Episode 027 - The People Are Right In Front of You

I spoke to Andrea Rudnick, one of the founding members of Team Brownsville via Zoom in July. They are a group of Brownsville citizens who are doing necessary work in even more difficult circumstances now under the challenges of COVID-19 than they were facing over the last two years. If you are moved to support them, please do. They spend close to $100,000 per month in feeding, clothing, and sheltering a couple thousand people in a camp in Matamoros who are waiting their chance to request asylum and enter the United States legally. You can read more here about the cynically named Migrant Protection Protocols, and the other new U.S. policies designed to essentially eliminate asylum seeking. The U.S. signed the 1967 Protocol, agreeing to provide asylum to refugees, and has stayed in compliance with it for half a century. Since then, a process has been in place to verify refugee status for asylum seekers. Recently, that process has been cynically manipulated to eliminate it in fact if not in law.

Andrea references the Department of Homeland Security page about Migrant Protection Protocols, here.

Our theme song is Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. All other music was made by me on Ableton Live, except for the outro music, which I made on Soundation.

Here’s the transcript:

Andrea: Transformation. Transformation comes slowly. You can't really seek transformation. It comes to you. It comes to you because of what you do, because of the ways that you put yourself out there. I could say that all of us that have started with Team Brownsville, that we've all been transformed in ways that we never would've expected, that our eyes have been opened to things that we just never knew about. I don’t know. Your priorities change, I think, when that transformation happens.

We started in July of 2018, and we've gone through a lot of changes, certainly more changes than we ever would have known about. We continued just by trying to meet whatever the needs are that day. Because if we had known what we were going to be doing for two years, we might've said, nah, we can't really do that. That's just too much. But this way, just, just one day at a time, let's see what today brings. OK. What are the needs today? What needs can we meet? That's really how we continue, just every single day.

You would think it would give people more compassion, more understanding of that situation, that the crisis was here. It wasn’t somewhere else, and so it was a lot harder to throw up your hands and say, well, I can’t do anything, because yeah, the people are right in front of you. There are people here that ignore that and go on with their business as though there are no people sitting in an encampment in Matamoros. I guess my biggest surprise has been that aside from Team Brownsville and a few more people, there’s a lot of people that kind of choose to ignore the whole thing.

I think each of us has slightly different creation stories of how Team Brownsville was formed, and the truth is that we came to the same work in different ways. We came in just as teachers and administrators from the school district here in Brownsville. The skills that we bring in, our skills that we've had from being teachers and administrators and working with kids with special needs, working in a community that's a high poverty community, the community where you do have a lot of kids that are undocumented, kids that are families that struggle a great deal. We came in with that more than anything, just that background of, these are our people. They're not different from the people that we'd been working with all along. For me, what inspired me was going to the big march, the March Against Family Separation and just, I knew about it. I knew what was happening. And then I went to that march and it was a really big march for Brownsville.

So I would say that was just a catalyst. And then the next thing that happened for me personally is one of the organizers, one of the people that works for the ACLU, his name is Mike Seifert, he sent out a message saying please do what you can, because we have people that are sitting on the bridge with nothing. The truth is if you feel called to this work, and you see people sitting on a bridge with nothing, with no shelter, with no water, with no food, you have to do something. You can't just ignore it. Or at least I can't. And I think that the people who eventually came to be Team Brownsville, couldn't ignore it either.

We started with five or six people and pretty quickly we got up to maybe 10 or so. We kind of had to come up with how are we going to do that work? And we did have good models to go by because there are other organizations that have been doing the work, especially in the bus stations. Like there's an organization in San Antonio and I'm sure there's one in Austin as well that meet and greet people at the bus stations. So this would be the starting place because we have three detention centers in the area of Brownsville. They would bring people that were released from the detention center to our bus station. I mean, we were getting people from here to wherever and we just had this network of people that would meet and greet at bus stations all over the country. The numbers have gone up and down. Right now because of COVID, I think that they're releasing more people because they have had many COVID cases in the detention centers. And so there's been a big outcry to release people.

And we talk to a lot of people and horrific stories and the stories affect you. You realize that there's so much you can't do. And I don't know, for me, that's just, my drive is just to keep doing what I can do. But just knowing that I can't do everything and I can't meet every need and I can't, there's many things that go on, in the encampment that we have no control over. There’s cartel activity everywhere in Mexico, and that doesn't exclude the encampment. Those are all things that we don't have control over.

I really don't know how these families got here, but they're getting here at a really bad time. But it was really metering that set these people on the bridge, because that stopped them from crossing into the United States to request asylum.

Rod: The population that you’re serving isn’t illegal anyway, right? They’re following the legal procedure for seeking asylum, right?

Andrea: They are, and a lot of people don’t understand that. But that’s also the rhetoric that comes through from the current administration, that these are illegals, they’re coming for the wrong reasons. It presents these people in the worst possible light. Hence the Migrant Protection Protocol. It's not protecting the migrants at all. It's protecting the American people against the migrants. Look it up. I think it's on The Department of Homeland Security webpage is where they have like a write up about what MPP is and you'll see, you'll be shocked. I was.

Because the rules say that if you're on US territory, you can request asylum. But if you put the checkpoint right at the midpoint, kind of straddling the line, and you don't allow these people to cross the line, well, then I guess it's fair game. It was making sure that asylum seekers did not get through to request asylum. As long as they keep them back in Mexico, you know, they haven't, they haven't requested asylum yet. So we never had people sitting on the bridge like that waiting to, to request asylum. They were, they had always been able to cross freely.

And so it was kind of like go back and take a number and then very, very slow crossing of people to request asylum. Where before, they would arrive, and they would cross, now they would arrive, and there might be 50 people ahead of them. And they were crossing people, they might cross two men one day, then they might wait a few days and then they might cross a family. And then a couple of more days would pass and then they'd cross a few more, you know, it was never very many. And so just had this effect of more and more people arriving and not being able to get across, and so just kind of building up and building up the encampment.

And it's frustrating and infuriating to think about, you know, you're serving these people that have been through so much, and our own government refuses to let them in. And we have people now that have been there a full year because MPP started near the end of July in Matamoros. That's when they started the policy, and we had our first family cross and come back to Matamoros. We almost didn't believe it when we heard it, almost thought, no, it just can't be. But when we got the first families back, everybody was devastated. All the people that were waiting were devastated because of course they had kind of heard about MPP and the possibility, and they knew that it might mean that they weren't going to their family in the States, that whoever was waiting for them in the US wasn't going to receive them because they weren't coming. And so now we have people that have been there a full year. It's heart wrenching to see people go through so many different things. And COVID is just another thing thrown on top of everything that was already really terrible there, just makes everything that much worse.

But how are we going to meet the needs of these people? Because at that point, which was the fall, it was growing and growing and growing and growing. So we went from about 150 people prior to MPP to by, let's say October, November, there were probably 6 or 700 and it was just growing by hundreds every month. So now, there have been up to 2000 in the encampment, and then there's been another 2 or 3000 they say in the city of Matamoros, there's a lot of people under MPP.

I think if we get a new president, I'm pretty sure that things will change. I think that MPP will end quickly because it's such a horror. I just cannot imagine that it won't change, be one of the first things that does change. I just, and if that happens, then the encampment will empty out. There won't be an encampment anymore, which is great. I mean, I'm actually looking forward to the day when I don't have to cross into Mexico multiple times a week with, and I don't have to receive numerous calls because this one needs that and that one needs this. These people have suffered tremendously and deserve a chance to come into the United States. These are not bad people. These are people that have suffered and have gone through terrible traumas, many of them, and they just deserve a chance to live.

Because right now the numbers say less than 1% are actually going to get asylum as it is. And then if they, and if they pass that new round of rules that they're trying to pass, it's going to be a tinier fraction of 1% that are actually going to get asylum, which means that the majority of the people in the encampment will never get to come into the United States and they've waited for a year for nothing, suffered for nothing, gone through traumas in the encampment, as well as back in their home countries, and now it's not going to come to fruition, and they've done it the legal way. That's the thing that gets to me. These people have actually done it the legal way. They've followed the process. They've followed the rules. They haven't crossed the river, like so many other people have.

Rod: Do most of the people who come, come knowing that the rules have changed and that their chances are extremely slim, or are they still operating under the belief that things are the way they were before Trump?

Andrea: You know, it's interesting. I see most people, and you cannot convince them that they're not going to get asylum. They just kind of hang on to that. You know, God's gonna let me, and I have suffered a lot in my own country, and God's gonna be with me and lead me to the promised land. And even if you put it down to statistics, you'll still hear people say, well, then I will be in that less than 1%. That will be me. And I guess when you've gone through as much as they have, that's all that you have left, is that hope.

Rod: How many, you, I saw on the website, you have a dinner program, a breakfast program, the bus stop program and a school program. How many meals do you think you, I, I don't, I'm sure everything has changed with Corona, but how many, how many meals do you serve in a day?

Andrea: So the breakfast meal is about 6 or 700. Not everybody gets up. Dinner meal is about 1200, but we also are providing food staples because a lot of people prefer to cook for themselves. And so they've made clay stoves in the encampment, out of the dirt that's there. It's full of clay and they mix it with water and they know how to do it. And they make stoves, incredible stoves that you cannot believe that somebody could just take a shovel and mix it with water and make a stove like that. But they do it. At this time we’re purchasing kindling, what you would think of kindling wood. That's what it looks like to me. And we pay someone to do that. And so they bring three loads of that wood a week and distribute it to everyone who has a wood stove so that they can cook.

Our funding goes in a lot of areas, and a lot of areas that people wouldn't even know about because you see, OK, they're funding food, clothing, shelter, all that kind of thing, but you don't see the other funding that we do, which is transportation costs to asylum seekers that come to the bus station and don't have a ticket. Buying phones, we've bought many phones, because when people get out of detention, and they have no way of communicating with their families, and they're crossing the country, sometimes we just feel like we need to do that, but that's an expense that most people wouldn't know about. We also help funding the shelters in Matamoros that take in asylum seekers, because there are people that definitely don't need to live in the encampment, that shouldn't live in the encampment, people that have chronic illnesses, people that have newborn babies, there's all kinds of reasons. And so there's two shelters in Matamoros that will take asylum seekers in, but limited numbers. Right now they're full, and they're not taking anybody, again because of COVID. They're scared, don’t want to take new people in.

When we could go into Matamoros, I was going into Matamoros three or four times a week, and each time I would go, I would be there for hours of the day. Now we're not, we can't really go into Matamoros like we did. We've been delivering supplies and leaving them, having some of the asylum seekers come down out of the encampment with their wagons and pick up supplies and delivering things that way. But we have chosen to stay out of the encampment really since this all broke, because we don't want to be the ones that take the virus in.

So it's hard, it's hard in the encampment. It's hard to get them to wear masks until there actually was the first diagnosed case in the encampment. I think they've been hand-washing, and well, social distancing is another thing. When the tents are wall-to-wall tents, it's kind of hard to say that you're socially distancing, but they're trying to keep people apart in lines, like lines for dinner, for breakfast and things like that. But we know that people get together. They just do.

So I actually retired from the school district three years ago. So, but I retired to help my daughter take care of her young son, who's now, he just finished kindergarten. We ended up homeschooling him from March on because there was no classes. So I didn't cross at all during that period of time. And my daughter is a nurse, and she's very opposed to me crossing, because she knows how the asylum seekers live close together and things like that. And so she's... 

I mean, I don't like just putting responsibilities on other people and not doing it myself. I don't feel right about that. But yet at the same time, I also have to live in the reality of, There is no winning. There's no… Either way. If I say, OK, well, you know, I need to do this. I'm going to do this. Then she says, OK, well then I guess you won't get to take care of him because you're going across. So that's kind of a big threat, isn't it? You're going to get your one grandchild that you have in Brownville, you're going to get cut off from him.

So, yeah, it's a stressor. I mean, it stinks. But as far as other things pre-COVID, it definitely affects you. And I'm the volunteer coordinator. And up to the point that COVID stopped people from coming, I was receiving probably 10 to 20 calls or emails or texts a day about people wanting to come and volunteer. And so that was in a way taking up every bit of my time that I wasn't across, that I wasn't in the encampment, or I wasn't at the bus station. That was taking up a lot of time, and I didn't really know how to stop it. I couldn't really come up with a way of both addressing people's desire to come and volunteer and my own need to actually have some time where I could think about something else other than this work.

Well, as it happened, COVID kind of cut all that off because we can't accept volunteers right now. So, I'm sorry the volunteers can't come, but in a way it was like a relief for me because I didn't have to deal with all those calls and letters. Looking at the positive here, I would say that because we have to rely on the Team Brownsville people that actually live here to do anything, we have become closer and perhaps more organized because we're the people that we have to rely on.

Rod: Do you think you were in danger of getting burned out before COVID kind of put the brakes on some stuff?

Andrea: Not, not burned out from the work. Where I was feeling burned out was from that job of volunteer coordinator, because it just, I had no way of reining it in. I didn't, maybe I needed some professional person that says, hey, I have a degree in nonprofit management or something. I know how to do this. Let's come up with a better system. And so it was always, you know, contact Andrea, contact Andrea, contact Andrea. And I certainly didn't mind talking to people or telling them about the work that we do and all that. I don't want you to misunderstand what I'm saying. It was really more of the unending quality of it. There were like six different ways to contact me. And sometimes people would contact me like in three or four different ways. And they would get irate and like, well, I called you and you didn't respond, or I sent you a text and you...  and I just, I did my best is all I can say.

Everybody always thinks of retirement as, Oh, OK, well now you'll be able to do all... now you'll be able to travel, and now you'll be able to do all the things you wanted to do. And now you’ll be able to relax, and you'll be able to do nothing, and any number of responses. But that's not been retirement for me at all. I think I'm actually working harder now than I did when I was working a paid job. It's just constantly thinking about what is the next thing? What is the next thing I need to do? What have I forgotten?

In January, so we had been doing it for, already for a year and a half. I had been talking to World Central Kitchen about coming because I said, what's happening is that we're getting a lot of volunteers, but nobody knows how to cook for a thousand people. Nobody has experience doing that. And so when I say, well, what we need volunteers for is to prepare a meal for a thousand people, people would often say, we can help in whatever way possible, but I don't know how to do that.

And we, because it's an all volunteer organization, we didn't have a person that was assigned, that was hired to, OK, you're going to be the head chef, and you're gonna lead all these volunteers to make the meals. We didn't have that. So we had to kind of work around ourselves and trying to find someone in each group that maybe had a little more experience with cooking and just giving people menu ideas and talking about budgets and how much. And the thing is, so we expected them to, if they were going to come with a group, we expected them to come up with a meal plan if they were cooking, one night, two nights, OK, you gotta come up with a meal plan. You're preparing a meal for a thousand people. How are you going to do that? And we would give them some resources, other people that had come and cooked.

 And it worked very well for some, pretty well for some, and not so well for some, but everybody managed to get a meal across anyway. I mean, even if it was hot dogs and store bought cookies. Occasionally people did that, they said, OK, well, we'll just make hot dogs and buy carrot sticks or something like that. OK. All right, let's go with it. Or sandwiches. Sandwiches was another thing that a couple of groups made.

But so finally, World Central Kitchen came, and they have their whole setup. They have, I mean, they cook for 10,000 and 100,000 people. They know what they're doing. So they came in January of 2020, they started. And so they set up in the parish hall of a church, and it was great. We had to kind of let them tell the volunteers what they needed to do and how to help. It was tricky, and we were just really getting used to it when COVID stopped everything, and they had to leave. And so they really only cooked for two months, and then they had to leave because we couldn't cross the food anymore.

So right now we are paying a restaurant. So this restaurant is now cooking both meals with a little assistance on a few days from a church that cooks some meals. But right now we are not cooking and crossing because we can't. And so we are totally relying on this little restaurant, and we have brought them a lot of PPE. We have supported them in whatever way we can to try to just let them do the work, and of course they've had to hire more people, just from going from a little mom and pop restaurant, which would maybe have, I don't know, at the most 10 people in it at any one time to now having to cook daily meals for over a thousand people.

Rod: How do you think you personally have changed over the last two years? How has this affected you?

Andrea: Well, As a person of faith, and that's challenging in this environment, I think that I’ve seen how other people's faith has carried them along through this process, and I feel like that has, well, it's made my own faith grow in a lot of ways. I am a seminarian at this point. I am an Episcopal seminarian in the Diocese of West Texas, and so as one of the other things that I do, I have to go to classes and study and do papers and all that kind of stuff. And so I am now in my, going into my third year. So it happened to be, and I never, ever would have planned it this way, it happened to be that I started seminary, and I started working with Team Brownsville, almost at the same time.

And I have been told that maybe I shouldn't be doing this because it's taking too much time away from my studies and the work that I, the seminary work that I have to do. And I have just said, look, this work drives the seminary. If I don't have this work or some work, some meaningful work, some work where I can actually see the whole point of the Bible and the gospel and all those things, if there's not something tangible for me to look at and say, this drives me to that there, this is the meaning of that, then I might as well not go. I'm not going to say, oh, I'm going to not do, I'm not going to be part of Team Brownsville, I'm not going to do the work because I need to study some or other theologian’s book.

I mean, I get the work done. It may be at midnight and it may be last minute, but I always get things in. I mean, I'm very driven in that way. I do the reading. I watch the lectures, I do the papers. I attend the classes. I do what I need to do, I guess is how I see it.

I think my call is to work in this ministry, work in migration ministry and to work with families in a colonia here. I don't see myself being placed in some church that they might want to place me in, because I already know what those churches are... They’re churches that are, well, I don't know if you know much about the Episcopal Church, but we have a long history of being a mostly white church, and not just white, but also the people that had money. I don't want that to be my church. And so I have presented and am going to continue to present the argument that my call is to migration ministry. And I live on the border. And even if the encampment closes, that's not the end of migration ministry. Migration ministry has been, there've been people migrating for forever, and they will continue to migrate. And there will be people in my community that are undocumented, people that are struggling, people that need to hear that  there actually are people that care about them and are concerned for their well being. And that's really what I want.

Rod: Well, I did want to ask you, what do you need, what do you want from people?

Andrea: The needs we're facing are we spend close to $100,000 a month on food, clothing, shelter, all the different things, wood, water, paying the people that bring that stuff in. I mean, there's so many different facets, all the bus station stuff. We just have a high outflow of money, and now because of the new people that are coming that don't have a place to go, we need to try to address that. How are we going to come up with a place? Do we have to buy, build, rent a building, make a shelter of some kind? I mean, how are we going to meet their needs? And so every one of those things costs.

Luckily before COVID started, we had gotten some fairly large size donations, and that's carrying us because we've been able to do the things, like kind of make the transformation from carrying the food across to having to buy all the supplies for the encampment. Right now, Team Brownsville is buying everything, every bit of everything that is supplied to the encampment. All food, all clothing, all is either donated, I mean, we take across things, donate directly like through Amazon, and we use the money to pay for all the things that we're buying. But the Mexican government does not buy anything. They're there. The immigration people are there. They’re more like a police force in a way you could say for the migrants. But they don't buy anything, and we sometimes say, what would happen if we weren't here? What would these people be doing? What would they really let them starve?

Rod: I've heard when people really want to donate after a weather disaster or something like that, that relief organizations would rather have money donations than material donations, because it creates a problem of sorting and storing and distributing. Is that true for you? Do you accept material donations?

Andrea: It has been true, and not so much now. We cannot accept any more used clothing. They're not allowing us to cross used clothing into Mexico, and we can't take it. And we got some good donations, don't get me wrong. We also got a lot of really junky stuff that we had to just literally throw away or get in there with gloves, because you never knew what you were going to find, clothing that was just so dirty and stained and ratty that were you really gonna give it to someone in the encampment? No. But so in a way it was kind of a relief when the Mexican customs people said, well, you can't cross used clothing anymore. You have to bring receipts. You have to have tags on the clothes.

So now pretty much what people send is stuff from our Amazon wishlist, which is stuff that we use and we need, or they send money, or we've gotten donations from CWS which is Christian World Services, which is kind of a ecumenical organization of a lot of different denominations. And they provide blankets, and they also provide some other things, some other like disaster relief kits and things like that. And we've gotten other donations from other organizations in the United States. There’s one that's called Baby to Baby that would send us just a lot of nice things, diapers, wipes, bags with baby clothes, things like that. This one group raised money for lanterns, for solar lanterns, and came down, and we got to distribute those with them. Then another time they raised money for Crocs, Croc-type shoes, cause people were saying they needed things that weren't flip-flops, things that had toes because of the mud and everything.

So people have done that. People have, yeah, lots of different kinds of donations, so we're grateful for that. We're grateful for people making donations, continuing to actually think about these people right now in this COVID time, because it's hard to think about anything but yourself. What am I doing now, or am I just staying in my house all day long and can't go anywhere? 

We have had very strong outreach from Austin to Team Brownsville, and there's a large group of Episcopalians. I guess I attract Episcopalians. But no, we've had really a lot of denominations like that, but this group just happens to be from a number of different Episcopal churches in Austin and they've come down. They actually started coming every month, and they would come and they would bring donations and they would work at our escuelita, which is, was, on Sunday morning. And they would cook, and it was great. It was great. We're sad to not have them coming right now.

Well, I could talk about Christianity and things that were meaningful to me as far as the teachings of Jesus and what all that is about, but doing this work has made it much more concrete, has made it much more tangible in a way. So when people talk about things about, well, what are the teachings of Jesus? Or what did he say about this? Or what did he say about that? For some reason, migration ministry always seems to fit right in. There's never a moment when I can't in my mind think about, well, he said this, and it relates to that. And I actually have to kind of hold myself back on more than a few occasions, especially when I'm around church people, because I know that you can bore people, and you can piss people off, and you can make people think that you have dementia because all you can talk about is asylum seekers. The eye-opening aspects of doing migration ministry have also opened my eyes to the fact that so many people that go to my church have zero interest in this. And actually they don't want to have anything to do with it.

Well, the other thing I discovered is that probably the majority of my church are Trump supporters, which also floors me. I guess I never would have, I mean, this is Texas, this is Bush country. And not a big fan of Bush either, but now he kind of seems like a saint, unfortunately. If there's anything positive that I could say about the Trump presidency, it's that it has brought enlightenment to a lot of people, their eyes have opened to, oh my gosh, what is he saying? This can't be. No, this is all kinds of wrong. He's driving people that are not supporters of him to action. He's driving people to reach out to others in a way that we haven't done in a long time. I mean, really since the Civil Rights Movement. That’s really the only positive thing I can see about the Trump presidency, really. I want to believe that, I want to believe that five years from now, we will look back and say it was a transformational moment, and not just another moment.

They keep trying to call me. I’ve had like 3 or 4 calls from the encampment just in our little talk here. I don’t know what they want, but anyway...

Episode 026 - Relief in Silence

I spoke to Alfredo Gomez after he spoke at a Circles of Men Project gathering. The theme was “If you know yourself, you can move past fear.” It was his first time at a Circles of Men gathering, and he was inspired to share. When I later asked if anyone would be willing to speak for a podcast, he contacted me to share his story in a little more detail.

Thank you so much, Alfredo, for sharing. I think it means a lot for men to be able to model openness and vulnerability to other men, and your story was moving and definitely relatable.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma. All other music in this episode was made by me using my new toy that I’m having so much fun playing with and learning: Ableton Live. So much fun! I hope you’re all finding ways to learn and grow and connect while we’re staying the hell away from each other.

Here’s the transcript:

I was born in Mexico. I was born one of 12 kids, and my mother had kids kind of like in a row, like almost every other year or every year. And so there was 2 older brothers and 2 older sisters before I was born, and then the rest of them followed, so I’m the 5th kid. Well, I felt like because of the number of kids that my mom, the large number of kids that my mom had, she just couldn’t, didn’t have the time to attend every one of us, and she neglected some of us.

And my father was a federale in Mexico, which is kind of like the Texas Rangers used to be back in the day. And he was rural, which means that he had machine guns, shotguns, .45s, carrying, you know… So he was very aggressive, and he would take some of that aggressiveness to the house. And he had a horsewhip for us. Sometimes he used the handcuffs on my older brother that I saw that he did. He handcuffed him to the window and whipped him with the horsewhip.

My mom, she would try to stop him from beating us, but then she would become a victim herself. He would push her out of the way, and then he would, that would really, made him more angry than anything because he would continue the beating, and then he would hit her after that for getting in the middle or trying stop him.

And so all those things made me fearful. I mean, I got horsewhipped too, but more than anything, what scared me the most is watching a lot of the stuff, my mother getting beat. It was just a lot of trauma. For me, just watching that and even my older two brothers were fighting at one point, and I went and told my dad so he could make them stop. They were hurting each other, I mean, there was blood. So I went and told my dad. I said, “Hey Dad, you know, they’re fighting.” So I wanted him to stop the fight. So he goes and stops the fight, of course, and whips both of them, and then he comes and whips me for being a snitch. And as a 6, 7 year old, you don’t understand what you did wrong. I didn’t understand what I did. And so it was, to me, very brutal.

And then so when we came to the States when I was 12 years old, the whole family. My dad, my mother, and all my brothers and sisters. We all came. Well my father had a job. He first came in and got a job here in Corpus Christi. He did a lot of construction. And then he brought us after he got settled, he brought us into the States.

I couldn’t speak English. I went to the school, and next thing you know, people don’t like me. They’re being mean to me, and they’re telling me, I don’t even understand what they were saying, but they kept on repeating this word “wetback,” and I didn’t know what that meant. I really didn’t know. That was my first time… Living in Mexico, there’s no, everybody’s the same, you know? There’s no racial tensions or any of that stuff, and so when I came here, that was foreign to me and a different culture.

So things didn’t get better for me. And then going to the school and then not being able to speak the language, the teachers would get mad because I was speaking Spanish. But what else was I going to speak if I can’t speak English, right? So then I would get in trouble for that.

And my English teacher, we were reading, everybody was reading out loud, and then she called me to read, and I had a really heavy accent, and she made me read out loud, and if you can imagine, the rest of the kids laughing at the pronunciation, giggling and all that. It was really hard for me. Being there, kind of like in front of everybody so everybody can laugh at.

So then I was 15, and my father had a gun in the kitchen, and I knew where he kept it, a small .22 revolver. And I decided that I just wanted to just finish this, finish with this anger, this anxiety, this hate that I was feeling constant. So I went to the kitchen and reached for the gun. And I looked in the chamber, and it had bullets, all of them. So I put it on my head and decided to, started squeezing the trigger. Well, being that it’s a revolver, and it’s, you know, as you’re squeezing the trigger, the hammer was all the way up, and I figured OK, it’s got to go off any time, and then there was a little pause in my mind that said, OK, what are you doing?

And then I stopped and thought for a second, and I say, maybe this is not what I should be doing. So I took it off my head, grabbed the hammer and put it back into place slowly. I put the gun back in the kitchen, and I went and picked up a Bible. Just a Bible. I just wanted to read something, something reassuring. The first thing that I read, I just opened it at whatever it would come up, and it was a scripture that I read somewhere along these lines. “God gave you life, thou should not take it away.” And then from then on, any time I felt that that was the answer, I knew it wasn’t the answer, taking my life out. So I decided that was never going to be an option.

It’s kind of funny because my father talked about the Bible a lot, and he said he had read the Bible, but it seems like he was choosing the things that kind of stuck, like using the rod and not letting kids get away with anything, but instead he used the whip, the horsewhip and belts and whatever. And then, I never saw him go to church, but he would send us to church. 

And there was a bus from the church that they would send by our house, and so I really enjoyed those times because they called it the Joy Bus, and so we were all singing church music and church songs, and it was really nice. I really enjoyed that growing up. But still, I always felt like I was alone, because I couldn’t talk about the stuff that was happening at home anywhere else. This is kind of like a secret, or a family secret. Still I felt alone during those times.

Then I got into athletics. I kind of decided that athletics was a good thing for me because I felt a lot of anxiety, and I felt like by doing athletics, by exercising, by running, by playing a sport, it would get my mind off and concentrate on something else than all the stress and all the anxiety at home and at school and so on. I tend to be competitive, if I couldn’t depend on people, I could depend on my own self by being the best that I could be on whatever sport that was.

And so the abuse with my father still continued, but I joined the track team when I was a sophomore, and I became a very good runner. I was a naturally good athlete, and they put me on the JV team, and because I joined like a week before the first cross country meet, and I was training by myself on my own, I had no knowledge about training, but I would just run as fast as I could for as long as I could, and that was my training. So my coach puts me on JV not knowing anything about me. And he told me before the race, Alfredo, if you get tired, just walk. He did a prayer also, before the race, and that was really neat, and I really liked that.

And when the gun went off, I ran into the guys in front of me because they were going like, they weren’t racing, they were jogging. So I went to the front with the frontrunners, and they were doing the same thing. They were jogging. In my mind, it’s like, you run as fast as you can. It’s a 3 mile race, cross country. So I’m like, OK. I ran with them for about 2 or 3 blocks, and then it’s like, I have enough. I just took off. I took off. I tried to relax as much as possible, but I ran at 90% effort, 85% effort, and then if I got tired a little bit, I would slack off a little bit and then resume again. That was my first 3.1 mile race, a 5K, and my time was a 16:08. As a sophomore in JV. And the winning time for varsity was a 16:06. So then my coach was just so happy, he’s like, oh my God, who are you? Tell me more about you! So the next time, he puts me on varsity.

So then I felt stronger, too, as a sophomore, and I started working at Kentucky Fried Chicken part time after school. And so my routine was to go to the gym at 5:30, go for a 3 mile run or lift weights, and then be at the school at 7:30 to start the classes at 8. And then after school, and after the track training, I would go to the house, and then get ready, go straight to work at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and then get off at 10 o’clock, do my homework, and then get up early in the morning the next day. And that was my sophomore year.

But then one day I decided, they were having something where they had some balloons that the manager said, hey, you want to take these to your brothers and sisters? Three helium balloons. And I said, yeah, I have a little brother and 2 little sisters I can give them to. So I took those helium balloons to the house, and I gave them to each one of them. And then my younger brother wanted the balloons, the girls’ balloons. And I told him, no that’s, you have yours, and you have yours, and you have yours. Now my dad was spoiling kids now. Now he wanted to change his ways, I guess. So he spoiled the youngest one, and he told the girls, give him their balloons. And I’m like, no Dad, that’s, everybody has a balloon. And he got really mad, and he started yelling and cursing at everybody, saying give the boy the balloons.

So he walked away, I went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and popped all 3 of them. Well, if you can imagine my father. He goes, oh, you see what you're going to get. So he goes inside to the bedroom, comes back with the belt. I’m 16 years old already. And he’s coming towards me, and I stopped him. I put my hand up, and I said look, Dad, if you hit me, we’re going to fight. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen. I’m going to fight you. I’m probably going to be on top of you most likely. I’m just letting you know, and I don’t know what’s going to happen after that. I’m not going to let you hit me again.

Well, he looked at me, and he saw that I was very angry. He knew that I wouldn’t have it any more. He looks at me, he says, well just don’t do it again, turns around and walks away. That was the first time I felt some relief. I felt some relief that that stopped. My father was never going to hit me again, and now I could stand up to him.

I mean, it was still the struggle. And my father was still very loud and aggressive and abusive with my younger siblings and with my mom. But he knew that he couldn’t do the stuff that he used to do to me. So I felt safe, but I would see what he was doing with everybody else.

And then my brothers, my brothers used to drink and do drugs. And I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, and one of them was more aggressive than the other towards me and everybody else. He was more angry. And one day, about the same time that I stood up to my dad, he came in, and I was playing with my youngest sister, and I was sitting on the floor with her playing, and he was sitting on one of the couches behind me. And then he told me to leave her alone.

So I looked at him, and I saw that he either had been doing drugs or he was drunk, one of the two, so I said, I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just playing with her. And then he kicks me in the back of my head and tells me again, I told you to leave her alone.

So when he kicked me, I got up, and I felt that anger rise out of me, and then I hit him. I just hit him one time. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the expression, turning off the lights, but I did turn off the lights on him. He couldn’t see. I didn’t knock him out or anything, but I hit him like right on the temple, and he could not see for like 15 minutes.

And I just had so much anger already, and I just had enough, everybody beating me up, and everybody… And I couldn’t talk sense into them, so I just felt like I had to use physical aggression. And now that I was running and lifting weights, I felt like, you know, I’m going to defend myself now. And I don’t feel good about it, but that’s what I did as a 16 year old. I hit him.

But you know what? That was the last time he ever tried to hit me again.

So then, it’s like I feel OK. I feel better now. They can’t mess with me anymore. But I felt like a lot of the damage was already done. But running would help me get out of the house, and I became one of the fastest, like I said, I won district in the mile, the two mile, in cross country. My sophomore year, my junior year, and senior year, in a 5A, which was the biggest division there was. And then I went to regionals and won the mile, or the two mile at regionals, and then I went to the state. I ended up 4th my senior year, and I think it was also 4th in the mile and two mile.

So I started getting scholarship offers, and I could go anywhere in the country, basically. I never thought about going to school. Well, with that, being that my brothers were also working construction, my dad worked construction, I’d be the first boy to go to college. My grades were OK. But my coach said to me, Alfredo, you ought to try it. Try to go to college, and if you don’t like it, try it a little bit more. And if you still don’t like it, try a tiny, tiny, tiny more before you… What I’m saying is, just give yourself a chance. And once you give yourself, you tried, and you didn’t do it, and you couldn’t do it, and you tried again, you couldn’t do it still, then you can say, at least I tried. So I said, well, I’ll try it coach. And next thing you know, I graduated from Rice.

But going through Rice and going through college, I found myself with a lot of anxiety. Doing presentations, I would feel that anxiety getting in front of groups, large groups in front of the classroom, I felt a lot of anxiety.

R: Did you think about those kids laughing at you in high school, and that fear of being laughed at?

A: Yeah, being laughed at, that I wasn’t smart enough, that I didn’t belong there, almost kind of like I felt like I didn’t belong in the States, coming here to the United States, because I was a wetback. I felt like I didn’t belong at Rice, that I shouldn’t be there. Same old feelings. And then getting in front of a classroom, I felt a lot of anxiety in speaking in front of, in doing a presentation.

But then after I graduated from Rice, I decided to teach there at Lamar High School in Houston. And I was teaching there, Spanish and coaching soccer, and I did that for one year, but again, I felt a lot of anxiety being in front of, in the classroom. And Mondays was like my worst day of the week. Well, actually Sundays, like the anticipation of Monday, and then Monday was terrible my first hour or two, and then I felt better towards the end of the day. And then Tuesday was better than Monday. Wednesday was better than Tuesday, and so on. And then Friday is like, what the heck was wrong with me on Monday, right? Well, the weekend came, and then Monday came again, the same feeling again. I felt awkward. I felt insecure. I felt, and I’m like, OK, it’s going to get better, right? And people say, well, it’s natural. You know, you get over it after awhile. It just wouldn’t go away. And I’m like, what’s wrong with me?

R: Why do you think you were drawn to that profession when you had such anxiety about standing in front of people?

A: Well, because I care about kids. I wanted to help kids. Helping people, even like love and affection, or caring for your students, showing them that you care for them, and that kind of thing. I really liked that, but I didn’t like to be in front of the class all the time. And I know that that was what I was signing on for, and I thought that I could handle it, being that I’m not talking to a whole bunch of professionals. These are high school kids, right? But then still I felt that anxiety of being in front of the class, like I said, Monday through Friday. And it was a cycle. It never got better.

So I moved to Austin from Houston. I started working for Texas Employment Commission, and I did a lot of good programs for them. I did Communities in Schools, which is a dropout prevention program. And I also did the Job Corps program, helping kids get education and training, and a lot of those kids had problems with the court system or with the law, and they were on probation and trying to get their life together. So I was trying to help those kids, and I did that for awhile, altogether for like 10 years working for the state.

But then I had my first panic attack. I didn’t know what that was. I found myself that I couldn’t breathe, and I was breathing very heavy and hard. The breathing would not slow down. So I’m like, what the heck is wrong with me? So then I started getting light-headed, and I felt like I was going to pass out. This is at the office. And so somebody said, you’re having a panic attack. You need to go to the doctor about it. And I went to the doctor, and they said, yeah you did have a panic attack, and he prescribed Xanax.

I was doing the Unemployment Services also for the Texas Employment Commission, so I was always doing presentations at which I felt anxiety, but it was a little bit more controlled, suppressing some of those feelings. And I would still do my job, but it got to the point where it was kind of like putting stuff under the rug all the time and just piling and piling. I mean, the medication would help me, but it never solved the problem. To me, it was just kind of masking my feelings and my emotions.

So after the Texas Workforce Commission, I got a call from a new program that was starting. It was Steve Jackobs from Capital IDEA. Capital IDEA is basically getting people into careers, not just a job, but a career. So we provide the training, the education, everything that they need so they can get a good quality job with benefits and the whole 9 yards, not just a job. It was 5 of us that started that program from scratch, and we started recruiting, we started doing presentations. I worked for Capital IDEA for almost 5 years.

But it got to the point where I felt that I’ve taken a deep dive, and I was running out of oxygen. And I could see the surface, but I didn’t think I had the energy to swim all the way to the top. That’s how I felt when I left Capital IDEA. And they offered me all kinds of different options, work from home, part time, don’t leave, what about your benefits, and all this and all that. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. I just wanted to leave. I couldn’t handle it anymore, and I went into a deep depression, anxiety, paranoia.

R: Were you doing anything besides the medication, like seeing a therapist or counselor or were you involved in church or anything?

A: No, not at that time.

R: Just on your own, huh?

A: On my own. So when I had, I call it a nervous breakdown, I mean, because I totally went under the radar after that. I just stayed at the house after that. I didn’t want to leave. I even felt embarrassed going to the mailbox to pick up the mail. So I just kind of stayed in one spot on the couch or whatever and just stayed there all day. And it was really dark for me.

That lasted for about 3 years, until I just felt that I needed to get a job, get back on my feet, and I got some medication. They thought I was bi-polar, and then they thought maybe it’s just anxiety, and then depression, so I was taking medication for just about everything for a large number of years. But it wasn’t doing anything for me. I mean, I would gain weight, it made me foggy, and it wasn’t just doing the trick. I had a lot of side effects that were kind of worse sometimes. I felt worse.

So I tried everything, and so then, so what is the answer? What can I do now? I started to look at more manual work, more using my hands more, and trying to ease the anxiety. So I tried to look for work that was less involved with the office and meetings and stress and the anxiety that I felt and working more on my own. So, and then for the next, I don’t know, 15 years, I would get a little job here and a little job there.

So then I started reading more about... and reflecting. Why am I so nervous? Why am I feeling so anxious? What happened to me that’s causing me… Is it in my blood? Is it passed down from my mom or my dad? What’s going on? Why do I feel so awkward? Why do I feel so much anxiety? So I started reading more about it, educating myself more about it. I went to church too, praying. Maybe I don’t have enough faith. More prayer. Maybe God, I need to get on my knees more often. So I was trying to do all kinds of things to help me deal with my anxiety, but I wasn’t finding a lot of positive feedback from a lot of that stuff.

My girlfriend and I were looking at documentaries, and we were looking into yoga, and then she was telling me, because she's been into yoga a lot herself, and she was telling me about it. And then we were looking at some documentaries from some of those masters, like the Dalai Lama and all those guys that are very deep. And then we saw Thomas Keating. And I'm like, oh, who is this guy? I don’t know, So when I saw the documentary of Thomas Keating, a guy that gave his life to God basically when he was 5 years old, because he got really sick, and he heard the nurse and the doctor talking about his condition that he might not make it. OK, I want to know more about it. 

So I started watching the documentaries, and I started, and then we start buying books, so we started reading about Thomas Keating and his beliefs and his findings and all of that. He studied all religions, not just the Catholic Church, or Christianity, but all the religions around the world. And at the end, you know how we have this little, something is missing in our lives? Everybody’s got that almost, like maybe you think it’s money, maybe you think it’s a relationship, maybe you think it’s a hobby, or a house, or something that you’re always trying to get to fill that little empty hole, that little empty thing in your heart. And what I’m gathering is that it’s the union with God, that you have to have that union with God in order to fill that empty hole there.

So then I started to do that for myself. I want to feel close to God. How do you get that union with God? Well, through prayer. And silence. So then I started doing some meditation, some prayer, and I started looking into yoga. And I started looking at Thomas Keating for answers, and I felt like that was one person that I could trust. One person that I know I can trust because his intentions were good from the beginning. He could have been a millionaire, he could have been whatever, if it was about money. But he saw that that was not him. So I found a little bit of a relief reading about him and what he's saying about our intentions, and to be kind to yourself, you know, and I've never been kind to myself. I hated myself for the longest. I hated falling short, not measuring up, and I’ve never been kind to myself.

But I started thinking about all that. And then, so my understanding of prayer was that you pray, and you’re always asking God for something. God, can you help me with this? God, can you give me this? Always asking. And I felt, and thankful, you know, thank you for the health. Thank you for helping me today, for this, with this.

But then when I started listening to Thomas Keating, he was talking about more, you kind of surrender to Him in silence, and you want to connect with Him in silence. You do that for like 20 minutes, most of the time, because of my anxiety and all the things that I'm always thinking about something, it's very hard for me to get anywhere because always, he talks about not getting on the boats that are passing by because your mind goes somewhere, and get off the boat and go back to the word that you, for the prayer. I find myself that for the first 20 minutes I was thinking the whole time about something else. And then the little alarm that I set up goes off. It's like, Oh my God, I didn't get to do the silence as much as I wanted to.

But it takes practice. It takes practice. So then I would do like, I'll try it again, and then I would get somewhere. I did it one time where I actually did 20, about 20 minutes of totally silence, and I felt getting deeper and deeper with union with God, and I felt the connection of almost kind of like stages as meditation and being in union. I felt so much peace. And I'm like, I want more of that.

So now one of the things that I'm beginning to realize in being kind with myself is that I do get a physical reaction with stress and anxiety. I do. I don't want it, but it happens. It's kind of the fight or flight sort of deal response for me because it happened to me for the first 16 years of my life. Even though I understand that is what is happening, I have to acknowledge that and not try to change it, but accept it sort of, and be kind to myself and tell myself that, yes, this is my body reacting because of my trauma, but it's not really who I am.

And so I joined the men's group, the Circle of Men. It's like 30 people in a group, 25, 30 people. And when Clay Boykin did the introduction about, OK, we're not here to judge anyone. We're here to support everyone, and this is not a group. This is a network. And we love each other. We care for each other. And what’s said here, stays here. And I felt a lot of love from everyone.

And I'm still, with my fear, with my anxiety, my fear’s always on guard. I always have my hands up for whatever happens. So then I started dropping my guard down, and I started listening to the stories or the conversation. I felt that I needed to come out, and I told my story in short, very compacted, but just basic, I came from Mexico, and all the things that happened to me at home, my dad was very aggressive and abusive and my brothers and sisters, and so on, and growing up and then coming to the States. And I, oh my God, my nerves were just, I felt it all over me. I was shaking inside me. I was sweaty. My body was reacting, and I was like, what is happening to me? as I'm talking and telling my story.

And the group was just so understanding and so compassionate with my story. And then I put my head down, and I said, I'm sorry guys, I'm feeling this way. And everybody's like, no man, there's nothing to be sorry about. There's nothing. They were giving me assurance and acceptance for the very first time in a large group like that. And I still, I was, I felt embarrassed. I felt the shame. I felt all these negative feelings about myself because I just kind of like, I've been carrying this load of rocks and I just dumped it right in front of the group. And when I did that, I was apologizing for that because the group had to hear it. And everybody was so understanding and caring, and loving and supportive and all that, that it was the very first time. I've been afraid of men for a long, because my history and everything that I experienced in my life, and I was angry at men.

So being in a group of nothing but men and feeling a little bit of acknowledgement, acceptance. Validation. I just felt like, ah, man. After I finished doing my spiel and feeling embarrassed and all that, I usually, when something like this happens, I tell myself that was stupid. Don't go back there. You're an embarrassment, sort of thing. I tell that to myself, so my natural reaction is like, OK, I’m out of here, I'm not coming back. I'm so embarrassed and so ashamed, I’m not coming back. But I told the group, you know what, I am coming back.

We are harder on ourselves. I've learned that, and for me, people are nicer to me than I’m nice to myself. And, and I realize that, and I realized that that's how we are. I tell my daughter who's 15 years old, that has some of the, as a 15 year old girl going to school, and the friends and all of that, and being very critical of themselves again. It's like no mama, just, it's like, I don't even tell that to myself and then I'll tell her, and it’s like, I should listen to myself when I'm talking to her. It's easy for me to tell her that, but it's hard for me to tell myself.

That helped me a lot being in that group. But still, I'm always going to come out with my hands up, guarding myself, especially the first 5, 10 minutes. And then I feel more at ease. Now can I stop my body from reacting? So far I haven't been able to stop my body from reacting. I don't want to fight it. I just want to be kind to myself and saying, it's OK, Alfredo. You've been through some hard, it's OK. Don't be anxious about being anxious. But I just have to be kind to myself, accept it.

And maybe sharing. Maybe others might feel the same and maybe I can talk to them about it, compare notes and help each other out. This past meeting, we were talking about free will and what is God's will. But I really believe that God's will for everybody is for everybody to be nice and be the best human they can be. You got struggles? We all have struggles, some worse than others. But at the end of the day, God's will for us is to be the best person that we can be. Help each other out, be there for each other, give somebody your hand so they can lift them up, and maybe they'll lift you up next time.

Episode 023 - Let Loose the Bird

Today we have Clay Boykin, a Marine, a retired business executive, and a New Compassionate Male. He was called to servant leadership in his professional life and in retirement has made connecting and helping others connect on a heart level his mission. My favorite quote of his from this interview is, “And this whole idea that once one is committed to one’s path, and they’re in line, and they’re on purpose, that providence moves, the divine will of God moves… Well, let me tell you, that’s not a metaphor. I’m learning that every day. The next thing happens, the next thing happens, the next thing happens. And I’ve got more uncertainty financially now than I’ve ever had, and I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been because I’m on purpose.”

The word “heart” appears 17 times in the transcript below, and Clay is definitely living his life completely in touch with his heart. My sincere thanks to Clay for all the time he spent with me on this project, literally hours before boarding a plane to Kenya. He is something to behold.

Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

“Redwood Trail” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 7:26

“Tiny People” by Alexei De Bronhe at 11:27

“Rastafarian” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 13:46

"Almost New" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 17:16

“Marathon Man” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 21:08

“Living in Hope” from Purple Planet at 25:24

"Laid Back Guitars" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 28:01

“Haunted” from Purple Planet at 31:21

“A View From Earth” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 33:05

“2 Above Zero” Creative Commons Music by Jason Shaw on Audionautix.com at 39:23

"Carpe Diem" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License at 44:25

Here’s the transcript:

I went to Texas A&M, and I got a Marine Corps scholarship there and took a Marine Corps commission, and that was in ‘76. When we were freshmen, they marched us over to the Memorial Student Center, and they said, “You memorize these lines.” It was an inscription. It was a Bible inscription. It was John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.” And that’s the heartbeat of A&M. And so I went into the Marine Corps. I served 4 years there, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. If a person is looking for an example of leadership, and leadership from the heart, it’s there in the Marine Corps.

In the Marine Corps, they teach us about servant leadership, and that really was ingrained, although they never used that term. So leadership begins there. Old gunnery sergeant back in the Corps, when I first checked in as a second lieutenant, and I said, “Look, Gunny, What can I do to help clear things out in front of you, from in front of you, so that you can do your job?” He’d pull me over to the side sometimes when I was heading off in a direction, and he’d say, “Lieutenant, don’t do that.” And he’d kind of keep me on the straight and narrow, and I’d support him.

When I got out, and I got into the corporate world, that spilled over. And I brought that into Motorola. I’d have supervisors and lead production operators, and I didn’t know about semiconductors. I didn’t know about test floor or anything like that, so I really had to rely on them. And so it was the same principle. What can I do to help you do your job and clear the stuff out of in front of you so that you can come through and be successful. Today I would say that I brought heart and spirit into the organization, but back then, we called it leadership, and I thought about it as servant leadership.

Motorola had gone through a quarter where it had lost money, the whole corporation, because of the downturn in DRAM prices. Well, it was a $250 or 260 million organization. I got there mid-year, and we ended up at $300 million. And so it’s time for forecast. I’m the marketing director. And I said, “Well, I’ve done an analysis, and based on this chart and numbers here, I just want to grow the business wisely, just add $100 million a year to it, and that’ll be good. But you know, I’ve done a little bit more study, and I think we could really do $460, so let’s forecast $460, but let’s budget on $400.”

They said, “Well, that’s fine. What are these numbers.” I said, “Well, it’s funny you should ask. I was looking at the Austin American-Statesman this last weekend, and there was a chart in there, and I found a correlation between that chart and the trends in that chart and our business, and so I’m using that as a guide.” “Well, what was that chart?” “Well, it turns out it was the history of rainfall for Austin, Texas, by month, for the last 10 years.”

Well, you could hear a pin drop. “What?” You know, “what?” And this really happened. The point being is, nobody can forecast, and you can’t forecast DRAMs. Sales guys were like, “Did you hear what Boykin did, forecasting on rainfall?” During the year, the sector president would come poke his head in the door and say, “How’s the rainfall forecast doing?”

Now, here we are in the semiconductor industry. High tech. And it was fun. There’s so much stress. And we had this crazy vision that we were going to forecast our business based on rainfall. It was crazy. But it was something to rally around.

Well, we missed the forecast. We did $461 million. We beat it by $1 million. Now think about that. A volatile market goes up and down, and bingo. You hit the number. Now how do you do that? It’s not by analyzing things. It’s by people putting their heart into something. People seeing something greater than themselves, being part of a bigger picture and getting some good energy out of it.

People noticed that. People engaged with that. People felt connected. And to notice that, and to bring that out within a group of people, within an organization, is to connect on a deeper level and aim at something greater than yourself. That’s the formula of success from my standpoint. About 3 years later, the organization was about $750 million.

So fast forward. I left Motorola after 22 years and went with a couple of startup companies. I ran one here in Austin for about 3 years, and then I was with one that was based in New York City.

I was running pretty fast and hard. I was pretty worn out. In ‘07, we took some vacation with Laurie’s family to Jamaica, and while I was there… You know, I like to get off into the woods by myself and just enjoy the peace that’s there, and I had my little Swiss army knife, and I would make things, just using whatever’s out there. And I started to realize that I was really not feeling well, that I was having symptoms that I thought were heart attack symptoms. But they would come and go. As long as I was calm, I was fine, but if I exerted myself, I would start feeling really bad. And I thought about going to the doctor, but then I thought, mmm, we’re in Jamaica. I don’t know that I really want to do that.

So I just stayed calm, and I also contemplated that really this is, these are heart attack symptoms, and this really could be it. And then I continued to work on my crafts. I don’t know what it was, but I went into an incredible peace during that time. It was leaning against the veil, as they say. Part of it was, gee, there’s a lot I don’t have to worry about anymore. But the other was just, I don’t know, it’s hard to put words to it. And there was almost a mystical experience, the things that happened there before we came home.

Well, sure enough, 24 hours after we got back to Austin, I had a quintuple bypass. I had 3 months of convalescing, and so I had a lot of time out on the patio reflecting on that and asking the questions. Who am I? Why am I here? And where am I going? And really thought hard about that and had a lot of confusion about that point.

Because you know, we guys, that’s what we’re taught to do. We’re taught to go to school, get out, climb the corporate ladder, so that someday you can retire and do what you wanted to do in the first place. Well, that sets up a real anxiety. I’m always looking over my shoulder as I’m climbing the corporate ladder, and that’s a way to trip up. And so I was reflecting on all that.

Well, I went home. The market was crashing. A few days after I got home, I got laid off. First time since I was 16 that I wasn’t earning a paycheck in some way, shape, or form, and I panicked. I really did, and began working desperately to get work. I barely got an interview for 2 years, and it took me down, hard. And I was just questioning my worth in the world, and goodness, I was deep depression, extended, eventually hospitalized.

So coming out of the hospital, I thought, “OK, maybe it’s time to go get back into church or something like that.” And so I would go down to church downtown on Sunday for 8 o’clock service, and I’d run up to the Unity Church for 9:30 service, then I’d head across town to the Austin Recovery Center for an Episcopal service over there, and I called that churfing. And I remember specifically, it was about 9:20 in the morning, January 3, 2010, I walked into the Unity Church for the first time, and if you’ve ever talked to anybody that goes to the Unity Church, and they’re talking about their congregation, they say when we walk in, we feel total love, total embrace, no judgment. And for me, I felt like the prodigal son. And it really, really touched me.

I remember early on, I’d sit in the pew talking about making notes and mind mapping everything, and I’d cry. There’d be tears. Something Reverend Steve said that really struck deep, but you know, one day he was talking, and I don’t remember the overall talk, but at one point he said, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I don’t have to build a condo there.” And I slapped my forehead. I thought, “Oh! I have choice! I can choose to move away from this victim mode. I can choose to do something different, take a different path. It’s well within my power to do it.” I was 54 learning that lesson.

After I’d been there for about a year, Reverend Donna came up to me, and she said, “You know, I think you’d make a good prayer chaplain.” And I got this big old lump in my throat, and I said, “Well, that scares the heck out of me, and so I guess I’m supposed to say yes.” And I did.

I became a prayer chaplain there, and I’d make hospital visits periodically, which I never was comfortable with earlier. What do you say to the person? What is there to say? Well, I’ll tell you what you say: nothing. You just show up, and the right thing will come, and it will come from the heart. But more than anything, it’s just the presence, sincere presence, to stand there and basically, “I see you.” To be their witness that they are going through something. At a certain level, that’s healing in itself. Those are the experiences that, and the opportunities to really connect on a heart level that I found over at the Unity Church and being a prayer chaplain.

A couple of guys, there were only like 3 or 4 of us out of 30 prayer chaplains, you know, 3 or 4 guys, and we started getting together to say, “OK, well what does holding space really mean? What is prayer really about? How do we show up? How do we make hospital visits?” And so, we decided to meet every week and talk about it. And it was a very formative time for me because I grew up not trusting men, and so I was beginning to step into being, it’s OK to be vulnerable. It’s OK to speak.

And I look around the foyer after service, and all these men are out there, and they’re not talking to anybody. And I said, well, if I have this feeling and this drive and this curiosity, and I’m afraid to talk to another man, I bet you there’s another guy out there that’s like that, or maybe there’s a few of them.

So in one sense, it was self-serving. I said, “I’m starting a men’s circle. I’m going to do it once a week, because that’s what I need. I don’t care if anybody shows up. I’m putting the word out, and I’m going to be there and set a drum beat. I’m going to show up.” And I did, and we had 12 guys show up.

So we started there, and we’ve been gathering every week for 7 years. And we may take off a week or 2 during the year, but that drum beat is there. And we’ve got a different mix of guys every Monday night. We’ll have 18 to 20. We had 37 one time this last year. And it’s so fascinating how we figured out how to set a container that’s safe, where people can, men can step away from everything that’s going on out there, and they can sit with other men.

And that’s really the essence, and I’m not teaching anything. I’m facilitating. And it’s interesting to watch the dynamic, especially when trust is built that a man can speak his heart, and nobody’s going to try and judge him. Nobody’s going to try and fix him. But he’s going to be heard by other men and accepted for where he is in life. Where can you go and do that? This is the one place for me where I can safely do that.

And that’s another thing. At the very beginning, I would say, “I want to make sure everybody has an opportunity to speak.” So I’d go around and make sure everybody had spoken, and then I pulled away from that because there are guys that are coming in there, and they’re wounded, and it’s enough for them to be in a circle of men. That’s a big step, and then just to listen and hear the experiences of other men. And they will assimilate themselves, and at some point they’ll say something. So that’s sacred time, and I can almost see the wheels turning when somebody is silent in there. And to hold space for somebody because they’re on their path, and there’ll be a time when they’ll share. More times than not, somebody that’s been silent for a long time, I mean weeks and weeks, first time they share is incredibly profound, and we all come out better for that.

Here’s an interesting fact: last year, 49.4% of the people who went to that website were women. And I was talking out in Bastrop, Texas, around the table at a luncheon that I was at, and I pointed that out, and they said, “Well, why is that?” And I said, “Well, the most obvious is that they’re women looking for a resource for their man.” A woman sitting next to me, very seriously looked at me, and she said, “Clay, I’ve been following your website for a long time now, and let me tell you why. I’m a man in a woman’s body. Where do I go? Where do I go to figure this out?”

You know, I knew intellectually, but to look into her eyes and see the pain, and to hear those words was very sobering to me and reminded me that we have no idea of how far our ripples go. And if we’re putting good energy out there, you have no idea of all the good we’re doing in the world. It’s still men, OK; on the website I also point out that it’s anybody who gender identifies as male.

And that’s the other thing is, I don’t ask anybody to commit. Guys will come up to me and say, “You know, I’ve been going and stuff, but a few months ago, I kind of got sidetracked, and business, and life and stuff, and I really need to commit to come back.” And I said, “No no no no no no. Don’t set yourself up for failure. You’ve got enough commitments in your life. You don’t need another thing that you’re going to beat yourself up for when you don’t show up. Set an intention. Set an intention. My intention is to be there. And I’ll be there, it turns out, when the time is right.” That’s how it plays out. It gives much more latitude because there’s so much going on in life. This is a place to relax and go within. It’s a contemplative circle. We can be pretty shallow at times. We pride ourselves on being shallow at times. But we can go really deep as well.

Back to the job side of things, I had resumes everywhere, and I got this phone call, and it was a young fellow at Office Max. And he said, “Clay, you’ve got a resume as long as my arm. What are you doing applying for a $9 job part time at Office Max?” And I said, “I just got to reconnect. I just got to reconnect with people.” And this was right after I’d started going to the Unity Church. And he said, “Come talk to me.” So I did, and he said, “You’re not going to be here long, are you?” And I said, “No, but I’m going to be your best employee that you ever had. You see, I’ve got to reconnect with people. I have to have that energy, that interaction.” And so he hired me.

So I went from the top of the Empire State Building, at the top metaphorically, and my next job was $9/hour part time. But that $9/hour job was so enjoyable, to observe myself learning again and observe myself connecting again, and just the energy made a huge difference. And then about 6 weeks later, an old Marine Corps buddy heard of my circumstance, and he called me up and said, “Let’s have coffee.” So we did, and he described what the position was, and I said, “I’ll take it.”

So I eventually became general manager of that company, then moved on, did some business development work, and then this past October, I decided that, you know, reflecting back on Jamaica, sitting in the woods, at the end of my life, doing my arts and crafts, doing something creative and being at total peace, that’s what I was doing at the end of my life. Well, what’s to say that today’s not the end of my life? And am I doing what’s mine to do? Am I on purpose? And it was at that point, I got home, and I said to Laurie, I says, “You know, I’ve been doing this for 42 years. I’m tired. It’s time to change. If I don’t do it now, when am I going to do it?” And so, the 1st of October, just a few months after my book came out, I left the business world.

When I was a kid, that I would catch birds with a box and a stick and a string. I caught one one time, and I had it in my hands, clasped down, and I could feel its wings fluttering in my hands. And my Mother said, “What do you got there?” And Dad’s like, “Let it loose.” And I was a little kid, and I ran off with it. Well, in the process of running off with it, I didn’t realize that I was squeezing down on that bird, and I killed it. And that fluttering that was in my hands, that I could feel, translated up into my gut. That twinge, that anxiety, I felt like it had been transferred into me, and I was filled with guilt and shame. And metaphorically, I grasped that anxiety, that flutter, with my hands, my one hand was guilt and the other was shame. And I held it tight.

And that flutter is the divine energy. And guilt and shame is what I’m holding it in. And you know something? It’s stronger than we are, and it’s going to come out one way or the other. So when I can turn loose, open my hands up, turn loose of that guilt and shame, that divine energy, that light can integrate with us.

So yeah, October 1, I said OK. You know, I said it in my book, I’m committing the next 20 years of my life to men’s work, and I mean it. I put it in print. I guess I need to do it. Well, a couple weeks after that, mid-October, a woman called me up and said, “Let’s have coffee.” And so we did. Turns out that she was the local director for Charter for Compassion, Karen Armstrong’s organization. And she and I talked, and she said, “You know, Clay, you really ought to go up to the Parliament of the World’s Religions. It’s in Toronto, the last week of this month. And if you decide to go, would you represent me up there?” I said, “Well, yeah, is there any budget?” And she said, “No.” So I thought, “Well, OK, this is another one of those things where this door is opening, and I need to walk through it.” And I did.

Well, Karen Armstrong had an influence on me in my book. Just look up Charter for Compassion, and one, sign the charter saying, “I as an individual believe in these principles that are about the charter.” IPeople think about compassion as being the soft side of things. Some people say, well, that’s the bleeding hearts club. It’s anything but that. I say compassion is not for sissies. Sometimes you have to do hard things. And the president of the Charter says that a compassionate city is an uncomfortable city because they are leaning into the norms to affect change, and that’s uncomfortable at times.

So I set my intention to meet Karen Armstrong and give her a book. And there she is, and to get my picture with her holding my book. It’s pretty cool. But I also had looked, and I said, “I want to meet the board chair for the Charter.” And I kind of ferreted out where he was, and I went and talked to him, and I shared with him what we were doing with our men’s circle. And I pointed out to him and said, “You know, I’m just looking around here at the Parliament, like 10,000 people, 80 religious traditions, countless sessions going on. Do you realize that there’s not one session on men?” He said, “My goodness, isn’t that something.” I said, “Yeah, and furthermore, the Charter for Compassion has got 12, they call them sectors, their initiatives. And the last one, they’re in alphabetical order, the last one I saw on the website was Women and Girls. Where’s the Men and Boys?” I said, “My vision for the Charter is that there be a Men and Boy....” Well, I said just men. And he said, “Well, if you add boys to that, why don’t you write it?”

And I said, OK. Another door opening. No, I’m not going to sit down and write it. But I’m going to create the conversation. He said to me, “OK, why don’t you introduce yourself to the woman who leads the Women and Girls sector? and you’ll see what she’s got going on, and learn from that.” That’s what we’ve been doing. And the truth of the matter is that in a way, the Women and Girls sector are giving birth to the Men and Boys sector. I’m translating what I’m learning. It’s not going to be the same. We have different things going on with us. We have different issues and stuff.

So I’m still up there at the Parliament, and I run into an organization called Gender Equity and Reconciliation, International. In a nutshell, they are about deep healing between men and women. And it’s recognizing that both men and women are wounded by the patriarchy and creating a space for women and men to come together and do that deep work. And I spoke with them for just a few minutes, But he said, “Why don’t you come out? We’ve got a facilitators workshop. I said, “Well you got any budget?” He said, “No.” I said OK. So after the Parliament, I flew home, changed clothes, and flew to Seattle, and I spent a week out there. And it was a transformative week for me.

And for men and women to come in together, a group of 20 or 30, and to go to that level, and to hear each other’s wound, to connect on that level, there’s an alchemy that happens. And it’s eye-opening. It’s one thing to generally know, but when a person really gets down to it, and they’re sharing that most intimate fear, that wound, you can’t walk away and be the same person. It changes you.

But this is what is so exciting to me about the Gender Equity and Reconciliation. We’re doing our work. We men have got to up our game. We’ve got to come up here and meet women where they are, and that work is work that men have got to do with men. We’ve got to get over this “I don’t want to be vulnerable” business. You know, there’s half a dozen different models for men’s work, and there are hybrids and stuff, but you’ve got the Jungian model, you know, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. You’ve got Robert Bly, which is mythopoetic. You’ve got Mass Movement. You’ve got neopagan, drum beating in the woods. You’ve got the traditional, you know, Knights of Columbus. And then you’ve got this integrative reflective.

All those models are kind of an outside-in approach except for the integrative reflective. These are “break the man down, get him to his heart, and then grow him from there so that he can connect head and heart.” What the Circles of Men Project recognizes is that there’s a whole population of men out there that are already in their heart, and they’ve gotten there because something is broken. They’ve been broken open. They don’t need somebody to break them open; they’ve already been broken open, and they’re in shame, or they’re in fear, or they’re in guilt, and they don’t know where to go because they’ve gone through their recovery program, and they’re looking for something a little bit higher level, maybe something a little more positive. And I can speak with my wife deeply, but there’s still a level underneath that that she just doesn’t have a frame of reference to connect. So I need to go to another man, but we’re raised, “Don’t trust other men. Don’t show your underbelly.” So where do I go?

So if we can create a circle of men where we can begin to open those hands up, connect with one another, then we can do our work. That will enable us to then be ready to move into something like Gender Equity and Reconciliation.

Now, that’s not to say I don’t agree with those other models. I do. Matter of fact, I’m in conversation with the board chair for the Mankind Project. Mankind Project is a big one, and it’s about rites of passage, and it’s about breaking, I want to say it’s productively, but it’s opening the man to examine himself. But it’s coming in from a different frame of reference. Absolutely valuable, and the Mankind Project is also connected to Gender Equity and Reconciliation.

And it turns out that one of the women who is a trainer for the Gender Equity and Reconciliation organization is from Kenya. And when I was out there, she said, “Why don’t you fly down to Kenya and do some work here. Do a men’s retreat here.” And I was going to do that, but a rocket attack on a hotel in Nairobi kind of shut things down. The State Department said no go. But tomorrow, I’ll be on my way to Kenya. I’ll be running a young men’s retreat. It’ll be a 3 day retreat. The first evening at least is going to be one question: what is it to be a man in Kenya? Who am I, this western white male, to come over there and think I’ve got the answer? You guys gotta teach me first. Help me. Assimilate me in, so then I can take my wisdom and share it. Not teach it, but share it, after we’ve built trust, after you’ve heard my story, after you’ve seen me open and share, stand in my truth with an open heart. It’ll be 30 or 40 young folks, and I’ve got 2 gentlemen that are there from Kenya who are my co-facilitators. I’m just thrilled with the opportunity.

So things like that are unfolding and unfolding and unfolding. Every day something’s unfolding. And this whole idea that once one is committed to one’s path, and they’re in line, and they’re on purpose, that providence moves. The divine will of God moves. Well, let me tell you, that’s not a metaphor. I’m learning that every day. The next thing happens, the next thing happens, the next thing happens. And I’ve got more uncertainty financially now than I’ve ever had, and I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been because I’m on purpose.

So in years past, I’d be a bucket of nerves right now. I’ve got to get my PowerPoint slides. I’ve got to get this thing all nailed down before I go, and I’ve got to go blah blah blah. Well, no. I’ll show up. And it’s how I show up and recognize that so much of life cannot be scripted. It’s all about showing up.

So I’m thrilled to be doing that. After that… Let’s see. I come back, and a few days later, I go up to Baldwin City, Kansas, and there’s a men’s retreat there that I’ll participate in. And then I come back from there. I go to Houston, and the Unity of Houston has invited me down to work with their team to give them a workshop on doing a men’s circle. And they had some budget to spend on that.

Rod: Somebody finally said, “Yes, there’s a budget.”

Clay: Yeah, all of this has been out of my own pocket! Yeah, but so I do that, and I get back from that, the first couple of days of October I fly to Atlanta. I get picked up there to go to North Carolina to do another Unity retreat. And I come back from there, have a little bit of a break, and then October 16th is an alchemy event in Seattle, where the woman who heads up the Women and Girls sector and me and a group of people are coming together to put on a day-long event, and there’ll be men coming and using circle principles to get a sense of what it feels like to speak on a heart level with other men. Women running circles, doing the same work, and then in the afternoon we’ll come together and have a mini-taster they call it. They’ll get a taste of what the Gender Equity and Reconciliation work is all about. There will be, we’re anticipating about 300 people to be at that. So it’s blossoming.

In May, I was invited to join the Gender Equity and Reconciliation team at the United Nations. And we put on a workshop for the Committee on Spirituality, Values, and Global Concerns. The first step into the United Nations. And what an incredible experience that was, to be part of that, women, men and women from all over the world. And the common theme is the patriarchy system around the whole world, and it’s wounded the whole world. And to be in that, immersed in that, with the United Nations of all places, again, I would’ve never dreamed that. And to make that, just those few days, it moved the needle just a little bit.

I go back to servant leadership. To create an inspired vision, to model the way, to enable others to act, to encourage the heart. That’s… To set a vision for something greater than yourself. It’s connecting at the heart level with another person, connecting on a level of compassion, bringing that good energy into the environment. And that’s not la la land, that’s the real deal.

Why not connect at a deeper level? I spent my career chasing a paycheck and had my chest cracked open and was reminded that there’s a little bit more to life. And look at the stark difference that I’m witnessing within myself since the first of October. I am connected to something greater than myself, and I’ve got a passion for it. And it’s helping me heal along my path. And I’m trusting that to make it sustainable, that the funding will be there, the part-time consulting work will happen. But I’m not focusing on getting this job or getting that job. I’m aiming at something higher.

Rod: Well, it’s good to know that you’ve really slowed down for retirement, have a nice relaxing time sitting on a beach. You’re a busy man, and I really appreciate that you committed the team to me and my little project.

Clay: Well, I appreciate the opportunity. I really do. And I want to thank you too. Well good. Are we complete?

Bonus Story - The Veil Drops in Squaw Valley

I couldn’t resist another story from Steve Birch, one I cut from the last episode in the interest of time. I learned a new word from Steve in this one: Kenshō. For this story, recall that Steve is writing a book on discovering his family roots, a discovery that started with a family friend finding a photograph in a magazine of Steve’s great grandfather, a circus contortionist, which lead to discovering Steve’s long lost grandfather, Joe, and connecting with an entire branch of his family tree that he had never known.

Thanks again, Steve!

Music for this episode comes from Free Music Archive, including:

“Negentropy” by Chad Crouch at 00:00

“Superconnected sleep” by Soft and Furious at 03:50

“Multiverse” by Ketsa at 06:37

“Dream Catchers” by Lobo Loco at 09:35

Additional audio came from YouTube:

“Tibetan Monks Practice Multiphonic Chanting” by Wilderness Films India, Ltd. at 02:54

Here’s the transcript:

OK. I had finished maybe the fifth writing of the book, and I have all kinds of marked up copies of the book, and I was feeling like I was getting close, and I met with a friend of mine, she worked with authors, she put together book tours, and stuff like that. And she did a lot of marketing. And I went to meet with her just to share what I’d been doing and to kind of pick her brain. And what I didn’t know was that she had also done some channeling and stuff, and it had become just too disturbing for her, so she put that aside.

But we’re having lunch, and we finish talking about the book and possibilities of how we might market it, because it’s not… it doesn’t fit in a typical niche. So she says, “So what are you doing? You have some kind of practice or something you’re doing these days to get clear and to stay connected?” And I say, “I’m not that guy. I don’t meditate. I don’t put much weight in that.” And then I said, “But there was one time when I was in Squaw Valley, and I had this experience where my grandfather had taken me through a series of steps, the spirit grandfather. It was like he was taking me by the hand, and he gave me a Kenshō experience, which is a spontaneous, sweeping, life-changing vision.

I was leaving the valley, I was going to go into town to do some more writing at a cafe there that I had found. The Olympic rings are still there from when the Winter Olympics were there in the ‘60s. And I looked over, and there was just like a mist over this clearing, and I saw a grid start to form. It was about this high off the ground. and then it started to separate out and turned into like multicolors, stuff. And I started hearing, if you’ve ever heard the sound of the multiphonic voices of Tibetan monks. I’m hearing that, and it’s blowing me away. I pull over to the side of the road. I’m in tears.

And then the next thing that happens is the veil drops. I was looking at the mountains, the sky, and all of a sudden, it just rolled away, like the backdrop in a theater, and all I saw was energy, bursts of energy. And it was like I’m sitting here, with the sensation… It’s hard to… It’s the hardest thing to describe, but the sensation was like I was at the center of a lotus blossom. And I saw ley lines going up the side of the mountains, once I could see the mountains again, there were ley lines going from me up the sides of the, I mean the middle of this mountain pass. And I’m just broken up. I’m just sitting there in this rental car, and I look up to the rearview mirror, and there’s my grandfather just with a wide open smile, laughing.

And that was the experience. It was something that changed everything. After that, I started seeing auras. I started seeing rainbow rings around the moon. And then I started tuning into it, and I started seeing rainbow rings around all light sources when I was in that zone.

So, I begin to tell her about this story, and at that moment, I felt my grandfather come down through me, like to the base of my spine, just this electric energy. And I tightened up, and she dropped her fork and said, “Did you feel that?” I said, “Yeah.” But she gets disturbed by it, because my grandfather is coming through to her. We’re sitting at the table. and she says, “What is this?” And she was going, “I don’t know this, but it’s clear, and he’s saying that you need to finish this book. He doesn’t even want you to rest. He doesn’t even want you to sleep. You have to finish this.” It’s like, this has to be done. And so, and then she apologizes, so I said, “That’s OK, I understand. I understand you don’t want to be in that zone anymore, but do you know someone who I could go to who could help me complete the picture?”

So I get booked, we go through this whole thing. I talk to all my relatives who are gone who were part of that nuclear family and the extended family, and filling gaps about, that I’m later able to go and verify about what happened through those years. And she’s trying to shut down the session. It’s coming close to the end. She wants to do some healing on me and clear my chakras.

So she’s trying to bring the thing down to an end, and I said, “So, are they still here?” And she said, “Oh yeah, they’re here to witness the healing.” I said, “I want to do one more thing.” And then my dad bursts in, because my dad’s gone at this point. And so she said, “Your dad, he has a thing he wanted to tell you. He said it’s really important that you know this. And he said you need to know that when he was a little boy, he used to love the circus.” I was writing this book all with circus themes throughout. I had the manuscript in my computer bag next to me. I had never mentioned anything about it to her.

And then before we go into the healing, I asked her, “So, is Joe still here?” She said, “Yeah.” I said, “Ask him what is it that I saw in Squaw Valley?” And she, so she’s doing her pendulum and she’s talking to him and getting messages, and she says, “No, no, no. Don’t show me. Don’t show me. Tell me so I can relay it.” And so they start arguing and stuff. It’s like she’s arguing with this person she’s channeling. And he’s saying, “I can’t explain it in words! That’s his spiritual experience. And there’s no way you can understand his spiritual experience.” And she’s pressing him more for words and stuff, and one of the things he had said a couple times was, “Receive the message in the book you’ll receive.” OK, what do I do with that? And then it came up again. And she pressed him on that a little bit, and he drew a circle of energy. She said, “I’ve never seen this, but he drew this circle.” And she said, “I don’t know what that means.” But then he said again, “Receive the message in the book you’ll receive.”

So I went home. I slept through the night and then woke up about 4 o’clock, you know, lucid dream state, was encased in this like blanket of energy. But I started seeing these images. I wanted to stay in that state, so I closed my eyes, and I started seeing images flying by, and then they slow down and stop. And Cathy’s, she is like a sister from another life. She used to be the manager of the bookstore at the church. It was a picture of her just standing in the bookstore smiling with the stacks of books behind her. And then it stopped, and I woke up.

So I’m at the church, and Cathy is working in the bookstore. So I go, and tell her the whole story about everything, tell her about “you’ll receive the message in the book you’ll receive,” and I’m talking about all the family and all the pain in the family and finding these relatives, and the whole thing. And I mentioned… I said, “So let me know if that book appears.” And she said, “I know exactly what the book is.” So she went into the back room and came out with a book, and it’s called Remembering Wholeness. And she got this sly little smile on her face and said, “I’ve been holding this book in the back room for months. I keep forgetting to send it back to the publisher.” She said, “It came to us, and half of the book is bound upside down.” She said, “It’s contorted.”

And she went on to say, “There’s an exercise she does in the book where she has you draw a circle of energy in your imagination on the floor” I said, “Woah.” And she said the underlying message in the book is that there comes a time in people’s life, in some family’s life, some very broken families, there will be opportunities will arise where someone can step in and heal for themselves, for future generations, and also for the generations that came before. She said it’s a rare occurrence, but it sounds like that’s what happened.

So that was… But it was so cool, you know? And it’s just… It’s all very pedestrian. It just happens in my life. People sit down next to me in Starbucks or something and strike up a conversation. The next thing, we’re, God, we’re in another world. It’s like we’ve known each other. You know? That’s what lights me up. That’s what lights me up.

Episode 022 - Earthly Angels Bring Me Puzzle Pieces

Today we have Steve Birch, who is chock full of stories about sneaking into shows as a teenager and tracking down musicians at their hotels. He has been a musician, a producer, a songwriter, an author, and played many other roles on his journey through this world, and he shares a couple of those stories about the beautiful people who turned up in his life at the right time and in the right way to really make an impact on him. Here is my favorite quote, because it’s just what I need to hear at this point in my life, “That’s the key, moving in a direction but not being rigid about it, releasing expectations of the destination but move in the direction of where you think you want to go. And then that’s when the surprises happen. That’s when those doors swing open.”

My deep gratitude to Steve for spending the time and sharing himself and his experiences with me. I can’t wait to read his book.

My loving thanks to Flora Folgar for her help with the editing.

Music for this episode comes from Free Music Archive which, at the time of publication of this episode, has been acquired by Tribe of Noise and is not currently linkable. Our opening theme is “Start Again” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. Other music that appears in this episode:

“Trio for Piano, Violin, and Viola” by Kevin MacLeod at 6:49

“Kelli’s Number” by U.S. Army Blues at 12:51

“The Edge of Nowhere” by Scott Holmes at 16:17

““Driven to Success” by Scott Holmes at 20:14

“Sweet Spot” by Scanglobe at 27:12

“Bells and Vibes” by Michael Brückner at 35:23

“I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside” by John H. Glover-Kind at 41:41

“Deep Dual Love” by Jared C. Balogh at 44:32

Here’s the transcript:

As a kid, I remember my earliest memory, my earliest really vivid memory is being in a basket under my mother’s grand piano in our living room. And she was like the president of the chamber music society, and she was always having chamber music rehearsals and everything. So I was in this basket, and I looked over to my right, and there were my mom’s bare feet working the pedals, and I could hear the dampers on the strings above me thunking on the strings, and I looked out, and there were the string musicians, like a cellist and a violist, in their folding chairs swaying with the music, and I could smell the resin from the bows.

So music was, it was just always there. It wasn’t, “Do you want to play an instrument?” It was, “Which instrument do you want to play?” So I picked up the flute. It looked like an easy thing to carry. And I liked the way it sounded. Because I saw these other kids lugging tubas and euphoniums and stuff around.

I was pretty resolved that I was going to be in the music business. I didn’t know how, but I was just so drawn to it. And at 13, I started working in this college radio station. They were in the midst of an inventory, and I asked how I could help, and they gave me a broom and put me to work doing things that no one wanted to do, just helping them with inventory and emptying the waste baskets and stuff. But that changed really quickly. If someone didn’t show up for their show, I was on the air, and before I knew it, I was doing radio shows and teaching the new college students coming in how to run the equipment.

And then when I got older, I got into junior high and high school, and I was not working at the radio station anymore, but I still wanted to meet all these people that were coming through town. First, I would cold call all the hotels in town and ask for their rooms. One of the people I wanted to get was Chick Corea when he was in town doing a concert, and so I called around and just asked for his room at the Hyatt or whatever hotel it was, and his manager picked up, and he figured out what this was. I was just a kid who wanted to meet Chick. He gave the phone to Chick, and so we talked for a minute, and he said, “So are you coming to the concert tonight?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well just, why don’t you just come backstage?” I said, “Ok.” 

It’s almost like these footprints were laid out in front of me, and I was just as nervous and scared and ill-prepared as I was, I just put one foot in front of the other.

And so I went to this concert, and when it was over, I went backstage, and there was just this crowd of people there, and they were all getting autographs and taking pictures, and people bringing him flowers and all kinds of things. I’m pressed against the back wall, and the people started to part, and he points at me and says, “Steve?” I say, “Yeah.” And he calls me in, so I go in the dressing room, and we sit on the backs of these folding chairs next to a fruit bowl, and we just, I started… He was so open with me, so giving. He just says, “So, what’s going on? I heard that you wanted to go to New York. What do you want to… Is there anything that you wanted to ask me about?” And we just had this probably half an hour conversation. Me and Chick Corea, in his dressing room, sitting on the backs of the folding chairs, and it was expanding my world to know that this person who I had been listening to and studying and admiring was just a guy, and he was accessible.

And you know, when it didn’t work, when I couldn’t reach them at a hotel, I’d call around, call everyone, and no one would have them staying, they’re probably under a different name or under someone else’s name, so what I would do in those cases is I would go to, the afternoon of the concert, I would go to the venue to the stage door, knowing that they would be off-loading equipment onto the stage from the trucks. And I walked up to the stage door, and there’s a stage manager there and everything, and just walked over and grabbed a mic stand off the back of the truck and walked it in and went back out, grabbed a little box of mic cords or something, and did that like 3 or 4 times, and then I was in. And it worked. It worked so many times. It worked time after time after time.

So that was my bridge from this small town in Michigan to getting up the nerve to say, “OK, yeah. I’m going to go and immerse myself in this world.” And so that’s what I did. L.A., when I was 20.

I was so ill-prepared. I had been there for maybe a week, and I decided, “OK, I have to go down to the Hollywood Musicians Union and see what this is all about, see if I can make some connections and stuff.” I remember, I went downstairs into the basement, and there was a big band rehearsal going on. They have the door open because it’s blazing hot down there, and they’re just doing this rehearsal, and there’s this guy with this tenor sax on a stand, and he’s just slumping in a chair smoking a pipe while this rehearsal is going on. And I’m listening. The band is kicking. And he takes his pipe and puts it on the music stand at one point and reaches over and picks up the sax and straps it on, and still laying back slumped in his chair just blew the most blazing sax solo I had ever heard, effortlessly. And I remember being just awestruck and defeated at the same time realizing that no, these were world class players. I had stepped into something that I was absolutely not prepared for.

But I was picking up whatever I could, and there just wasn’t any work. And it got to a point where I just had to make a living, just to be able to stay there and not move back to Michigan and lose face. You know? Because I was the one who got out.

Talk about transformational moments. Sometimes they’re nice and perfectly laid out, as if planned. And sometimes they’re trainwrecks. And this was my trainwreck, this was my bottom. I was driving a delivery vehicle in Skid Row and the Jewelry District and the Garment District, and just all over L.A., and I was doing a lot of drinking, and so I would drink to put myself to sleep at night, and I’d get up in the morning and take little white pills and stuff to get me going, sometimes like a handful. And drinking coffee and taking these pills. And I remember, I was in this frenetic state, and so I would rush through everything, and I was driving very recklessly and everything. I came around a corner and realized as I swung around the corner that there was like a shadow of a person in front of me, and I just brushed past them, and I looked over as they fell away from my truck. I could see this horror on their face, this terror. And I still see that face today. I will always see that face. And as I continued to drive, I looked in the rearview mirror, and he’s cursing me. He’s OK, and he was just one of the guys on Skid Row. You know? But in a way, he’s the guy who saved my life because almost running this guy over, almost killing this guy, was the thing that made me say, “I can’t. I can’t keep going like this.”

And so, I drove the truck to my therapist’s office and just sat in the waiting room until she would see me. And she came to see me, and I gave her the keys to the truck and said, “I’m done.” And that afternoon, I was checked into a hospital, and I was there for about 10 months. I was having suicidal feelings. I was having even homicidal feelings at times. I just had all this rage inside that was unresolved, and so I had to take that time. And fortunately, I had insurance that allowed me that time. I just stopped my life and said, “No, I have to fix this.” And I had this sense that, if I didn’t fix it, I wouldn’t be able to live out my purpose or even find what that purpose was.

And I had a boss who kept my job for all that time and in fact welcomed me back when I left. I was so blessed with just wonderful people. There were these angels that just kept appearing that were just wonderful. That’s a theme for me, is these angels who pop up. And sometimes it’s a very mystical thing, and other times it’s like that guy I almost killed. To me, in my memory, this is the guy who helped me turn that metaphorical corner in my life as I almost killed him turning the corner with the truck. And I imagine, in my musings I imagine, maybe I had the same effect on him. I don’t know.

I got back on my feet. And I was at this for a long time. I mean, I was getting my act together for the good part of a decade, and I got to a point where I was feeling really grounded and assessing my life and saying, you know, there were problems. Some of that stuff I did with music, I did for the wrong reasons and all that, but I still loved music, and there was still a big part of me that wanted to be there because those are my people. That is my tribe, you know?

So I decided I’m going to go for it again. And at that point in time, I was pretty clear that, yeah, it wasn’t going to be as a musician. I just wasn’t that good. So I decided that I still liked putting music together. I liked the studio aspect of it, putting the pieces of a song together and working with musicians. So I thought, yeah, OK, I could be like an engineer or producer or something. So I took a bunch of classes at Cal State L.A. and UCLA. And I met this guy, he was one of my teachers, he was a Record Production teacher, and he was a serious working musician. This guy was a monster player. And we hit it off, and he helped me put together my production demo so I could show my skills as a producer, and I decided, OK, now I need to find somewhere where I can work my way into the business and do this record producing thing. And again, I had no idea what I was doing, but I just went for it anyway. And I remembered that there was this guy who I had met a couple times in passing back in Kalamazoo.

So I figured, if I could get this tape to him, since he had become a producer, a really hot pop producer, then maybe there could be some work there. But I didn’t know how to reach him. But I knew he had a studio in San Francisco, and I knew he was from Kalamazoo. And I figured he’s gotta still have some family there. So I went back to my old childhood ways, my tricks, and started cold calling. 

So I called and called and called, and then I got his mother, and I said, “I’m going to be in San Francisco on business, and I was really hoping to connect while I was up there, but I don’t have any of his current contact information or anything.” And so she just assumed I was an old friend. She said, “Oh, baby, just a minute, let me get it.” So she gave me the address to his studio and the telephone number to the studio. So I drove up. I rented a car, booked a hotel room, spending all kinds of money I didn’t have. I was going to take this tape, I was going to get in that door somehow.

So I drove up there, found the studio, it was just around the corner from San Quentin, found a phone booth, and called the number. Now this guy, he was huge at the time, and he was just in this incredible zone as a producer. So I called him, and he had like 10 people working for him in the studio, but for some reason when I called, he picked up the phone. So I just went to work. I just started to talk my behind off. He said, “So where are you now? What are you doing?” I said, “Well, I’m just up the street in a phone booth.” He’s like, “Here? In San Rafael?” So he reluctantly asked me if I wanted to come down. I said, “Yeah, be there in a minute!”

So I drove down to the studio, and he met me at the door, and the first words out of his mouth as I was walking through the door, he said, “So what do you have for me?” So I reached in my pocket, and I hand him this cassette tape of my 3 little musical pieces, and he put it immediately into a boombox there in the lobby and listened to, oh, I don’t know, maybe 20, 25 seconds of it, turned it off, and handed it back to me. Oh man. OK. So is this how it’s all going to end? All this stuff, all the classes, all the studio time, all this stuff, he was my best bet to get in with a production team. And he was clearly not interested. He knew that I wasn’t up to their level.

But he was nice, and he said, “Hey, look, you want to come back and see what we’re doing?” So I followed him down this dark hallway to the control room, and there was this little guy hunched over a piano in one of the booths, and he walked over to that room. He slid the door open, and he stuck his head in and said to the guy inside, he says, “I want you to meet Steve. He’s from Kalamazoo. He’s a writer. You guys talk.” And then he turned to me, and he said, “This guy is the songwriter of the ‘90s. You guys need to work it out.” And then he left.

So we talk, these 2 socially awkward musical geeks trying to carry on a conversation, and it’s going nowhere. And so, in my head, I’m tallying up all the money I’ve spent and saying, well, I’m just going to have to write this whole thing off as an experience. And so I’m starting to say my goodbyes, and I get one foot out the door, literally, and he says, “So do you write lyrics?” I say, “Yeah.” I had never written a lyric in my life. So he reaches over to his desk and picks up this cassette tape, and he’s going, “I have these 3 songs. I need lyrics. I need these things done. I was like, “Cool.” So yeah, I took the cassette, I said, “So when do you need them?” And he said, “Tape rolls tomorrow at noon.”

So here I am, with the opportunity to write the first 3 songs of my life, and I have about 18 hours to do it. So I drove up and parked under a streetlight in front of an all-night diner so I could keep the coffee flowing, stay awake while I hammer out these songs. Now, I had no idea how to write a song. I never paid attention to lyrics because I was so into the music, but here I am being asked to write the lyrics to these songs. And they were completed songs. They were studio-quality with a la-la melody over the top and a song title. So I had to create these stories around a song title to match the melody. I didn’t know what to do, so I just went by the seat of my pants and said, “What would a writer do? How logically would they go about it?”

So I just wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, until I fell asleep. Woke up the next morning. The lyrics are crumpled at my feet, and I pick them up, flatten them out. The sun is high in the sky, and I still have 2 verses to write. So I crank them out really quick and hit the road. I get there about 20 after 12. They’ve been there, they’re just waiting for me. The music is up on the monitors. The vocalist is all warmed up waiting in the vocal booth, and this writer is across the room nervously, I’m sure, imagining the extra money he’s going to have to pay for the studio time because he doesn’t have lyrics for these songs.

And he sees me walk through the door. “So you have it? Do you have it?” And I just raised up this legal pad, this crumpled legal pad with the lyrics, just cooler than I had any business being. And he rushed over and took it from me and read through the first one, then flipped the page real quick and started reading through the second song and started to slow down, and slowly turned the page and read the third and just sat there for a second and then turned to me and said, “Cool.” Walked out into the studio, put this pad on the music stand and taught this singer the melody to show her how the words would go with the song. So those 3 songs ended up being the first 3 of over 200 songs we wrote together. And that was what launched me into this career that consumed the next 10 or 15 years of my life. Never had I set my sights on being a lyricist. I’d never imagined that. But I found that it was the perfect thing for what I had been prepared for in life.

I set the intention, but when you set the intention, one of the tricks to that is that you can’t be rigid about it. You set your intention, and you release it to the universe to whatever is going to happen, whatever door swings open for you. I was on this journey to reawaken this childhood dream of being in the music business, and I thought I knew where I was going, but I didn’t. And that’s happened to me so many times in life that I’ve come to really trust it. That’s the key, moving in a direction but not being rigid about it, releasing expectations of the destination but move in the direction of where you think you want to go. And then that’s when the surprises happen. That’s when those doors swing open. 

I have to go back a little bit. My immediate family, my father and us kids, we were like black sheep in the family. We were really different. But it always bothered me that I didn’t know why we were so different. And then we had a grandfather who I did not connect with at all. He was this beloved doctor. He delivered me, and I never connected with him. 

When I was probably 16 years old, my dad pulled me aside and explained to me that my grandpa was not his birth father, that he was his stepfather and that my father had been adopted when his stepfather married my grandmother. It was apparently very serious for my dad. And “Don’t bring it up because it really upsets your grandmother” and all this subterfuge, all this stuff. It was apparently a chapter in her life that she just wanted to bury.  I knew that my dad was really, he was really wounded when his father left him. He was 9 years old. His dad left, and he was never heard from again.

But I wanted to help my dad find what happened to this guy, and I imagine from the way my grandmother tightened up and got angry whenever the subject would come up, I just assumed that this guy probably just died homeless under a bridge somewhere. But I continued to help my dad look. And his name was Joe Miller. We didn’t know what state he was in. But years into this, after helping my dad search every 5 years or so, I’m grown. And I’m on the phone with my brother, we’re having this conversation, and we’re finishing up the conversation, he said, “Oh yeah,” he said, “Did you hear about the circus picture?” It’s like, “Huh?” He said, “Yeah, yeah, there’s… Larry found a circus picture.” And Larry was a guy who was my parents’ best friend. He introduced them to each other and everything.

So what happened was, he was down in Florida, and he was going through a local yard sale. He came across a stack of New Yorker magazines for a nickel apiece, so he bought the whole stack to have something to read while he was down there. And he opens up one of these New Yorker magazines to see this picture, a class picture of the sideshow from the Barnum & Bailey Ringling Brothers Combined Circus. And there’s a guy down in the corner who my dad’s best friend said looked just like my dad looked when he met him in college. And he was doing a contortion that my dad used to do when he was in college. It’s like when they met, when these 2 guys met, my dad and his roommate, they’re getting to know each other, and my dad says, “Yeah, they tell me that my grandfather was a contortionist in the circus, and look, I can do some tricks too!” And he disjointed his shoulders and crossed his arms behind his head, with his arms sticking out straight the wrong way. And there’s this picture of this guy looking like my dad doing that same contortion in this picture from Madison Square Garden in 1929. It’s entitled “The Congress of Freaks.”

And I’m doing Google searches to try and find something. Boom, there’s a posting from a circus genealogy bulletin board where people are looking for their relatives from the circus. There are no responses to this posting that was posted like 6 years prior to my seeing it. It’s just sitting out there. And this woman is looking for, I think her great uncle Lan, or her uncle Lan, or something, who was double-jointed.

So I write to her, and it’s after midnight, and the house was totally asleep. And there’s this email from a woman who says, “I can’t believe it. Seems like every year at Christmas, another relative finds me.” She was in her early 70s. She had been a lifelong genealogist who had done the whole family tree, but it had run cold at her uncle Lan, my great grandfather, that leg of the tree.

So she writes this letter back to me, tells me what she knows, and I’m starting to close this thing down, and I notice that there’s an attachment to the email. So I open it back up, click on the attachment. It opens up, and there’s this picture, this sepia tone picture of a little boy, probably 4 years old, who looks exactly like I looked at that age. And written in calligraphy underneath the image, it says Master Joseph Dustin Miller. This was the first picture I ever saw of my grandfather, and I’m at this point, I’m well into my 40s when I see this for the first time.

It was one of these moments where everything became very surreal. It was very unreal feeling as I’m sitting there looking into the eyes of this child from generations before me. And I get a sense that my wife is coming down the stairs, and I call her name, and she doesn’t answer, and so I look up from the picture, and that’s when I saw the ancestors gathering, gathering like they would around a street performer, with little kids trying to see between legs and between people to see what’s going on as I’m reconnecting with this lost generation in my life. I mean, and it was filmy, and it was just light, but it was clearly people. And they were there for the moment.

So the next morning, I write to the woman. She writes right back, and she introduces me to a couple of people, and they introduce me to a couple people. And I’m doing more and more searches now that I know where he was.

He’d left in Prohibition Chicago. My grandfather, turns out, was an emcee in Vaudeville and burlesque, and he would tell corny jokes. It was like, he would take a piece of bread out, and he’d say, “Now I’m going to sing, ‘A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody’,” and he’d put it in his pocket. He’d come to the end of the song, he’d pull out a piece of toast. It was just really bad, corny Vaudeville stuff. This man who was a Vaudeville burlesque entertainer had had a knock down, drag out fight with my grandmother because he caught her with the grandfather I knew growing up. They had this fight, he disappeared, was never heard from again. Nearly 70 years, never heard from. And she would never help along the way, help us put it together.

So I break the code. The code is broken with this circus picture, you know? That’s the thing that lit me up to search again, and to search with passion. Things started falling into place like... you know, they talk about moving in the direction of your passion, and the universe will conspire to support you. I felt like I was riding a wave and like I was having all these, at the time I would refer to them as rolling epiphanies because it was like everyone I talked to, every turn, every email I received, there were all these people welcoming me to my connection to my family. People who knew my grandfather, people who loved my grandfather.

So there’s all this stuff is emerging, and it’s all emerging, I’m telling you, from the moment I opened the picture in the email, to see that picture of my grandfather, that little 4-year-old boy, to 5 weeks later, I’ve met all these people. And all these people come together to celebrate what would’ve been his hundredth birthday, and I was the guest of honor. All these mystical experiences started coming at me. It was this season of awakening for me that changed everything.

But I learned through this experience and connecting with these aunts and uncles that had no idea that I existed or my dad existed. I was able to bring them all together and find a place for healing those wounds, for reconciliation, for reconnection. And ultimately, I believe, to heal those wounds for those who had long past. There was so much damage through the generations, so much disconnection, so much pain that it needed to be healed. It needed to be healed for all those who are living today who struggled with their strained relationships with their father, you know, this man who abandoned my father, and for all the generations to come.

And that happened very miraculously. It just… It just happened. It fell in my lap, the one person who was best equipped, because it meant so much to me to solve the mysteries for my dad. And also because I was the one who was, who had become now a wordsmith, through my lyric writing and all of that. So I didn’t know how to write a book, but I knew enough to get a start and imagine what a writer would do, just like I did with the lyrics. And so I started doing it, and more things started coming, and I started getting visited by Spirit and by earthly angels who had a piece of the puzzle to bring to me.

And so I’m taking pieces of that, stringing all those experiences together, those things I didn’t feel like I was worthy enough to tackle. Who am I to say I’m a writer, or to suggest that I had anything worthwhile to hear? But I’m at the point now where I’ve had so many experiences and learned so much in life and feel like I’ve been gifted so much that now I’m compelled to get to that place where I can share it, share it out.

But it was so cool, you know? And it’s just… It’s all very pedestrian. It just happens in my life. None of this is sacred. I like to have fun with it all. I don’t take myself that seriously. I’ll tell you, when I hit 50, that’s when I decided that I was going to be honest and speak my mind, and when I hit 60, that’s when I decided I was, if I’m going to share myself, I’m going to share my heart. And I’m not going to do it halfway. I’m going to do the damn thing. You know? My wife says that. Whenever she sees me backing away from something or being cautious, she says, “Just do the damn thing.”

Episode 019 - Nothing Out Here Can Stop Me

Today we have a conversation with Brandon Foster, a coworker of mine. Brandon’s has a charisma and energy that I really like and admire. Despite everything he has been and continues to go through, he keeps a positive attitude and a focus on growth. As he says, he’s always grinding. Thanks for taking the time, Brandon.

As always, please rate and review us in iTunes, and if you have a story you’d like to share with us or you’d like to be interviewed about a transformative experience in you life, let us know! i’m at rod@rodhaden.com.

Our theme song is “Start Again” by Monk Turner + Fascinoma.

Other music used in this episode:

4:14: “Far From Home (and feeling bad)” by Squire Tuck

8:01: “Home at Last” by John Bartmann

17:47: “Get Out” by Jahzzar

24:55: “Get Out of Dodge” by Frenic

32:38: “Roaming the Streets at Night” by Daniel Birch

35:08: “Back Up The Truck Jam” by Podington Bear

39:45: “Homebound” by Audiobinger

Here’s the transcript:

Rod: So where did you come from? How did you get to Austin?

Brandon: I moved to Austin 6 years ago. Unfortunately, the police of Buffalo, New York killed my father, and my uncle came for the funeral of his brother’s death. We sat for the couple of days that he was there, and we vibed, and we had a chance to talk and everything, and he told me about opportunities out here. So, while I was back home in Buffalo, New York, surviving, I had a chance to get online and look for jobs out here. So the first job that offered me an opportunity to come out here, I explained to them that I had tattoos on my face; would that prevent me from getting a job? And they told me no, no problem, come on in. So I winded up calling my uncle, down, calling him, and let him know that I had got a job offer sooner than what we planned for. So he brought me down here. It was all because of my uncle. I stayed with my uncle for the first 6 months when I moved down here, and by me having the mentality that I have, I was already in the “grind and go get it” mode, be on my own, so within 6 months, I kind of was looking for a place, and he was helping me look for a place. So we found a place, and he helped me co-sign the first lease. He helped pay the rent for the first 2 months, so I was rent-free for the first 2 months. I had to get on my grind and do what I do to keep myself out here, unless I would’ve been back on a plane going home. So here I am. If it wasn’t for my father passing, would I be here? Would I not be here? You know, that’s the question I ask myself.

Rod: Do you want to talk about what happened to your dad?

Brandon: My father, the night before he was in jail, me and my father was together. And he wanted me to go out to the club with him and hang out. My dad was a bar owner. He owned a couple different bars, and that particular night, I didn’t want to hang out, so I winded up going back home. And the following morning, I get a phone call from my grandmother saying my father killed himself. My dad was tied up to a pole on his knees by his t-shirt. And Buffalo, New York, the Erie County facility, you have to do your rounds every 15 minutes to check on the inmates. And it took them 45 minutes to do CPR on my dad.

Rod: Were you living with him at the time?

Brandon: No, I wasn’t. I never lived with my dad. I was always with my mother. Him and my mother had always had their differences, so we’d always go to my dad’s house on the weekends.

Rod: How old were you?

Brandon: When he passed away? I was 23. So they did the 45 minutes CPR and brought him back to life, but he was basically like a vegetable. The hardest thing was sitting at the table with nothing but doctors, and my mother, and my uncle, and all eyes on me. They wanted… I’m the one that has to answer the question of pull the plug or not on my father. And it’s like, do I let him live? Look at him, like he is? Or just let him go? So at the age of 23, that was the most hardest thing for me.

Since I’ve been here, I lost my father. I lost my brother. I lost my sister. I lost my niece. My niece hung herself 2 years ago. She was found in the closet by her mother. When I got that phone call, it was very crazy, very crazy phone call.

After my niece, I buried my other brother. So I lost about 6 people since I’ve been here, in the past 6 years. It’s hard being away because it’s like when you get certain phone calls, and people need help, and you can’t do nothing because you’re so many miles away, and it’s like, what do you do? What do you do? And you try to make phone calls to other people to see if they can get to the situation and handle it for you. I just really hate getting phone calls and not knowing if it’s good or bad or not. In the past 6 years, no matter, I tell myself now, no matter what phone call I get, early morning, I’m always going to think bad, always going to think it’s something bad happening because it’s been going on for the past 6 years, and that’s what haunts me. No matter what, 2 o’clock in the morning, 3 o’clock in the morning, if my phone is ringing, I’m always jumping up thinking something bad is happening back home. It’s crazy that I feel like that, but I do. So I don’t necessarily miss home. There’s nothing there. I miss my family, that’s it. If I could bring them all down, then I feel like I did my job. They still surviving. I’m living.

Rod: Are you the baby?

Brandon: No, I’m the middle child, so I have my oldest brother. He was 32. He passed away, he just turned 33. So he was back home at a club, and a fight led from inside the club, and it led to outside the club. A couple guys left; they came back, and they shot the bar up, and my brother winded up getting hit by a stray bullet in his head, and one in his neck. That was hard as well, getting that phone call at 3 in the morning.

So my sister, I say it’s my sister because my brother’s wife, so my sister-in-law if you want to technically say it like that. So she passed away first, and a couple years, two years later, he passed away. She died at the age of 29. She was fighting cancer all her life. She had her foot amputated at a young age, so all her life, she was going back and forth to the hospital, just treatments and treatments. And it was falling to a point where she knew that she was going to be taking her last breath in a couple months. So we just basically prepared ourselves for it, because she knew that, we knew that she was in those stages. So, you know, you got to prepare. You’re just hoping for the best, but you’re prepared for the worst. It was sad, but I was prepared for it. That’s all I can do.

My second oldest brother was 31, or 30, when he passed away. He was in jail for 25 years to life, and he did 15 before the cancer got the best of him. He was facing cancer for eight years and never told nobody until he was on his deathbed. That was an unexpected death, so that kind of hit hard.

Rod: Do you think him seeing her go through it was why he didn’t tell anybody? Like he didn’t want to put people through what…?

Brandon: Probably, but my brother always been a quiet person. He never really was into the social media kind of things, or he was never into the limelight, but at the same time, my brother spent most of his life in jail, in and out of jail, so he didn’t really have a chance to be on the streets of Buffalo, New York. Probably a year or two, he had a chance to be out, but my brother was in and out of jail his whole life at a young age, I mean literally. When he went to, when he was facing 25 years to life, he was young. He was about, I want to say almost 18, 19 himself. He died in the hospital of cancer, stage 4 cancer, some kind of skin cancer. It was hard. It was hard.

And my little brother is 28. He’s been incarcerated for the past 6 ½ years due to a robbery. He came home for 10 months, and he violated parole, so he’s back in jail now. Hopefully he’ll get a chance to come home, try to do something with his life.

I don’t talk about my problems, or anything like that, so I may tend to shed a tear or what not, but I’m OK. I can talk about it. I just don’t know who, you know, how people are going to take it. And it’s like the things that we talk about, it may be some things that people may not want to hear, or people may be scared, but I don’t want you to take that and make your perspective on that. Just look at me now. The things I’ve been through is what’s making me the man I am today. Every day, I’m trying to change, some way, somehow, shape or form. If that’s helping somebody else, then so be it. So I’m really open to whatever, it’s just how open are you to hear the things that you want to hear?

Rod: Do you ever get down, like “Why me? Why all of this in my family?” Do you get like, “That’s not fair?”

Brandon: I ask that every day. I’m not one of them guys that go to church every Sunday. I didn’t grow up in church. I believe in God, but I don’t believe you have to go to church to be surrounded by colorful windows and hear praises and everything to believe in the Man. So we have our talk. God gives his worst battles to his strongest soldiers. I’ve been through a lot in life, and I’m still going to go through things in life that’s going to be bad, worse, so I feel like if I can get through the things I’ve been through back home on the streets of Buffalo, New York, then nothing out here can stop me.

Rod: Is it strange to you, like getting older? Getting, like thinking about someday being older than they were? Like you’re the oldest now?

Brandon: Yeah, I’m the oldest now, living. So it’s just me and my little brother left. That’s why I work hard every day and try to better myself, so that way, I could try to get him down here with me.

Rod: That gives you a sort of sense of responsibility being the oldest one now?

Brandon: Yeah, definitely a responsibility. I was always the… not say always, but I was more of always the caretaker, like taking care of everybody back home when I was home. So now it’s like even more hard trying to take care of everybody being so far away. I just try to take it one day at a time and stay focused. I just grind hard every day, trying to come up with a master plan to figure out how can I make more money a positive way.

So it’s just a blessing to be here, having opportunities to sit right here with you and have this conversation, and people get a chance to see a different side of Brandon, not knowing the B Boy. That’s my nickname, B Boy. But I kind of stopped calling myself that because I don’t consider myself B Boy no more. B Boy was somebody who was in the streets heavy, who did a lot of activity that wasn’t right. As I get older, I’m just realizing that that’s not my name, and I don’t want to carry that on no more, so when people would call me that, I’d tell them, “Don’t call me that, because that’s not me.”

Everything happens for a reason, but it’s all about timing. Anything lost can be found again except for time wasted. So I try not to waste time on things that don’t benefit me or what I’m trying to do.

Rod: That’s why you left?

Brandon: I left because I just had a, you know, I had the opportunity to get a better chance at life and to just stop doing the things I was doing and living the lifestyle I was living. I didn’t have a pretty good childhood growing up. My father was around, but he didn’t teach me how to ride a bike. I didn’t learn how to play basketball. I didn’t learn how to do fatherly things with their son. Like when I went to my dad’s house on the weekends, I learned about different kinds of drugs and things that kids shouldn’t learn at a young age.

Rod: When your uncle talked about you coming here, were you already looking to get out, or that hadn’t even occurred to you, or…?

Brandon: Before my uncle talking to me, no, I wasn’t looking to get out. I was, I had a job. I was working for a private security company, and we traveled throughout the United States, so the job can last for a day, it can last for six months, it can last for a year. And we did things such as fire disasters, rural response, strike work, you know, things like that. So I was doing that on and off for like a year or two before I had the opportunity to come out here.

Rod: Wow. My brother worked, when he was in his early 20s, he did clean up after fires and all that kind of stuff. He said that was a horrible job.

Brandon: It was, but you get paid good money, though. I was loving it. I was young. I don’t have no kids now, I didn’t have no kids then. So it was an opportunity to see other things, even though I was stuck in the streets of Buffalo, New York. I had an opportunity to get out and see different things. I wasn’t really fully developed as far as trying to get out what I was in, but it did give me a chance to open my eyes up a little bit more. But at that time, I still wasn’t fully ready to just switch my whole life around.

I mean, I always had goals. I always wanted to be my own contractor, but I never really took the steps in going to that direction. But I’d love to remodel houses and do construction and landscaping and things like that. That was always my goal was to be my own contractor. I’m different in ways of not doing the things I used to do. I don’t hang around the same crowd of friends that I used to have. The friends I have now are amazing. They’re all doing something positive in their life.

My job gave me an opportunity to go on a business trip, and on that business trip, there was over 65 people in that conference, and there was only two black people. And I was the youngest one. And when I went there, I went there with the perception of, how was I going to be able to uphold conversation with some of these big people in high positions? I didn’t really have the qualifications, or it felt like I didn’t meet the criteria to be at this conference. So for the week that I was preparing myself, I was really trying to figure out, was I going to be able to handle it? And when that time came, all I can do is just be myself. So that’s what I did, and within those 72 hours, I took notes. I asked questions. I was being proactive. And a couple of different big people in high positions pulled me to the side, and they didn’t have to do that. So when they pulled me to the side, they’re talking to me about different things in life, and goals, where I want to be, where do I see myself. And it really dawned on me when I got back to my bed, and I asked myself, “Well, Brandon, what do you really want in life? Where do you see yourself?” And the only thing that’s really holding me back is myself, because I’m a young black man with a tattoo on my face. I have no felonies, by the grace of God, or anything like that, so really, it’s really me that’s holding me back. So I said, “You know what, Brandon? You’ve been here for six years. You’ve been closing chapters of your life since you’ve been here. You need to take this step and close this one.” So I just got online one day and looked up Eraser Clinic, and I gave them a call. And I’m taking my steps on getting my tattoo laser removed from my face. So going to that conference really gave me a different perspective on life. So I have 12 treatments altogether. They do my treatments every 6 to 8 weeks to give it time to heal. But hopefully by the end of next year, March, it’ll be completely gone. So it’ll be a whole new Brandon.

Rod: Were you afraid at that conference that that tattoo was shaping how people saw you? Do you think it did?

Brandon: Honestly, yes. I was afraid that people was going to judge me. You know, they say, “Never judge a book by its cover.” But there’s also a saying, “There’s no second chance at a first impression.” So I was going there being myself, but at the same time trying to be distanced because I didn’t want nobody to just stare and look and say, “What is that?” And you know, people asked me. They did. “What is that? What is that?” I tell them, “Everything is for a reason. Some things are just not meant to be talked about.” So I left it as that. And you know, people, at the end of the day, they loved me because I was being myself. I was being very talkative, and I was going around just being proactive and being in the mix of everybody and asking questions and talking and mingling and being very open with everyone. And so when I got back, and I called that tattoo laser removal, I just was ready. I was more eager then than I was last year or four months ago, prior to the conference. Before the conference, I wasn’t even ready to remove it. So within those three days of me being there, it just really gave me a whole outlook on life and said that there is more. You can do more. You can achieve more. The only thing holding you back is yourself, so I’m taking that next step, trying to close that chapter and elevate.

Rod: You having any feelings about it? Like you feel like you’re betraying who you used to be, or betraying people you used to know, or…?

Brandon: Not necessarily. Not at all. At the end of the day, it’s still with me. I know that. But I don’t have to show it, people don’t have to have a second judgement on me, or just figure out what does that mean? Because there’s been times I done walked into places and instead of getting a hello, I’m getting a what does that mean? What does that tattoo mean on your face? I mean literally, the first thing that’s coming out of people’s mouths, so I just don’t want that no more, for them or for myself. I was 17 when I got it. I wasn’t expecting to live, so I really didn’t care about it. I didn’t really care about the consequences. I didn’t care about what people say. I didn’t care about what people anything. I didn’t care about nothing. So now that I’ve had this opportunity to be out here, it’s all about growth. And that’s what I’m trying to do. Just grow day by day, some way, somehow, and I’m taking the steps with that.

Rod: What’s the chapter that you were closing? What does the tattoo represent to you? Like why did you get it?

Brandon: I was young when I got this tattoo. I was about 17. I wasn’t expecting to live past 21 the way I was going. I used to be in a gang. I used to sell drugs. I used to do the whole 9. That’s the way I was going, dead or in jail. I dropped out at 9th grade. I got my GED. And I wasn’t expecting to live past 21, so I didn’t care about nothing. I did some things in my life that I wasn’t, I’m not proud of, but when you come from where I come from, you have no choice but to do what you have to do to survive. So I managed to still get through it, and by the grace of God, I’m still here. Some people don’t get a chance to make it, to see 30. So I’ve done some things in my life that made me who I am now. I’m not the best, but I am a better man I am today than I was six years ago.

Rod: You talk about closing that chapter by having the tattoo removed. What are you taking with you from that chapter, from those days? What are the good things that came out of that that you still carry with you as part of yourself today?

Brandon: It just gives me a chance to look back and say, “Damn. If I can make it, and these young guys made it through the things that they’ve been through, then we all can make it. We all can make it. So just the fact that I can get on social media and look at some of the guys and see them doing positive things in the Air Force and meeting counselors and different lawyers and senates for the New York State, it just gave me a different outlook, like there’s more to it. So I say, “You know what, Brandon? You need to go ahead and close it.” I wasn’t ready then. I wasn’t ready.

Rod: What do you think are your strengths, like the characteristics that are part of who you are that are going to help carry you where you want to go in the world?

Brandon: I want to say everything I’ve been through is my strength. I still go through things to this day. For six years, I’ve been getting phone calls every morning, and it’s always been something bad. Someone has died. So I think that is what scars me, is going to scar me for the rest of my life, getting those early morning phone calls. But at the same time, it’s motivation, because it gets me up to knowing that I have to strive and grind every day to make it better for myself. Having my father in my ear and my brothers on my back. Knowing that I got nieces and nephews to take care of, and a mother to take care of. Knowing that I have a little brother that’s incarcerated that needs to come home one day. Hopefully I can get him a chance to come out here and make a better life for him as well.

I was always born to be a leader, so I kind of take that and try to mold it into my work ethic, and grind hard, and show them that just because I have this tattoo on my face, don’t judge me by that. Let my work ethic speak for itself. I love to work. I’ve always been a working man, no matter how much I was in the streets back home. I always kept a job for myself. It always just kept me going. I love to hustle. I love to work. I like to get my hands dirty. I don’t like just sitting around not doing nothing.

I’ve been through a lot. It makes me the man I am today. I come from a place where it’s a jealous city. It’s a bad place to grow up. There’s no good schooling for kids. There’s no opportunities for jobs out there. I mean, you can’t be doing good and let someone see you doing good, because instead of it being motivation for them, they want to go try to rob you, to take your stuff or what you have and what you’ve been working on. And it’s just sad. It really is sad.

Rod: You said you don’t have any kids, right?

Brandon: No, I just turned 30. No kids, no girlfriend, no wife. Nothing like that. I thought I would.

Rod: Is that important to you?

Brandon: It is important. I do want kids. I do want a wife. I want a family. I’ve been to more funerals than weddings. So I’m definitely not trying to go that route. I want to have kids. They can have different lives. They don’t have to go through the things I go through or deal with the things I deal with or seeing the things I’ve seen or anything like that. I want them to have normal lives, be a normal kid, do what kids do. Kid things. I want a son, so I can show him how to treat a lady by the way I treat his mother. I want a daughter, so I can know what she can look for in a man by the way I treat her mother. Until I have that, I’m just going to continue working and grinding hard and try to secure my bag, until that lady comes.

I don’t know. You know, when I was younger, I was always scared of rejection. I used to always thought I was the ugly fat kid, or being around my friends. So I would never talk to girls. I didn’t go to clubs when I was younger. I wasn’t doing the club scene. I wasn’t going to parties or different things like that, so I just really stayed to myself and my area.

Rod: You just talk to everybody. You’re not shy any more.

Brandon: Yeah, that’s why I am who I am now, because you just, you’re either going to get somewhere, or you’re not. You’re going to gain something, or you’re going to be back where you started. So that’s who I am now, very forward, just straight forward, just trying to get in and get somewhere. So I’m growing. That’s all I’m doing. Growing.

I like to get out and do different things, try different things. Being here in Austin, there’s all kind of things to do. You can do something every day. Where I come from, there was nothing to do. There’s nothing to think about but trying to live. But being out here, you can go… I go tubing. I go water rafting. I go jet skiing. I like to go to the mountains and go hiking. I want to go see the Inner Space caves out here, that they have out here. I like to do indoor skydiving. I’m down for adventures. I like being open to new things.

Rod: You seem like you’re good at making connections and making relationships. It’s always about who you know. It’s always about who you know, who you can help, who can help you, and I think you’ve got the skill.

Brandon: Yeah, you know, that’s crazy, because I was just telling somebody that last night. In this world nowadays, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. As long you know the right man or woman in the position, you can get the things that you need to get done. I want to start getting more involved in it. I don’t have to just be secluded in my area. I want to be able to mingle and talk to different people. I used to work at nights when I first started there. I used to work night shift, 10pm to 6:30am, and being on nights, you don’t see nobody in the day, so nobody knows you. By working nights, when you have meetings in the daytime, and you got to go to these meetings, and everybody’s talking to everybody, but you’re stuck at a table with your group of night crew, and nobody’s not mingling to you. So when I had the opportunity to come on days, I made sure that I was going around to different departments, showing my face, talking to them and being open and just showing them I’m here. I made it. Don’t nobody know, didn’t know me or know my story or anything like that. I was just trying to get more open within the company myself, because by me being myself and going around and being proactive.

Just trying to stay positive with the things I’m doing, trying to stay with positive people in my life. So I’m just glad to be here, having an opportunity to come to Austin, Texas and open my doors to people if I can and show them that there is a better way. You know, my dad always told me, “If it’s going to make me mad, don’t do it.” So I still think about that. If it’s going to make him mad, I don’t do it, even though he’s deceased. So I carry that with me throughout my day to day basics or what I do and how I go about it. I’m just trying to better myself at every aspect that I can. Hopefully this will reach out to somebody young, old, who knows? Just get them a different perspective on life as well. There’s more to life than just doing the same thing that you’re used to doing.

Episode 010 - Deep Thoughts: Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Rod Haden

I keep coming back in my mind to WNYC's On the Media and their interview with Mohamedou Ould Slahi. I haven't read his book yet, but I will. Maybe it will answer the question I have. I don't know what he went through, or how long and how much work it took for him to get to where he is now, but I wonder: how can he not blame? How can he not hate? What was done to him was unforgivable, yet he forgives.

Episode 005 - Breathe Deep

Rod Haden

In this episode, I sit down with Christopher Howell on squeaky chairs in a church conference room to talk about personal growth, spiritual exploration, addiction, work, cancer, and taking yoga out of the studio and onto the trail. He is doing what many people dream of doing: earning a living doing what he loves. Yoga Hike is a deeply satisfying experience. I've done it twice, and will be out on one of Austin's many trails with Christopher and his team again soon. Check it out on the web at yogahike.com or on Facebook ( you can also search Facebook for "Yoga Hike"). He's also on Instagram at @yoga_hike.

Here's the transcript:

I tried college out of high school. I wasn’t a disciplined student, but I was a good salesman. And in those days, it was still believed that you could get by in life with a good handshake and a smile. And so I went that route. I was up in College Station selling shoes at 18, 19, 20, and she would drive in on the weekends, got pregnant one weekend, and as a good Catholic boy, that’s what you did in those days.

And I wasn’t good at relationships. And I was in my 20s. I was in my 20s. I mean, that’s just it. I hope no one ever gets married before they’re 30. Wasn’t for me. And no birth control as a Catholic, and so, you know, we had 3 boys and a miscarriage. We were pregnant the whole time that we were together. I was money-driven. That’s all I wanted. I wanted to be successful. I was one of the top Chevrolet salesmen in the country, number 3 in the state of Texas. I like to, still like to brag about that 25 years later. The only path for me after that was to buy a dealership, and that wasn’t a path that was going to suit me.

I was an alcoholic in my marriage. I was just very irresponsible 20 year old, had 3 kids from 20 to 27 like that. I wasn’t actually, I’m not that kind of guy. I’m not the father of 3 children kind of guy. And so the cocaine came as a way of covering the feelings that came with all of that, all the shame around even saying, “Hey, I’m not that kind of guy.” You know, I can say that now, 27 years later, but I couldn’t say it then.

For about a year following the divorce, all I cared about was being successful. I didn’t really deal with the pain of making my first mistake. I was kind of a golden boy growing up. I didn’t make a mistake until that divorce, and it hit me pretty hard. I mean, I got in trouble as a kid, but that was part of the adventure for me. That was the first time that, because I had a pretty strong Catholic background, that was the first time I’d ever failed at anything. I really never made a mistake.  And I didn’t really deal with that.

I felt if I were successful enough, it would make up for it. I got introduced to cocaine, did coke for about 9 months and then, I think I probably had a psychotic break, a drug-induced psychotic break, quit my job one day, left my demo, walked from the dealership to my house. That was about an 8 hour walk, went to bed for about 2 months.

Then got in my car, started driving around. I drove from here to California, and then I was making my way, I was going to go to Florida, and met these hippies down in South Padre.  I was 28 at this time. I even remember the night before meeting them. I mean, I got down on my knees, and I prayed with all of my might to try and find a way out of the hell that I was in.  And that showed up for me. And they invited me to go on a meditation, and I was pretty much a confirmed atheist following my divorce and such. But the girls were hot, so I said I would join them.

We met on the beach at dawn, swam out to this sandbar, and the leader of the group gave us a mantra to use, just saying a series of words over and over again to confuse the brain. And we’re doing them silently. He also told us to visualize dolphins while we were doing these mantras. I played along. Peer pressure. About 20 minutes into the experience, there was like a simultaneous breath, and everyone opened their eyes at the same time. We all kind of looked in one direction, like satellites, you know, and there was a school of 15 dolphins that went swimming by, the same amount that was in our circle. And so, that was interesting to me. It reawakened me to the possibility of some kind of mystery beyond my understanding that I’d pursued in the Catholic church as a child. The only thing that I’ve come to is that there’s this idea that Jung has of synchronicity.

So these people that I met down in South Padre were from Austin, and so I moved to Austin to study with these guys. The excuse I gave my family was that I was going to learn how to do massage therapist. I didn’t tell them I was coming up here to study with a hippie.They were intense. They used breathwork as the therapy for cleansing the body to make that realm of possibility more accessible to the psyche. The guy that was leading the group, I sat outside of his house for half an hour bawling, trying to get the courage to walk up and ask him if he would be my teacher. He was connected to something that was, that I very much wanted to be connected to.

What I’ve done since shortly after that experience, I got introduced to The Power of the Myth. that was an interview with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. And I have chased the references of that conversation for the last 30 years. So all of my reading has been on the authors that he’s referenced.

And I added work by Stanislav Grof, who’s one of the leading technologists in brain studies, near-death experiences, and how to access that using breathing techniques. Grof’s background is that he was the leading psychology researcher of LSD research in Czechoslovakia in the ‘60s. And then when he moved to the U.S., he couldn’t use LSD, and so he found this breathing technique, which I think is more impactful than LSD. I think that breathwork is more substantive and accessible, and you get as much of it or as little of it as you want at any time.

Psychologists will work with having you exame decisions you made as a child from 1 to 6 years old, or something like that, and that’s kind of determined who you are as a human being. Well, a spinoff from the work that Stan Grof does with breathwork, he does what’s called holotropic breathing, and it’ll be deep, round, circular breathing, where you go beyond hyperventilation for 3, 4, 6 hours, and using different sounds and things like that, it creates a what he calls a non-ordinary state of consciousness which is also the way he describes near-death experiences. And so all spiritual awakenings, according to this theory, come from that edge.

A deviation from that work was there was some work in the ‘80s and ‘90s called rebirthing. And the rebirthing is using the same, similar, breathing techniques as Grof, but what you’re working on is the interpretation, what they were working with is that the decisions and the way your personality is shaped by the way that you interpreted your birth experience. And so what you’re working on doing is breathing deep, full breaths and clearing out the cellular memory of whatever decisions were made during that birth process. So when you have a thought, it creates a chemical reaction in your body, and that gets stored in your body unless you find some way to work it out, and then you get addicted to that chemical blend, and that influences your psychology. By using specific breathing techniques, they would use an affirmation process. You’d write affirmations over and over and over and over again to stir up a thought that you hadn’t fully integrated. Like it might be, “I, Christopher, am an innocent child of God. All my desires are holy and always have been.” That was the first thought that I worked with, and I probably wrote that thousands and thousands and thousands of times because just to work through the layers of where I wasn’t an innocent child because of all of the shame that I’d carried. And using these breathing techniques helped facilitate that for me. And then part of the work there was discovering what your purpose is, and helping people realize their oneness is part of what my purpose is using my charisma, my ability to learn.

I was introduced to a weekend encounter group. With the rebirthing work, there’s not a lot of emotional work done. You’re supposed to breathe through the emotion, and I think that’s one of the fallacies of the work, or one of the shortcomings of the work. I think you need both. And so I was introduced to this encounter group where we just cried and screamed and everything at 100%. The weekend was about expressing yourself at 100% through the entire weekend. And so every time I went, you found new expression, new levels of 100%. There was tons of healing that went on in those classes. I was able to do years worth of therapy in one weekend, all the time. And I went into a training to learn how to facilitate those weekends. 2 years worth of training once a month out at a corporate headquarters, a Thursday through Monday training, and then every other weekend at a local training facility, for 2 years. Only like maybe 5% of the people that went through the training ever graduated and became facilitators, because you have to go through your stuff. So I took my sales background, I became a good teacher, and I learned how to fill these courses for these folks. They didn’t have a machine that would regularly put together classes that they could count on in size that they needed, and so I helped build that machine and then helped build franchises for them and other centers around the country with that.

I didn’t get a buzz from putting people in Chevrolets any more. I really got a buzz in putting people into their lives. And so as easy as I could make that process for people to make the decision to take those steps and make those changes, and we finally found a path and you know, worked on it for 2 years.

I was teaching, I was facilitating the weekend events. And what those were was a male and a female instructor and 24 students. They paid about anywhere from $500 to $700 to be in the weekend. And then there’s 20 to 30 graduate assistants who come back to help provide the same course experience for other people. So I got trained on how to facilitate those, but in the path, along the road there, one of the things that the franchises had a problem with is they didn’t know how to put people in the classes. They were just weak at doing it. Attracting people to the class. Anyway, I found a path. I found an introductory workshop that made it easy for people to make the decision, see if it was good for them, found a way to get the graduates to make that available to their community.

So I worked in that for about 7 or 8 years, and then the facilitators starting going in another direction. I went to massage school. This was in my late 30s I guess. So through all of that work, you’re also working with the work of Louise Hay. Louise Hay’s work is that you store different thoughts, feelings, and attitudes in different parts of your body, and those can contribute to different types of illnesses. So she’s got this catalog of “here’s the illness, here’s the low quality thought that might be impacting that area, here are some high quality thoughts that you can add into it,” and that’s affirmations, and you would work to that.

So through that, I got to understand where thoughts, feelings, and attitudes are stored in the body. I can look at somebody’s posture and kind of have an idea about their psychology just from being in the work and doing it myself. And massage is a great way to work it out of people, so it was like doing the same kind of work that we were doing in these encounter groups, but instead, I could just put you on the table, have you practice specific breathing techniques while we’re doing massage, and we can work those thoughts and stuff out of your body in a massage. So it was all the same kind of work.

So I had a lot of clients that we did an intake on what are your dreams, what you think your purpose is, if massage could facilitate that, that kind of thing. From there I opened the Center for Health Resources on Burnet Road. We had 4 rooms there. I rented out 3 of the rooms to other therapists, helped therapists coming out of massage school learn how to build their own business, and there’s 2 people still operating in that room now, and that was started probably in around 2000. So, after having a full practice for about 7 or 8 years, I was still traveling around, teaching weekend courses every once in awhile, but it wasn’t a full-time gig. And I had been exploring this breathwork more deeply.

And so, there’s one process where you can fast for several days, a vision quest kind of process. Fast for several days, and then I would go… this is the first time I went camping, actually. That was on my 40th birthday. So I fasted, and then I got to Enchanted Rock and started a silent meditation, stayed up all night Friday night keeping a fire burning, and then hiking, started hiking at sunrise, practicing these breathing techniques in hopes that I would have some kind of vision, like, you know, Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days, and Billy Jack got in the snake pit and got bit by a bunch of snakes.

You don’t know Billy Jack? It’s a great cult movie from the ‘70s, really influenced me when I was 13 and just after my father had died. Yeah, that’s how he had gotten his transition was, they like put him in a snake pit. You gotta see it. It’s a cult classic. Yeah. “One tin soldier rides away!”

So anyway, just to produce a non-ordinary state of consciousness along that lines without using mushrooms or LSD. And I had a non-ordinary experience for about 6 hours. So what I wanted to do was I initially wanted to start taking people on those kinds of adventures. I wanted to take you, have you start fasting, get to a campsite, stay up all night in silence keeping a fire burning, teach you these specific breathing techniques. You would have to learn the breathing techniques before we go on this adventure. There would be like an advanced thing, and then bring you into this other realm.

But to do that, I felt like I needed more credentials, and so I wanted to go back to school and get a doctorate in transpersonal psychology so that I could have an academic conversation about what I was doing. My wife’s business, was quite successful at the time. We were in a position we could do that, where I could go back to school. And in that process -- this was probably 41, 42 -- after selling the Center for Health Resources, back in school at ACC, and I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Then the testicular cancer really kicked a hole in all of that. I put too much emphasis on, “Why didn’t I catch that low quality thought in order for that illness to show up in my body?” So I had a little guilt and shame and stuff around that. I used to think Louise Hay was a bible. And we don’t know what the fuck cancer is. We don’t know, really know, what disease is. I mean, when you really get honest about it. There is so much variable.

And so that started tainting me. So after I got sick, I didn’t, I wasn’t interested in going back to school right away. I went to work at a plant nursery digging holes in the winter for, I think I was working $8 or $10 an hour. I mean, really just digging holes. And so, I didn’t say much, and when spring started coming around, I had a conversation with the owner and told him that I had some other skills. We had discussed partnering and opening a second location, and I recommended instead that we build something here, build something spectacular here. And it ended up going from a 6 employee place to 30 employee place. And 2 ½ acres into 5 acres, and it’s one of the top 100 destination nurseries in the country. And it’s fantastic.

While working at the nursery, I was just kind of slipping further and further away from any metaphysic healing, oneness. I don’t care. I’m working for this guy that’s a, just a… I call him this deeply rooted Aggie, deeply rooted into family in a spiritual way, but doesn’t care anything about any of the other… I don’t think out of the 7 years that I was with him, I might have hugged him once. And I hug everybody. Yeah. But we were buddies, you know what I mean? And he was a hunter. I started just becoming a Joe Six Pack. Worked hard, drank hard, and gained about 60 pounds...

So I went to the nursery just to heal from the radiation. I was really sick after radiation, and I didn’t have any juice. I didn’t want to think. And this was a nice… It was a great hobby. We were wildly successful in what we were doing, but it just wasn’t really true to me. And so I was just kind of slowly slipped into this depression, which I didn’t really realize. I was kind of in a panic mode.

I dropped 60 pounds on P90X. While I was working at the nursery. And I got almost an elite, fit body. First time I’d been fit in my whole life. And on P90X, there’s a yoga section, and I physically hurt myself every time I did the yoga portion. And so, about a year out of the nursery, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was 51 years old and didn’t want to do massage again, and so I was kind of freaking out again. You know, I was having a spiritual crisis that I had like when I was 27.

I could’ve ridden that at the nursery until I died, and I’d have been just fine. I’d have been as happy as anybody could expect to be in their life, you know? It would’ve been just fine. And I think what it was for me was, like I said, meeting those people down in South Padre, the night before I was on my knees praying with all my might. And I had one of those nights. While losing the weight had a lot to do with it. I do believe that that weight was a result of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that I was carrying in my body, and I wasn’t carrying that anymore. So I had to take those layers off to get down to something closer to the core of whatever was going on, so it was more accessible then. Here I am, a 51-year-old guy. I don’t want to go back into car sales. The relationship business stuff is… the way that I was doing it was in the past. I didn’t have enough education or credentials to really start something new with that at the level of, there’s already work out there that’s great. There’s other programs that I send people to now for that kind of work because it’s better than anything I could’ve done. Anyway, so I was in a panic on what am I going to do, and it was a, I think, probably like a midlife crisis. It was that same kind of feeling of just getting down on my knees and praying with all my might on, I’m so fucking lost. I remember one night just really wailing and wanting it so passionately. And then it was probably within days of that that I found Sapphire’s yoga class.

And so I went to a beginner’s yoga class at Yoga Yoga with Sapphire Bell. Sapphire Bell’s parents were yoga teachers at Esalen in Big Sur. Right? So she was doing yoga in utero. But in her class, man, in addition to the asanas or postures that she was putting you in, she was getting people to breathe efficiently and deeply, and while they’re doing that, she’s just dropping in all these huge spiritual bombs that were in alignment with all the other stuff that I’d been… I was like, wow, this is really powerful.

The reason that I was hurting myself was because I didn’t have alignment. You know. P90X is an extreme workout. You’re going to get to an elite, fit body in 90 days, and that’s extreme. The yoga portion of it is extreme yoga. That’s for people who had been in yoga, they know the difference, you know, if you’re in Warrior I, you ought to be able to look down and see your big toe. I didn’t know that. My knee was bending over in the other direction. And all the modifications that were available. That’s why I was hurting myself. I didn’t know good posture, and I didn’t know modifications.

So I went to yoga every day for a year. There might have been a couple of 6-day weeks in there, but most of them were 7 days a week. Wow, my body’s starting to vibrate up right now just talking about it. I’d never been fit before, and so what I liked was the fitness aspect of yoga. I liked that I could still get my workout. But like I said, in that very first class, I knew what she was doing with breath. I had an understanding. I was like, wow, this is profoundly therapeutic. And they were bringing in high quality thoughts at the same time. And now, how can I maintain that same breath and state of mind while holding a posture? That was interesting to me. That added another dimension to the experience.

And rapid therapy started happening for me. You know, that depression I kind of slipped into over the 6 years started peeling away. So then I went to yoga therapy training with Genevieve Yellin at Sundara Yoga Therapy, and that was just 200 hours of training. It kind of teaches you how to learn how to be a yoga teacher, really. Then you have to find your practice and continue doing other training. I wouldn’t consider myself a yoga therapist until I’d done 1,000 hours of training with them and maybe 10,000 hours in practice with classes.

But it was incredibly therapeutic. I did a bunch of emotional release work, and it brought me back to that connection that I had before I got sick, brought me back to that mystery in a very powerful and emotional way. And in the middle of that training, I thought, “Man, if I make my way through this, I’m going to bring as many people with me as I can.”

And that’s how Yoga Hike ended up coming to be. It was after I did my year of training, now I’m a 52-year-old guy, I’ve only got 200 hours worth of training, and you know, who wants to go to that class? So I started inviting friends that I trusted to go with me to the Austin 360 bridge for sunrise, and I would just kind of practice teaching yoga with them. So then I put it up on Facebook as an event, and 4, 6,10, 12 people started showing up to the events, and I was making it donation-based classes. Then there was one event where 5,000 people on Facebook said that they were going, and so I had to build a website to filter that to something that was manageable, and something that was manageable all across the board. I didn’t know what was going to be what.

And so, but we had 100 people show up on a January in 37 degree weather, overcast, sprinkling a little bit, and we had to cross 100 feet of water ankle-high deep, and nobody turned around. That’s when I realized that there’s something larger than me that I want to try and ride with, and so the following week we had 80 people at the same location, and then 2 weeks later we had 90 people show up to clean up the Onion Creek trail that had been flooded the year before.

What I have found is that there’s something that’s informing the trees and informing the birds and the cosmos. Seems like there’s something there that has order, and the human ego seems to be the only thing in the universe that’s disrupting a natural flow with all of that. And so what I hope to do is have myself be more connected to whatever it is that it’s informing the trees and the birds and the sun and the oceans and the moons and all of that and have a heartfelt connection to that. And being on the trail seems to do it in a more profound way than being in a yoga studio where all that aliveness has been kind of manufactured out to make walls and air conditioning and all that kind of thing. So I think the reason that Yoga Hike has been so profound for people is because they’re more connected to whatever all that source is. I just open them up to specific techniques and mental games that connect them to that for themselves.

It’s because of whatever I’m synced up with, I’m sure, but I’m just amazed at how many people that I meet that, what the Austin experience has been for them is that they’ve had that transition like you speak about having, you know, 3 years ago, that this is a place that was an impetus for it. So there’s something magical here.

I think I’m a spiritual atheist. We may edit that out later. I don’t know. I’ve tried it on a few people. They don’t seem to like it. But the thing is, is that there seems to be some higher functioning in the brain that if we’ll surrender to it in a really powerful way, a higher brain functioning comes in and guides us on our path like it would a bird, you know? And I think it comes to that mental breakdown, where you’re just, “God, I can’t keep moving like this. I need something.” Where it’s a cry from deep in my soul. I think everybody gets to that. I think that’s what it is. It’s that final breakdown on, fuck, I’ve got nothing left. Help. And it feels like God comes in, so I could see why books would be written about that.

For the business of Yoga Hike, we’re hoping to expand that this year to where we can have 6 or 8 classes going every month instead of the 4 classes that are happening now. And then I’m interested in weekend adventures. I’ve tested a couple of them, camping locally, come out on a Saturday, set up camp. We do a sunset practice, or sunset hike and practice, a night hike back, have some dutch oven cooking overnight, a big campfire, have scotch and a cigar. It’s not a yoga retreat. It’s a yoga hike. And no pressure to have scotch or a cigar. I need to work on that marketing a little bit. And then a sunrise hike in the morning, and paddleboards, and a couple of kayaks, and that kind of thing. So Camp Yoga Hike is on the horizon.

Travel Yoga Hike, or Yoga Hike Travel, is also on the horizon. We’ve done a few trips where we went to Yosemite from a Thursday through Sunday and had a cabin a mile from the Yosemite park entrance. So all the food is catered by Whole Foods, a big, huge deck to do a morning practice on, go out to the hike in the park from can until can’t. And those have been great. So I’m hoping to do more of that. September this year, I feel pretty good that I’m going to take a group to Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, which has one of the best sunsets I’ve ever seen anywhere, any time. You’ve seen it in movies. It’s a cool spot. And then, you know, if I’m smart enough, and I pull the right kind of team together, I’d like for travel, for Yoga Hike Travel, to expand to being international, trips to international locations. I’m interested in that landing out in Norway, and there’s other places, and then having nationally ranked yoga teachers be part of that.

We’re starting to hire teachers now. I’m starting to get the courage to ask people that are way better at teaching yoga than me. I’ve been a little intimidated by that, so we’re going to start branching out into bringing masters in and getting #OldGuyYoga off the trail, with the exception of adventures. The weekends and the long adventures, I’m interested in facilitating those, because we can incorporate a bunch of other work.

That’s the biggest challenge that I’m having with Yoga Hike right now, is that I think that I’m trying to open people up to too large an experience at their introductory experience. Right now, the hikes that I lead, I think I’m more intense than what people are expecting to show up for. Some of these other great teachers have the finesse to ease people into that in a beginner’s class without them knowing. I think that’ll come from experience. I don’t have that right now. I think I hit people too hard on their intro experience. That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in bringing in other teachers that are a little bit more gentle in that approach and haven’t had the experience of taking people as deep, so they’re not going to. I feel like I bring a whole encounter group, weekend encounter group experience, into the way that I say, “Deeply connect to your breath, your purpose, and your intention.”

How much of me are they coming to the trail for? Those people that are coming back, are they coming back for the experience of the trail, or for me, or…? I’m hoping that they’re coming for the yoga and for the trail. I don’t want the Yoga Hike to be a cult of personality. What’s been great is that me, as a dumb ol’ country boy from Beaumont, Texas, people have had profound experiences on those hikes. And I want anybody that has the desire, to provide that, to be able to do that by facilitating a yoga hike.

So the one thing that I would hope that everyone, that I do want to close my experience with everyone with is that, there’s something about this that is a calling for you, and I hope that all the things fall into place in order to make this kind of experience a thing that supports the kind of lifestyle that you want to live. That’s my biggest dream for you and for anybody that’s interested in listening to this conversation between you and I.

Episode 004 - The Quiet Man

Rod Haden

I hope you're all having a wonderful holiday season! I certainly am. Time is flying and my days are packed. This week we have a conversation with my father, Rudy Haden, a man who has fascinated me ever since I was a wee lad. He's that special kind of quiet that invites others to project onto him whatever they want him to be. Getting him to open up about his past, present, and future, and what he thinks and feels about all 3 was a very special treat for me. I've known the man for 45 years and heard some stories when we talked that I have never heard before. He is my role model for what it means to be a man, a father, and husband, and though we are very different from each other, I couldn't have asked for a better teacher. Thanks, Dad!

Transcript:

I don’t move around very good. I’m in pain quite a bit. It comes and goes. It comes and goes. Some days it’s worse; some days it’s not. It doesn’t seem to depend on how much exercise I get. Some days it’s painful to exercise; sometimes it’s not.

I sit and try to meditate, and it does nothing for me, but when I’m really quiet, or when I’m just totally listening to music, it’s like somebody plants knowledge into my head. I know and I understand things, which I had no idea before. So my meditation is basically checking out and listening to music.

Early on in our marriage, I was in an apprenticeship program, tool and die maker. I had to really concentrate at work. And it’s not easy for me to relate to other people, but I really worked on the journeymen. I would constantly hang around them, and ask them questions, and ask them the best way to do stuff, and I got in as I guess a favorite pupil with about 3 or 4 of them.

So that when I’d come home, I was exhausted, and I would lay down on the floor and play a Beethoven record or something with earphones on, and Robbie would get so pissed off at me because she was making dinner and taking care of the kids, and I was checked out. She didn’t understand that that’s the way I did my meditation.

I’ve been in and out of a lot of churches. My parents were married in a… I can’t think of the religion right now. Reverend Grace. I remember the name of the preacher that married them, and that was there. The guy wore a collar, but he wasn’t a Catholic. But he was deaf. He ministered to the deaf people. He was deaf himself.

He was in the deaf community, and in the basement of his church is where they held all the deaf fraternity meetings.It was based on the Masons. Only it was all deaf men. It was called the Frat. That was what my mom and dad called it. The Frat. We’re going to the Frat. When they went to Frat, the women all sat outside in the waiting room. The kids played on the floor. And when the big meeting was over, they’d throw the doors open, and everybody would go in and have a big social event.

And then my mother’s side of the family was deep into the Reform Christian Church, and I went to a lot of Bible schools and Sunday schools and stuff in that until I was about 3rd or 4th grade. And then I felt like I needed to get hooked up with different churches, so I went to a Methodist church, I went to a holy roller church with a friend, and I went to a couple of Catholic services. As a teen. None of that stuff stuck with me. 

Just because there was so much religion on my mother’s side of the family, I don’t know, I just felt like I was supposed to do it. In order to be accepted by them, I should have a church, but I never could find one. And I came away from it having no respect for organized religion because the main thing they wanted, no matter what it was, they wanted money up front. Seemed like everything was driven by the collection plate. If you were a big donor, you got a lot of attention. If you weren’t, you didn’t get much. And that’s what really turned me off. 

My dad was born on the farm in Kansas, and he was sent to the Kansas State Home for the Deaf and Blind. My dad was born deaf, they think because in the early days when they had the traveling doctors going around the frontier and the farms and stuff, my grandmother evidently had a lot of morning sickness, and the doctor prescribed quinine. Well, later on they found that quinine did stuff to the unborn child. 

My mom came over on the boat from Holland witH her mother. And my mother, we don’t know if she was born that way, or it was some kind of sickness or something that she got in Holland or on the boat or what, but ever since she was a baby, she was deaf. Then my mother was, because she was deaf mute, she was sent off to the school in Colorado Springs.

The strange thing is that the Colorado School for the Deaf and Blind insisted that deaf people learn to lip read and speak, and so my mother was pretty good at lip reading and speaking. And they were discouraged from using sign language, so if you compare the deaf people now that use sign language to the old people that use sign language, now it’s all really broad and all over the place, and the older people, their signs are all close in and secretive about it, where now they’re just flamboyant about it. Their signs are all over the place. 

And my dad, the Kansas School for the Deaf and Blind weren’t that way. They were teaching them to do stuff and sign language and be able to be self-sufficient. 

See, in my dad’s side of the family, all the people learned sign language, the hearing and the non-hearing. So I had no idea whether they were hearing, any memory of whether they were hearing or not. On my mom’s side of the family, I had one uncle that learned the deaf sign language, learned the deaf alphabet, and he could do that. He was the only one that made any effort to sign to my mother. All her other brothers and sisters didn’t because she had been sent to school, and they were told that she was to learn to lip read, and so they would talk to her. But the thing of it is, it’s really easy to ignore somebody like that, because all you do is turn away. Turn around, they can’t see your signs. They can’t read your lips. So, whenever there was an argument or something, it was easy just to walk away from that.

My dad’s family had a big get-together once every summer. They came from all over the place. They were Kansas, Nebraska, western Colorado, and they’d have these big, long picnics on the weekend, and there were aunts and uncles and cousins. I didn’t even know all the cousins I had. But I never just seemed to fit in.

He worked in a factory. He started out in a printing shop, a paper cutter. Cutting stuff for the print shop. Then ended up in Shwayder Bros./Samsonite, cutting stuff for the suitcases and plastic tops of card tables and chairs. And my mom worked there on the assembly line putting stuff together. And my Uncle Jim and Aunt Julia also worked in the same factory. Shwayder Bros. hired a lot of, I guess what they called the handicapped people. 

Clarence, he was a rancher. He raised horses, and at one time he had a riding stable up on Lookout Mountain just above Denver. And they had 2 boys, and the youngest one, John, he had a pinto pony named Ruben. And they taught me how to ride. And I could put the bridle on Ruben, lead him over to the fence, they had a rail fence, and I’d climb up the rail fence and get on him. And I was, what, 5 years old.

John would go off hunting. He’d go out, he had a rifle, and he’d go out shooting magpies. I had no idea what magpies were. I was determined I was going to follow him one day and see where he was going, and I’d see these cow patties in various places, you know. So I thought cow patties were magpies, and cousin John shot them. I couldn’t have been 4 or 5 years old. And then he, one time he put his rifle in, we had a, there was a kind of a mud room entrance to the farmhouse, and he left his rifle leaned up against the thing, and he had a thing in the chamber, and I went up there and was messing with it, and I inadvertently pulled the trigger. And it shot a hole in the roof. My Uncle Clarence was really pissed off at John for doing that.

My bed was in this big room where the radio was. There was no TV in those days. It was during the war. World War II. I remember there was a big old tree in the backyard. When I wanted to get away, I’d just climb up in that tree and sit up there all by myself. Could see the whole neighborhood. 

I don’t remember when I realized that there was a hearing world and a deaf world. You never knew. I mean, you could talk to some people, and you had to sign to some people, and some people were talking and signing, and you know, there was no distinguishment. And a lot of the deaf people could read lips. I don’t know when I realized that. I suppose it happened to me some time in high school when, you know how high school gets. How clannish and cliquish it is, and some kids are favored by the teachers, and some aren’t. I realized I was different. During high school, I was really aware of it because people would kind of shy away from me. If I tried to be friendly with somebody, they wouldn’t necessarily because I was a child of dummies. That’s what deaf people were called in those days. They were deaf and dumb. The deaf and dumb part came from deaf and dumb, couldn’t speak. But the dummy part carried on as not being intelligent.

And then in high school, I don’t ever, in junior high or any of those, I don’t ever remember having a parent-teacher conversation. Nobody ever, none of my teachers ever contacted my parents, even when I wouldn’t do my homework or my grades were down. There was nothing. They just passed me along. And in high school, I signed up to take a Spanish class, and I was discouraged. I should take English. I was going to sign up to take some math classes, and I was discouraged. I was to take a general math class where the big thing was to learn how to write a check and keep a bank account and pay your taxes. There was none of that geometry stuff. I didn’t get hooked on that stuff until my senior year in high school. I finally got into an algebra class. 

And I hated high school. I just didn’t fit. Didn’t know how to talk to girls. I had no experience with girls. When friends come over, it was really awkward. If somebody came home with me, it was really, really awkward because of my parents. My parents would try to be friendly with them, but they didn’t know how to deal with it. And so they just dealt with me away from my house.

I really got big into leatherwork because I had an Industrial Arts teacher, Mr. Landon was… he taught Print Shop, Leather Shop, and Woodworking. And I took all those courses. Originally I thought I was going to be an Industrial Arts teacher, then I thought about getting a degree to be able to become a forest ranger, but there was no way. I couldn’t figure out how in the hell I was going to go to college to do that. Although it was a lot easier to go to college in those days than it is now. The costs weren’t so damn much. 

 And I was really into skiing, through the Boy Scouts. Some of us in the neighborhood learned to ski. It was scary in the beginning until I learned to parallel ski. Once I got out of the snowplow thing. I got fairly good at parallel. I never was Olympic quality, but I could do alright. I just loved the freedom. Just felt free. Riding up to the top of the mountain and letting go. And then after I got out of the Navy, I really went into it for a couple of years. In fact, that’s how I met Ruth, my first wife. We met through a friend, and she was really impressed with my skiing. I took her skiing every weekend. She was really into that. And then somehow we ended up getting married.

I really got into skiing, and it was a really good friend that we skied with a lot. And he said he was going to join the Navy. At that time when you turned 18, you were eligible for the draft, so I turned 18 in 1955, and that was right between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, that period. His argument was, “If we join the Navy before we turn 18, we get out on our 21st birthday. Plus the Navy will send us to school.” He laid it out, you know, that we were going to end up getting drafted for 2 years anyway, and there was this opportunity, and I felt, “Yeah, this is a good idea.” It wasn’t all that analytical, it was it felt right. And so I did it. So we joined the Navy. We took tests and everything, and both of us qualified as machinists.

Yeah, I was out in ‘58. I rejoined in ‘61. I was out for 3 years.

I remember going and applying for this one job, and the guy interviewed me and said, “No, you’re too young. You couldn’t do all that.” And then that was the end of the interview. He didn’t believe me. And at the same time, I was going to night school, it was late ‘50s and early ‘60s recession. And you’d work for 3 months, and you’d get laid off. And you’d work for 3 months and get laid off. 

And then when I had such a hard time with all the on again, off again jobs, and I don’t know how I found out the Navy came up with a need for my particular skill. When I got out the first time, I was a second class petty officer, and they… I found out that I could go back in as a second class petty officer, got assigned to a ship in San Diego. We started, originally it was all those old diesel boats, and we worked on those all the time. And then the nuclear subs started to come in. Some of us were cleared to work on the nuclear subs.

So then I was going to make a career out of it. And I just remember getting a call, the piping over the com. And I just remember, “Petty Officer First Class Haden, report to the quarterdeck!” And I thought, “Oh crap! What have I done now?” I go up there, and a guy hands me, you know, he served me with separation papers, and I opened them up and looked at them, and it was, you know, legal language about… I showed the officer, and I said, “I don’t know what to do about this.” And he said, “Well, the first thing you ought to do is get a hold of the chaplain.” 

I knew things weren’t really good with us, but I didn’t think they were that bad. It was a real slap in the face getting served. I was just dumbfounded. “I don’t know what to do now? What?” I had to ask some officer who was probably a lieutenant junior grade or something and was probably 23 years old or something, you know, “What do I do now?”

So I made an appointment with the chaplain and talked to him, and then he got her and me into counseling. And it broke down and went to divorce. It was really traumatic. I had no idea what to do. I was at a loss. And that chaplain gave me options what to do. “Well, you can just not contest it and let her have the kids and stay in the Navy.” And I thought, “Crap, I’ve seen too many of those guys. I ain’t going to be one of them. I want a relationship with my children.” He just gave me all these different options to think about. If it’s something physical, like a computer or a computer program or a piece of machinery or a car or building or something like that, I’m very analytical. But when it comes to feelings and interactions with people, I’m more intuitive. One of my big things that I’ve known over the years is that when a door opens, you look to see whether you want to go through that door or not, whether it feels right or not, and that’s pretty much the way I’ve gone. From being a piecemeal machinist to a maintenance machinist to a tool and die maker to a numerical control programmer to a software developer, and that’s where I was until I retired. But all of those were, a door opened and I went through. There was no analytical thing about it. Did it feel right? Yeah, that felt like it was a good thing to do. 

And then when the divorce happened, I had already... You know, I was committed for another 4 years. And the padre, the chaplain, said, “You know, you could file for custody. If you get custody, you could get an honorable discharge for hardship.” And I just felt like, “Am I good enough to be a father to those kids?” And I just had the feeling, “Yeah, you can do this, but it ain’t going to happen anyway, but what the hell. Go for it.” And I’ll be damned if it didn’t happen. And I thought, “Oh crap. Now what do I do?” At that time, Harold had just gotten a divorce, and he was a single father with 2 kids. He had this big house. And he said, “You could come live with me, and we’ll help each other out.” And so we did. 

And it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. But at the time, more than resistant to it, I was confused by it, scared of it. What am I going to do now? What am I going to do with the kids that I love so much? I had heard so many terrible things about split families, you know, kids bouncing back and forth and back and forth, loyalties, mothers saying bad things about the father and the father saying bad things about the mother, that at one point I thought that if I ever have to get divorced, then I’ll just let go of the kids, not be in their life. Well that was dumb-headed. I realize that now. Just so many things happened there that I had no clue. I had no idea what I was doing. Just taking it a day at a time.

And then when I got out of the Navy the second time, because I worked on nuclear submarines, I had a top, not a Top Secret, but a Secret clearance, so when I came out, I went to Rocky Flats, which was the big nuclear plant. They made triggers for the atomic bomb. And I applied there, and they said, “Well, it’s probably going to take about 6 months to get your clearance through the FBI.” 3 weeks later, I got a call says, “You’re hired.” 

I was a maintenance machinist. We just went around fixing pumps and stuff, generators. And they opened up an apprenticeship, and I was close to 40 years old. The cutoff date was 40. And I took the test, I went into the interviews and took all the tests and everything they gave us, and there were 2 of us that were picked for the apprenticeship, and I went into that. So I went into the tool and die shop, and that’s where they made all the tooling and everything for the equipment, the nuclear stuff. It was all classified stuff.

Well, when I got… finished my apprenticeship, I became a journeyman, and I worked nights. But during that time, they brought in a milling machine that was numerically controlled, and all those old journeymen, they had no clue about that thing, so I really jumped on that, and I learned all about how to manually program it. And so whenever they wanted to put something on there, why, I was assigned to do it. They had other numerically controlled machines all through the plant. Well, there was an opening there for a programmer, and I applied for it and got it. And in the meantime, during that time I had taken some nighttime college courses on FORTRAN and drafting programs through The University of Colorado.

You know, you get out of marriage and everything, and all you’ve got is work and little kids, and you just figure you need something else. That dating thing was not analytical. That was totally gut. I kept seeing it in the paper and throwing it away, seeing it in the paper and throwing it away. And I read it and thought, “Aw, what the hell. I’ll try it.” And I was ready to give up on that because I had 2 or 3 bad dates. I remember going and walking down the steps into her garden level apartment. And opening that door, and thought, “OK, this is a good one.” And we went out, and the rest is history.

It was such a whirlwind. We were going to get married at 6 months or something. I didn’t think it was right to get married right away. The divorce wouldn’t even be final until March. So then we thought, “OK, in the summer. No, let’s get married in June. How about Spring Break?” And I thought, “My God, this is soon!” But I’ve been following her lead for years. I just know that it sure as hell worked out. Here we are, almost 50 years later. 

When Mom and I met, she was determined that she had found me and that I was the guy, and she was going to marry me, and I had just 2 years ago gotten out of a marriage. I didn’t even know who the hell I was. I had 2 little kids, was living with my brother in his basement, and your Mom was determined we were going to get married, and she was going to have 2 kids. And then we got married, and she was determined she was going to have her own kid. And then she had her own kid, and then she determined that she wanted another one. In those days, it was all the hippie thing, you know. You replenish yourself. So I’d already, I was the husband and a wife, and we had a boy and a girl, so when I got married again, I said, “OK. One more, for Robbie.” But then she was Empty Arm Syndrome or something, and she was determined she was going to have you. And so we had you. Best thing in the world.

After I worked at Rocky Flats for 7 years, I got laid off because they were cutting back, cutting back on nuclear bombs and everything. So they had to cut back on the staff, and they ended up closing Rocky Flats because it was so contaminated. For a long time, I had to go in and be monitored by medical once a year because I was exposed to americium and some other chemicals I don’t remember. I’d go in, and they’d take blood. I was exposed, but I was never contaminated, so I was alright. 

I knew that if I was just a piecemeal machinist, I’d be doing that 3 months on, 3 months off thing for the rest of my life and never getting out of debt. And so I just followed the path. I knew that I had, because the layoff from Rocky Flats, the Bomb Factory, I was back in that mode of working in small shops for short periods of time. And I knew that I was going to get into numerical control. I wanted to. But my goal was the eastern boundary of Colorado, anything west, and the southern boundary of Colorado, anything north. And all I kept getting was this crap in Texas! And they kept offering to bring us down here for a weekend, for a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and put us up. And I thought, “Well, what the hell. It’s an opportunity to get out and spend the weekend on somebody else’s dime.” And I came down here, and I was interested. They were interested in me.

Because I worked so hard at it. I spent a lot of time self-educating. The computer has been the best damn thing in my life. Although I got a lot of enjoyment out of my kids. Just enjoying watching you do things and try things and being assistant coach for your soccer team and watching Rik at swim meets. I was a timer and a stroke judge, and I also shot the gun. Starter. It was either sit in that stupid tent, or else go out and participate. Mom just really enjoyed sitting there, and I enjoyed watching how the thing worked and keeping track of Rik’s times.

Yeah. I got involved in Scouts because of you. They fill out those papers, and I’d very carefully fill them out so that I didn’t raise any flags to where they’d want me to do something, and then when you guys went into Webelos, I said, “OK, I can do it for a year,” and the next thing I knew, I was a Scoutmaster. I seemed to get all the misfits. We had some strange kids in our troop. 

One of my favorite memories is that Ford Escort you had, when I taught you how to put new brakes on it. We went through one wheel together, and then I showed you how to do it, and then I said, “OK, you’re on your own now.” And then watched you do it on your own. It was big. 

Ruth was a very outgoing person. Early on, her dad was a senior forest ranger, and it entailed being lots of parties and groups and cocktail parties. And it’s pretty much the same with Mom now, Robbie. I’m just also-ran. I just tag along. We go into groups, and she’s willing to talk to anybody, and I have a hard, hard time. Especially with people I don’t know. I can open up like to you. I can have a conversation with you, or I can have a conversation with Rik. You get into a group of people like Rik’s New Years or Christmas when he has people over, I have a hard time talking to those people. Some of them I can talk to because I know them, but I can’t talk very long. I don’t know what to say. My brain just does not work that way. I’m very very shy. I had a hard time in my jobs too. I just never really fit into those kind of groups.

But the thing of it is, my brother Harold went through the same experience, and he didn’t have any trouble. My cousin Jimmy and my cousin Elaine. Man, Elaine was really into it. I mean, she could talk sign language with the fastest of them. And I couldn’t. I could tell that people automatically slowed down when they talked to me, and I would say, “What?” a lot, and they would spell it out, and then I would understand what the sign was. But deaf people don’t like to spell things out. And so, it was easy for me to check out because if you’re not looking at somebody and reading their signs, you’re not conversing with them. So you’re looking over here. They’re signing, and you’re not paying attention. And it’s a cop out, and I realize it now, 70 years later.

If I had nothing in common with, I’m at a loss. Walk up, you know, Robbie can talk to store clerks and have conversations, and I don’t know what the hell to say other than, “Have a good day.” I don’t know how to deal with those kinds of situations.

My mom was good at it. And my dad too, just talking to people. My dad carried a little pad of paper and a pencil in his shirt pocket, and he had no qualms at whipping that sucker out and writing, talking to people. And my mom would talk to them and try to read their lips. Biggest problem she had was that once people learned that she was reading their lips, they would exaggerate everything, and she couldn’t understand it.

Best thing I ever did was get hooked up with your mom. She’s given me so much love and stability. We still have our rough edges. Mostly it’s me not talking to her enough. That’s because she’s lost all her friends in Dallas. It’s become more important to her to be more interactive with me. I have to cope with it. One of the things is, this iPhone here, I couldn’t live without it. See that? 10:30? This one here. 10:30. It’s my alarm clock. It means “Get up and talk.” When I get up out of bed, it’s time to get up out of bed, because I slept in as long as she will tolerate, and I have to talk. Sometimes I just go on down the hall, saying, “I’m walking, and I’m talking. I’m walking, and I’m talking.” And then we’ll get in a conversation, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. This one here says, “Get up for PT” which is physical therapy, “and talk, and have a happy face.” Because she’s convinced that those girls will work harder with me if I have a happy face with them. The therapists. So that’s how I’m learning to cope with that stuff.

Big thing that we have is that she’s the balloon, and I hold onto her string. I keep her grounded. But every now and then, I have to kind of float with her. To keep me in the world. Not let me crawl in a hole. To give me love.  And it works. It works for us.

In Richardson after the stroke, I was pretty much isolated, just me and Robbie and my therapists, and the therapy ran out. Robbie over the years before that had been talking about someday we need to move to Austin to be with our kids and grandkids, you know. And then when I was in in-house rehab, I just realized that maybe that’s what we ought to do. And then it was a whirlwind.

I had nothing more there. She had all her friends and her contacts and her woo woo stuff was all up in that whole area up there. When we came down here, she had a, she’s still having a rough time, but she had a really rough time in the beginning, mostly with the driving thing. Over the years, I’ve had to map things out for her. And I still do that. I map out where she wants to go. I’m really proud of her, because she’s got to where she’s really moving around a lot.

Big events in my week are physical therapy, and now that’s about to stop and I have to do it on my own. I have to force myself to do it. It’s too easy to blow off. Mom will say, “Let’s go to lunch,” and I blow the rest of the afternoon off, which means I don’t do the exercises I should. I’ve got to do it, got to get myself on a regimen. You know the old saying, “Use it or lose it?” With me it’s really true. If I don’t do it, I’ll lose it. My walking is worse than it was 6 months ago. Although I try. I just don’t seem to be able to get the rhythm good enough, fast enough. And Robbie’s really patient with me. She just walks along at a slow crawl, either behind me or by my side.

She does a lot for me. She’s walking a narrow line about doing stuff for me and not doing stuff for me. She has to decide what I really need her to do and what I can do on my own. I try to do my own laundry, but she’s pretty much grabbed a hold of that. When she hears me kicking the bucket down the hall, she runs out and grabs it and does it, but she leaves the shirts and pants for me to hang up, which I can do. I can fold the other stuff, too, but she has a need to do something. So it’s a fine line on what she wants to do and what she wants me to do.

I’ve had a couple of times since I stroked. I thought my family would be better off without me, but then I realized that’s not true. Robbie would not be better off without me, even though she has to do so much of the physical part of it. I still keep track of the finances and when things need to be paid, the mortgage and utilities, and I give her moral support. I keep reminding her that she needs friends, and she needs to make them. She’s found a couple of lady friends that she really likes that she has coffee with on Wednesdays but I really wish she could find a clan. I just have to keep reminding her that she needs to look and not give up on it. So I can’t give up. I still got to hold that string.

The biggest thing is that she got all her talking and communication with all those people she had up north, and now she depends on me to do it, and it’s difficult for me. I try hard to do it, but it doesn’t satisfy her needs. People project onto me that I’m stuck up and antisocial. It’s not true. I just don’t know how to be social. It sounds like a cop out, you don’t know how. Of course you should know how. I read all kinds of books on how to do it. I can’t do it.

I don’t know if I can pinpoint things. It’s just a path. Some of it’s rocky and some of it’s grassy and easy going, and some of it’s a struggle to climb up, but I’m just on this path. Hadens are resilient. I don’t know whether it’s in genes or whatever the hell it is. It’s there. My next goal is make it to 85. Try to talk to my wife whenever I can. Enjoy my kids and grandchildren. I’m satisfied with my life.

 I don’t know how you’ll make sense out of any of that.