The initial year of writing was 2004; my wife Jeanne and I had just moved our family from one side of town to the other. Our children were ages 3, 7 and 9. Life was incredibly busy for us. Our children were adjusting to going to formal schools for the first time since up to then we had been home-schooling them. My parents' health was declining. At the same time, I was finishing up my bachelor degree and planning my next career move.
The year before I started writing my story, a best-selling book called A Million Little Pieces came out by an author named James Frey. Frey's work was marketed as a memoir, but over time fact-checkers discovered that much of the material in it was actually fictional, fabricated by the author in order to heighten the appeal of the story. I read about this controversy in the local paper and decided then and there that I wanted to write only the truth about my experiences in the monastery.
It had been 17 years since I left the monastery-long enough for a whole brood of cicadas to mature underground and rise up again. Was something new maturing in me over those years that could help me to understand what had happened to my dream to become a monk? Was I ready to let that something rise up out of me to share with others? Evidently not! Even though I made an outline for the project and began to write productively about the past, it would be another 17 years before the project would finally come to completion.
What happened was this: My focus on the events of the past took shape according to my feelings about myself in the present. The 17 years during which I was either writing the story or letting it lie fallow, the world around and within me was changing so much that I didn't always know what was real about life or myself anymore. So how was I to evaluate the past? Where could I stand objectively? On what basis could I compare the actions of my younger self in relation to the actions of significant others?
Some of the most important parts of my evolving story became the sections in which the main character dialogues with others: with his friend Bean, with his wiser self, with his girl friend Joni, with Abbot Keller and novice master Father Francis, with Brother Anthony the multi-cultural enthusiast, with the Zen Master Seung Sahn and, finally, with the Jesuit Father Joe McHugh. The dialogues were like platonic exchanges seeking after the truth. The reader will understand, I think, that such writing about conversations in the past, over 30 years ago, had to be reconstructed. Because they were reconstructed, they were partly creations of my mind and therefore not strictly factual recordings.
More about this at a later point.
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