I won't spend too much time on my early life, after all we all had a childhood. I do think there were some things that affected me at a young age and shaped me into the crazy mystic that you see before you.
So I should get all the big stuff out of the way, you see I was a boy with lots of questions. I am of the belief that these questions have fueled my spiritual endeavors. I don’t think it would be wrong to say that I spent the bulk of my adult life trying to make sense out of my childhood. In many ways I think we all do, in my case I think it is just very obvious. Furthermore I think my art has always been an attempt to explain what I have learned in my search for answers. So the whole process is me trying to figure stuff out and then show the world the best way I can.
There were a couple of things that took place during my childhood that caused me to question life, family and existence as a whole. I think I also detached a great deal from those around me, it is because of this I think that I don’t have a lot of fear about being alone. I have felt alone for most of my life. I don’t say this to gain sympathy or anything. I don’t even feel it is a “bad” thing. I just think that I learned very early that people won’t always be around. Because of this I can count on one hand most likely the people I feel absolutely connected to. This has actually served me very very well in my adult life. It has allowed me to remain objective in many situations and I feel I can actually help people better when I counsel them because the typical attachment just isn’t there.
Now I don’t want any of you shrink like types to take this and charge me with being anti-social or a sociopath, I feel about people deeply. I just expect them to go away someday so the way I think about people is different. What I mean is most people try really hard to hold on to the people in their life, and place much of their own happiness on another one's existence in their life. I don’t really feel like I do that as much because of my childhood. I was taught very early that people leave, people die, people change.
By the time this picture was taken I had already watched my father leave our family, seen my grandfather suffer a stroke, and watched my sister die in front of me. So the little mystic in this picture had already learned that life is a very fragile thing. That people lie, die, get sick and break down. He had already watched his own family try to move through several tragedies. This little mystic had gained enough questions to last him for the rest of his life.
Now, not to be too much of a bummer, my childhood wasn't all doom and gloom. In fact because I was a kid when all this happened, I don't think it was until much later that I realized this wasn't a normal beginning. I do remember having those big questions rambling around in my noggin however. I also felt like I was still in communication with my sister even after her death. This only made me feel more isolated, because people don't like to hear that you talk to your dead sister. If I was actually talking to her or not is topic for great speculation and debate. It is enough to say that as a child who had lost his big sister, it was vital that I thought I was in communication with her. Those early experiences would shape my later search for answers. I mean one of my biggest questions of course was about death and dying. Why we die, where we go, and is it really death?
This feeling that death was all around me and could strike anytime continued to stay with me. In fact I was talking to a friend the other day about this. I was telling him that ever since I was a child, if someone was late showing up or coming home. I assumed they were dead. In my mind I would begin to think about all the things that I needed to do. All the people I should call and so forth. I have been doing this for as long as I can remember. To me it was normal behavior and to this very day that will play out in my mind. Of course now I understand what is going on and just let it do its thing without reacting to it.
That is one of the things that meditation has taught me over the years. It has taught me to observe my brain and not react to what it is doing. That has given me a great understanding of how our crazy little brains work. I look at this little thing that my brain does and I realize that it does this because I lived through what some would consider a traumatic experience and as a result it rewired itself to handle it better next time. The interesting thing about this for me is that I remember quite vividly standing on the side of the road holding up my sisters bike and thinking that I had no idea what I was supposed to do. So my brain took this and hard wired me to figure out in advance what to do when someone dies. I have used this knowledge a lot in this life to dissect my thought patterns. In conjunction with meditation I can observe, detach and find the cause of my thoughts. Since thoughts lead to behavior, I have come to understand a great deal of my own craziness. So were many people would look at this part of my life as being very tragic. I can't help but think that it gave me both the desire to ask questions and a very obvious mental pattern to dissect. So really that experience gave me very useful tools that I still use today.
Maybe this is the reason that I never really felt like a victim as a result of all that. I mean I felt broken, dysfunctional and neurotic, but not like a victim really. That is part of the reason I mention all that stuff here, I think it is important to understand my motivations and possibly my methods. I think this may be the only difference between me and anyone else. I feel that such great losses at such fundamental ages set me up for a mystical life. It was in many ways all the ingredients to a perfect mystical storm.
The rest of my childhood was pretty normal I guess. Normal for any gay guy growing up in the 80s in the Midwest. I had to hide my sexuality, hide the fact that I thought that I seen and talked to my dead sister. Hide the fact that I didn't know where my dad was most of the time. So ya, a pretty normal rock 'n' roll loving, mystically inclined, skinny kid with thick glasses. According to my mom I was a great kid until I hit 14.
One of the prophetic things that happened in my youth had to do with a camera. I got a camera for either my birthday or Christmas, I’m not sure which. Anyway, the budding artist in me took over and I remember using up almost a whole roll of film taking pictures of my best friend acting out crimes. We were kids so it wasn’t like murder or anything crazy. It was him acting like he was stealing mail, kicking the bumper off his dad’s van and things like that. When I look at it now, I wonder how much of that played into what would later become my “Apocalyptic Youth” series that launched my art career.
I guess it would also be important to note that music played a very important part in my life. I would put on headphones and go deep into music. I still do this from time to time. As a child I would sit for hours listening to eight tracks with headphones on living out my own rock ‘n’ roll fantasy. In that way I was very much a normal little rugrat.
Both of those elements would go on to play a huge role in my life. Both photography and music became my preferred method of communicating what I experienced in my more subtle spiritual life.
I also believe that I was given some pretty good examples of strength during this somewhat turbulent childhood. I watched my family especially my mother experience some incredible loss and still manage to go forward instead of backward. That in my eyes is a pretty amazing standard to have. I believe absolutely that this gave me a worldview that would help me to navigate my life. My mother’s strength became my strength. This leads me to believe that the relationship that I have with my mother, my brother and my sister is absolutely karmic. I look at it now and see how a situation that could have destroyed all of us, instead made us who we are.
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