I don't know if he was trying to tell us that one comes, or can come, to the experience of universal perception by facing death squarely, or whether he meant to convey that, for him, from this experience, the continuity of existence and our transcendence of death is plain. Maybe both. Maybe something else entirely.

Whatever...it's written down now.

If you asked me in high school what I thought I would be doing ten years later, I would never have said this: living with, maybe apprenticed to (I'm not sure what such an apprenticeship means for either of us, but sometimes other people use the word) a world class martial artist who was traditionally trained by a Shinto mystic. It would have been easier to predict the other half of my life: working for the U.S. Government in Washington as a fairly high level computer consultant. It looks schizophrenic when you put it on paper, but somehow it doesn't seem that way when you live it.

I'm glad I'm here.

A lot of important things in my life happened while I was living with Sensei and Taiji and Patty. I wasn't comfortable putting some of them in my diary. Those were things that I couldn't talk about either. I didn't think that there was anyone to hear me.

At Christmas in 1980, and old friend from college came to Washington for a job interview at the State Department. We hadn't seen each other in six years, and I agreed to drive him from Washington, where he was visiting another friend, to Boston where we were each expected by different people to spend the holidays. We took two days to complete the drive, talking almost continuously.

In January I found my voice and wrote this.

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