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Notes from the Edge of the Map. Stories from a life between worlds.

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I'd waited fourteen months for a surgeon to cut my throat and release my new voice! Yes. It was a goiter operation. Huge. We met just before the surgery. He explained what his team would do. He was middle-aged. Spanish. Years of practice at his fingertips. "Oh, by the way," I said as he turned to leave, "I want to tell you—my friend Padre Rene and his whole village in the Peruvian Andes, north of Cusco, are at this moment praying for me, for you, and for all your team." We smiled at each other. “Oh, and what is your name?” I asked him quietly. “Jesús,” he said. And our smiles met each other with faith. Before the operation, I made many art-filled affirmations. The one I've included here was the last. I made a new friend two years ago. He encouraged me to tell my "faith-guided adventure stories." For sixteen years I was on a mission without a name—travelling in remote areas of Peru and Bolivia. Each adventure had a miracle embedded in it. Each one r...
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Notes from the Edge of the Map

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  The Toothbrushes That Never Arrived Post-op, now feels like the perfect time to begin sharing these stories. Last week, I shared something a new friend said:  “You yearn to be helpful, to understand more deeply the mystical in the everyday. This is where the outer journey meets the inner one.” So yes. I’ve started writing. The American Toothbrushes, and the Wannabe Astronaut A Life Lesson Learned In 2008, I was on my way to Bolivia to meet Iván Nogales Bazán, the visionary behind Teatro Trono. But, as so often happens on the path of intuition, a quiet redirection changed everything. Through a chance introduction, I met Washi—a former street child mentored and sponsored, along with his four brothers, by the remarkable Dr. Sharon Forest, affectionately known as Mama Sharon (yes, Winston Churchill’s great-niece).  Washi, now a young man with a higher education and an enormous heart, had founded a soup kitchen in his native village of Ollantaytambo, in Peru’s Sacred Valley....
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Litvak family.

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Lithuanian Jews or 'Litvaks ' are  Jews born in Lithuanian, Belarus, Latvia, two north eastern regions of Poland, and some border areas of Russia and Ukraine .  Today very few remain.  Those who escaped in 1941 mostly fled to Russia.  My great grandfather Harry Rubin immigrated to Canada around 1910. Thanks to the DNA test I'm  here to discover my Litvak ancestry, in the landscape,  in the collective memory, and in my soul. My mountaineer friend Ken immediately called my journey to Lithuania a  Pilgrimage. And that's what it's  been, all six weeks, and not a single blister. The pilgrimage started in Gdansk in July, drifted over the Polish border to a monastery near Kaunas , and meandered down to the south west of Lithuania to my great grandfathers village, Seirijai. This village was the original goal of my 'pilgrimage.' I believed my fathers family had escaped from Seirijai on foot to Poland (then immigrated to the US), but it turned o...
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