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I grew up during a very unique sliver of time between the working class, low-tech, low-regulated time of the 80’s and 90’s and the high-tech, investor-class, cell-phone centric, track your location, amazon 2-day shipping world of the 2000’s and 2010’s. I came of age during a time when we played outside from the early-morning hours until dusk, as best we could manage, were the smell of wood smoke filled the house all winter, and where our coaster-break BMX bikes were our prized possessions. Phones were all landlines and the only screen in the house was the huge box television in the living room with a dial to change the channel. As a teenager, I was trusted to be where I said I was going to be or that I would figure it out and be okay if I was not. No one was tracking my whereabouts because there was no way to do so, and trust was all there was. I survived. My friends survived. Well, most of them…. That wasn’t until later.

I feel as though I am also of the last of a breed of kid who lived and experienced some of the old ways before the onset of the digital and communicative age. I grew up in a working-class family where the men swung hammers for a living and hunted and fished during much of their non-working days. I learned to shoot a bow in elementary school, could shoot a rifle accurately and consistently by age ten, shot, field-dressed and butchered my first deer with my dad at age 13. I did not have a cell phone or a computer with internet until I was 17 years old. I worked at least one job from the age of 14 on. I know the different between a rotor and a drum, I can change my own oil, start a fire, train a dog, butcher an animal if I needed to, sharpen a knife, strip, clean and oil a firearm, grow my own food as well as how to regulate my nervous system, be emotionally communicative, feel my heart, and stay connected to my body and my instincts. I have overcome addiction, have sat for many hours in meditation on retreat and at home, have lived in the mountains of northern Arizona and Colorado, studied and graduated from a Buddhist university, become a therapist, started a family, and made some of the best friendships that I believe have ever existed. I have learned how to grieve well, love deeply, rid myself of additions and a host of distracting and unhelpful behaviors, understand the great significance of my job as a father of two boys and a man designed to bring other men together.

I learned long ago that there are holes in the world the exact shape and size as each of us. That it is our fate to be brought into this world at this exact time, to fill those holes with our unique gifts. It is our job to step up, embody our reasons for being here and help make the world whole in the process. This writing is an attempt, along with the many other ways I have tried and practiced, to take my place and accept the responsibility of my birth and of my gifts. Here is part of my gift to you and to the world.

In the corner of the world and time where I grew up, kids were allowed to run, mostly wild, most of the time. I have many fond memories of being out in the world, with my best friends, doing whatever we wanted to do for as long as we could manage. I grew up in an incredible pack of kids from three neighborhoods, all connected by state-owned and protected wildlands in northern New Jersey. I learned early how to rely on my friends and how much that reliance and trust did for my confidence, sense of myself in the world, and sense of strength in the formidableness of a strong pack against other packs and against the world.

There were no play dates, for what I can remember. We either walked, rode our bikes, or were dropped off at friends’ houses to run amok and explore the world as we saw fit, for the most part. We had rules and needed to be in at certain times, but games of tag spanned entire neighborhoods, pools were open for business in the summer, water gun fights were high intensity and wide-spread, and fenced-in yards were not really a thing yet.

During my early years, I formed friendships with a few of the neighborhood boys which would last as a strong and tight group through our early 20’s. It was within this group of boys that I found my first real taste and feel of what strong friendships really are, the power and strength that comes from belonging to a group like this, and how such a group provides a sense of home, belonging and resilience against the steady crashing tides of life.

We were unruly, we were mostly untamed, and we were counter-cultured at heart. We gravitated toward punk rock, hardcore, and rap music and drifted about from fire to fire in the darkness of night and the anonymity and freedom of the forest. We were our most free and genuine selves gathered around a fire, surrounded and covered by the coolness and shade of the dark pine forest, amongst the pine straw and the crow, unceremoniously offering tobacco to the fire with our breath.

It was in this pack where I found companionship, identity, self-assuredness, safety, and refuge from the modern world. This was where grew up, where I gained confidence, found place and status, and was protected. We rolled hard everywhere we went, and I loved my boys. We were stronger together. We were wild, we were rowdy, and we were well-known. I trusted and was trusted. I believed without a shadow of a doubt that if I were with these boys, however few, we would make it out of whatever we got ourselves into. They was my roving, ragtag band of home.

I have never quite felt that quality of home since. My grief and longing for those days and for that lost place inside me drives me toward creating a Place for me and others now. As an adult, I have found individual friendships that have brought me profound feelings of connection, brotherhood, and common cause. My friends and I are scattered in the world, orphans of a time that once brought us together, like my friends of home.

We are all orphans of a kind, seeking place and companionship, and to re-experience a sense of home in the world. John Wellwood determined that “The core wound we all suffer from is the disconnection from our own being.” I believe that our own being is inseparable from the world and each other. This is our true nature that we must reclaim and reform, if we are to survive the changing of the tides of our old and emerging worlds.