Who am I? I am driven by an abiding interest in and concern for my fellow humans and the other creatures who share our planet, and in the well-being of the very Earth on which we all depend. This interest and concern is the motivating factor for my life-long travels to nearly every part of the globe, and for studies and a career that were carefully designed to allow me to live in different lands, giving me time to get beneath the skin and belief systems of my planetary kin. It is also the impetus behind my writing. What else but this kind of passion could account for spending a decade of my life writing the Veronica trilogy? Not to mention the other books that went before that. (Only two of these others are available as e-books at this point, while all three Veronica books are available on Amazon in both paper and e-format.) It certainly isn’t the money – thus far, at least. This passion keeps the fires burning to ensure the books that still crowd my mind will eventually see the light of day. Much of this comes of my own past, which demands to be revisited, allowing me to make sense of the present day. How did our world get to be the way it is? I don’t need to list here the imbalances, the unrighteous nature of our political and economic systems, the wars and brutality; they’re self-evident to anyone not slumbering in denial. My past, your past, the millennia we have trod the Earth together, criss-crossing, leaving behind in our wake the residue of our great successes and our worst follies. It’s all there, right in front of our eyes. I might as well come clean here, in case you haven’t caught on already – at the core of my writing, no, at the core of my psyche, my very being is an absolute conviction of what’s generally called reincarnation. Not only have we come and gone countless times throughout history, but we have incarnated in an amazing array of personalities rich and poor, conservative and progressive, black and white, male and female, cruel and kind … and so it goes. The world that we see then, is a world of our own making. And the sooner we can own that, the sooner will we be able to resolve the injustices, re-creating a world defined by interest and trust, by sharing and a concern for sustainability for the good of all. For the past four decades I've studied a range of religious and philosophical traditions, from Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic offspring of Abraham. I’ve also studied Native American thought and ritual, and the Ancient Wisdom teachings found in Theosophy and elsewhere. I've taught and facilitated classes, workshops and retreats in Qigong, Tai Chi, Yoga, meditation, personal development and various esoteric and spiritual themes. All these threads of aspiration and wisdom from the human family are woven together to make me what I am, and what we together are as children of the One. My first remembered thoughts in childhood gave hints of what was to come. I grew up in a blue collar family that rarely traveled beyond our conservative Protestant community in the Midwestern state of Minnesota. I was just learning to read when I discovered a set of books called Lands and Peoples and from that moment on I poured over them from cover to cover, over and over again, telling my mystified parents that I would visit all those places one day. Many years later, deep into my spiritual quest, I began to understand this to be a soul imperative not simply to know my brothers and sisters in other parts of the world, but to actually retrace my own soul’s journey through time, as I had myself once lived in all the places I was now visiting. Traveling, I was making manifest this soul journey in the here and now, bringing it back to the surface of my awareness. The Veronica trilogy and the Children of the Light series are a product of that remembering. A few words on my academic and professional background, for those with an interest in such things ... I have Bachelor and Masters degrees in International Studies and Asian Studies, was recruited into the U.S. Diplomatic Corps and served as Cultural Attache in Embassies in Portugal and Japan and as Press Attache in the Consulate in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While this work provided rich rewards on many levels (not least the opportunity to live and work abroad in a bridge-building capacity), I left the Foreign Service 15 years ago to focus on my writing and teaching. Most of these years were spent in California (returning to where I had first moved in 1966); that is, when I was not traveling. And in the fall of 2012 I moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to -- as they say -- be with the one I love. And so Philly is my new base for exploring the vast scope of life on this beautiful planet. I invite you to join me in this remarkable journey.
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