Confession of a soul searcher

I was raised in California by communists from Texas. Actually, my father was the one who railed against the opiate of the people. My mother tried, once or twice, to sneak my four sisters and me into the Methodist church, where she had grown up (my father was raised Episcopalian, and his grandfather was one of the early Jehovah's Witnesses), but my father stopped her. So I grew up without the concept of "the soul." It was just another one of those mysterious words, like "god" and "love," that other people made a lot of fuss about. I could see clearly right through myself, and I was sure that I didn't have a soul. Interestingly, my three youngest sisters were equally sure that they did have souls, and, who knows, maybe they did. They were all a lot louder than I was. Maybe their souls were the source of all that jabbering.

What I believed in, when I was a boy, were Science and Revolution. My father was a physician and scientist as well as a political activist. As children, my sisters and I were happy, both because it's the nature of children to be happy, and because we thought we were, somehow, at the vanguard of history. Let the other kids talk about what they'd seen on TV the night before...we didn't have a television because TV was bourgeois, and it, along with the rest of the establishment, was going to be swept away soon anyhow and be replaced by an idyllic new world of selfless love and selfless work. Or so we believed. But the solidarity of our family proved to be an illusion. As we children entered adolescence, the family dissolved into a chaos of betrayal and madness. My father left us. My oldest sister married, at 16, a much older man and moved away to the east coast. My next two sisters had mental breakdowns and were hospitalized. I started writing poetry and took a long detour from science (I had been doing pre-med at Berkeley). I did little but read for many years, supporting myself with various short-term laboring jobs. Finally I concluded that nature was wiser than man. My ideal was to live in such a way that doctors and lawyers, symbols of man's authority, were unnecessary. This I proposed to do by becoming a peasant, living within nature as much as I could. I worked on farms, met and married a woman, we had a child, and then my wife left me to go back to the comfort of her suburban family. I realized that my peasant life was too limiting. I was a happy animal, but I wasn't a man. I returned to school at the age of 39 and got bachelor's and master's degrees in agronomy. I found that I could get along with agronomy students, many of whom were from other countries. So now I travel the world, planting my seeds. A couple of years ago, not long after my oldest sister hung herself, I started praying every morning. I still don't have a church (the closest thing is Sunday morning yoga class), but I find that I have to do something to express my awe at the infinite power that is creating the universe.