The Cornerstones of My Life

                                                      Looking at the Moon looking at Me.

 The Cornerstones of My Life

I began life as a child without a home of my own.
Given up for adoption at birth, I entered the world already carrying the ache of separation.
It was my first lesson in impermanence — the first fracture that would shape my search for belonging.

Years later, I was readopted by my birth parents.
Their home was not the home of my earliest memories;
it was a new terrain, a reunion both tender and turbulent.
It taught me that identity is not a fixed inheritance, but a shifting landscape.

At twenty-five, I crossed oceans.
I left my country, a young husband with a child in my arms,
and landed in the United States —
a place where I would try to build a future from the bricks of a foreign dream.

Then came the breaking.
A fallout with my wife, the loss of my son.
In that hollow, I learned how a father’s heart can keep beating even when split open.

College became my refuge and my crucible.
Here, I shaped my mind, sharpened my craft,
and began to weave my scattered life into something with form and meaning.

Alaska called next —
its wild, salt-bitten air testing both my body and my soul.
There, amid the vast, frozen edges of the sea,
I learned to trust the silence and the raw truth of nature.

Ten years in San Francisco followed —
a city where Zen practice and fatherhood grew side by side.
I lived between meditation halls and playgrounds,
between the brushstrokes of art and the economics of survival.

Japan came after —
a place of precision, of daily rituals,
where discipline took root in me, and fatherhood matured into something quieter, steadier.

And now, I have returned to my own country.
I carry with me the seeds of all those places,
the languages of different skies,
the lessons of many selves.

I have come full circle —
but the circle is not closed.
It widens with each breath,
with each step I take in the only pilgrimage I have ever truly walked:
the making of myself.

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#Adoption #LifeJourney #SpiritualGrowth #Migration #Fatherhood #ZenLife #AlaskaStories #SanFranciscoYears #JapanLife #Homecoming