I stopped by Katie’s Rose Hip Coffee the other morning. There was a bunch of people gathered there, I thought maybe it was somebody’s birthday or something but no it was just a buzzy morning crowd after the brilliant rain storm that had swept thru the neighborhood at 4 am washing everything clean, reviving and renewing humanity after the long hot dry drought of the summer.
I met a cafe friend (forgot his name) and we started talking. The conversation turned to haircuts (I had just cut mine) and the warrior princess story (that I had shared with him in our earlier encounter and will share with you here) and the rohn report itself. He suggested that I do a story about ‘Rohn, the early years’, and that he would love to read it.
As a general rule I like to avoid talking about myself so I can remain mysterious and inaccessible to people’s assumptions and expectations, but then there’s Thoreau’s dictum which he includes at the very beginning of his famous work Walden.
“Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”
Ha! So people like to know your personal story, then, who you are, where you come from and how you came to be who you are. I’ve been writing this newsletter every week for two years now, so maybe it’s time to give an accounting of myself.
I was born on September 26, 1950 at 6 AM in the Howell Hospital in Howell, Michigan, 8 miles down the road from the small farming town of Fowlerville where my family lived. The transition was, apparently, successful. I don’t remember any of it.
My father was the minister of the Baptist church there and our house, the parsonage, was located directly behind the church and on the other side of the block facing Ann Street.
I remember playing in that street with the neighborhood kids on the long twilit evenings that seemed to go on and on forever in Michigan, especially in the Fall. The Armstrong kids across the street from us were considered to be of a lower class, at least culturally (they couldn’t have been much poorer than us), but they were also the only playmates on our block so we played: hide and go seek, some form of stick ball as I recall and other such games as we could make up. That street was our park.
Actually, come to think of it, that was a defining feature of my childhood, the idea that we were somehow superior to the unsaved and unbaptized around us. I mean I didn’t feel that way myself, necessarily, but that seemed to be the official policy of the family being representative of the one true religion based on the Holy Inspired Word of God. To that effect we were proscribed from going to movies, dancing, playing cards and other activities that might invite demonic possession or lust. This was considered to be our witness to the community. It may also have been the reason why the congregation of our small Baptist church remained small.
It was all normal to me but looking back I can see what a narrow, rigid childhood little Rohn had between Baptist church 4 times a week and public school the rest of the time. I refer to him in the third person because I can hardly relate to that little boy now. I know he was me but he wasn’t me yet in another sense. I had yet to become myself.
Anyways the street was our park. We made snow forts and tunneled into the snow banks where it piled up along the edge of the street in the Winter, we burned mounds of fallen leaves in the gutter come Autumn (and roasted marshmallows in the glowing coals), we roamed up and down that street (and others) on Halloween, totally unsupervised, hunting for candy and sweets from the neighbors. And it was on the sidewalk next to that street where I learned to push off from the stone retaining wall, find my balance and ride a bike all on my own.
I don’t recall feeling underprivileged or overprivileged, my traumas and dramas, while peculiar to me, seemed not more or less than any other kid growing up in any other place.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized how boring and bizarre it really had been and began the process of finding myself. That took awhile. I had to lose my faith, question everything, travel the world, do psychedelics, make a million mistakes, find my mentor, realize I was somebody (as opposed to nobody), realize, infact, that I was way more than I had ever dreamed I was and that I needed way less than I ever thought I did and infact that I already had more than I would ever know. But I’m getting ahead of the story.
After Fowlerville we moved to Newaygo, on the banks of the Muskegon River. That was a cool town but a different kind of congregation. I guess we never really fit in, or maybe my dad didn’t have the same youthful charisma he had in Fowlerville. I don’t know but he lost that ministry and along with it his avocation and began a long slide into rough times, including depression and financial difficulties. For us kids it was all masked and hidden but there was definitely something wrong with the picture, something that we really didn’t understand but could feel.
Eventually we ended up in Sparta, a small town near the city of Grand Rapids, where we were no longer preacher’s kids. My big brother, my little brother and my little sister were the only ones left of the original clan. The oldest two having moved out, either to start a family of their own (Carol) or to join the Air Force and travel the world (Jim). We no longer had to bring a note from our parents excusing us from PE class because they were learning how to square dance, and my father was able to find gainful employment in the big city and little Rohn, now 6 1/2 feet tall, attended high school and played sports and ran the mile like his dad did. I got pretty good at that. My best time was 4:45 and I remember the exhilaration of being ‘in shape’ and feeling like I could run forever. My basketball skills, however, never matured much beyond grab a rebound and try not to drop the ball. I didn’t have any moves and couldn’t jump.
Well anyways I hope that wasn’t boring but that’s what happened. And that was pretty much the end of my career as a dutiful preacher’s kid type kid. Somewhere around that time we went to Ann Arbor (home of the University of Michigan) for the state track meet and I wandered into a head shop with black light posters and paraphernalia and crazy stuff I had never imagined or seen before. It blew my mind. Around that time I also read a book that I found in the carousel in a bus station called ‘Daybreak the Autobiography of Joan Baez’. She talked about vegetarianism and non-violence and meditation, also things I had never thought about before. It occurred to me that there were many things I had never thought about before and knew nothing about and that infact everything I believed that I did know (although obviously they were all true) were not true just because I believed them. It was a short hop from there to the idea that truth, obviously, existed independently of my beliefs.
That was like a crack that appeared in this giant wall that had been right in front of my eyes my whole life. The wall was everything that constituted my reality, everything that I knew to be true and then I watched in fascination as the crack widened and widened until, shockingly, the whole wall collapsed. It was shocking but kind of cool at the same time. I figured, ok, if truth exists, and it must otherwise why am I even searching for it, then it also must be discoverable with or without my beliefs. This turned out to be not only a brilliant insight but the beginning of one hell of an adventure.
I also realized around that time that my childhood had been completely fucked over by pretty much everybody: my grandmother, my big brother (especially my big brother), my parents (no matter how well meaning they had been), my teachers (most of them) and I had no idea who I was or what I was supposed to be doing. Infact I felt like some kind of a curse had been laid on me, like I had been under a spell and was just beginning to wake up. I felt like a slingshot that somebody had been pulling back on for years, for all my life really, and suddenly it was released. I flew.
My destination was the Holy Land. I wanted to travel and explore and that seemed like an exotic and far away enough place to fulfill my need for adventure. Besides I had spent my entire childhood sitting in the adult church service every Sunday morning, bored and looking at the colored maps of the Holy Land in the back of my Bible: Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee, the only color in an otherwise black and white book.
So I hitchhiked to New York City and flew to Europe (after being robbed in the airport by a con artist) and arrived in Luxembourg with basically zero money and no ticket home. My adventures had begun.
I spent 9 months on the road, including 6 in Israel, working on a kibbutz, traveling around, from Tel Aviv to Eilat and including of course Jerusalem, the ‘City of Peace’. I actually never felt like I found the Holy Land or the City of Peace, it was just a country like any other. There were fat people and dishonest people and kind people and generous people.
One of my strongest memories from that time was hiking from Jerusalem thru the West Bank all the way back to my kibbutz which was near the city of Beit Sh’ean. The West Bank of course was Arab, atleast it was in 1970, and I had a small tourist map that showed a road all the way thru from Jerusalem, which was on the southern end of the West Bank, to Beit Sh’ean which was on the northern end. So off I went with my neon orange backpack with the aquamarine blue tent rolled up on top.
I remember entering this small Arab village and all the kids running around me and laughing. I guess because they had never seen anything like that before: a tall white stranger with a weird looking backpack walking thru their village. Anyways they summoned the only person in the village who spoke English - the school teacher, and he came and greeted me and offered me food. To this day I remember the taste of the goat cheese and the olives and the pita bread dipped in olive oil that they offered me. Food that they had grown themselves in that rocky soil with an ox pulling a wooden plow.
Later I ran into an Israeli patrol in a jeep and they asked me where I was going and I said back to my kibbutz and showed them the map. They replied that there was no road thru that area and I said ‘Yes there is. Look.’ They laughed and drove off after checking my passport and I continued on. The road eventually turned into a dirt track and then into a goat path and went over a hill and disappeared. I had to walk back to the nearest town and take a bus.
I remember that when I finally returned to the United States I was so acclimated to camping out that as soon as the sky would begin to grow dark I instinctively began looking for a camping spot. Oh! I’m back in civilization, I would realize and then feel a little disappointed. The kindness of strangers and the adventures of the road are unknown in the civilized world.
So anyways I did continue my life in the U.S. working dead end jobs and trying to figure out who I was. I fell in with the counterculture crowd in Grand Rapids and smoked marijuana sitting in a circle, and listened to Traffic’s ‘The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys’ and George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ and Carol King’s ‘Tapestry’ on the turntable and sat up in the attic all night long with headphones on writing poetry. And the funny thing is I did find myself. That was the seventies, man, and magic was in the air. If you wanted to find yourself - well you would definitely find something.
One day I was walking down Charles Street where I lived, on my way to the little grocery store at the end of the street where the basketball courts were, and I saw a poster on a telephone pole. There was a little boy who seemed to be looking right at me and the caption read, ‘The energy that moves the atom moves you. Come and realize.” Something clicked and I could probably write an entire book about what it was that clicked that day and why it clicked and how it clicked but I’ll just simply say it clicked and I attended the event that was advertised on the poster even though it was in another city 60 miles away and I listened to this Indian mahatma guy (not the same person who was in the poster) speaking in a heavy accent from the dais of a church (of all places) and felt the presence of truth. For the first time in my life, except for a few random, spontaneous moments, I felt the presence of truth. After 19 years of sitting in the Baptist church, being baptized in front of the congregation by my father, accepting Jesus as my personal lord and savior at an outdoor camp meeting with sawdust on the ground, I finally encountered truth. It was remarkable and distinctive. No doubt about it. This is truth. I always thought it was something that you believed in. No, actually it’s something you feel.
And the little boy in the poster was Prem Rawat, known as Maharji at the time. He was only I think 14 years old or so. He eventually became my mentor, my friend and ally and has remained so over the intervening 50 years.
Honestly I think I’ve known him since childhood. I remember reading in the newspaper as a little kid that the saviour of the world had been born in India and I remember thinking ‘That’s good.’ then pretty much forgot about it. I mean if the savior of the world has been born then what is there to add to that really except, ‘good, excellent, alright’. Anyways that was my response as a child of probably around 7 and probably that was him, I mean who else could it be? I mean I guess it could be someone else but he is the one who reached out and touched me when I was 22 and living on Charles Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, trying to find myself. Anyways I figure it was him even though I don’t remember any name being mentioned in the article. It was just a little article buried in the second section, like oh by the way the savior of the world has been born in India, now on to other news.
And that pretty much brings us up to date, except for a whole lot of other stuff that happened like living in Mexico on Xcacel Beach with my friend Buddy when I was having my mid-life crisis and being Mr. Business Man making lots of money and trying to be a famous writer (still not there yet) and moving to San Antonio as a member of ‘The City of Love and Light’, a quasi-commune type spin off of the seventies composed of about 150 people meditating for peace and living in the Gunter Hotel and of course finding myself all along the way. As it turns out that’s a life long process, it never seems to end and it never really gets boring. Turns out that what a human being is, is actually pretty interesting, pretty amazing.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the Warrior Princess, the story that the guy in the cafe remembered when he asked me ‘why don’t I write about Rohn, the early years’. The Warrior Princess is a real person and I have met her at the Sacred Spring.
I have lived in San Antonio since the mid-seventies. Although I have left several times I have always come back. Why, was a question I used to ask myself. I’m from Michigan, where they have seasons and real forests and real rivers. Is it the low cost of living? Is it the bi-culturalism, the Mexican/American thing?
One day I was walking along the River Walk, by a certain place that I really like and I was feeling, you know what, this river and the springs that feed it were sacred to the ancient people who lived here for thousands of years. For longer than we can imagine they would gather here and worship Mother Nature in the form of that fountain spring and this enchanted river. Mother Nature giving life to all her children - the plants, the animals and the people is what they felt. And I felt it too as if I were one of those ancient people or was in conversation with one of those ancient people. One of those people who knew what this place was. And sacredness still resonates thru our fair city and that’s why I kept coming back here. I could feel it even though I didn’t know what it was.
One day I was at the springs, the headwaters of the San Antonio River, the place where Mother Nature herself resided for those ancient people, the so called ‘Blue Hole’. It happened to be flowing, which these days is a rare event, and I was in the water frolicking. A mother and father showed up with their daughter who was about four years old and I started tossing pebbles out of the spring, which was kind of beneath or behind this retaining wall that they built to keep people from falling in I guess and then she would throw them back down the well. This became kind of game which she thought was hilarious. She had this beautiful lilting laughter that was a delight to hear so I kept pitching pebbles out of the spring and she kept tossing them back in.
Then I got out of the spring and was sitting by the water talking to her parents. They told me her name in Mayan, which I forget, but it meant Warrior Princess. I told them that we need warrior princesses these days and thanked them for that. Our game had sort of ended but she looked at me, this beautiful little four year old and she said ‘You can hold me.”
Oh my god, I think I was too stunned to respond. I could have picked her up and held her but I didn’t I just enjoyed knowing that she felt that trust and that connection with me, that I had met the Warrior Princess, that she was here and I was in her presence at the sacred spring.
That’s it. That’s the story of the Warrior Princess and that’s the story of Rohn, the early days. It’s still early. The story isn’t over yet. I’m still finding myself
.
Rohn, the early years