The Book -revised:
The Aleutian Blues
Chapter One: The Biggest Catch
They called Sand Point, AK., a one-horse town.
One bar. One restaurant. One policeman. One school. And dogs—more dogs than people, it sometimes seemed. Big huskies and scrappy mongrels trotted through the streets as if they owned the place. In truth, the real owners of Sand Point were the Aleuts, descendants of the first people of the Aleutian chain. Broad-faced, dark-haired, Mongoloid in appearance—except for those who had intermarried—they were as much a part of the land as the wind and the sea. Most of the fishing boats bore their names. Their dogs guarded the porches.
The FV Iceland.
Into this world I arrived a stranger—one of the few non-whites—with nothing in my pocket but hope and desperation.
I hadn’t planned to join a boat. But fate has a way of deciding for you. The Iceland was short a man, and Captain Donald Bark—swearing violently about a no-show—looked at me as a last-minute solution. She was one of the few remaining wooden vessels built by Paul Martinez, the Norwegian boatbuilder who christened each of his dozen creations with -land at the end: Wonderland, Iceland, and so on. She was beautiful. I was scared shitless.
I kept fear from overwhelming me by clinging to a koan, whispered over and over like a lifeline:
Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji‘un.
From Him I come; to Him I return.
The Bering Sea did not care about my prayers. It's cold gnawed straight through to the bone. The work was endless—long lines, heavy hooks, sinkers—and the discipline of keeping pace with the flow of things left no room for sleepiness or doubt. For ten days, I lived suspended between exhaustion and awe, holding on to the rhythm of labor and the knowledge that at any moment the ocean might take me. I had arrived at the end of the world—Alaska, the Aleutian Islands—with no stepping back. I had burned all my bridges behind me.
After ten days of halibut fishing, the Iceland returned to Sand Point harbor for the Fourth of July. We were among the last boats to dock. The entire town seemed gathered at the only restaurant, the Windward Café, and we stumbled in already drunk from the whiskey passed around in the galley of the Iceland. We found a table by the door—loud, tired, still reeking of salt and fish slurry in our beards and clothes.
That was when I saw her.
She was walking away from the counter, two enormous pizzas balanced effortlessly on the palms of her hands. And out of my mouth, without warning, without permission—burst the words:
“I am in love!”
The place went silent. Burly fishermen froze mid-chew. Even the jukebox seemed to choke back a note. Captain Bark’s hand clamped onto my arm, his voice a low growl in my ear.
“Are you tired of living?”
But she turned. Long curly hair. Round blue eyes locking onto mine in disbelief. And I, drunk and foolish, said it again, louder and clearer, this time.
“I Am in Love!”
Silence rolled through the room like thick fog. Rough fishermen, elderly Aleut boat owners, their wives—everyone paused. My eyes stayed on her. I felt ridiculous and could only smile my silly grin at Ms. Judy, one of the restaurant owners.
Later that night, still drunk, I walked the long road to her mobile home. Somewhere in the darkness, a husky rose from a porch and padded toward me—slow, deliberate. My lifelong fear of dogs, born of a German Shepherd’s bite back in Green Bay, tightened my chest. I crouched, picked up a stone, bracing for a fight that might end me right there.
But the animal stopped, studied me, then turned away.
I carried on, blessed by the kind of drunken luck that only looks like courage in hindsight. I was possessed.
I woke the next morning on her sofa. How I got there, what words were spoken, the details are gone, lost to the fog of Whiskey. What mattered was simple: I was no longer a stranger. I was in her life, and she in mine. We lived together for almost two years.
I never made it back to Iceland as a crew member.
When the boat was ready to sail again, I packed my meager belongings, shook Captain Bark’s hand, and said goodbye. I didn’t even collect the wages owed to me for those ten days at sea.
Looking back now, I smile. The crew of the Iceland hauled fish from the violent womb of the Bering Sea. I hauled something else that most men would die for; the love of a beautiful woman.
If a fisherman is measured by the size of his catch, then in that season, I made the biggest catch of them all.
Chapter Two
The Artist of Sand Point
Living in Sand Point for nearly two years brought me into the orbit of both the Aleuts—whose families had fished these waters for generations—and the drifters from the Lower 49 who had washed ashore and made the town their own. It was a place where stories braided together: native heritage, hard-bitten fishermen, free-spirited wanderers, and a handful of dreamers chasing something they couldn’t quite name.
There was Hippie John and his wife, owners of a small boat called the Sun Dial. Bob Barnett and his girlfriend, Ms. Brenda Karkut, co-owned the Windward Café with my friend Ms. Judy Pennini—the woman who had changed the course of my life. These were the people I came to know: those I drank coffee with, shared long silences with, and stayed up with through even longer nights.
Through them, I found myself stepping onto a stage. I was invited to take part in two plays at Sand Point High School. Through those productions, I earned six academic credits from the University of Burbank, which had sponsored the activity. Acting was not something I had ever imagined for myself, but in the Aleutians, even the unexpected had its own tide.
My closest friend during that time was Cletus Brown, a man whose life seemed anchored by love. He married an Aleut woman, and together they raised two daughters. Through his family, I came closer to the rhythms of Aleut life—their gatherings, their quiet humor, their way of carrying endurance and tenderness in equal measure. In my spare time, I helped nail shingles onto the roof of his newly built home at the far edge of town. We were often stoned while working, enjoying each other’s company as the cold wind tore around us. From the rooftop, we could see everything—the open sea, the surrounding mountains, and Mount Pavlov itself, majestic even after having blown its top the year before.
Work came in unusual forms. For a time, I labored under Dwight Blackburn, digging pits for communication towers. Dwight was also the town’s bush pilot, flying a Cessna across the Aleutian chain to ferry supplies and mail to places that otherwise lived in silence. On a few occasions, I flew with him, an experience that was both humbling and exhilarating. Once, we circled above a volcano as it spat molten earth into the sky. In that moment, I thought of the mud crabs of my childhood in Kampung Selut, scuttling across tidal flats and spitting up little towers of mud. Home rushed back to me in that plume of fire.
When I was not working or wandering, I painted. My subjects were the fishing boats of the locals, each vessel carrying its own dignity and scars from years at sea. I painted them in oils and sold them to the sons of fishermen who wanted to give their fathers something lasting for Christmas. To my surprise, I earned more money with my art than I ever did fishing in Alaska.
That money did more than keep me afloat. It allowed me to pay off my student loan from the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, closing a chapter that had weighed on me for years. It also covered my expenses to return to Green Bay, where I reunited with my son, who had traveled from Germany to visit his grandmother. Those days were fleeting, but precious. My brushes and canvases carried me farther than I expected—not only across oceans, but back into the arms of my family in Malaysia.
By then, I had already graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, but Sand Point gave me an education of another kind. With Judy, I once drove from Anchorage to Burbank, about six hundred miles one way, through mountains, rivers, and an endless sky that made the distance feel even longer. Later, we flew across the world to Malaysia, Thailand, and Hong Kong, a journey that folded my old life and my new one into the same fabric.
When the time came, Judy and I parted as friends. She returned to Kent, Washington, to live with her parents. I returned to Green Bay—the only place I could call home then—carrying with me the memory of those two years, my time as an artist in Sand Point, where the wind and the sea brought me farther than I could ever have planned.
As my friend, Rob Serge, wrote in my sketchbook:
“Sam—he was not a fisherman, but a fisher of men.”
Chapter Three
The Ghost Ship
Short as it was, my life as a fisherman in the Bering Sea was filled with trials and moments worth dying for.
Gale warnings came often, as if the sea were reminding us of her true nature. I battled seasickness more than once while working the eight-mile-long longline as it fed back into the revolving drum, spreading the heavy line evenly so it wouldn’t pile into a dangerous mountain. Often this was done in darkness, hard rain, freezing wind, cold that cut straight through wool and oilskins. My private horror was imagining the nearly one-inch line snapping under strain, wrapping around me, cutting me down where I stood.
Sea sickness was an ordeal. One day, as the Iceland made a desperate run from a gale, I reached my breaking point. My stomach turned, my body weakened, my spirit ready to quit. In reckless desperation, I stood and opened the forward hatch, hoping fresh air would save me. Instead, a towering wave crashed down over the bow and slammed straight into me. The cold salt water soaked me to the bone, brutal, shocking, cleansing; it cured my sea sickness for good.
When I looked back toward the wheelhouse, the captain and crew were doubled over laughing at my stupidity. But from that day on, my seasickness was gone. The sea herself had baptized me.
Time became unreliable. Days and nights blurred into a single gray stretch of labor, hunger, and exhaustion. More than once, riptides dragged the Iceland toward the rocks of nearby islands. At the mercy of wind and current, you learned how small both a boat and a man could be.
There were moments of triumph. Once, we hauled in nearly twenty-five thousand pounds of halibut, bound for Dutch Harbor. The largest, seven feet six inches long and nearly four hundred and fifty pounds, was christened Big Bertha by the skipper. It was raised on board using a winch line, and the Skipper decided to take a picture of himself holding a fishing rod standing alongside the fish.
Sleep offered little refuge. One night, I woke fighting invisible hands at my throat, gasping, clawing the air, my body convinced I was under attack. My head snapped upward and struck the beam above my bunk. I jumped up, heart racing, searching for an assailant that wasn’t there. When I lifted the galley hatch, the crew sat calmly drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
Was Iceland haunted? Or was my mind—frayed by exhaustion and fear—betraying me?
Stories circulated among fishermen that the old wooden vessel carried strange happenings with her. Some believed Paul Martinez, her builder, still had a presence aboard. Whatever the truth, among the fiberglass boats with their modern electronics, the Iceland stood apart—older, stubborn, and deeply alive; truly, the Lady of the Sea.
It was during a run through Unimak Pass, bound for Dutch Harbor, that the strangest event occurred.
Earlier, Captain Donald Bark had shown me how to read the radar. Each square represented two nautical miles. The center of the screen was Iceland. My instructions were simple: hold the compass course exactly and watch for blips. A blip meant another vessel. If anything seemed wrong, scream.
That night, it was my turn at the wheel.
The wheelhouse was quiet, the sea invisible beyond the windows, the hum of the engine the only sound. Alone, I drifted between memories and unease—pride at surviving something few from my country ever would, and a deep loneliness knowing that if something happened, there would be no one to call, no one to tell.
Then I saw the blip.
It appeared in the upper left corner of the radar, two squares out—four miles away. Relief flickered. Company. But instead of passing off the screen, the blip stopped, reversed direction, and began climbing back—at an angle—toward the center.
Toward me.
Panic replaced disbelief. When it was less than half a square away, I hit the alarm and screamed for the skipper, spinning the wheel instinctively, uselessly. Donald Bark was at my side in seconds, cursing as a blinding light flooded the wheelhouse from above.
Through the window, I stared at two massive searchlights bearing down on us.
Then, in slow motion, a huge gray ship slid past—silent, fully lit, its deck clearly visible and completely empty. No voices. No engine noise. Just light, steel, and water. Then it was gone, leaving only bubbles in its wake.
“Hit the bunk,” the skipper said.
In the morning, the crew sat in silence. No one spoke of the night. Later, only JR, the skipper’s nephew, admitted he had witnessed the entire thing from the galley, unable to make sense of it. Donald told him not to dwell on it.
Neither did we.
Even now, as I write this, I struggle to believe it truly happened. The more I tell it, the less solid it seems. Perhaps it was exhaustion. Perhaps fear. Perhaps the sea is playing tricks on a tired mind.
Or perhaps it was simply Unimak Pass—one of the most treacherous stretches of water on earth—where reality and mystery share the same currents.
All I know is this: in the Aleutians, the sea sometimes speaks from the dark, and when it does, it reminds you how thin the line is between what we know and what we don’t.
Chapter Four
From Meat Cutter to Way-Seeker
“Man cannot attain the truth unless he is pure… When the Lord Most High is Himself the Teacher, He gives one knowledge from Himself… The child of the spirit, born in the heart, is the meaning of true humanity.”
— Hadrat ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (may Allah sanctify his secret)
“Man cannot attain the truth unless he is pure… When the Lord Most High is Himself the Teacher, He gives one knowledge from Himself… The child of the spirit, born in the heart, is the meaning of true humanity.”
— Hadrat ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani (may Allah sanctify his secret)
When I first set out to seek answers to the questions gnawing at my soul, I was living in Green Bay, Wisconsin. For three years, I worked as a boner and meat cutter in the packing houses of Green Bay and Milwaukee. It was among the most grueling and dehumanizing work I have ever known.
For hours on end—sometimes eleven hours a day—we stood in the cold, blood soaking our clothes from head to toe, breathing air thick with steam rising off freshly cut beef. I later developed a severe sinus infection; the mucus dripping from my nose smelled of rotten meat. Survival in that place depended on sharp knives. I carried five to ten at a time on my belt. Ceramic and steel sharpeners hung from chains—tools as precious as oxygen. We wore thick rubber belly guards, though now and then a blade would pierce through and find flesh. One hand wore a wire mesh glove holding a hook; the other held the knife. You learned never to touch the meat—only the hook. Focus narrowed to cutting. Nothing else existed.
Green Bay Meats and Cold Storage was owned by the Frankenthal family. My encounter with Ziggy Frankenthal came the day I was fired.
I was working near the end of the line when I noticed quarters and shanks sliding past, no one pulling them off. I reached for one, but the man beside me grabbed my arm and stopped me. Only then did I realize what was happening. A union work stoppage. I watched it unfold like a silent tableau. I wasn’t even a union member. One of the boners up the line was taken away. The others, one by one, went back to work.
Something snapped.
I stripped off my belly guard and knives, slammed them onto the table, and shouted—poorly, clumsily, still new to American profanity—
“You Americans got no balls! You let one man take the blame and you give up!”
I was still Malaysian then, still carrying a British sense of propriety. I could have cursed far worse. Thank God I didn’t.
The other man and I were hauled before Ziggy Frankenthal and his daughter. Ziggy looked at us and said, “Today I fire you. Tomorrow I can hire ten.”
I met his eyes and replied, “It will catch up with you soon enough,” and walked out.
A month later—almost to the day—Ziggy suffered a heart attack while answering a call from the FBI, accused of wiretapping his competitors. I learned of it later, while working at another packing plant in Milwaukee.
By then, the damage had already been done—to me.
I stayed in the industry long enough to realize I was becoming like the cattle I cut apart for supermarkets and burger joints. The monotony, the violence, the cold logic of the line seeped into my bones. I lost my marriage and, with it, custody of my son. I descended into a shadow version of myself—drunk or stoned most days, chasing women, driven by appetite and impulse. I had become beast-like. Conscience dulled. Fear of God and man evaporated.
That dark period taught me how far a human being can fall when stripped of meaning.
Grace came quietly. First, through the pain of divorce. Then through a neighbor who saw something in me I had forgotten. He urged me to leave the meat industry and return to school. He believed I could be a student.
With nothing left to lose, I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. To my surprise, academic life fit me naturally. Despite clashes with a few professors—some resulting in failed or incomplete grades—I graduated cum laude.
More importantly, those years reawakened a spiritual dimension that had lain dormant since I left Malaysia. Professors and friends introduced me to spiritual writings. I found deep resonance in Zen Buddhism, even as I remained Muslim. Art returned as my means of reflection. My sketchbooks filled again.
I was accepted into the University Without Walls program under the University of Wisconsin–Madison—a self-designed degree. That was when the real journey began. As part of my studies, I traveled widely: England, Germany, Colombia, Ecuador. I crossed deserts and mountains in New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado, living out of the trunk of an old Chevy Impala. My final semester was spent in Malaysia, where I witnessed the Gawai Hantu ceremony of the Iban people in Sarawak.
I traveled light, carrying books instead of baggage—Krishnamurti, Yogananda, Alan Watts, Ram Dass, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, D.T. Suzuki, Chögyam Trungpa, Carlos Castaneda. I wasn’t just reading. I was testing, observing, applying.
By the time I completed my degree, I had gained something beyond education. I had awakened. That awakening set me on a lifelong path of inquiry and discipline. Since then, I have kept journals and sketchbooks—records of thoughts, encounters, and realizations. They have become the scaffolding of my life’s work.
Not long after graduating, I met Robert Serge at Bellin Hospital in Green Bay. We were preparing for a two-man exhibition—his photography and my printmaking. His images stunned me: stark, luminous photographs from his annual fishing trips to Alaska. I asked him outright to take me with him. He laughed. I insisted.
I had no money. No job. My son and his mother had moved to Germany. My love life lay in ruins. There was no reason to remain in Packer Town and drink myself numb.
In May 1982, we packed Robert’s Chevy Nova for the long drive north. The fuel tank leaked and could only hold a quarter tank at a time, so we watched gas stations like lifelines. We left Green Bay on the first of May, passed through Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Near Spokane, we drove through thick dust from Mount St. Helens, which had erupted only days earlier. Before leaving Wisconsin, we stopped in Little Suamico to help plant pine seedlings with a small community of nature lovers. I still wonder how those trees are doing.
Along the way, we visited Teanaway Valley, Washington, and stopped at the home of a skipper named Donald Bark. His yard was littered with old outhouses from the wagon-trail era—his peculiar hobby. It was my first glimpse of the man who would later trust me on his boat in the Bering Sea.
I did not know it then, but everything I had endured—the slaughterhouses, the collapse, the long road of study and seeking—was preparing me for what awaited in the Aleutians.
Chapter Five – The Two Voices Within (Revised)
I have come to see that my life is shaped by two distinct currents flowing within me—two natures that often move in opposite directions, yet somehow keep me afloat. One speaks in English, the other in Malay. One dreams in the language of the West, filled with plans, ambition, and the hunger to experience. The other whispers in the tongue of my ancestors, reminding me of faith, humility, and the ever-present reality of God.
For many years, I did not recognize this division clearly. I thought I was simply being myself, reacting as any man would. Only with time did I begin to see how my mind operates in layers. My Western self is restless, inquisitive, and daring. It urges me to explore, to paint, to cross oceans, to test the limits of my body—whether on the deck of a fishing boat or in the quiet concentration of etching a plate. This voice gave me courage and expression, but it also fed my ego, and more than once led me close to the edge of ruin.
It was my Eastern self that kept me from stepping too far into the abyss. This voice carried the faith of my parents, the grounding of Islam, the inherited wisdom of my forebears—and even faint echoes of the Awakened One. It reminded me that life is not measured solely by experience, and that beyond striving lies surrender. Without this voice, I might have been lost to my own impulses.
The tension between these two selves was not abstract; it played out in daily choices. At times, I allowed the Western voice to lead me into new worlds, hungry for knowledge, freedom, and expression. At other times, when the weight of my own recklessness pressed in, I heard the Eastern reminder: be still, trust, remember. Between these two currents, I stumbled forward, somehow surviving.
In Green Bay, as in Alaska, my life unfolded as a conversation between these voices. Standing at the edge of the unknown—whether facing a storm in the Bering Sea or enduring a Wisconsin winter—I could feel them both speaking. And in their friction, I began to sense something else: quieter, deeper, and steady.
This was the witness.
The witness is not Western or Eastern, not ego or faith. It observes without judgment. It notices when one voice grasps and when the other restrains. Discovering this witness marked the beginning of my real education.
I came to understand that I am not my body, though I have trained it hard. I am not my mind, though I have chased its thoughts down countless corridors. These are instruments—useful, necessary—but not my essence. The essence is this silent awareness, always present, always watching.
This understanding changed how I met others. I began to see that every interaction—every conflict, every friendship—was shaped by which voice I was speaking from. Was I meeting someone through hunger or through restraint? Through ego, or through faith?
The witness allowed me to step back, to see myself in motion, and to forgive myself when I faltered. It taught me that life is not about silencing one voice in favor of the other, but about listening to both, and finding balance in the space between.
I write this not as a confession or a boast, but as a map of how my inner world works. The West gave me curiosity, freedom, and expression. The East gave me grounding, reverence, and faith. Between them, I found the witness—untouched by thought, steady beneath the storms.
This, perhaps, is the most important discovery of my journey so far.
Chapter Six – Wish You Were Here
When I think of Green Bay in the late 1970s, Pink Floyd plays in the background. Wish You Were Here was everywhere on campus—the soundtrack of a generation wandering through smoke-filled dorm rooms and restless dreams. It became my soundtrack too, though my way of arriving at it was far from ordinary.
In 1978, I had just returned from a two-and-a-half-month odyssey across the Southwest—New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. I was driving a beat-up 1964 Chevy Impala, once owned by my girlfriend’s grandmother. M. Counard had sold it to me for two U.S. dollars. That car was my freedom, my shelter, and ultimately, my trial by fire.
On Highway 666—aptly named—the journey nearly ended. Between Gallup and Durango, in the darkness of the Navajo Reservation, a pickup slammed into me around one in the morning. The Impala was crushed on the passenger side from front to back. Somehow, I walked away. Sheer miracle. The road could have swallowed me whole that night, but it did not.
By the time I limped back into Green Bay, battered and bruised, I was exhausted—physically, emotionally, spiritually. My first stop was at my friend Francis Wilson’s house. He was on his way out the door. With a hollow look, he handed me his house keys and told me he and his wife were divorcing. Another blow.
Then came worse news: my three-year-old son had left for Germany with his mother. I didn’t know if or when I’d ever see him again. The weight of it all pressed on me like a mountain.
I drifted back to campus, numb, and ended up at the apartment of my Thai student friends. They must have seen the wreck I had become, because they pressed a bottle of whiskey into my hand, as if to say, drink, forget for a while. I leaned against their living room wall, headphones clamped over my ears, as Wish You Were Here flooded in on repeat. The sound felt like it bypassed my ears and poured directly into my soul.
Then something happened. I slipped out of myself. I watched my own body slumped there in pain, while “I” floated above, untouched—a witness to my suffering but not trapped in it. For those moments, I was free.
When I woke, the headphones were still on, the record still looping. My friends had gone to class, but they had left food for me. I was grateful for their kindness. These Thai students treated me like a brother. One was even the son of the chairman of Thai Airways. Their generosity extended to my battered Impala: when I finally sold it, the only part worth anything was the sports radials that had once graced their fancy cars.
Looking back, that night was more than just a low point—it was a strange turning point. Between the crash, the loss of my son, the collapse of friendships, and the music of Roger Waters echoing in my skull, I glimpsed the fragile border between despair and awakening. My Western side tried to drown in whiskey, but something deeper lifted me out—to watch my suffering without being consumed by it.
Years later, Roger Waters’ Amused to Death struck me in the same place: a world lulled to sleep by distraction, drifting toward its own demise while staring at screens. That night in Green Bay was the same lesson, written small: my pain, my losses, even the music, could have been another diversion. But for a few moments, I saw through it. I became a witness.
And in that brief silence beyond the storm, I understood something that has never left me: I was not the body leaning against that wall, not the mind tormented by loss, but the awareness that held it all.
It was also in Green Bay that my life took a different turn. I had earned a solid foundation in art, but the studio walls began to feel confining. I wanted to live art, to test it in the world, to let life itself be the canvas.
Around that time, I discovered the University Without Walls program—UWW—a pioneering initiative introduced in 1979 by UW–Madison and offered through Green Bay. Students could design their own degree paths, provided they had the academic standing to handle independence. The requirements were steep: at least 37 credits, a 3.7 GPA, and a written proposal to a panel of faculty from across disciplines. Most applicants had to sit for an interview.
I met the criteria, wrote my proposal, and to my surprise, was accepted outright—no interview required. Perhaps it was the audacity of my plan that caught their attention. My proposal was titled Art in Quest of Universality. I argued that I had reached a plateau in the studio environment. To grow, I needed to take my education into the world. I wanted to create and perform as an artist in public spaces, letting the world shape me as much as I shaped my work.
Some professors chuckled; others believed in me, enough to donate art materials and pocket money to get me started. One whispered during my first solo exhibition at the Lawton Gallery, “Sam, all these guys can’t hold water up to your work.” Those words stayed with me.
My first semester as an independent UWW student took me to England, carrying fifteen credits in sketching, photography, and journal writing. On return, I presented my work as a slide lecture, a journal of sketches, and a reflective paper. The faculty received it well—they saw that my experiment was no idle dream.
Next, South America called—Colombia and Ecuador—where I immersed myself in a different rhythm of life. I returned with journals, drawings, and photographs, earning straight A’s. Along the way, I began a habit that has never left me: keeping a travel journal that mixed sketches, notes, and fragments of reflection. They became my companions, my archives, my witnesses.
The third leg of my UWW journey took me across the American Southwest—Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. I drove my battered Chevy Impala along Highway 666, survived a head-on near miss in the rain, picked up a hitchhiker who vanished into Durango, and found myself trapped in a snowstorm with only a dashboard Virgin Mary for company. I lived out of that car, slept in a tent pitched wherever the night found me, and subsisted on canned food. It was reckless. At the time, it was freedom.
Finally, I returned home to Malaysia. I documented Thaipusam in Penang, a traditional Malay wedding, and the haunting Gawai Hantu festival among the Iban in Sarawak, where I stayed in a longhouse. I photographed the turquoise waters of Kapas and Redang before they became tourist havens. These images left a deep impression on the Green Bay community when I returned. I was invited to present in schools, churches, and community halls—me, a scrappy Malaysian kid with sketchbooks, trying to explain a world few had seen.
The UWW program didn’t just give me an education—it gave me a way of life. Since then, I have never stopped chronicling my journey. My journals grew into this blog, Ramblings of the Cheeseburger Buddha. My travels carried me farther still—Alaska, where I fished on the Bering Sea; San Francisco, where I worked among wanderers and poets; Japan and Malaysia, where I became a father and a seeker. But it all began here, with a university willing to let me step outside its walls and test the world as my classroom.
Education, I learned, is not confined to lectures or textbooks. It is the act of living with awareness, turning each encounter into a teacher. The UWW gave me permission to follow that path, but it is life itself that has carried me along it ever since.
Chapter Seven – The Rascal in Uniform: A Memory Reawakened by Alan Watts
It is strange how memory works. Some moments slip away for decades and then, without warning, resurface—triggered by the most unlikely spark. Today, at seventy-six, in the quiet of my morning, I stumbled on a recording of Alan Watts’ final radio interview. His voice—tired but mischievous—unlocked a part of my past I had not visited in years.
Suddenly I was thirty-two again, in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The year was 1977, maybe 1978. I had a job with J&J Security, guarding inside a McDonald’s. Imagine the absurdity: a young Malaysian man in the heart of Redneck country, standing in polyester among the hiss of fryers and the smell of greasy burgers, while outside the windows the Wisconsin snow lay silent and white. The uniform was my shield. To others it was a rent-a-cop outfit; to me it was armor—my Buddha’s robe in polyester, keeping ridicule at bay and giving me the space to play the rascal. Hidden inside its folds, I felt safe enough to observe, to chuckle to myself, to carry a little spark of Watts’ playful spirit.
Alan Watts was my secret companion then, just as he is now. His books and talks—contraband to my young, searching mind—gave me a way to see life as both a cosmic joke and a profound mystery. He taught me not to take the whole show too seriously. So there I was in that ridiculous in-between: fryers crackling behind me, snow piling outside, teenagers hollering nonsense—and me, smiling to myself in uniform, a private audience of one.
On a break, I sat with a Double Cheeseburger in one hand and The Way of Zen in the other. The irony was thick: a Muslim holding haram meat while reading about a path that often shuns flesh. Heat blasted from the kitchen; I sweated in thermal underwear beneath the polyester; the room smelled of oil and ketchup; and yet, in that ridiculous tableau, time stopped.
I had a satori.
Time suspended. I looked down at my hands—cheeseburger in one, Zen book in the other—and saw myself reflected in that absurd moment. I floated out of the slump and watched my body as if from above: a Malaysian student in America, a rent-a-cop in polyester, Muslim and curious about Buddhism, colored and invisible at once—a stranger and yet a participant. The name thundered in my head like a sudden laugh:
“You are nothing but a Cheeseburger Buddha!”
I could almost hear Watts’ comic Zen laugh in the background.
That was the birth of the Cheeseburger Buddha—a paradox, a living irony, a reminder that awakening does not always arrive in a temple or a silent hall. Sometimes it sneaks up in the least likely of places: at a McDonald’s, in the American Midwest, in a sweaty uniform, with a forbidden burger held like an offering.
Years later, Roger Waters’ Amused to Death would strike that same place in me—the picture of a world lulled into sleep by distraction, watching itself vanish into flickering screens. That Green Bay night was a smaller, truer echo of the same lesson: so much of life is a diversion, an anesthetic. But for a few minutes, lifted by music and absurdity, I saw through it. I became the witness rather than the eaten-up actor.
Now, more than four decades on, I know the rascal never really leaves. He grows quieter, humbler, kinder perhaps, but he remains. The Cheeseburger Buddha is not merely a nickname. He is a time capsule of who I was at thirty-two in uniform and despair, and who I am now—an older man who still sometimes feels that flicker. The lesson is not to banish him. It is to embrace him, feed him a cheeseburger if it helps, and sit down to pray when the azan calls.
So I release the memory not with shame but with gratitude—for the uniform, the grease, the snow, the laugh. For Alan Watts’ voice that turns keys in the long-locked drawers of myself. For the rascal that kept me breathing when everything else felt like it might drown me.
Yes, the Cheeseburger Buddha still lives here. He sits quietly now, sometimes nudging me toward mischief, always reminding me that life, in its deepest sense, is both funny and holy.
That little rascal—the Cheeseburger Buddha—was never just a joke or a momentary satori. He was the seed of a mindset that would carry me far beyond the walls of any classroom or the greasy floors of a fast-food kitchen. The same curiosity, irreverence, and willingness to watch life unfold without clinging to the outcome propelled me into the world as a UWW student.
From the streets of Green Bay to the sketching studios of England, the mountains of New Mexico, the longhouse festivals of Sarawak, and the turquoise waters of Malaysia, I carried that spark. It whispered to me when I was alone in the Chevy Impala, when I faced snowstorms or near misses, and later when I stood at the helm of the Iceland in the Bering Sea. It reminded me to remain present, to find humor in the absurd, and to observe without attachment—even as life demanded courage, endurance, and faith.
In every journal page, sketch, photograph, and reflection, the Cheeseburger Buddha sat quietly, nudging me to notice the wonder, the paradox, and the beauty in all things. He was my silent companion through the world-class chaos of living art in the world itself. And it was this mindset—playful, alert, resilient—that allowed the lessons of UWW, travel, and spiritual practice to take root, transforming curiosity into awareness, and mischief into insight.
In that sense, the rascal and the seeker are one and the same: the witness, the student, the fool, and the sage all rolled into a single, improbable human experiment.
Chapter Eight
Basement and Boxes — Unsui on the Fox River
For eight years, I lived in a cold country. Twice, I came close to ending my own life and failed. For eight years, I found friendships and love that knew no bounds. For eight years, I traded my soul for a life of hedonism and lust, and I let my ego run free. It was survival, plain and simple: freeze my ass off in the Wisconsin night, or keep moving.
I remember one evening standing on Main Street waiting for the bus. I had only my army jacket and long johns under my sweater. It was so cold I could feel every bone in my body, and at one moment I felt detached — watching myself under the streetlight, waiting. Riding the bus was a brief reprieve from the cold, but the ride itself was an inner questioning: How did I end up in this state of consciousness?
If you ask me what was most beautiful about Green Bay, I will gladly say: the women. My love and respect for all of them, those I have touched and those who touched my life. I am grateful for every moment we shared. Forgive me if I hurt or made you feel bad when we parted ways. The ladies of Green Bay — I salute you better than I salute the Packers.
I miss my young friend Jerry Sule, a plumber in Green Bay. We still keep in touch through the Internet. When he was about seventeen and I in my thirties, we drove all the way from Green Bay to the southern edge of New Mexico. I was then a student at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay (UWGB), enrolled in a program called University Without Walls. It was an unusual course: you had to maintain a 3.75 GPA, write a proposal, and defend it before a faculty committee. I passed and designed my own study plan. My first trip was to England; later came the American Southwest. The rest is history — retold many times in this blog.
I owe the Sule family a debt of gratitude for letting me sleep in their basement while I studied. Mrs. Mariane Sule was like my mother; Chuck Sule was like an older brother. They had five boys. Back then people said the Sule brothers ruled Green Bay. One night at a bar called the Duck Duck Goose, a Mexican man was about to knife me when a large arm wrapped around his throat — Jerry Sule. I ate, slept, and breathed the Sules on Hickory Drive, and I got to know Tanya, their husky bitch who snapped at fingers until she trusted you. My son Naz used to visit me there; he bonded with Tanya even more than I did.
During those years, I called my life Basement and Boxes, Unsui — The Way of the Cloud. It was minimal living, traveling light, and almost homeless.
Later, I moved to Humboldt Road near the university. The old farmhouse there looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting: a hundred-year-old wooden house with a dilapidated barn, two leaning silos, and, hidden inside the barn, the relic of a biplane. In summer, it was a sea of green cornfields; in winter, pure white snow. The landlord, Leon P. Lodl, worked for the water department and lived alone. He had also bought a church up north in Iron Mountain, Michigan, which he was converting into a ski lodge. In the fall we would drive up together. From the top of the International Ski Ramp you could see four states at once — a sea of color like no other.
Leon loved jazz and classical music. Every evening we lay in beanbags facing a blazing fire, a bottle of red wine between us, listening to his albums. He was a voracious reader, respected by his peers, a divorced father of four grown children. He once considered taking a job on Tonga Island in the Pacific. He drove an old black Beetle with a small trailer hitched behind for hauling materials up north.
The farm on Humboldt Road was one of the cornerstones of my life. It was where I learned what it felt like to be a complete Green Bay boy. I studied art, drifted between relationships, and fell into alcoholism and marijuana. The devil is in the details, but this is as far as I’ll go; my private life draws a line here. I owe those I loved a debt of gratitude and hope for forgiveness for my wrong moves. This is my final effort at reconciliation with myself.
Sometimes writing these memories feels like watching lumps rise to the surface — reminders of who you are, or think you are. Yet even those lumps, once seen, drift away.
Ya hey. Green Bay.
When I look back on those eight years in Green Bay, I see both the best and the worst of myself. I came close to ending my life, and I also came close to discovering it. I drowned myself in whiskey, smoke, and fleeting loves, and yet I also found friendship, warmth, and people who gave me shelter when I had none.
What sticks with me now is not the cold nights waiting for the bus, not the basements or the hunger, not even the heartbreaks. What stays alive in me are the faces of those who stood by me — friends, women I loved and hurt, families who welcomed me as one of their own. To all of them, I owe a debt of gratitude, and to some, an apology.
Green Bay was never just where I lived. It was where I was stripped bare, forced to meet myself without excuses. I stumbled, I failed, I laughed, I loved. And in that crucible of cold and fire, something inside me survived — a flicker of spirit that still carries me today.
Chapter Eight
Basement and Boxes — Unsui on the Fox River
For eight years, I lived in a cold country.
Twice, I came close to ending my own life and failed.
For eight years, I found friendships and love that knew no bounds.
For eight years, I traded pieces of my soul for a life of hedonism and lust, letting my ego run free.
It was survival, plain and simple: freeze my ass off in the Wisconsin night, or keep moving.
I remember one evening standing on Main Street, waiting for the bus. I wore only my army jacket, a sweater, and long johns underneath. It was so cold I could feel every bone in my body. At one point, I felt detached—watching myself under the streetlight, waiting. The bus ride was a brief reprieve from the cold, but the journey itself became an inner interrogation: How did I end up in this state of consciousness?
If you ask me what was most beautiful about Green Bay, I will say it without hesitation: the women. My love and respect go to all of them—those I touched and those who touched my life. I am grateful for every moment we shared. Forgive me if I hurt you or caused pain when we parted ways. The women of Green Bay—I salute you more deeply than I salute the Packers.
I miss my young friend Jerry Sule, a plumber in Green Bay. We still keep in touch through the internet. When he was about seventeen and I was in my thirties, we drove all the way from Green Bay to the southern edge of New Mexico. At the time, I was a student at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, enrolled in the University Without Walls program—an unusual course of study that demanded discipline, independence, and courage. You had to maintain a GPA of at least 3.75, write a proposal, and defend it before a faculty committee. I passed and designed my own path. England came first. Then the American Southwest. The rest is history—retold many times in this blog.
I owe the Sule family a deep debt of gratitude for letting me sleep in their basement while I studied. Mrs. Mariane Sule was like my mother; Chuck Sule like an older brother. They had five boys. Back then, people said the Sule brothers ruled Green Bay. One night, at a bar called the Duck Duck Goose, a Mexican man was about to knife me when a massive arm wrapped around his throat—Jerry Sule. I ate, slept, and breathed the Sules on Hickory Drive. I came to know Tanya, their husky bitch, who snapped at fingers until she trusted you. My son Naz visited me there; he bonded with Tanya even more deeply than I did.
During those years, I called my life Basement and Boxes, Unsui—the way of the cloud. It was minimal living. Traveling light. Almost homeless.
Later, I moved to Humboldt Road, near the university. The old farmhouse there looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting: a hundred‑year‑old wooden house, a dilapidated barn, two leaning silos, and—hidden inside the barn—the relic of a biplane. In summer, it was a sea of green cornfields; in winter, pure white snow.
The landlord, Leon P. Lodl, worked for the water department and lived alone. He had also bought a church in Iron Mountain, Michigan, which he was converting into a ski lodge. In the fall, we would drive up together. From the top of the International Ski Ramp, you could see four states at once—a sea of color like no other.
Leon loved jazz and classical music. Every evening we lay in beanbags facing a blazing fire, a bottle of red wine between us, listening to his records. He was a voracious reader, respected by his peers, a divorced father of four grown children. At one point, he even considered taking a job on Tonga Island in the Pacific. He drove an old black Beetle with a small trailer hitched behind it for hauling materials up north.
That farm on Humboldt Road became one of the cornerstones of my life. It was where I learned what it felt like to be a Green Bay boy. I studied art. Drifted between relationships. Fell into alcoholism and marijuana. The devil is in the details, but this is as far as I will go. My private life draws a line here. I owe those I loved a debt of gratitude—and hope for forgiveness for my missteps. This is my final act of reconciliation with myself.
Sometimes writing these memories feels like watching lumps rise to the surface—solid reminders of who you were, or thought you were. And yet, once seen, even those lumps eventually drift away.
Ya hey.
Green Bay.
When I look back on those eight years, I see both the best and the worst of myself. I came close to losing my life—and close to discovering it. I drowned myself in whiskey, smoke, and fleeting loves, and yet I also found friendship, warmth, and people who offered shelter when I had none.
What stays with me now is not the cold nights waiting for the bus, not the basements or the hunger, not even the heartbreaks. What remains alive are the faces of those who stood by me—friends, women I loved and hurt, families who welcomed me as one of their own. To all of them, I owe gratitude. To some, an apology.
Green Bay was never just where I lived.
It was where I was stripped bare—forced to meet myself without excuses.
I stumbled. I failed. I laughed. I loved.
And in that crucible of cold and fire, something survived—a flicker of spirit that still carries me today.
Chapter Nine
A Leap Into Liberation: Skeletons, Smoke, and Selfhood
The inward journey rarely moves in straight lines. In the previous chapter, I wrote of suffering and insight, of the fragile line between endurance and collapse, and of my own brushes with both. But reflection is never finished; it is more like peeling an endless onion. Each layer reveals another beneath it.
This chapter is one such peeling back—a step into the closets where old skeletons rattle, where smoke from past fires still lingers. What emerges here is not a tidy philosophy, but a lived struggle with the most persistent riddle of all: the “I.”
What follows is neither sermon nor doctrine, but a personal leap—a movement away from conditioning and toward something resembling liberation.
Having lost my own attention more than once over the past weeks, I now return to the deeper recesses of the unconscious, opening those hidden cupboards where old assumptions lie dormant. I take this step deliberately—and I invite you, if you wish, to take it with me.
Let us leap into the unknown, over the edge and into the abyss—not as an act of despair, but as surrender. Not an ending, but the closing of one chapter and the opening of another.
You ask: Liberation from what?
I answer: liberation from conditioned thought and inherited patterns. From addictions and attachments, from dreams long faded yet still flapping on forgotten flagpoles. Liberation from arrogance and apathy, indulgence and sloth, and that subtle sense of superiority we wear like perfume. Liberation from the idea that we are our thoughts, our names, our histories.
Liberation from the “I” itself.
From the moment we learn to say Ma or Dada, our fate begins to calcify. Parents lead the way, then neighbors, uncles, aunties, teachers, classmates. Even the ice cream man leaves his mark. Slowly, we are shaped into a “wholesome entity.” The shaping continues through school, society, and endless education until the mind becomes a cluttered attic of secondhand knowledge.
Then, one summer afternoon by the shore of Lake Michigan in Green Bay, Wisconsin, something interrupted the noise. Sitting quietly, lost in thought, I noticed a dead lake trout—its flesh gone, its bones bleached white by the sun. In that moment, time seemed to stop. Even the ripples on the water went still.
An epiphany.
Everything decays.
Everything dies.
And knowing this is what gives rise to suffering.
That is the human burden, we tell ourselves.
Descartes declared, “I think, therefore I am.”
Centuries earlier, the Buddha observed, “So long as there is an ‘I,’ there is suffering.”
Remove the “I”? Easy to say. Impossible to master.
Since the beginning, we have asked: How do I liberate myself from myself?
Even in Scripture, God tells Moses, “I Am That I Am.”
A declaration. A mystery. A paradox.
And so began my long estrangement from religious certainty, though not from faith. I followed religions, yes—but I never stopped asking. Eventually, I found myself saying: I am spiritual, not religious.
Once I glimpsed what I needed liberation from, the next question arose: How?
It has taken me more than forty years, and I am still unsure how close I am. My compass spins. I head east and find myself facing west. I climb, only to fall. I surrender, only to cling again. A cycle of insight and delusion, of collapse and quiet grace.
Yet I keep walking.
And with every utterance of the word “I,” I now know—more clearly than ever—who it is that speaks.
Not a name.
Not a past.
Not even a body.
Only presence.
Only witness.
Only the breath of God passing through the hollow reed of this life.
Standing on those shores of Lake Michigan, staring at the bones of a trout, I sensed my own skeleton waiting somewhere down the line. The self I had clung to was already decaying. Books, questions, smoke-filled nights—they had brought me here, but they could not take me further.
An old line echoed back:
Suffering is—but none who suffers. Enlightenment is—but none who attains it.
Something had to give. A life lived only in the mind would never be enough. I had to leave the library and step into the world. I had to test truth in wind and salt spray, in work and silence, in the open sea.
Green Bay had been my crucible.
Now it was time to step out of the fire and see what shape I had been forged into.
Chapter Ten
The Zen Hijrah – My Journey to San Francisco and Beyond
Sometime around 1983 or 1984, I landed at San Francisco International Airport, departing from Austin Straubel Airport in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was a turning point—a Hijrah, a migration both outward and inward, a conscious shift from chaos to clarity.
I hadn’t left Wisconsin entirely by choice. It was a gentle push from Rosella Kelly, an elderly fellow printmaker at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. Sharp-eyed and compassionate, she told me bluntly that I was becoming self-destructive, and that my energy was affecting others. Her advice? “Go to New York. My son is being ordained a Zen priest. He plans to open a monastery. Perhaps you’ll find your peace there.”
I agreed. That very day, I scraped together what funds I could to support a journey to the Daibosatsu Zen Center in the Catskill Mountains.
But fate intervened. Rosella later told me her son, Dennis Kelly, had changed plans—he was headed to the West Coast to set up a monastery in the San Francisco Bay Area instead. So I rerouted, bought a plane ticket to California, and prepared to meet a man I had never met, newly ordained as Junpo Kelly, Zen priest.
At the airport, just as I was about to turn away in fear, I bumped into a bald man in full priest robes, holding a large staff. We apologized, and his assistant handed me a brochure announcing a Zen talk in Berkeley by an old Korean monk. I took it as a sign.
I hopped an airport shuttle into the city, then caught a BART train to Berkeley. Wandering the main street, asking strangers, I stumbled upon the Old Plum Mountain Zen Center. I met Mel Weisman, not yet abbot, and asked to stay the night. Gently, he refused and directed me instead to the City Zen Center on Page Street in San Francisco.
On my way back to BART, I spotted a flyer in a laundromat window. Lord Ganesha’s image stared down at me above an announcement for a Deepavali celebration in Golden Gate Park hosted by the Hare Krishna movement—promising free food and drinks. Hungry and tired, I went, only to find books on Hinduism, a statue of a swami, and saffron-robed devotees chanting and dancing—no food, no drink.
I was worn out. My heavy backpack and portfolio weighed me down—prints I had hoped to sell to support myself. A passerby pointed me to Page Street. I looked up. Only one way to go: forward.
Passing a small shop filled with incense and candles, I was drawn in. A striking woman with long black hair invited me inside. For $25—more than I could afford—she gave me a tarot reading. The card that stuck? The Devil. She said, “Don’t be afraid. The Devil can be your ally in times of need.” I left disturbed but intrigued.
Thus began my path into Zen. I never attended the Korean monk’s talk in Berkeley. Instead, I eventually found my place at the Green Gulch Zen Center in Sausalito, Marin County. Strange how destiny unfolds.
Along the way, devils came in many forms—some wore robes, others sold drugs. Yet some of these “devils” were my deepest spiritual allies:
-
Dennis Kelly – once a drug dealer, later Junpo, Zen priest and founder of the Hollow Bones order.
-
Buddha Ron – living at Stinson Beach, a hippie haven of seekers and driftwood souls.
-
Joshua Bowes – residing at the legendary corner of Haight and Ashbury, cradle of counterculture.
Without their friendship, I might never have survived—or thrived—in those early days.
Places that shaped this chapter:
📍 Stinson Beach – quiet coastal town, home to surfers, mystics, and Zen poets.
📍 Haight-Ashbury – the soul of 1960s counterculture, still echoing with chants, incense, and Grateful Dead ghosts.
📍 Page Street Zen Center – where I first sought shelter and a foothold.
📍 Green Gulch Farm Zen Center – where I eventually lived, worked, and practiced.
San Francisco was less a city than a mirror. Every corner reflected back parts of me I had ignored, denied, or buried. The devils I feared, the friends I trusted, the strangers who handed me breadcrumbs of fate—all pointed toward the same truth: the path of Zen is never linear. It winds through shadows, temptations, revelations, and encounters that seem accidental but carry the weight of destiny.
My Hijrah was not to a place but to a way of being—walking the thin line between chaos and clarity, between the Devil and the Dharma. And as I arrived at Green Gulch Zen Center, what used to be the Wheelwright Cattle Range, now an organic farm, located at the foot of the Tamalpais, where the Pacific Ocean meets Muir Beach, I knew the migration had only just begun; the Devil is in the Dharma.
Chapter 11 – The Imperturbable Mind: Rinzai, Rupture, and Redirection
Prologue: A Forgotten Journal, a Forgotten Fire
"I forsook intellectual understanding in favor of a knowledge that would be stronger than perception... to fill the time allotted to man with an almost blissful waiting, a knowledge redeemed from oblivion..."
— Hermann Broch, The Spell
I found this quote pasted inside the cover of one of my 1986 journals, a book of sketches and half-formed thoughts I carried in San Francisco. Rereading it now, I realize it was never just a quotation — it was a mirror. It echoed everything I had been reaching for, everything I was burning through.
Back then, I was still a seeker stumbling in the dark. Still restless. Still bouncing like a stone skipping across the surface of the unknown, praying I would land in truth before I sank.
Leaving Green Bay: A Nudge from the Universe
It began, strangely enough, in the printmaking shop at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.
One evening, as I was scrubbing copper plates, Rosella Kelly, an elderly woman with gentle eyes and a spine of steel, turned to me and said,
“Sam, I think it’s time for you to leave.”
She wasn’t just speaking casually — she was sending me.
Her son, Dennis Kelly, had just been ordained as a Zen priest and was opening a Zen-Yoga center. At first, she said New York. Then, plans changed: Dennis was headed west, to San Francisco.
That was all I needed. I was drowning in Green Bay — lost in grief, addictions, and anger. Rosella’s words were like a rope thrown into quicksand. I packed what little I had, said my goodbyes to professors, counselors, and friends, and boarded a plane to California.
Saying farewell to my life in Green Bay was no easy matter. I had come to love the cold Midwest and all the people I had the privilllage of sharing my life with for better or for worse. The people who I owe my very existence to, like Mrs. Sheryl Clark, the secretary at the International Student Center, and her boss, Mrs. Elizabeth Kudinger, my former mother-in-law, Mrs. Beatrice Goerst, and her brother, Barney Moese, and my sister-in-law, Phyllis Goerst. The Farrs Family of Farr's Grove, in Brown County, Chester Farr, who took me as his adopted son. Then there was the Sule Family of Hickory Drive, in whose basement I had taken shelter when I was homeless. The faculty members of the UWGB Art Department, who tolerated me more than they cared to. As it was not easy to see them all and express my gratitude, I decided to skip them all and made up my mind that they will remain in my mind as they are now, as I am writing this line. I will live in their memories as they did in mine.
I didn’t know it then, but I was flying into a koan that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
Arrival: The First Encounter with Zen
I still remember stepping out of the terminal at San Francisco International Airport. Backpack on one shoulder, portfolio in hand, fear holding me by the throat, and I made a quick U-Turn like the heat outside was too much, I was scared. As I turned, I bumped into a character that would only exist in a Chinese Opera. He was an old man dressed all in white with layers of robes, shiny bald-headed, and holding a huge staff. We were both caught off guard and automatically stepped back, bowed to each other in apology. His name I later found out, was Soen Sa Nam or something close, a Korean Zen Master on his way to Berkeley.
We bowed instinctively.
His attendant handed me a pamphlet: “Zen is understanding yourself.”
On the back, words that would never leave me:
Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed — that is human.
But there is one thing that always remains clear.
It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.
That was my welcome card to California.
Meeting Dennis Kelly
I eventually tracked down Dennis in Sausalito, and later followed him to Corte Madera, where he opened the Kanzeon Zen-Yoga Center.
He was Rosella's eldest son and had a younger brother, who lived in the Noe Valley area of San Francisco I stayed while I was waiting
Dennis was magnetic. Tough, raw, a former drug dealer turned Zen priest. He became my mentor, teacher, and tormentor all at once.
One day, as we were driving, he turned and asked:
“Bahari, what is the Imperturbable Mind?”
He threw it like a dart, and it pierced straight through me. I had no answer. I still don’t. But that question has shadowed me ever since.
Zen, Yoga, and the Breaking Point
Life under Dennis was rigorous. Zen meditation. Ashtanga yoga. Long silences broken by sharp words.
One evening, during an intense yoga session, Dennis pulled my arm across my chest with a jerk, a stretch. Something tore. Later that night, on New Year's Eve, alone in a shared house, I woke unable to breathe. My ribs seemed glued together. Each inhale was like swallowing glass.
I thought I was dying.
As I lay hung half way from the floor in suspension, from the corner of my eye I saw a squirrel dart past the window on a branch of the tree, and I whispered, “Ya Allah, if this is death, I accept it.”
Then, blackness, the last feeling I had was my face dropped, slapping the wooden floor. I was not sure how long I had stayed there, my body on the futon while my head rested on the floor, but I first heard a whistling-like sound, as though coming from a distance. As it approached my face, it entered my nose like a little worm crawling into my nose. I then realized that I was breathing. Upon this realization, I immediately decided to suck in more air, but the pain in my chest returned with a vengeance. I could not even scream. Then the small voice in my head whispered," Do not panic, let the breath happen on its own, just watch!" I watched my whole body roll slowly back onto the futon.
Weeks in Marin County Hospital followed. I was diagnosed with Pleurisy. My ribcage was filled with fluid. I could barely lie down. Fear and drugs became my daily practice. Anger too. Much of it turned on Dennis and his 'Guerrilla Yoga,' but most of it was on me.
Eido Shimano Roshi was the Abbot of Daibosatsu Zen Center in the Catskills Mountains, in NewYork. He was Dennis's Zen master.
The storm peaked the day Eido Shimano Roshi came to officiate the opening of the Zendo.
I was drugged on painkillers, raw with anger and disorientation. Something in me snapped.
In a moment I can’t fully explain, I grabbed the junko stick that was lying before the small bronze Buddha statue — and brought it down, stopping just a hair from striking the Roshi’s head.
He didn’t flinch. He had his hands crossed before his face to block, and He only whispered, “It’s okay… It’s okay.”
Dennis later told me that the Roshi does not want to see me at the Daibosatsu ever. So much for the Rinzai Zen Linneage, that pride in surprise and aggressive spontaneity
I told Dennis, “Take me to Green Gulch.”
That’s how I found my way to Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County. A slower path. A gentler path. Soto Zen, not Rinzai. A field of silence rather than a hammer of discipline.
Sometimes I wonder: if I had endured, if I had stayed — would I have become a Zen monk, a teacher, an abbot? I silently thank the Almighty for small favors.
Maybe. But the Muslim in me — the fire that refused to bow completely — would never have been silenced. That rupture was necessary.
Zen was a lesson. Not a destination.
The Imperturbable Mind Revisited
I never answered Dennis.
But his question has followed me like a shadow, like a seed I cannot spit out.
Late at night, I would scribble poems in my notebook:
What is the Imperturbable Mind?
It’s eleven fourteen, the moon on the leaves,
The sound of night, an empty Calistoga bottle.
I blow my nose.
It’s eleven fifty-nine. Almost midnight.
And still I wonder…
Where Is Dennis Now?
Dennis Kelly became Junpo, a recognized Rinzai Zen Master, Vice Abbot of Dai Bosatsu, and later the founder of Hollow Bones Zen — a lay order that blends meditation with warrior spirit. His teaching continues. His life evolved.
We haven’t spoken in decades.
But I still hold his question close to my chest, and he has been my first Zen Instructor close to my heart.
Final Reflection
Perhaps the answer was never to be found on the cushion.
Perhaps the Imperturbable Mind is simply this:
To break, to bleed, to breathe again…
And still choose to walk on.
Chapter 12 – Fields of Silence: Compost and the Dharma of Decay
We come into this world full of it and depart with even more. Shit, that is. All through our lives we create and add more shit until, one day, we hardly know what to do with the load. As the Americans say, we find ourselves “up shit creek without a paddle.”
Well, shit isn’t all that bad — if you know what to do with it.
When I was a boy growing up in Penang, I used to watch the Chinese 'night-soil carriers' lug heavy buckets of human waste from outhouses in my neighborhood. The smell was unforgettable, and the thought of dealing with human manure made my stomach churn. Later, I learned that the waste was used to fertilize vegetable gardens, and those same gardens produced the fat, healthy greens my grandmother bought in the market. It was recycling in its most primal form, the original “organic farming.” Zen scatology at its finest.
Years later, on a quiet morning, I found myself watering my own compost piles — heaps of cow and chicken droppings behind my house. Not quite as pungent as human waste, but the irony was unmistakable. In a world where I needed to survive, I was once again selling shit — this time as high-quality compost. Guaranteed organic. Life has a way of circling back.
There was humor in it, of course. Here I was, trying to market manure. But there was also recognition: waste, when processed with care, becomes life-giving. The same applies to thought. This very writing — my mental compost — is no different. Some will dismiss it as garbage. But perhaps, in time, even this will fertilize someone else’s growth. You either put your waste to use or you bury it as waste.
I learned this lesson deeply at Green Gulch Farm in Sausalito, California.
I lived there for two years, surrounded by acres of organic vegetables destined for restaurants and organic produce markets across the Bay Area, including the famed Greens Restaurant. Our practice wasn’t only Zazen in the meditation hall — it was also work practice in the fields. One of my favorite jobs was building compost piles.
Every day, we layered kitchen scraps, weeds, and straw. Sometimes we hauled horse manure by the truckload from a nearby ranch. I loved stacking the piles, watching steam rise as the material fermented, then waiting months to see it turned into dark, rich earth. Later, I would help bury that compost in the soil, planting lettuce, potatoes, and kale, which would in turn feed hundreds of people.
There was a healing in it. A cycle. Touching the soil, sweating with the work, I was tending not only the land but my own brokenness. To compost was to trust time, heat, and transformation. It was as much meditation as sitting on a cushion.
In fact, next to Zazen itself, building compost became the most rewarding practice I experienced at Green Gulch. Waste transformed into nourishment. Suffering transformed into wisdom.
This was Zen in its purest form — not philosophy, but practice. Not escape, but engagement.
Chapter 13 – The Green Dragon Awakens
When I first arrived at Green Gulch with Dennis Kelly, I could hardly walk a few yards without gasping for air. My lungs were still filled with fluid from the injury I had sustained during a yoga practice, what the doctors called pleurisy. I was broken, exhausted, and desperate. I was homeless, no one in Malaysia knew of my whereabouts, and I needed a break really badly.
I went to see the practice period instructor, Paul Discoe, carpenter, priest, and at that time the Shuso, head student of the community. I visited him in his shop, surrounded by the smell of sawdust, and pleaded with him to let me stay. By the time I finished talking, I was almost in tears. I had nowhere else to go. Paul, moved by compassion, gave me permission to remain and recover. That was the beginning of my life at Green Gulch. I had reached ground zero — my true Dharma position.
Breath by Breath
The first weeks were slow and painful. I sat Zazen as best I could, finding that simply sitting with my breath became the most powerful medicine. The new students, many also uncertain and raw, welcomed me with sympathy. The older students were not always so kind. Some made it clear they didn’t want me there. This too became practice: to endure, to bow, to keep breathing.
But soon, healing came. My strength returned, and with it, my belonging. Green Gulch became my home.
Teachers and Companions
Paul Discoe, the Zen Bull, was a man of work more than words. He embodied Zen in hammer and nail, saw and timber. His compassion was sharp, not sentimental. When I once asked him about smoking pot and Zen, he shrugged: “It’s like drinking tea. Make no big deal of it, and it will be no big deal.” He was simple, direct, uncompromising.
Ed Brown was his opposite in some ways — loose, warm, and non-judgmental. His talks were not dry lectures but wide-ranging conversations on Zen, cooking, and life. In the kitchen and in the zendo, his presence kept the Sangha human. He has a great sense of humor that made Zen practice less rigid and down-to-earth. Ed gave me his first Zen robes to wear during my practice at Green Gulch.
Wendy Johnson and Peter Rudnick brought Zen into the earth itself. Under their guidance, work in the fields became practice — planting, weeding, harvesting with mindfulness and joy. They taught us that to touch the soil was also to touch the Dharma.
Blanche Hartman was like the stern but tender mother I never had. She saw through my anger and idiosyncrasies, guiding me with small corrections that left lasting impressions. Once she noticed how I sat Zazen with a fist clenched on my palm. She gently corrected me, showing me the universal mudra, thumbs touching lightly as if cradling an egg. That tiny adjustment became a lifelong teaching.
Later, Blanche would become abbot of Zen Center, but in those days, she was still a teacher finding her own way — and I, her difficult student. Yet she never gave up on me. I still honor her strength and compassion. She officiated my marriage to my late wife. Nancy at Green Gulch.
A Sangha in Mourning
When I arrived, the Sangha was still reeling from the Baker Roshi scandal. Many older students, especially the ordained women, seemed weighed down, walking in black robes like mourners. Community meetings were heavy with pain and recrimination.
But the newer students, under Paul Discoe’s leadership, chose to turn the page. We put our energy into work — into farming, fixing, planting, and cooking. Slowly, the Green Dragon stirred from its slumber.
By the time our practice period was in full swing, the farm was thriving again, the zendo alive with chanting, the kitchen filled with laughter. The past was not forgotten, but it no longer ruled the present.
Encounters with Teachers
I was blessed with encounters that marked me deeply.
Dainin Katagiri Roshi, visiting from Minnesota, once held my hand in dokusan and said softly, “Always remember your original intention, your original motive. Who you are, and why you are here.” His words cut through all my doubts.
Thich Nhat Hanh, when I apologized for ringing the great bell at the wrong time, smiled and told me, “Perhaps it was the right time. Many were falling asleep. You woke them up.”
Ed Brown, when I confessed my unease bowing to the statue of Manjushri as a Muslim, reassured me: “If you believe you are bowing to a piece of wood, then you are in trouble. But if you bow to emptiness, what is there to worry about?”
Each teacher left me with something simple, profound, unforgettable.
Beginner’s Mind
Suzuki Roshi, founder of San Francisco Zen Center, had taught that Zen Mind is Beginner’s Mind. When I entered Green Gulch, I was empty — spiritually, emotionally, materially. I knew nothing of what lay ahead. My life was a tabula rasa.
And so, for two years, I lived as a beginner. I studied in the library, dove into sutras, wrestled with Tibetan texts, tested every practice I could find. I worked in the fields, in the kitchen, in the gardens. I laughed, cried, argued, loved, and learned.
I met writers, artists, bankers, farmers, seekers from every walk of life. To some I was the clown, to others a companion, to others still a mirror. Beginner’s Mind — open, raw, unformed — was my gift and my challenge.
At Green Gulch, I learned that Sangha is not just a community. It is family, fire, and mirror. It heals, and it wounds. It tests, and it carries. In those fields, in those meditation halls, I found both the tenderness and the toughness of Zen.
And I found breath again, the very essence of Zen Practice.
Chapter 14 – Gifts from the Green Dragon
All my ancient twisted karmas, from beginningless time, greed, hate and ignorance, I now fully avow.
These were the words that echoed within me during my days at Green Gulch, the Green Dragon Zen Center nestled in Marin County. I had heard them before, chanted with the others, but over time, they became my own. They were no longer just words on a page or ritual sounds in the zendo—they became a mirror in which I saw my life reflected.
When I first arrived, I was broken in body and spirit. My lungs burned from pleurisy, my pockets were empty, and my mind was in despair. Yet at the very gates of the Green Dragon, I was given life again—not only by the compassion of those who let me stay, but by the practice itself. Sitting with my breath, feeling its rise and fall, I slowly began to heal. Breath became medicine, silence became a teacher, and community became my refuge.
At Green Gulch, I formally took the Bodhisattva vows. To this day I remember the weight of those words as if they were carved into my bones:
Beings are numberless, I vow to awaken with them.
To awaken with them—this was the heart of it. Not to run ahead alone, not to claim some private enlightenment, but to realize that my awakening was bound with the awakening of all beings. This was no small promise. It was not just poetry from a distant age; it was a living vow, one that continues to shape my days.
The Buddha, under the Bodhi tree, declared, “I am awakened, and the whole universe is awakened with me.” At Green Gulch, I caught a glimpse of what he meant. My healing was not just mine—it was tied to the Sangha around me, to the work in the fields, to the laughter at meals, to the discipline of the schedule, to the compassion of teachers who guided me even when I tested their patience. I was not walking this path alone.
I learned, too, that the poisons of greed, hate, and ignorance were not abstract flaws belonging to someone else—they were mine. They were the knots of suffering I carried, the reasons for so much of my stumbling through life. Yet through practice, I also learned of their antidotes: generosity, compassion, and wisdom. The Dharma pointed toward balance, toward the Middle Way—not too tight, not too loose, just enough to let the music of life be in tune.
The gift of the Buddha was this: the reminder of my original nature, untarnished though long forgotten. The gift of the Dharma was the path itself—sitting, working, studying, falling, and rising again. The gift of the Sangha was the family of strangers who became companions, who accepted me even in my rough edges, who showed me that practice is never a solitary endeavor.
From Green Gulch, I carried these treasures forward. They were not possessions to hoard but living vows to embody. I did not leave with robes or titles or recognition, but with something far more precious—the knowledge that I, too, am Buddha in essence, as are all beings, and that my life’s work is to keep remembering this, to keep practicing, and to help awaken with others.
This was the Green Dragon’s roar in my heart, and it still reverberates through my life today.
In the silence of Green Gulch, I discovered not an escape but a return—to breath, to simplicity, to the vow that binds me with all beings. What I carried away was not a certificate or a robe, but the living gifts of the Triple Gem: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, each a reminder that awakening is both personal and shared. These remain my compass, wherever my wandering takes me.
Homage to the World and Time Honored One!
Chapter 15 — The Heart Sutra: The Great Wisdom Beyond Wisdom
Maha Prajñā-pāramitā Hṛdaya — The Great Perfection of Wisdom: Heart Sutra.
We chanted it twice a day at Green Gulch. In Japanese, it is the Hannya Shingyō; in Sanskrit, Maha Prajñā-pāramitā Hṛdaya. It is small and short, the size of a slip of paper, and yet in those few lines the Mahāyāna tradition places the whole of its most radical teaching.
I first met the Sutra in the Zendo, in the low morning light, voices layered in Japanese transliteration that had come to us by way of Chinese and Sanskrit. The words were not merely recited. They were a device for cutting through thought — a liturgy, a hammer, an invitation to see.
The Heart Sutra is, in plain speech, about one crucial, terrifying idea: everything we take for granted as “me” or “mine” — form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness — is empty of a separate, independent self-nature. The Sutra says the five skandhas (the aggregates that compose our experience) are empty. Empty does not mean nothingness in a nihilistic sense; it means nothing exists apart from relationship and dependence. Forms arise only in relationship to other forms. Without the eye there is no seeing; without seeing, there is no visible world. The senses do not function as independent islands. The world is interdependent — dependent-arising.
In practice, this teaching felt less like an argument and more like a bedside lamp turned on in a dark room. I remember once, sitting by Lake Michigan in Green Bay, seeing a sun-bleached trout and feeling time stop. The Sutra’s line — “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” — folded my ordinary world and my inner world into a single revelation: what appears solid is actually a matrix of relations; what seems to be “me” is woven from conditional causes and effects. When that insight touches you it is at once freeing and unsettling.
Some teachers warn that trying to parse the Sutra with only the logical mind misses the point. I agree. The Heart Sutra is not a neat syllogism. It is a series of blows at fundamental delusion, meant to dislodge our clinging rather than satisfy our intellect. As one modern teacher put it, these texts are designed to be confusing to the grasping mind because they aim to break the mind’s habit of grasping.
The Sutra’s grammar is spare, its metaphysics immediate. Consider the statement that the five elements of personhood are empty of their own being. What does that mean for daily life? It means we are called to look: to watch how identity is assembled and to notice how suffering arises when we insist on solidity where there is none. The antidote is not denial of experience but an awakening to how experience depends on conditions.
If the Heart Sutra felt, at first, like high doctrine, it quickly became a practical song in the fields at Green Gulch. We chanted it before the meals, after zazen, and sometimes at dusk, when steam rose from the compost heaps and the valley smelled of damp earth. The verse that says form is emptiness, emptiness is form would settle into my belly and change how I handled a shovel, how I washed a pot, how I met another human being. The teaching moved from page to palm to practice.
The Heart Sutra also has a kinship with the Vedantic insight — the collapse of outer and inner into one luminous understanding — and that resonated with me as a seeker who had read widely across Asian traditions. Yet Buddhism’s framing is pragmatic: the sutra places responsibility on the practitioner. You do not outsource awakening to scripture or ritual. The text points and you must look.
The rising questions stayed with me: if sense experience and thought are dependently arisen, who is the one who “sees” the emptiness? The Sutra does not leave you as a theoretical observer. It invites you to sit, to chant, to work, to let the insight seep into the bones until the usual boundaries relax. The Sangha’s practice — zazen, samu, chanting, and composting — became the laboratory where the Heart Sutra’s ideas were tested and tasted.
It is a difficult sutra for the casual mind, and that is intentional. If we insist that the requirements of logic alone be satisfied, we miss the point. The teaching is a means to shatter the grip of concepts so that the spontaneous, luminous activity of wisdom can move without obstruction.
At Green Gulch, the Heart Sutra lived in the little things: the hand that wiped a table, the breath counted in the zendo, the wheelbarrow full of compost turned back into soil. Wisdom was not something abstract; it was the transformation of waste into nourishment, clinging into letting go.
When I chant the sutra now, the sounds recall wet earth and steam, the flat thud of a shovel, the bell after zazen, and faces at the communal table. The great teaching is brief enough to carry in a pocket and strong enough to hold a life. The Heart Sutra asks us to wake not as an escape from the world, but as a way to live inside it — lighter, more open, less captive to the "I" that produces so much suffering.
Chapter 16 – Beginner’s Mind in the Streets of San Francisco
What did I learn about myself after two years at a Zen monastery?
That I could lose everything—my place in the Sangha, my roof, my safety net—and still carry something no one could take away: a beginner’s mind.
At Green Gulch, I was labeled a disruptor. I rang bells at the wrong times, recited verses from the Qur’an in the zendo, and was accused—among other lighter grievances—of sneaking food from the kitchen in the middle of the night. The devil, it seemed, was always in the details. Eventually, Paul, the shuso of the practice, politely told me it was time to leave. He assured me the doors were always open should I wish to return. His final words stayed with me: I was good at rebounding, he said, and he was sure I would make it.
When I left Green Gulch, I was homeless. No money. No plan. No idea what came next. What I did have was the generosity of friends. Joshua Bowes, a regular at Green Gulch, and his girlfriend Shirsten took me in. They lived in a tiny garage converted into a makeshift home on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, right at the edge of Golden Gate Park. My “room” was under their kitchen table—a temporary shelter, but enough to keep me afloat while I figured out how to stand again.
I still remember the neighborhood clearly: the Aardvark clothing store across the street, a GAP just down the block, and my favorite Chinese place, Hunan on Haight. That corner was a world of its own—a strange stage to step onto after years of Zen silence and farm practice.
Josh soon introduced me to his friend Will Harris Jr., who offered me some yard work in Piedmont, Oakland. That small job opened the door to something larger: employment with H&H Ship Services and Environmental Services, located at China Basin off Third Street on the San Francisco waterfront. Will Harris Sr. was one of the founders and the president of the company.
My first meeting with Mr. William Harris Sr. at seven o’clock in the morning remains etched in memory. I was greeted by Cleveland Valrey, the company dispatcher, dressed—as I later learned he always was—in blue coveralls. Cleveland informed me that Will Jr. wouldn’t be in until later, if at all, but that Bill Sr. was already in his office.
I agreed and stepped inside to find a massive elderly man bent over a wastebasket, opening a letter with a letter opener. He didn’t look up, continuing his task as he asked, “Yes?” I noticed his thick neck, the large cigar clenched at the side of his mouth, a half-filled glass of liquor on his desk, and a framed photograph of him shaking hands with President Ronald Reagan.
I explained why I was there. He replied that his son might not come in that day at all. Then, without lifting his gaze, he asked, “How would you like to clean my yard?”
Something inside me stirred. This felt like a test. I thought, If I let this slide, finding work will be hard. Without hesitation, I said, “Sure. After I do your son’s, I’ll take care of yours too.”
“You think you can handle my yard?” he asked.
“Sure,” I replied, “and better than you can imagine.”
For the first time, he stopped, removed the cigar from his mouth, and looked at me. “You think you can handle my yard? Look out the window.”
It was the first time I laid eyes on the H&H Ship Services yard.
“You can start tomorrow morning at seven,” he said. “Tell Cleveland you’re hired.”
I arrived on time the next morning. Cleveland handed me the tools and pointed me to the front parking area. It was covered in debris—plastic, paper, dirt—grass growing where it shouldn’t have been. It looked as though no one had cleaned it in years.
My Zen practice kicked in, and I laughed inwardly. This should be fun. I had been doing this kind of work for free; now I was being paid. Like an artist facing a blank canvas, I went to work. By the time the office staff arrived, the lot had been transformed—parking lines were visible again. People stared. I doubted they even knew I had been hired for the job.
By mid-morning, I asked Cleveland what to do next. He inspected the yard, clearly surprised, then led me to the men’s restroom and told me to clean it.
I nearly walked away when I saw its condition. Then a voice inside whispered, Welcome to the Hell Realm. The walls were filthy, layered with graffiti and neglect. One line, absurdly poetic, stuck in my mind: Here I sit broken-hearted, tried to shit but only farted. I spent the entire afternoon scrubbing, restoring some measure of dignity to that place. Nothing, I realized, was beneath me if I intended to survive.
Next came the workshop area—tools, hoses, weeds growing from dirt long undisturbed. Cleveland placed me under the supervision of the shopkeeper, a seventy-two-year-old Navajo elder named Tim Mosquida. Everyone called him Chief. He was deeply deaf and loudly opinionated. When he learned I was Malaysian and Muslim, he started calling me “Muhammad.”
“Hey, Muhammad!” he would shout. “You don’t know the score!”
He was difficult at first, but beneath it all, kind and fatherly. I worked hard—harder than necessary—to earn his respect, and eventually I did. From him, I learned the rhythms of the yard and the unspoken rules of survival.
One day I wandered into the backyard area where underground fuel tanks were being cut and dismantled. The ground was slick with oil residue, hoses strewn everywhere. In the corner stood a shed with a dent in its zinc roof. I asked about it. Someone told me that was where the body of a supervisor had been when a six-thousand-gallon tank exploded during cutting. The force had thrown him upward into the roof and beyond. He was killed instantly.
The accident had occurred just a week before I was hired. I soon learned that the company was under a U.S. Coast Guard lockdown. I understood then why Bill Sr.—nicknamed Big Foot by the workers—was drinking at seven in the morning. The explosion resulted from a complete lack of safety protocols during one of the most hazardous operations imaginable. The man, Mike Wayggod, paid with his life. It was a tragedy that could have been avoided. H&H earned a reputation as a fly-by-night operation, and the company needed a reckoning.
Among the characters in the yard was a man known as Rocky—short, round-bellied, bald, wearing his hard hat backwards. One morning, as Rocky and I talked—him standing on a boiler, me on the ground—a young worker brushed past and shoved me. Instinct took over. My hand followed the motion and struck his stomach. Our eyes locked.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said.
He froze, then ran toward the main office.
Later, I was summoned to see Big Foot. The conversation was brief.
“I want harmony in the yard,” he said.
“Make me the supervisor,” I replied.
I hadn’t wanted the position. But something deeper nudged me forward. I sensed the next level of practice had arrived—not in a monastery, but in a broken, toxic workplace that needed cleaning, healing, and attention.
Blood, Brotherhood, and the Broom
The road wasn’t smooth.
I was still an outsider — and now, in charge. I was Asian, non-union, and newer than most. Many of the truck drivers and senior laborers didn’t like being ordered around by someone they didn’t understand.
For those involved in working on the Underground Storage Tank Disposal Facility. USTDF, all were provided with a change of clean coveralls every day, and this included the truck drivers, which earned me their respect. The men were given training in work safety by a qualified instructor, which was made mandatory by the various Government-related agencies such as OSHA, EPA, DOH, and the DOT. These classes did not only provided the employees with a genuine certificate but also boosted their sense of responsibility towards one another in performing the duties.
In working towards becoming a yard supervisor, I was met with challenges from those vying for the same position. I stepped inot the role of becoming the supervisor, not because of the salary or the perks that came with it, I was moved by what I saw happening and had to do something if there was going to be any change or the company was even allowed to stay in operation. A man had died almost exactly a week before I started my job as a sweeper and cleaner, and I learned about it when I took a walk to the work area of the facility and discovered that there was a large dent in the zinc roofing of the dilapidated wooden hut where a single messy refrigerator sat in one corner. I asked what had happened and was told that that was the spot the body of the supervisor had smashed into whe the 6000-gallon tank he was cutting blew up. His body had ricocheted from the roof and landed in the parking lot next door, 70 feet from where he was working.
I had a knife to my neck once.
Got a punch that almost cracked my jaw.Threatened with a metal pipe in the middle of the yard. Had rumors spread. Faced envy and resentment at every turn. I faced it all simply because my future hung in the balance.
But I also had allies. Good men who had my back. Oddell Edwards, an elderly Black gentleman man and his partner at work, Mr. Herman Renauld, Rudy Anderson, and a quiet giant who looked out for me when I needed it most. especially when in the process of cutting the tanks. When you are about to cut a 12 thousand gallon fuel tank, highly combustible, you need someone you can trust as your 'Fire Watcher'.
I had to speak many languages without speaking them — learning how to communicate with Cubans, Filipinos, Black elders, and Vietnamese youth, many of whom had no formal education but knew how to work hard if you treated them with dignity.
And I never stopped reminding them of the man who died — blown sky-high for taking safety for granted.
From all this, I developed what I called:
“The Broom Philosophy”
Keep the house clean — literally and spiritually.
That meant from the toilet to the yard. That meant the mind. That meant the soul.
In a place of poison, death, and fire, I learned the truth:
Discipline is love. Cleanliness is care. And leadership means serving those who would never ask for it or knew not how to.
Chapter17: The Yard Boss
They called me The Yard Boss. Officially, I was the Yard Superintendent, hired by William Harris Sr. to oversee the operations at 220 China Basin — a stretch of the waterfront that has since vanished under the San Francisco Giants baseball park. Back then, we worked right beside the old Third Street drawbridge, later renamed the Lefty O’Doul Bridge, a landmark immortalized in films and etched into the memory of the city.
When I started, there were barely fifteen men on the payroll. Within a year, that number had grown to more than forty, each trained, certified, and equipped with proper coveralls and safety procedures I had fought to implement. Together with researchers from UC Berkeley, I helped draft the protocols for underground storage tank disposal — procedures that would become national standards under new EPA laws. Overnight, H&H Environmental Services became the only company on the West Coast capable of handling UST removals, and business soared into the millions.
But the real work, the brutal and thankless work, was done by the “yard boys” — men who spent their days inside the dark, suffocating bellies of fuel tanks, scraping muck and toxic sludge by hand. They were mostly Black and Latino, Vietnamese and Filipino; the white boys usually drove trucks, the dirtiest jobs considered beneath them. I tried to protect my crew as best I could, to make a hazardous trade a little less deadly. Men like Oddel Edwards stood by me in return, shielding me when tensions rose and fists threatened to fly. Others, like Robert Gutierrez, showed up every day with steady hands and reliable hearts.
I gave six years of my life to that yard, watching it grow from a ragtag operation into a respected enterprise, all within sight of the Bay Bridge and the old O’Doul drawbridge. It was a place of grit and danger, of loyalty and betrayal, of sweat and survival. And when the ballpark came, and the yard was erased, I knew I had lived and worked on a piece of history now lost to the city.
H&H Ship Services and Environmental Services are gone, but the men who labored there, and the lessons I carried from those years, remain etched in me like the scars of fire and steel. That chapter closed, but it forged in me a resilience I would carry into every trial that followed.
Chapter 18 – Ten Years in the City
I lived in San Francisco for ten years of my life. In those years, I tasted nearly everything the city had to offer. It was large, expensive, restless—and I became part of its crowd, swept along by its currents, sometimes thriving, sometimes barely holding on.
I drove a Porsche once, sold to me by my friend George Berberis. I also came close to living on the streets around Haight and Ashbury. I worked as a field hand at Green Gulch Farm, tending soil and silence on their organic land. At other times, I bought produce from Del Tomasso in Rockridge, carrying groceries like small treasures back to wherever we were living then.
For six long years, I worked as a Yard Supervisor at a hazardous waste facility on China Basin. On other occasions, I sold temporary tattoos at the Shoreline Amphitheatre—another face, another hustle. I managed to host an art exhibition or two and, now and then, sold a piece of my work. Enough to keep believing I was still an artist.
My two younger children were born in San Francisco and spent the first three years of their lives there. Those were not easy years for my wife and me. I became the primary caregiver—the “babysitter,” as I sometimes joked—while my wife worked. We were stretched thin, financially and emotionally. We survived largely through the kindness of a few good friends who showed up when it mattered most.
Our marriage was tested. We sought counseling, not as a failure, but as a necessity. One of our counselors was Blanche Hartman, then the Abbess of the San Francisco Zen Center. She was also the one who married us at the Green Gulch zendo. After the ceremony, we gathered for a garden party—the same garden where I had once learned to till the soil under the guidance of Wendy Johnson.
Looking back now, San Francisco gave me no single identity. It gave me fragments—worker, seeker, artist, father, husband, outsider, insider. It taught me how quickly circumstances can change, how fragile stability is, and how adaptability becomes a form of faith.
Those ten years did not make me successful by conventional measures. But they trained me in survival, humility, and endurance. They showed me that a life is not built in straight lines, but in loops, returns, and second chances.
San Francisco did not promise comfort.
It offered experience.
And I took it—all of it.
I lived in San Francisco for ten years of my life. In those years, I tasted nearly everything the city had to offer. It was large, expensive, restless—and I became part of its crowd, swept along by its currents, sometimes thriving, sometimes barely holding on.
I drove a Porsche once, sold to me by my friend George Berberis. I also came close to living on the streets around Haight and Ashbury. I worked as a field hand at Green Gulch Farm, tending soil and silence on their organic land. At other times, I bought produce from Del Tomasso in Rockridge, carrying groceries like small treasures back to wherever we were living then.
For six long years, I worked as a Yard Supervisor at a hazardous waste facility on China Basin. On other occasions, I sold temporary tattoos at the Shoreline Amphitheatre—another face, another hustle. I managed to host an art exhibition or two and, now and then, sold a piece of my work. Enough to keep believing I was still an artist.
My two younger children were born in San Francisco and spent the first three years of their lives there. Those were not easy years for my wife and me. I became the primary caregiver—the “babysitter,” as I sometimes joked—while my wife worked. We were stretched thin, financially and emotionally. We survived largely through the kindness of a few good friends who showed up when it mattered most.
Our marriage was tested. We sought counseling, not as a failure, but as a necessity. One of our counselors was Blanche Hartman, then the Abbess of the San Francisco Zen Center. She was also the one who married us at the Green Gulch zendo. After the ceremony, we gathered for a garden party—the same garden where I had once learned to till the soil under the guidance of Wendy Johnson.
Looking back now, San Francisco gave me no single identity. It gave me fragments—worker, seeker, artist, father, husband, outsider, insider. It taught me how quickly circumstances can change, how fragile stability is, and how adaptability becomes a form of faith.
Those ten years did not make me successful by conventional measures. But they trained me in survival, humility, and endurance. They showed me that a life is not built in straight lines, but in loops, returns, and second chances.
San Francisco did not promise comfort.
It offered experience.
And I took it—all of it.
Chapter 19 – Fault Lines
After many years, thanks to Facebook, I reconnected with an old friend—Elyze Stewart. She had once lived at 191 Haight Street, the old Georgian apartment building on the corner of Octavia and Haight, where I first met my late wife, Nancy. The building had been introduced to me by my Zen buddy, David Carlson, who also lived there.
At the time, I was staying on Army Street, near the junction of Mission and Army, in a room inside a converted Sears Roebuck building. Long abandoned, it had been transformed into artists’ apartments and studios. I shared the space with another artist named Rory—his last name escapes me now—and together we hosted a show during the San Francisco Open Studios Exhibition.
It was in that building that I experienced the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989.
The quake struck on October 17, the most powerful since 1906. Sixty-three people lost their lives. Thousands were injured. Billions of dollars in damage rippled across the Bay Area. The Cypress Street Viaduct collapsed. A section of the Bay Bridge gave way. Fires broke out in the Marina. Much of it was broadcast live by the Goodyear blimp, which had been filming the World Series at Candlestick Park—forever marking it as the “Earthquake Series.”
I had just returned from my job as a produce buyer for Del Tomasso. Exhausted, I lay down on my bed when the building erupted with a sound like gunfire. Pipes tore loose. Nail hooks sprang from the ceiling. Concrete cracked as debris fell. I reached the doorway frame just as the lights went out.
A woman clung to me in the darkness, shaking. Outside, the roar of the earth sounded like a freight train tearing through the city. Then—silence.
A child cried in the next room. A phone rang. When the lights flickered back on, the woman answered. Her friend in Tokyo was already on the line, telling her that the Bay Bridge had collapsed and the Marina was on fire.
Instead of resting, I walked toward 191 Haight Street, passing through Mission Dolores to check on friends and see the damage. Strangely, that neighborhood had been spared the worst.
David Carlson was especially close to me. I visited him often, and the day before the quake had been his birthday. I brought him a lithograph of Yamantaka, the Tibetan Buddhist protector of the Dharma.
It was in his living room, during that visit, that I first saw Nancy.
She looked tired—worn, perhaps even defeated. And yet, in that instant, I heard my mother’s voice rise within me:
You’ve always chased beauty on the outside.
Try to see the beauty within this time.
It was not love at first sight.
It was compassion at first intention.
I resolved then, quietly, that I would help bring out the hidden radiance within her. In time, Nancy became an angel in my life—the mother of my children, my companion until illness took her far too soon.
Perhaps she, too, had mixed feelings when she first saw me. I will never know. But within a year, we were married at the Green Gulch Zen Temple. She was already carrying our son, whom she gave birth to just ten days later.
As I have often said, the devil is in the details, so I will not dwell on the inner mechanics of our marriage. I will simply say this: I loved her. And I did succeed in drawing forth the inner beauty I saw in her that very first day.
Spiritual teachings remind us not to cling to the past. Yet returning to these memories brings me healing. They are a form of catharsis—an act of release and integration. I was never perfect. I made mistakes. But I was present. I was committed. I was alive.
Now, in my later years, I live without regret. Everything—love and loss, joy and pain—belonged to the path that shaped me. Writing is how I gather these fragments of my soul, turning them into grist for the mill, compost for new growth.
If anyone ever asks why I write so much about myself, the answer is simple:
This is how I honor the life I was given.
After many years, thanks to Facebook, I reconnected with an old friend—Elyze Stewart. She had once lived at 191 Haight Street, the old Georgian apartment building on the corner of Octavia and Haight, where I first met my late wife, Nancy. The building had been introduced to me by my Zen buddy, David Carlson, who also lived there.
At the time, I was staying on Army Street, near the junction of Mission and Army, in a room inside a converted Sears Roebuck building. Long abandoned, it had been transformed into artists’ apartments and studios. I shared the space with another artist named Rory—his last name escapes me now—and together we hosted a show during the San Francisco Open Studios Exhibition.
It was in that building that I experienced the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989.
The quake struck on October 17, the most powerful since 1906. Sixty-three people lost their lives. Thousands were injured. Billions of dollars in damage rippled across the Bay Area. The Cypress Street Viaduct collapsed. A section of the Bay Bridge gave way. Fires broke out in the Marina. Much of it was broadcast live by the Goodyear blimp, which had been filming the World Series at Candlestick Park—forever marking it as the “Earthquake Series.”
I had just returned from my job as a produce buyer for Del Tomasso. Exhausted, I lay down on my bed when the building erupted with a sound like gunfire. Pipes tore loose. Nail hooks sprang from the ceiling. Concrete cracked as debris fell. I reached the doorway frame just as the lights went out.
A woman clung to me in the darkness, shaking. Outside, the roar of the earth sounded like a freight train tearing through the city. Then—silence.
A child cried in the next room. A phone rang. When the lights flickered back on, the woman answered. Her friend in Tokyo was already on the line, telling her that the Bay Bridge had collapsed and the Marina was on fire.
Instead of resting, I walked toward 191 Haight Street, passing through Mission Dolores to check on friends and see the damage. Strangely, that neighborhood had been spared the worst.
David Carlson was especially close to me. I visited him often, and the day before the quake had been his birthday. I brought him a lithograph of Yamantaka, the Tibetan Buddhist protector of the Dharma.
It was in his living room, during that visit, that I first saw Nancy.
She looked tired—worn, perhaps even defeated. And yet, in that instant, I heard my mother’s voice rise within me:
You’ve always chased beauty on the outside.
Try to see the beauty within this time.
It was not love at first sight.
It was compassion at first intention.
I resolved then, quietly, that I would help bring out the hidden radiance within her. In time, Nancy became an angel in my life—the mother of my children, my companion until illness took her far too soon.
Perhaps she, too, had mixed feelings when she first saw me. I will never know. But within a year, we were married at the Green Gulch Zen Temple. She was already carrying our son, whom she gave birth to just ten days later.
As I have often said, the devil is in the details, so I will not dwell on the inner mechanics of our marriage. I will simply say this: I loved her. And I did succeed in drawing forth the inner beauty I saw in her that very first day.
Spiritual teachings remind us not to cling to the past. Yet returning to these memories brings me healing. They are a form of catharsis—an act of release and integration. I was never perfect. I made mistakes. But I was present. I was committed. I was alive.
Now, in my later years, I live without regret. Everything—love and loss, joy and pain—belonged to the path that shaped me. Writing is how I gather these fragments of my soul, turning them into grist for the mill, compost for new growth.
If anyone ever asks why I write so much about myself, the answer is simple:
This is how I honor the life I was given.
Chapter 20 — Three Years in Sendai
If Matsushima was water and islands, Yama-dera was stone and sky. And Sendai—the city where my family spent three transformative years—was the space where all of these elements converged: family, art, learning, and life unfolding in both quiet and chaos.
If Matsushima was water and islands, Yama-dera was stone and sky. And Sendai—the city where my family spent three transformative years—was the space where all of these elements converged: family, art, learning, and life unfolding in both quiet and chaos.
Arrival and Family Life
My wife Nancy, through her work as an ESL teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, was hired by Kawaijuku Bunri, a respected prep school in Sendai. From the moment we arrived, everything was arranged with meticulous care. Three days after landing, we moved into our apartment on the fifth floor of the Dia Palace Yasoen, a building perched on a gentle rise overlooking the city—from the ocean at one end to the hills at the other. Within walking distance were the Mukaiyama Yōchien, where my children would spend their preschool years, and the Yasoen Gardens, a natural wildflower preserve. Next to it stood the Sendai TV Station, its towers lighting up the night sky in changing colors as the weather dictated.
For the first time in a long while, I felt grounded. The apartment was fully furnished, even the kitchen stocked. Living in this environment felt like a gift. Winter in Sendai was mesmerizing—snow blanketing rooftops, hills, and streets, muting the city into dreamlike silence. Spring brought cherry blossoms and the delicate beauty of the Japanese gardens that fueled my creative energy.
My children, Karim and Marissa, initially frightened and lost by the unfamiliar language, quickly found their stride in a Rudolf Steiner–inspired curriculum. Within months, it was almost impossible to keep them home; the school and its vibrant, disciplined atmosphere captivated them. For them, these years would become a treasured part of their childhood.
My wife Nancy, through her work as an ESL teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, was hired by Kawaijuku Bunri, a respected prep school in Sendai. From the moment we arrived, everything was arranged with meticulous care. Three days after landing, we moved into our apartment on the fifth floor of the Dia Palace Yasoen, a building perched on a gentle rise overlooking the city—from the ocean at one end to the hills at the other. Within walking distance were the Mukaiyama Yōchien, where my children would spend their preschool years, and the Yasoen Gardens, a natural wildflower preserve. Next to it stood the Sendai TV Station, its towers lighting up the night sky in changing colors as the weather dictated.
For the first time in a long while, I felt grounded. The apartment was fully furnished, even the kitchen stocked. Living in this environment felt like a gift. Winter in Sendai was mesmerizing—snow blanketing rooftops, hills, and streets, muting the city into dreamlike silence. Spring brought cherry blossoms and the delicate beauty of the Japanese gardens that fueled my creative energy.
My children, Karim and Marissa, initially frightened and lost by the unfamiliar language, quickly found their stride in a Rudolf Steiner–inspired curriculum. Within months, it was almost impossible to keep them home; the school and its vibrant, disciplined atmosphere captivated them. For them, these years would become a treasured part of their childhood.
Art and Community
Living in Sendai gave me space to flourish as an artist. The Miyagi Museum of Fine Arts welcomed me under its open-studio policy, offering studios for painting, sculpture, photography, and printmaking, with instructors ready to assist. For three years, I worked there free of charge—an opportunity I have rarely encountered elsewhere.
I met local artists—many housewives—learning about their lives, their creativity, and their discipline. I shared what knowledge I could, and in return, I learned patience, subtlety, and the quiet joy of collaboration. Foreign artists like Mr. Pimenta, from Brazil, showed me other ways of seeing: his delicate Mongolian mandala watercolor technique required focus and steadiness I could only admire.
I held six solo exhibitions across Sendai, including at the Miyagi Museum Art Gallery itself. Yet more important than exhibitions were the lessons I absorbed: humility, restraint, and the importance of keeping ego in check. The Japanese read character with ease; sincerity was currency, pretense easily detected. Even my desires—particularly toward women—required careful self-discipline.
Living in Sendai gave me space to flourish as an artist. The Miyagi Museum of Fine Arts welcomed me under its open-studio policy, offering studios for painting, sculpture, photography, and printmaking, with instructors ready to assist. For three years, I worked there free of charge—an opportunity I have rarely encountered elsewhere.
I met local artists—many housewives—learning about their lives, their creativity, and their discipline. I shared what knowledge I could, and in return, I learned patience, subtlety, and the quiet joy of collaboration. Foreign artists like Mr. Pimenta, from Brazil, showed me other ways of seeing: his delicate Mongolian mandala watercolor technique required focus and steadiness I could only admire.
I held six solo exhibitions across Sendai, including at the Miyagi Museum Art Gallery itself. Yet more important than exhibitions were the lessons I absorbed: humility, restraint, and the importance of keeping ego in check. The Japanese read character with ease; sincerity was currency, pretense easily detected. Even my desires—particularly toward women—required careful self-discipline.
Kyoto COP-3: An Artist’s Statement
During this period, I attended the Kyoto COP-3 UN Climate Change Summit. I could not enter as a delegate or NGO member. But I had spent a year clipping environmental articles from the Japan Times, filling four foam boards with my statement. Outside the convention center, delegates glimpsed what was at stake. By chance, an American NGO offered to carry my boards inside, and they were displayed. When the summit ended, they were returned to me in Sendai, along with a thank-you note.
The experience reminded me that individual action, especially as an artist, often requires support. Passion alone is rarely enough. Yet the responsibility we feel—toward the planet, toward suffering humanity—is real. Wars, famine, disease, and global warming are not abstractions; they live inside me as personal concern, whether I can solve them or not.
Sometimes I wish for a telepathic connection among all humans, so we might feel each other’s responsibility, hear silence speaking, and act before it is too late. We are the thinking creatures, capable of preservation or destruction, yet so often blind to consequences. The waters rise, temperatures climb, species disappear, and still, we chase desires, forget our fragility, and cling to illusion.
During this period, I attended the Kyoto COP-3 UN Climate Change Summit. I could not enter as a delegate or NGO member. But I had spent a year clipping environmental articles from the Japan Times, filling four foam boards with my statement. Outside the convention center, delegates glimpsed what was at stake. By chance, an American NGO offered to carry my boards inside, and they were displayed. When the summit ended, they were returned to me in Sendai, along with a thank-you note.
The experience reminded me that individual action, especially as an artist, often requires support. Passion alone is rarely enough. Yet the responsibility we feel—toward the planet, toward suffering humanity—is real. Wars, famine, disease, and global warming are not abstractions; they live inside me as personal concern, whether I can solve them or not.
Sometimes I wish for a telepathic connection among all humans, so we might feel each other’s responsibility, hear silence speaking, and act before it is too late. We are the thinking creatures, capable of preservation or destruction, yet so often blind to consequences. The waters rise, temperatures climb, species disappear, and still, we chase desires, forget our fragility, and cling to illusion.
Pilgrimages: Matsushima, Yama-dera, and Haguro
Sendai also offered access to some of Japan’s most spiritual landscapes, and I took every chance to walk them. Matsushima—a scattering of islands in the bay—felt like a living poem, water and stone in harmony. Yama-dera, in Yamagata Prefecture, clung to cliffs like an eagle’s nest. More than a thousand stone steps wind through cedar forests into a silence so profound that every cicada cry seemed eternal. It was here that Bashō composed one of his most beloved haiku:
Shizukesa ya
iwa ni shimiiru
semi no koe
Ah, this silence—
sinking into the rocks,
the voice of cicadas.
Mount Haguro, one of the sacred Dewa Sanzan mountains, offered a thousand stone steps through ancient cedar forests. Pilgrims had walked here for centuries, ascending to bronze bells and summits heavy with history and faith. Walking the same paths as Bashō, I felt the weight of time, of devotion, and of silence—the silence that is not absence, but presence.
These three sites—a triangle of spirit—taught me that the path of the wanderer, through poetry, art, or pilgrimage, is not about arriving. It is about walking with reverence, letting each step become a verse, each pause a prayer.
Sendai also offered access to some of Japan’s most spiritual landscapes, and I took every chance to walk them. Matsushima—a scattering of islands in the bay—felt like a living poem, water and stone in harmony. Yama-dera, in Yamagata Prefecture, clung to cliffs like an eagle’s nest. More than a thousand stone steps wind through cedar forests into a silence so profound that every cicada cry seemed eternal. It was here that Bashō composed one of his most beloved haiku:
Shizukesa ya
iwa ni shimiiru
semi no koe
Ah, this silence—
sinking into the rocks,
the voice of cicadas.
Mount Haguro, one of the sacred Dewa Sanzan mountains, offered a thousand stone steps through ancient cedar forests. Pilgrims had walked here for centuries, ascending to bronze bells and summits heavy with history and faith. Walking the same paths as Bashō, I felt the weight of time, of devotion, and of silence—the silence that is not absence, but presence.
These three sites—a triangle of spirit—taught me that the path of the wanderer, through poetry, art, or pilgrimage, is not about arriving. It is about walking with reverence, letting each step become a verse, each pause a prayer.
Reflections on Sendai
Those three years in Sendai remain alive in me. They shaped me as an artist, a father, a chronicler of life, and a witness to both beauty and fragility. Through sketch journals, photographs, and memory, I hold them intact: the snow-blanketed city, the gardens, my children’s laughter, my wife’s dedication, the sound of cicadas in cedar forests, and the quiet weight of stone steps leading skyward.
Sendai was a turning point—a place where I faced responsibility, cultivated creativity, and learned humility. It remains, as it always was, a foundation upon which the rest of my journey has been built.
Those three years in Sendai remain alive in me. They shaped me as an artist, a father, a chronicler of life, and a witness to both beauty and fragility. Through sketch journals, photographs, and memory, I hold them intact: the snow-blanketed city, the gardens, my children’s laughter, my wife’s dedication, the sound of cicadas in cedar forests, and the quiet weight of stone steps leading skyward.
Sendai was a turning point—a place where I faced responsibility, cultivated creativity, and learned humility. It remains, as it always was, a foundation upon which the rest of my journey has been built.
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