A multi-faceted, clear-thinking, independent, and earnest child, I loved Mighty Mouse, Peter Pan, Wyatt Earp, Sky King, Annie Oakley, and named my bicycle for a horse who ran like the wind. Wardrobe complemented passions. If I could have found flying green tights, I would have worn them. I did glory in my Daniel Boon rough and ready brown coon-skin cap and the formal white one too. I wore and put to good use leather holsters with silver six guns, my Annie Oakley white-fringed red vest and skirt, and my overalls and cowboy boots, sometimes worn while watching Howdy Doody, perhaps with beer can in-hand. The Pabst probably eased me into evening after dusty days out on the lone prairie.

As well, by age five I started making my own way with God. Kindergarten nun and Church priest were side notes to my precocity wending on Paths of Discovery to destinations of Certain Truth.

First up: Earth is The Garden of Eden. This needed announcing, and I did. Sure of God and my own reasoning, and with desire to keep Those Who Mattered updated, I spoke confident explanations to parents and clergy.

The women in habits were charmed, and the parents smiled, moved their heads side-to-side, tsked a tad, and thus pronounced me incorrect. Undaunted, I persisted. So did they. My confidence submerged a smallish bit.

Then, up a rung to First Grade, individual desks, and catechism classes.

“Who made man?” “God made man”

Whoa! Then, an even bigger Ta-Da!

“We are made in the image and likeness of God.”

I was free! Man, sanctified, and me on solid foundation! I worked the angles, found myself accurate: Eden, that Heaven on Earth, proven. We could all go home decided and happy, sure the rest of the catechism was superfluous

I continued my interior travels. I found clearly, obviously, people are good. Earnest still yet, I explained and proselytized. Parents with smiles and slow chuckles persisted with disproving argument. I lost ground a bit more, and soldiered on

By second grade, more discernment, and thus I could firmly champion a pro-human, democratic God. ‘Mystery of The Trinity’? Humph! Echoing Einstein, who I did not know at the time, I told Sister Mary-Something God wouldn’t fool with us like that. I explained The Trinity. I wondered how so many before me missed the obvious.

I could have been the First Woman Pope, I was so clear on all this. Unfortunately neither my precocious pronouncement nor potential as pope remain. And back then, my passion slowly drooped and finally died as Church and Parents boggled me with confounding inconsistencies. God was more lightening bolt than love, and Sin got more press than Redemption. Fifth grade bored me and my imagination moved on.

I did not bother to stop believing in God, but institutions had challenged me on so many fronts by age nineteen my interior life and inclination to independence were hunkered down to subterranean levels. I secured some measure of secret high ground, tramped onward, achieved graduation from college and family, left the nests, and let life carry me to the Midwest where I lost several identities and tossed the admissions to law schools.

Fourteen years, four jobs, two careers, shiatsu school and a move to California later, God was re-introduced on a Friday afternoon by my brilliant acupuncturist and teacher, who folded his arms and said oh-so-calmly, “You really ought to re-consider God.”

“GOD??!”

“Mm-hm.”

“JESUS!”

“Well, if you want. I have always liked Jesus.”

I stared. I blinked several blinks. I would have known he was nuts but for having already figured out he was brilliant and, as a mystic Jungian Doctor of Oriental Medicine with Mormon upbringing and long out-of-the-closet gay fellow, not ~to my way of perceiving~ the average guy to suggest God. There was more blinking, and we spent four years shifting life with weekly exchanges of acupuncture and shiatsu, opinions and investigations. For me, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, meditation, Science of Mind and my own inner knowing became basic reality, and my shiatsu more eclectic, more accomplished.

Molecules of reality spread apart, came back together in changed configurations. I both lived life and practiced shiatsu multi-dimensionally. God was fine, Jesus was too, and I had no recollection of my grammar school fascinations with deity and reality. Cowboys and flying heroes had long given way to detectives. My penchant for bicycles, somewhat dashing hats, clothes, and good beer, evolved.

Experience, and intellectual independence came to include my working with the innate intelligence of the human body-mind-spirit. Within that, I found God as a fluid, beautiful dance of reality and invitation.

Then, tectonic crashing ruptured the bedrock of relationship and all the furniture upended. I plunged, traveled in, raveled out, rode deranging fractals of excruciating unfoldment. Like the shamans buried alive to pass tests of the underworld, I slowly resurrected to new light, new world, and a reality challengingly malleable. With metaphysics, spirituality, and bicycling, still and more my cornerstones, it would take another fifteen years for me to recollect convictions about Eden, human possibility, and my passion for God as democratic, accessible, and personal, even as all that formed a foundation of my stance and practice in medicine.