The spiritual foundling woke up in a trash heap in a dusty rural town of a forgotten continent when he was not yet past Shakespeare’s proverbial ‘first stage’ of life,
One of the first memories he has is of stealing the H2O-merchant’s horse and water-tank and running wild through the village like some modern charioteer,
Of course, he got the whipping of his life for it by his mother, but, “hell...”, the ride was worth it...,
This experience, some half a century later, kind of set the tone for the tapestry of his life...

During the first few months of school, his elders discovered that he could not see the blackboard and or read the pages of the readers,
Spectacles and vision, at last catapulted him from last in class to first, a title he never lost for the rest of his school career,
In those days of yester-year, he was the only kid in school with specs, so ridicule from the other kids and the epithet ‘four-eyes’, bit deep into his psyche, leaving emotional wounds that still hinder him, setting him up for a life of ‘being-different’ and a cosmic kind of loneliness...

From the fringes, he watched with an aching heart, as the other kids frolicked, beclothed with fun and laughter, as he reticently held himself back,
He was, after all, ‘different’,
And being a harmonious soul, he avoided conflict by lingering in the grey areas...

Fast-forward, past lonely teens, young adulthood, marriage, children, higher education, career, mortgages, etc., etc...,
Inside he’s still the lonely little boy,
Still seeking the community that he knows will heal him,
Suddenly whilst watching an episode of the TV series ‘Northern Exposure’, the truth finally gets through to him,
He will never find the community he seeks, unless he takes the initiative to found and build it himself from scratch...