Gondola of Hearts: The Life of an American Buddhist

Angebote / Angebote:

Gondola of Hearts" is an autobiography of a man whose Buddhist beliefs came to him long before he ever knew the term. It's a journey told in non-chronological vignettes that capture moments in time in which life lessons are drawn. Some large, some small, but all invested with a spiritual quality that would gradually define him. They tell the story of a boy who became a man, just as America itself was coming of age after the war. It is full of touching, humorous, and sometimes sad stories, based on memories that reveal their impact only after years of contemptation. In mining these moments, Roger Bergman brings us not only into his own world, but in closer to touch with our own. In the author's words:"Friends as well as a publisher have suggested that I write an "author's preface" for these stories, to point out my unusual childhood and to introduce the stories, which I hope will look outward to the world I grew up in, rather than inward in an autobiographical sense. Those years - my years of growing up -- were years of virtual silence, a spiritual silence that I often yearn to return to - someday.In my early life, I was stalked by two demons: one, asthma, affected almost everything I tried to do until my years living at sea. The other, an assumption that I was mentally retarded, was accepted by most of the adults I came into contact with, and even by myself. My life at school, with rare exception, was to sit in the back of the room and be quiet.It was long in coming, but I eventually realized that what I suffered from was a learning disability, one that as an adult, free from the tyranny of school life, I learned to work around almost subconsciously. My understanding of this disability was all the more perplexing, not because of my many predictable failures, but because of my surprising, at times confusing, successes.It was only in the writing of these stories in old age, did I come to see that though this disability may have limited my life's choices, it did not stop me from sharing my vision of the world."Roger Wiley Bergman