over the years, I've had therapists who have helped me gain perspective on my family of origin, and in particular, my psychobiography, the dynamics at work in my particular version of a difficult childhood, although they did the best they could, my birth family became an alcoholic family as my parents sunk deeper into that addiction over the course of my teenage years, my developmentally challenged twin brothers, the next two younger ones and a baby Sister, born when I was 15, there were now six of us together with increasingly absent and financially strapped parents, and I might add my gender place me squarely in the role of substitute caregiver, as was normal for the culture of my place and time I experienced confusion, resentment and the. Ever present painful self consciousness so layered on the ethical failure of my church, I was experiencing the devastating effects of witnessing my parents disappear into addiction. I was beginning to be profoundly disappointed in the way things seem to be and the way things seemed to be consisted of bad stuff going on at church, cliffs at school, fetishized items of clothing and makeup we coveted and occasionally shoplifted romance comic books, the hit parade and a sometimes terrifying home life. Just at that precarious point in my young life, I had an insight lingering with a good friend at the end of our long walk home from school, our books and clipboards clutch clutch to our chest, shivering in the cold. We were always freezing in Winnipeg winters, we confided to one another our mutual conviction that there absolutely had to be something beyond what our life to date had revealed, something mysterious, something unknown, something unnameable, something to know, beyond knowing, and something that we could and we would eventually come To encounter this moment, this simple, intuitive and hopeful insight, shared and confirmed face to face with another, felt more authentic and more reassuring than anything else in the life I knew then. It became a kind of underground and sustaining conviction of my subsequent teenage years, along with the question, it implied, what is it? And it sent me searching. Snapshot number five is a color snapshot. This one a little out of focus and not well cropped. This girl is sitting alone by a crowded swimming pool, apparently absorbed in a very thick and water warped paperback book. When I look back, I see myself searching for that, something to know through various modalities on offer by the zeitgeist of the time pulled into the hippie culture blooming in my generation, I was more and more out of sync with my parents expectations. It was 1963 the Civil Rights Movement exploded. JFK was assassinated in November, and the war in Vietnam escalated. Canadian young people were somewhat insulated, but nevertheless aware and politically galvanized by these events. Bob Dylan's the times they are a change in resonated with us all, especially the words aimed at parents. Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don't criticize what you don't understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old world is rapidly aging. Be grateful I didn't sing it. Those lines have universal relevance for the coming of age moment, and back then, they helped inspire revolution. My rebelliousness and resentments were both confirmed and vindicated by those words and countless others in the protest music of the times. But I didn't run away to San Francisco. Instead, I sat by a community swimming pool just about every day for a whole summer school vacation. As a 15 year old, my parents thought I was joining in the fun for a change, doing something wholesome. In fact, I was wrestling my way through Jean Paul Sartre's being in nothingness. I This was beyond their comprehension, and mine too, if I recall, they were appalled, but this was my rebellion. I was still socially isolated, now plunging more deeply into an interior life and beginning to value intellectual endeavor as the most promising way to cope with the conditions of life as I knew it. Then my family continued to move eastwards from province to province in Canada, the next stop was Toronto and then Montreal. In those days, there was no unified sequence in the high school curriculum between provinces. So by the time we landed in Quebec, my education was seriously messed up. I was a senior with no coherent sequence, especially in math and science. Somehow I was able to gain admission to university and persistently interested in the life of the mind, I dove into a strenuous major in English Literature at Concordia University in Montreal. It was heady times the late 60s. By age 17, I had managed to leave home and was living with roommates in a flat in downtown Montreal, some amongst my young professors and friends would go on to become the cultural icons of our time, Margaret Atwood. One of my teachers, Leonard koan, was scribbling away at the Bistro around the corner. My reading outside the required Chaucer Shakespeare and English novels on the assigned course list might be familiar to some of the elders here today, James Fraser, Mircea Eliade, Northrop Frye, Carl Jung, Eric Hoffer, Thomas Pynchon, the visionary Marshall McLuhan, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and the beats Simone de Beauvoir and the existentialist Bachelor and The phenomenologists Betty Friedan and the second wave feminists. Anything that touched into that persistent intuition, also a question that there was something, something to encounter beyond what I knew.