The author, 63 years of age, brings literary, spiritual, mathematical and science views to his writings. At age ten, he found himself forming a writing club in elementary school; at fourteen, he sold five magazine articles for a total of five hundred dollars; and at age eighteen onward he kept a journal. He also played classical violin until age 18, studying at The MacPhail Center for Music, in Minneapolis, and finally with John Lindsey, now in New York, hoping to become a concert violinist - but was not able to go with his last orchestra group on their tour of Russia in 1979, opting instead to attend West Point to pursue pre-med.Also, he has studied considerably in the areas of science and mathematics, including electrical engineering at West Point, and fifteen mathematics courses at Berea College, starting at age 41. There, he also started his amassing a collection of 160,000 personal flashcards, using SuperMemo. Noting, though, he is greatly aware of the typical tendency of we Scientific-Era-Moderners to miss the forest for the trees, and the incredible amount of Data Smog we are subject to, in general. So, he greatly benefited from three years in a remote village of 800 people in northwestern Illinois, starting at the age of 37, without a car the entire time. He has resided in the major metropolises of Detroit, including attending an inner-city Detroit Kindergarten, and San Diego in his twenties, as well as in small villages in Minnesota, Illinois, and Kentucky, including several years in Appalachia, and spent many of his childhood summers on a farm in Michigan.He was raised largely by his mother's side of the family, who were war refugees from Poland. His grandfather was a Mennonite born in Ukraine, with whom he built some woodworking projects. His mother emigrated to the United States by way of a two-week steam ship, to Ellis Island, in 1950, at the age of twelve. after fleeing from the Russians, by horse-drawn wagon, from farm to farm, across Poland, in1940.Currently, he spends a great deal of time looking into the nature of our Western vocabulary, and loves to invent new words he calls neologisms, with the aim of furthering his understanding by refining these tools by which to see people most respectfully. He counts it fortunate that his father taught English.Additionally, he travels extensively throughout Appalachia: Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, talking with people and making photographs of them and the surrounding nature, and has published seventeen photography books, after studying with The New York Institute of Photography in his 30’s. He has three photography websites. He is guided by Warren Brunner, whom he first met in 2002, now 96, perhaps the premier Appalachian photographer, who completed thirty photography projects for the Johnson administration in the 1960s; and in 2021-22, he wrote two biographies about Mr. Brunner. An additional area of his interest is with the Native American Indians, having visited two areas of the Navajo in Arizona; the Cherokee Indian areas of Cherokee, North Carolina; and the Cherokees at Vonure, Tennessee, where he wrote his first of three books on religion while camping in the Cherokee National Forest, following further his interests in religion and spiritual growth which started when his parents considered work as missionaries to Canada. He was baptized in a creek in West Virginia at seven; noting too, his parents briefly lived near The Lakota Indians in South Dakota, when first married. Later, at age 21, he spent a week studying at L’Abri Fellowship near Boston, Massachusetts. Since then he also explored other views, including the Amish and Mennonites, the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. And too, one hundred Saturdays at a meditation center and four visits to a Tibetan monastery, where he found his talks with the Tibetan monks useful.He has Vimeo and YouTube channels.Currently he lives in a village of 15,000, assisting his 86 year young mother. Read more about this authorRead less about this author