Although I was brought up well, appreciate beauty, and enjoy fine things, I wasn’t especially driven to achieve on the material plane, as once I became aware of the ‘spiritual path’ I considered the development of spiritual consciousness to be my essential work; so through the years I have done more or less whatever presented itself to me, always somehow getting by, engaging in a wide range of activities and experiencing at least three or four different sides of the tracks, from first class to no class.
Among other things, I’ve worked as a Head Start assistant, bank teller, the ubiquitous waitress, freelance photographer and journalist, organic wine salesman, natural food store cashier, carpenter’s assistant and private caterer. I’ve been an organic gardener in Connecticut and a live-in housekeeper in Beverly Hills. I’ve driven a taxi in NYC and a tractor in Israel. In Montana, as a volunteer, I organized weekly Art and Music shows, and designed and executed a traffic safety and courtesy campaign. And I sold Japanese yo-yos with my then nine-year-old son on the street in Boulogne, France one Christmas season until we had enough money for dinner each night. I’ve slept in a sleeping bag on a marble floor in the Plaka in Athens, wrapped in a blanket in a hammock in the rain on the island of Kauai, and in suites at the Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong and the Oberoi in New Delhi. I know what it is to be comfortable, to have plenty, and to have nothing. I know what it is to have to ask for food every time you’re hungry, to ask for shelter from the cold at night, and to sleep on a couch in a public library during the day, because you’re tired and have nowhere else to go. And I know what it is to have a body so weakened by disease that you can barely get up to use the bathroom, have no appetite or even strength to eat, and can only lie in bed, helpless. I know what it is to be so broken that if some miracle doesn’t save you, you have nothing to live for - the end of the rope.
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