I’ve traveled neither frequently nor very far from my home here in the San Francisco Bay Area, in northern California— and have divided my life fairly evenly between the tumultuous streets of Berkeley and the placid countryside an hour or so to the north, near the coast.
First impressions being what they are, I put great store in our first memories as indicators of what will become major themes in life. My own first memory— very early in life— was the recognition that this very human condition that we live is simply another story being told, whether it is listened to— and heard— or not. My first decision in this life was immediate: to take part eventually in the telling of that story, when I understood it better, and was ready.
Throughout World War Two my early childhood was spent close to my grandparents, at first with my mother’s family in Berkeley, and then with my father’s family in Oklahoma— two very different families. When the war was finally over we settled on a farm in Sonoma County almost a mile or so from the paved county road, without electricity, and at the very end of the then-known world.
There a serious childhood illness isolated me even more, and for two years my only companions were the books from my parents’ library and— as I began to recover— the animals of the countryside, both domestic and wild. It was a primitive and pastoral life, and one that nourished a romantic, mystical appreciation of the natural and numinous world in which I lived. I began to write poetry.
In time the woods and fields of the country, and the roads I walked and later bicycled toward the sea and toward the town, all gave way to the populated streets of the city: first the county seat— Santa Rosa— and then Berkeley, and San Francisco. There, as a young man suddenly on his own I began to adventure, meeting remarkable people and reading poetry in bars and coffeehouses, which led in turn to writing experimental drama for radio and the stage.
The Berkeley of the Sixties was not the town my grandparents had known, but I grew to know it intimately and well throughout the drawn-out watershed of that amazing decade. The Revolution began on campus and spilled noisily out into the world, where we fought against the Pigs in demonstration after demonstration, confident that the whole world was watching. We fought against discrimination and we fought for freedom of speech; we fought against The War and we fought for The People.
I entered the university and I left it often, like a young and inconstant lover; my commitment to the academic life seemed always in competition with a fascination with the more emotionally satisfying life of the artist and activist, throwing myself into the political teach-ins and marches, the all night poetry readings, the drug-laced music festivals, and finally the inevitable epiphanies and initiations into a spiritual awareness that promised transcendance and peace at last. It was a heady time, a wonderful time, a time to be remembered, and honored, and grieved with little regret.
My work at the University came to focus upon the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Blake, and in particular upon their use of astrology as a poetic language. To understand their work better I studied astrology itself— before it became popular— and learned to draw up horoscopes and to explain them as though the personality were a poem that could be analyzed and explicated. Echoing my childhood belief, I began to view descriptions of the human condition as fundamentally a literary enterprise based upon archetypal elements. The person is best comprehended, I came to believe, as the hero of an epic poem— making mental health as much an esthetic imperative as it is a moral dilemma.
After graduation I continued to draw up horoscopes, taught astrology at the university, and married a remarkable woman named Barbara. She and I established an astrological center which drew the attention of certain Jungian psychiatrists who, in time, encouraged my enrollment in graduate school and an eventual licensure as a psychotherapist. For those who are interested, I have posted a resumé of my professional work since then here.
I established a private practice in Berkeley and, after our divorce, found myself at mid-life as a young urban professional single parent in an upscale portion of Berkeley, still writing for the stage and preparing for the next season of life. This is when Maria appeared on my doorstep, whom I immediately recognized as the companion of the remainder of my life. I proposed very soon afterwards, some twenty-five years ago, saying if we marry and begin a family I would like to raise our children where I was raised: up north, in Sonoma County.
After wandering some four or five years around the western, coastal half of Sonoma County— which had changed greatly since my childhood, having been “discovered”— we came finally some twenty years ago to the luscious wine country known as the Valley of the Moon, where we now live and where I still keep a small family practice and continue to write. This is where our children grew up, and this is where I begin my third third of life as an elder. I can hardly wait to see what happens next— but I am patient.