This morning I had a delightful time interviewing David Parks, a Zen teacher. David and I both grew up in Kentucky where he has returned to live on a small farm after spending many years in California. His father, John Parks a psychiatrist and now deceased introduced me as a college student to meditation 50 years ago.
While I knew of David as his son we never really had a chance to connect meaningfully until recently as we prepared to record an episode of All Things Contemplative. He spoke of growing up seeing his parents meditating on a regular basis and he would flip through books laying around the house by Akhilananda, their meditation teacher, Manley Palmer Hall and others. I said likewise with the books my mother left discreetly around by Gurdjeiff, Ouspensky and Yogananda hoping I’d show interest in them. It was she who introduced me to David’s father.
This is all to say that it is as if I was only aware of threads and in a flash the whole cloth, invisibly woven together appeared as some type of interconnecting "it", sensed though incapable of precise definition. The episode with David will air in about two weeks.