Transcript/History

My name is Terry, and I live here in Galveston. And we’ve been here about 30 years. And we came moved down here from New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico, outside Santa Fe, up in the mountains outside Santa Fe, had an art gallery. And so we started an art gallery here. My wife and I did and used a lot of the artists that we were working with up in New Mexico down here. And so we had a nice entry into this community because we started the business and people liked what we had. And so we got to know the Galveston community, and that was great. It was very rich. But yeah, Galveston’s I don’t know if it’s the end of a long journey in terms of where I lived, but, you know, I moved to New Mexico, moved to Albuquerque from New York City, and lived there for a couple of years. My wife, my then wife was working at the New School of Social Research, and so I had a chance to I was working as a studio artist, then doing sculpture, and we had spent the previous year before moving there. There might. And I was able to do some quite a bit of research on structural systems, which was part of my sculptural work. And so getting New York was a great time just to, just to do studio work, but also while I was there, um, who came in contact with the Gurdjieff community and would sit with them. You know, they had an Upper East Side, they had weekly meetings and you’d go and sit in them in a dark, uh, kind of a dark room. That was, uh, about 90 degrees. They’d overheated and the chairs are really uncomfortable. And, and you’d listen to these, these talks by name. And I think his name was he was a student of Gurdjieff. And once, while he’d show up and play the piano, it was you know, it was part of spiritual work. I mean, it seems like pretty much everywhere I’ve been the kind of the one thing in common, it’s been the spiritual references are art and spiritual. The two things, um, um, so prior to, prior to going. So I came here from New Mexico prior to that in New York, prior to that. Cambridge.

Prior to that. Eugene, Oregon. Uh, where we, uh, my wife, my then wife and I both got graduate degrees. Uh, I took a degree in art history and she took a degree in psychology, and one was living in Eugene. There was a, uh, there’s a good friend of mine there who was, he was a Ph.D. candidate in biochemistry, and he had a good friend that was a computer programmer. And Tom Lane and Tom was a, was a seeker and he, um, this I’m doing, I’m doing the story backwards. And so Tom was studying Tonka painting with a rubbish day in Berkeley who had escaped from Tibet and, uh, and the like. Right. Either with or shortly after the Dalai Lama, uh, and brought with him, smuggled out, I guess you would say, these ancient Tonka paintings. And so Tom said, Hey, you take photographs, I want you to go down to Berkeley. And so we went down there and they invited us in to his place and and he was working on a shelf. He had a he was creating building a shelf and he was trying to put screws into a plaster wall. And so the shelf was kind of hanging off of the screws are kind of hanging out. But it was like sitting there you it was like kind of just magically sitting there. We all had a good laugh over that. But, you know, it’s the first time I’d really seen Tonka paintings and had, you know, had direct contact with the Tibetan Buddhist and very, very just beautiful man, beautiful guy. We laughed and drank tea and took photographs and he opened his closet door in his bedroom and he had built a false wall. And in it was all these these little square, you know, kind of like, uh, oak cubbies. And each one of them had a talk of painting in them, and they were just magnificent. I mean, I was taking photographs and taking details, and I just like, oh, so, you know, that’s when I think I first realized that it was the Tibetan really had a really had a hold for me. So, you know, prior to that senior in high school, Bozeman, Montana, you know, my dad was a professor at the university. My mom was a schoolteacher. And, uh, um, my dad went, I guess I was like freshman or sophomore in high school. My dad made a couple of trips to Japan and brought back all this Japanese art and remodeled our house with a token Oma and a Shoji screen and, you know, just, you know, so I was very, very early, very captured by then.

 

Yeah. Enlightenment is possible...
But, you know, that's that's that's a pretty big commitment.

Uh, this the esthetic, you know, the architecture, the art, the poetry, you know, just really held something. And, and so when I was asked to do an essay in senior English Lit, I wrote a paper on Buddhism, and it’s kind of the first time I’d actually studied, you know, I’d just been exposed to images and whatever and poems. But the first time I actually did a little bit of research like, you know, what is Buddhism? What, what’s that about? And the result of that was a poem, uh, dig you dog. Your bone of being is buried deep. So I guess I got something out of that, right? So I didn’t really realize it, but, um, so anyway, it, uh, we had traveled, uh, to Europe and my, as I said, my dad was a, was a art history professor and he took my sister and I, my mom and sister and I, we went to Europe, bought a little car in Paris or similar in Paris, and spent the next three months just driving around Europe. I was like an art history tour. He was he wanted a photograph for his for his classes, seminars. He wanted to have his own images, his own photographs. So so we had every museum, every church, every I mean, it was like a graduate seminar in art history. It was fantastic. And we got to I’m in Cathedral in northern France, in northern French Gothic Cathedral. And, um, my dad kind of prepped us about it, you know, he said, you know, this, this place, this is maybe one of the most incredible achievements of mankind. The name was like 152 feet up to the peak of the six partite vault. And he said, all without, without, uh, it’s all masonry, without mortar, too. It’s all, you know, cut to fit, you know. So I remember walking in there and, and of course, you know, you’ve got these enormous windows, you know, because of the of the, uh, uh, of the, of the supports that go on the outside supporting the walls or the windows. You know, the walls can be, you know, that was the whole idea of the Gothic was to the flying buttresses, took the all the load and all that weight of the vaults and took it out like that so that the walls themselves were basically holding themselves up. You know, there was sort of some structural point, but it allowed them to be very open. So there was like a lot of light. So you’re walking into this this ancient stone building that’s filled with light. And I looked up and the next thing I know, I’m laying on the floor. I mean, it was like a spiritual experience. It just it was just powerful, just the spirit of that place, you know, it’s just overwhelming on the scale of it. Just so that stayed with me. That definitely stayed with me. And, uh, and then, you know, as I said after, I mean, I didn’t really wasn’t much to follow up with that, you know, going to college and getting a degree and going to graduate school. Then that’s when I met Tom Blum and um, or, you know, he introduced me to Ricochet. So I’m in, we’re in Cambridge and I’m doing research on structural systems at MIT. And I started doing yoga. I didn’t even know yoga. I didn’t know what it really very much about it. But I’d heard about the what’s it called, sun, sun, sun salute in the morning or you know, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I started doing that and I started sitting and I’d heard about when I started graduate school, first in Montana and then in Oregon, I started getting migraine really incredibly painful migraine headaches. And, uh, I, I would be pretty much debilitated for up to 24, 30 hours. I mean, not able to move, not able to, you know, light those smells just, you know, like there’s a knife embedded in your head, you know? And, and, uh, so when I was, when I was working in Cambridge there, you know, doing research at MIT, we were working on structural systems. And, um, I got a migraine that led me down for two days. It was like it, I was immobile for literally two days. The pain was just and never experienced anything like it. And that whole image of the I’m in Cathedral came up REM pictures Tarkas came up the, you know, the sun silhouettes that I was doing that came, you know, you know, it’s kind of doing those, you know, kind of visualizing those. And, um, and, um, I, I don’t know exactly what it was, but I, I didn’t have any fear and I’d had a lot of fear up to that point in my life. It just kind of, you know, uneasiness about stuff, you know, and kind of worry and little fearful. And and in that two days of just being in mobile, there was I realized all the immaturity, all my emotional immaturity, you know, ways that I had been kind of out of integrity with, you know, being a good person, so to speak, you know, just attitude wise, you know, just kind of ways. I was thinking so like fear and and and a lot of immaturity just disappeared. And it was it really I really felt like I was a different person at that point. I continue to have migraines, but within about two months, um, I had a migraine where the visual, you had the visual with the distortion, the, all the, the geometries and whatever started to happen and which was really had up to the previous. It just terrified me. As soon as that visual thing happened, it was like I felt like a sense of panic. The visual thing happened. I was washing dishes. The visual thing happened. I didn’t have any I didn’t react to it. I just observed it. And it went on for maybe ten, 15, 20 minutes and was gone. And there was no pain. And I’ve never had a painful migraine since. I still get the visual sometimes when I’m tired or eat too much sugar or something. But, um, there’s no pain with it. So it changed me somehow. It changed me. That experience changed my chemistry, you know, really mentally and emotionally. I felt a huge shift. And shortly after that, my wife and I separated. And because we realized that, you know, we had different goals in our life, was perfectly amicable and we moved to New Mexico and uh, uh, she went on to teach at the University of New Mexico. And I became, um, kind of a, a mountain. What about a property in an old ghost town outside of Santa Fe? And it was like the coal company had been mining up there for, you know, a couple of generations. And the thing had been shut down for 20 years. And finally, the coal company said, I would love to sell this place. So they sold a lot by a lot of house by house. So I bought a place there and, and, uh, started working as a studio, you know, which is what I always really wanted to. And, uh, so became a studio artist at that point. So, um, I don’t know, that was an interesting growth period, being a kind of a mountain hippie, not really hippie, but there was a lot of hippies around and uh, and then, uh, you know, doing commissions in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I did a big commission in Albuquerque, uh, across Route 66 is Nob Hill Gateways and Route 66 going through. And we went, we were up there last June and, and uh, with Albuquerque and they’re still there. They look great, you know, that’s all going on. And so that was part of the history. But, um, I, uh, we moved, we moved to Galveston and we had a business here. I had a studio, had a big warehouse over here, had a studio, did a lot of work here, a lot of work in Houston. And my wife started a yoga studio and it was first yoga studio in Galveston and people loved it. You Tube, you know, the the docks over here, a lot of them had heard of it and med students and then just people in the community. And and, you know, she had become pretty well known just because of her business or her clothing business and jewelry business. And, um, so, uh, she started a yoga studio and there was a couple that came, we went out to dinner and after dinner we went back over the yoga studio and the guy went over to the little bookshop. My wife had a little bookshelf there for books for sale, pulled out a copy of Awakening the Buddha Within My Love of Syria and said, You need to read this. Oh, okay. So I took it home and I did. I read it. In fact, I was I still had a studio up in New Mexico, had some property up there, and I’d built a studio up there. And so shortly after that, I went back up to spend some time in the studio up there, and I took the book with me where I ended up the whole time reading that book and learning to meditate. And there was a at the end of the book, there was a thing about who he was, whose emissary was, and and there was a name, you know, the Zo Chin Foundation. So I look that up and I found a phone number and I called up and I said, you know, what do you guys do? You know it? And they said, well, we’re we’ve got a retreat that’s starting in two weeks in Massachusetts. Um, I said, Well, how can I come to that? You know, I mean, what do you have to do? Is it you’re dumb? No problem. And so I went I left New Mexico and went to Massachusetts and had a two week silent retreat with llamas. Sorry. What was that? That was 19 or 2096. 2096, I think it was. And so over the next ten years, I’m going to every retreat that he did all over the country and practicing and.

 

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!