I’ve always been a humanities nerd who thinks science is way cool too. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings so enchanted me as a teen that I ended up in medieval studies at UC Berkeley. During my college years I was active in the Society for Creative Anachronism, which re-enacts medieval tournaments, and in science fiction fandom.

In 1979 I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study medieval art history in Germany. I lived and worked in Munich for over two years. While there I began meditating in earnest and discovered that there are levels of truth and beauty beyond the intellectual.

I returned to Berkeley, finished my Ph.D. and gladly bailed out of academia. I got married, meditated for two to three hours a day and kept busy with various kinds of volunteer work. I was among the early adopters of desktop publishing and the internet. I have also held positions of responsibility in my spiritual teacher’s organization, both spiritual and organizational. Since 2003 much of my time has gone into end of life care for elderly relatives.

Now, in my mid-60s, I am reinventing myself yet again, this time as a writer of essays and novels. I want to share my understanding of what is driving current events.

Here it is: the upheavals of today are so vast because we are we are moving out of the world order we know into a new era unlike any ever before on earth. As a historian who likes to look at big pictures I can tell you that this isn’t the first time we’ve done this. Humanity has gone through intense passages from one era to another six times already. That’s how we got where we are today. We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends. It’s going to end the same way this time too: in a brighter future that as yet we can barely imagine.

Our present turmoil feels less terrifying when we see the bigger picture. I love to share my vision of how bright our future is likely to be. With this understanding maybe we can avoid making things even worse than they need to be during this period of rapid, wrenching change. This is the passion that drives my writing and public talks.

I also love art, music, song and dance of many kinds, big ideas and silly fun, nature, and potato latkes at Saul’s deli.