I'm primarily involved in international human rights work these days, along with some environmental work, some entertainment-related things, and a few assorted odds and ends. Spiritually, I'm a Buddhist-Jewish eclecticist/Universalist, having spent decades searching and seeking, over a decade practicing and studying Buddhism (mostly Tibetan and Zen/Ch'an), and some time exploring pretty deeply Taoism and Advaita Vedanta, along with some variants of shamanism of the Americas. I've also done some deep work in my root-religion, the faith of my grandfathers and grandmothers, Judaism.

My first true "wow" or "aha" spiritual experience was immersing myself in a copy of the Bhagavad Gita given to me by a Hare Krishna in the early '70s, when I was still quite young and in the sway of my hero of those times, George Harrison. That was followed shortly thereafter by Be Here Now, having glommed onto a tattered copy belonging to a friend's older brother. And that led to, well, it's been both a long and winding road, and a long, strange trip.

I'm heavily into nature, and spend a lot of time hiking and, when I can, getting up above treeline, which I somehow find to actually bring me closer to the Ultimate, silly as that notion is. But anywhere there is nature, which is just about everywhere, I seem to see Her/Him/It, and I'm quite happy in a city park, a beach, the desert or a forest of any kind. The earth is my cathedral, as John Muir once observed.

I'm also heavily into music, and have spent a lifetime immersed in it, from Beatles to the Grateful Dead to world music, jazz, bluegrass, folk, singer-songwriter, and good old rock and roll, along with some forms of ambient, trance, goa, and other assorted genres of electronica. I've been to over 100 Grateful Dead shows (not counting the bandmembers' side projects and post-Dead projects), nearly 50 String Cheese Incident shows, and in total probably well over 500 concerts altogether, and that's not counting the dozens and dozens of summer music and arts festivals where one can see 25, 30 different artists and bands in a weekend. Music is the language of angels.

Art is the language of the soul, and I love all forms of art -- painting, poetry, sculpture, graffiti, installations, performance, theatre (of all sorts), photography, film and yes, even some TV/video. I find in art, when it is well-executed, an ability for humans to communicate without all the filters we normally have in place, and some of my most transcendent moments have been when I was engaged with some work of art, enabling me to connect with the pure essence of the artist and that particular moment in spacetime when the artist created that particular work.

I'm keenly interested in meeting other seekers, no matter what your path. We're all headed to the same, well, I guess place is as good a word as any, and as the Buddha taught, there are innumerable paths and gates, we each have only to find or forge our own. Hopefully we can help each other draw our maps, cast light into the darkness, and walk a little ways together down that golden road to unlimited devotion (to quote another source).

Shalom v'salaam v'shanti.

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