As a child in a dusty corner of Romania, I ruled the unpaved road leading up to my home. The hill across the railroad tracks was the frontier land of my experience, and my American birthplace lied somewhere just behind that hill. I flew back to the United States finding an ocean between my two homes. Just when I began learning my first language, Romanian, I found myself in a strange place having to learn a new one. In school, they taught me only to forget who I was.
But I found myself again, through trial and error, in the words of great men, and I found expression through music. I taught myself guitar and poetry, yearning to simultaneously understand myself and to make myself understood. When the time came, I chose a literary, academic path through college thinking it as fair a course as any and a reasonable way to write and travel. My degree in English literature from the University of Nevada, Reno, only proves I was there. There, too, I learned to unite my mind and body through yoga, and I learned the yoga of words and music. In Las Vegas, I took graduate-level courses in English rhetoric and composition theory dropping out when academia, research and writing lost its Romantic lustre. Music filtered through the thick growth on the edges of my well-worn path. Unsheathing my metaphorical machete, I changed course again, cutting through towards the distant lure of a Siren's song. Instead, I found an old guy with a guitar – a sage and guru. "Sharpen this, and you will have no use for blades." I am now a student at the UNLV School of Music studying Classical Guitar Performance with Ricardo Cobo.
I am a writer, musician and photographer. But I am none of those, for I would fall terribly flat on my face at the feet of anyone who really is a great writer, musician or photographer. I am an artist, and these are my mediums (media). Who can argue against that?
I do want to be another drop of water competing with the sea to reach the shores of delight. I am the sea itself lapping up the grains of Truth on endless beaches, but even the vast sea cannot reach past its own shores. Zen Ritual is my ship. It is my vessel for conveying to the world every aspect of my being and expression. It is my vessel for employing the talents of the gifted and passions of the compassionate to carry our vision and to take those wishing to reach a new world and those who are weary of the old one with us. I am not the shipbuilder, I am not the ship, I am not the sails, I am not the crew, I am not the winds or the water, but they are all me.
Zen Ritual is a multitude of differences, synergetically synchronized with one vision of reaching, one hope of obtaining, one dream of discovering. Wherever a new shore lies, we implore destiny to take us there and beyond.