by In 1994, my former boss and mentor retired. Married to his former job, he was like the proverbial fish out of water. Every day as soon as I got home from teaching at the college, he would arrive. Many times, it was for lunch and that would roll on into dinner out. After that, we three, he, my wife, and I would top the evening off with ice cream at a local Baskin & Robins.
We would lunch, have a coffee and a piece of cake, and then have another coffee as he was wont to say. Talk? We talked about philosophy, religion, education, quantum physics, literature, and Greek mythology. He’s a first generation American Greek, a violinist, artist, and wonderful mimic.
One day, I said I should be taking notes on all these discussions so we could go back and check what we had been talking about. And so, began the sessions with note taking. Shared books flew from his house to mine. Sometimes he struggled to find the right metaphor for my literary mind. His physics background meant much learning for me. He read books in quantum physics like people read pulp fiction.
He suggested I write a book about all of this, emphasizing attributes of human behavior because that’s where our conversations ultimately converged. I had written college textbooks in the humanities and had been an art book reviewer for a couple of major textbook publishers. Why not? It might be fun. I agreed.
In 1995, I retired. With my wife and two cats, we flew to Seattle and eventually settled in the Puget Sound area. It was then I began to write A Conversation Between Two Old Men. Needless to say, the title didn’t last long. I very soon realized I couldn’t have he said, I said. Who in their right mind would even want to buy it, let alone read it.
Of course, the two men needed names. They had to become characters, living, breathing people that strutted across the written page. Because I had met a shaman when I was a small child, and because one of my students was a shaman in-waiting, I decided to make the characters shaman, one who didn’t know he was, and one that did.
The book became a teaching/learning commentary: the young learning the traditions from the old. And having taught philosophy for a good number of years, a philosophical undertone began to take shape.
The Quest Seeking the New Adam was born. It was self-published in 2000. Ten years later, it was rewritten, 50,000 additional words added, and given a new cover and a new title, The Shaman’s Quest, the first in a series of six books called the shamanic mysteries.
As news commentator, Paul Harvey would say, “And now you have the rest of the story.” Well actually, not quite. After all, no story ever just begins and never just ends. Not even this article.
