament.
I’m the post-World War II child of a U.S. Army corporal and German shop girl. His parents were itinerant farm workers from the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Her father was a painter before he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and lost in action in an assault on Crimea. Her mother managed a local wine shop in Fürth, where I was born. My father was off fighting the Korean War when the neighborhood midwife delivered me on our living room couch. He first appeared in my life three years later. My mother and I tagged along wherever the Army sent him — France, California, back to Germany, Texas. So I grew up in four very distinct cultures, and that, too, says a lot about me. To this day, even though I’ve lived in and been a U.S. citizen since I was ten, in many ways I still feel European. That doesn’t make me any less American. I believe in the ideals the nation was founded on — liberty, democracy, equality — but there are Continental habits I can’t shake. Like wearing socks with sandals or not eating dinner before 8 o’clock.
My exposure to mysticism began in my late teens, when my family moved from a dusty Central Texas hamlet to Los Angeles. It was the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love. In no time at all, the Magic Bus picked me up at the corner of Hollywood and Vine and drove me all the way to euphoria. I turned on, tuned in and dropped out. I read everything I could find by Timothy Leary, the Beats, Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Robert Heinlein, Alan Watts. I pored over texts on Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Theosophy, philosophy, astrology and the occult. In short, I was a hippie. It wasn’t until I got to grad school in Philadelphia about a decade later that my then girlfriend took me to a Quaker meeting. Wow. The Quaker vision of spirituality without a creed “spoke to my condition,” to use a Quaker phrase. So I took a second look at Christianity — the Christian mystics in particular. Now I see parallels in all mystic traditions, Western or Eastern, modern or ancient, in esoteric philosophies, even in quantum mechanics.
In this weblog I share some of my thinking on mysticism, as well as on culture and the arts, philosophy, politics and the economy, and some of what I’ve seen and done in my life — my travels, my work, what keeps me up at night, what pleases me, what keeps me in awe of this mystery we call life.