I am a...VERB

HIGH SCHOOL MUSIC I  was blossoming creatively when I reached high school.   In junior high I had taken up the guitar and began singing with friends.  'Folk music' became my passion.  My early favorites were Jimmie Rodgers and the Kingston Trio, and I patterned myself after them. Later came Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Ian & Sylvia, the New Lost City Ramblers and finally Bob Dylan...along with a host of others. I grew up with music.   My mom loved musicals...Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, etc....and comic operas, especially Gilbert and Sullivan.   She knew the clever lyrics and catchy tunes to almost everyone and sang them to us from the time we were in the cradle. Now, for the first time, I was focused almost entirely on music and the performing arts. MR. MORTON I was lucky to have had a fabulous music teacher and choral director, Bob Morton, with whom I had a great rapport and who encouraged me to stretch myself and perform.  He 'di

I never had a problem being alone…or with occupying myself.   W hen I started school, everything changed. STARTING SCHOOL School activities couldn't match the projects I immersed myself in at home.  WAITING FOR THE BUS WITH DICK Also, I wasn’t keen on getting on a bus to God knows where loaded with a bunch of kids I didn't know, some of whom were pretty much untamed.  If I couldn’t  walk  to a place, and if I didn’t know where I was to be taken, I wanted nothing to do with it....even if my big brother Dick had done it a million times.   Every day we waited together on the curb  with the neighborhood kids . Dick knew the ropes, but we each went to different schools. When I got to school, to kindergarten, it all hit me as a traumatic shock. I SEEM TO BE THE ONLY KID LOOKING AT THE TEACHER My world turned upside down. I wasn’t used to regimented activities. I didn't like my time prescribed; I had no problem self-or

INTRODUCTION Suppose there were a world that only could be described by verbs...not nouns: a world of continual flux with no static, permanent things...or permanent 'persons'; a world of ‘tabling ', but no ‘tables'; a world of ‘Donalding,’ but no ‘Donalds'. I perceive that world, and it is that world physicists, along with great spiritual teachers, describe. We are blinded by our ability to name, to insist on seeing things as nouns .    We attempt to 'freeze' a liquid world.    We conceive as motionless what, in fact, is constantly in motion .  Our ability to perceive reality is extremely limited.   The convention of language distorts our perception .  We and the world  go through countless manifestations without our noticing it. We are verbs...not nouns.   I speak from experience... BEING A KID ME (1948) I was born and grew up in Whittier...then a relatively small southern California town with a lively and viable downtown of