Title: El Futurino

Gender: Male

Age: 34

Sun Sign: Pisces

Chinese Sign: Wood Rabbit

Location: Lenox, MA

By way of introduction, I’m going to try to convey how cool it can be to have a guru—I mean a bona fide, ass-kicking, enlightened spiritual teacher—without making it seem at all weird to you. It’s kind of paradoxical, and I don’t quite understand it myself, but when I think about everything I’ve ever done and loved and hoped for and struggled with in 31 years of life, it all curves and orients itself rather miraculously around my meeting with one man, my teacher Andrew Cohen.

Life. Running through the whole long series of typically sweet, painful, & comical details is one thing that makes everything else pale in comparison: ever since I was a kid, I always heard a sound like the wind calling from very far away, skating over the sidewalks and schoolyards, hiding behind the music store or around the side of Chuck’s Donuts, murmuring out over Half Moon Bay or slipping across the cliff walls at Yosemite. It said the heart of everything was perfectly perfect, as good as good could be, and it was beyond question in the way things like the wind are beyond question.

Squaring that simple message up with pretty much every other aspect of actual daily existence, on the other hand, was no cinch. Quite the opposite—the world seemed forever haunted by the promise of a beautiful unity that was always just out of reach. Psychedelics brought it closer, meditation closer still, but sooner or later, one had to come down or get up and do something, and that’s when things had the tendency to become difficult again. Then early one spring night when I was 24, about a year before I got married, I met Andrew for the first time.

His message was also simple: if you want this badly enough, he said—freedom, wholeness, perfection—nothing can stop you. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to bring the spiritual revelation that all is ONE into the world as a living reality. And he wasn’t kidding. So my life basically tilted radically upward at that point, in light of the revolutionary possibility he was demonstrating and teaching about, which was by far the most ecstatically uncynical thing I’d ever heard of before, to put it mildly.

I’m from San Francisco. Undergrad at Emory in Atlanta, GA where I met (a) my good friend Morgan and (b) my wife Laura, both of whom live here with me at Foxhollow in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts with Andrew’s largest body of formal students. Post-undergrad years at an organic farm way the hell out in rural Missouri and back in San Fran at NRDC. Grad at Naropa in Boulder, CO which is an awesome place to study 20th century avant-garde poetry, a lousy place to find cutting-edge spirituality, no disrespect to Ken, and the home of America’s most delicious beer.

What Is Enlightenment? is a bona fide, ass-kicking, enlightened magazine at which I also happen to be an Associate Editor. Come join our Zaadz Pod. Speakleaping is the name of the book of poems I’ve been working on ever since I left Naropa in 2003. I’ll post one on my blog. Mixolydian is the mode Jerry Garcia is famous for, and when conditions are right and I break out my Dead tapes or my Boomerang, can occasionally be heard wafting along on a summer evening right here at home in the balmy Berkshires.