I used to be a very spiritual person.  In graduate school, I took my winter break to travel to India where I essentially roamed the foothills of the Himalayas wearing robes, a staff in one hand, and a pipe of some smokables I purchased from some locals living in a straw hut by the Ganges River in the other.

My days were filled with being lost in meditation, chanting, reading, visiting shrines of local saints, and stepping from one rock to the next while reciting the Buddhist Scriptures at the top of my lungs...all because I wanted to 'find God'.  What that meant to me at the time, I did not know, but looking back on it, I am quite confident to say that I was searching for myself.

Having had a very bizarre upbringing, I always felt disconnected from my friends, family, and even my physical surroundings.  I was prime candidate for going insane...and I almost did.  I was such a soul searcher and an avid hallucinogenic drug user that I tore away most, if not all, of my ontic self to see what was 'beneath'.  Needless to say, I spent a good amount of time in therapists' offices, clinics, and immersed myself in 'self help' books.

How odd it is now to look back on that time.  I can barely recognize myself in what few pictures I have of then - my eyes seemed so open, yet unsure...my skin was so tender, yet so malleable...my outlook on my life was infinite...yet haunted...my lips...subtle...yet curled and somehow, strangled.

These days, I find myself to be a militant atheist with a sense of wonder.  I no longer read poetry.  I no longer play music for the sake of 'losing myself' like I once did.  No.  I fathom myself to be a man of science.  A man of intellect.  The very sort of man that was deemed to be fallen away from who we really are in the many works that I had my nose buried in.  The very sort of man I once despised as an undergrad student.

Is this just the process of getting old?  An unconscious rebellion against senescence.  These days I wonder if I am fighting to rebuild so much of my psyche that I had to tear down to see who I was just to emotionally survive.  It seems horrible now what I did to myself...but I had to...I had to break through the floor of my Being with an axe...I kept hacking away at my own foundation with drugs and alcohol and asceticism and gnosticism and all kinds of other '-isms'...most of the time I had no clue what I was looking for or even why I was doing what I was doing...after digging and digging deeper and deeper, one day I hit bottom...at the bottom of my foundation I saw two golds coins
...looking back at me.

I used to have hair down to my ass and an 'almost ZZ Top' beard...now I have a buzz cut and I don't go more than two days without shaving.  I used to smoke three joints a day...now I'm straight laced (more or less).  I used to want to be a rock star and melt people's faces...these days, I am an adjunct professor of psychology at community college and I try to get people to look within themselves...I used to not care if I lived under a bridge...now I own a home and pay taxes and have a son.

All of that wandering in search of something...I went all the way to the other side of the globe...and I learned the wellspring of life is right here...I just needed to go on that journey to find it.