Through the Sieve of Maya

I once read a challenge to write an autobiography in 150 words. Not counting the notes below, this is mine, the first piece in my Autobiography Passed Through the Sieve of Maya.

Harlingen, Texas: born, barefoot. Alabama: outhouse, one-room school. Virginia: Blackberries, ticks. Tokyo: post-war occupation, sleepwalking, bicycle. D.C.: Army-Navy Medical Museum, Arlington National Cemetery. Paris: banks of Seine, petting, impressionists, piano, Schumann. Scotland: sixteen, rape. Munich: high school concert, hoarse. London: senior trip, Shakespeare. Garmisch: Zugspitze, skiing. Boston: Simmons B.S., Vedantism, medical secretary, Alexandria Quartet, e.e. cummings, marriage, folk guitar. Indianapolis: Stranger in a Strange Land, classical guitar, Villa-Lobos. San Francisco: Irish country dancing, fog, jazz, mushrooms, baby girl. Cincinnati: Tae Kwon Do, Flamenco guitar, baby boy, marijuana, group marriage, divorce, Taft Fellowship, M.A., T.A., R.A., PhD, textbook, William Stafford seminar; parenting, mini-skirts, psychic experience, lover, Mozart; Bast Consulting, hot shot, wealth, loneliness, second marriage, depression, divorce. Gainesville: mother care, Tai Chi, high school sweetheart, If I Should Fall Behind, grief, market crash, rebirth, Out-of-the-Box Coaching, the poet, Wildacres, jeans and Birkenstocks, Qigong, Buddhism, breast cancer, painting, found poetry, dulcimer, Bardo.

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NOTES:  "Maya is the veil that covers our real nature and the real nature of the world around us. It's like dense clouds that prevent us from seeing the sun. Our clouds appear as egotism, selfishness, hatred, greed, lust, anger, ambition. When the clouds disperse, we become aware the sun has been there all the time." Vedanta Society of Southern California.

"Bardo is an interval, a hiatus, a gap. It is a peak point of experience, and at the same time a situation of extreme tension, caught between two opposites. It is an open space, filled with an atmosphere of suspension and uncertainty, neither this nor that. It is a crossing, a stepping stone, a transition." Tricycle Magazine.