Seventy-Three Plus
A year ago, I noticed that my life had gone off-track. Nothing new about that. Life has always seemed to me like a series of false starts and subsequent adjustments: never quite finding a middle.
But here's what happened. On July 7th, 2025, one day after returning from an intellectual conference in Chicago, I was operating the web feed for my community group. Part of the presentation was a video clip of a rude and decidedly un-intellectual social media influencer. The audience seemed delighted with his antics. As I watched them enjoying the show, I suddenly realized that I hadn't actually been paying attention for quite a while. Not to the group, and not to myself.
I saw the “Lake Superior Freethinkers” mentioned in the local paper in 2013, and for a dozen years it became my vital "third place." It helped me build a core group of friends and a wide circle of acquaintances. When I led the group in the early 2020s, we successfully got the sectarian declaration "Jesus, I Trust in You!" removed from a city bus.
We weren't opposed to Jesus, of course, but believed that Duluth's Jews, Buddhists, and non-believers shouldn't have to feel like the city had picked a theological side. That seemed like important work. I wanted us to be a support group for people (anyone) who did not have Jesus to call upon when things went wrong.
Somewhere along the line, the mission had crept. I looked around that day and realized I was surrounded by people who were as outraged by GMO foods as by religious oaths of office, and whose main purpose was to attack conservatives (even if religion had failed them). I couldn’t say when that happened, because I wasn't noticing. But that influencer clip was a brash mirror, unflinchingly showing me what I had been ignoring.
How did I end up there? Momentum, perhaps. We all do it, I guess. We think, "Things are fine, don't rock the boat, go with the flow." Then, suddenly, we find ourselves living a life we haven't really chosen. I was living the comfortable life of a standard Midwestern dad — four-bedroom house on a wooded lot, no debt, a large retirement cushion, and a daughter in private school. By any reasonable measure, I had "sold out" the hippie values of my teens.
The trouble is, there is much more to me than that. I had forgotten who I was and where I came from.
My mother grew up in Yonkers, New York dreaming of being the singer in a Glenn Miller–style band, She had a deep appreciation for the performing arts and especially comedy. Her mother was from a foundational Upper Canadian pioneer family whose original York County homestead eventually became the very grounds of York University. Her father was a charming salesman with deep roots in County Cork who used his smarts and charisma to build an affluent life in Connecticut.
My father, Ontario's electrical code interpreter and high-ranking Royal Arch Mason, straddled the borders of technical mastery and ceremonial mysticism (honoring our ancestral roots in the border regions of Scotland). His father was a United Church of Canada minister from County Down who established churches all across Northern Ontario and Quebec. His mother, the granddaughter of Ontario Premier G. W. Ross, was a living monument to old-school class and noblesse oblige.
And that's before we even get to me. I like to say that I was raised as an only child, much to the chagrin of my three younger siblings. I spent the 1970s as the musical director of touring bands, designed theatre lighting in Toronto, supported the Liberal Party of Canada, took precepts with the Korean Zen master Samu Sunim (under whom I became, and remain, Single Breath), then got a Ph.D. and taught university courses for decades.
It has taken a minute to get back on track. I meditated with the Bluestone Zen Practice Community and the Iron Lotus Meditation group, made a few visits to a church in Two Harbors with genuinely good preaching, and spent a lot of hours back inside the music of Carole King and James Taylor. Although I have no interest in going backwards to any "good old days," that was what it took to restore a sense of balance.
I now spend very little time with the old crew, none at all on facebook, and a good deal more with my own small family. I suppose I'll always be a member of Mensa and the American Philosophical Society. I'll still write bad songs that sound suspiciously familiar and sing them off-key into REAPER software in the basement. But I can remember what matters now, and it is not Current Events. So here we go again … let's see what kind of re-invention comes next.