CHAPTER 1

THE SHATTERING
We need to change the lens by which we see the world.
Jeremy Lent, The Web of Meaning
My lens of perception and understanding was shattered two months before my fourth birthday, when my biological dad, Fred Irving Soloway, died at the young age of thirty-six. As a child, he had contracted rheumatic fever, which ravaged his heart. He fell ill again in 1937 while fighting for freedom and democracy against the fascism of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and his heart never recovered. My father’s death shattered the expectations about life I had learned from the stories my mother read to me at bedtime: ". . . and they all lived happily ever after."
I did not know it then, but this loss, while a shocking introduction to the teaching of impermanence, initiated a journey that eventually led me to Indigenous spirituality, psychedelics, shamanism, and quantum physics.
As a youngster, I knew my dad was sick. I had carried medicine to him in his bed more than once, careful not to spill. However, I had no idea of the severity of his condition. I never suspected or feared he would die. Instead, I felt loved, safe, and cared for. Then suddenly, he was gone, taken away.
And so was my mother. No one told me where she was. Months later, I learned that just after my dad had died, my mother had entered the hospital for emergency thyroid surgery and was hospitalized for six weeks.
During that time, I was left adrift. My baby sister Ilsa and I were shuttled around New York City, moving from one of our seven aunties to another.
"Your father’s gone on a long ocean voyage," an uncle told me.
But I knew this wasn’t true. I knew somehow that my dad had died and would not be coming back. I remember feeling clearly yet another loss—loss of my trust in adults for telling me the truth. I felt totally alone. I am in this by myself, I thought. Shell-shocked and frightened, with no one to turn to, I shut down.
I had no closure or support in dealing with my father’s death because I never got to attend a funeral or memorial service, or see Dad’s body. No one in my family knew how to help a young boy deal with his grief at the loss of his father and the sudden disappearance of his mother. Had hospitals allowed children in to see their ailing parents in those days, I might have been better prepared for his death. So what does the body do with unresolved grief? What does a child do with trauma? The energy gets locked inside the body. In my case, this led to life-threatening asthma attacks and panicky gasps for breath. Weekly visits to the doctor for shots in both arms went on for years in an attempt to stem extreme allergic reactions to pollen, dust, and who knows what else.
"Tommy, it’s time to stop playing," my mother would say. "We have to go get your shots now."
I hated it all. Underneath the asthma and the fear lay stuffed emotions that exploded outwardly as testosterone hit when I turned thirteen, leading to a cycle of destructive juvenile delinquency fueled by alcohol. I was sad, angry, short-tempered, and wallowing in self-pity. I was running a story: "I got fucked over by my dad’s death, so I am going to fuck the world over twice as much."
That story drove me to begin lifting weights to build up my skinny frame, so I would be strong enough to beat up anyone I might get in a fight with at school or in the street.
And fight I did. Given the right provocation, something would snap inside and my reptilian brain would take over with its fear-based conditioning to destroy the threatening other. My buttons were especially pushed when I’d been drinking, which was pretty much every weekend and sometimes during the week.
Twice, my opponent was so badly injured they had to be taken to the hospital. One of them might have died if the blood clot in his eye had gone to his brain. The other, suffering a concussion after a gang fight during which I pounded his head to the pavement of a back-alley street in Washington, DC, could also have died. Both hospitalized "opponents" recovered from the damage, sparing me from facing manslaughter charges.
It was a gift of grace that I was never caught for my most serious offenses, including burglary, car theft over a state line, and destruction of property. I was also privileged in that my skin was white and my parents (my mother married Ray Pinkson three years after the death of my father, Fred) could afford a good lawyer, so all I ever got was probation. Looking back, I realize I was divinely protected—I could have easily ended up in jail, or worse.
Another saving grace for me was spending time outdoors. Growing up in New York City had meant playing in parks, rocking on seesaws, digging in sandboxes, and roaming free in an empty lot beside our apartment building. I’d especially liked climbing on jungle gyms and swinging from the bars.
Being outside came to mean more when I was three and our family traveled to upstate New York for vacation. We stayed in a rented country home beside a small pool and a vegetable garden tended by caretakers who lived on the land. There, Mother Nature spoke to me for the first time, although I didn’t understand it in that way at the time. This was my first journey beyond the city’s confines, where the only untouched nature I was exposed to regularly was the occasional tree growing through a concrete sidewalk.
When my mother took me out to the garden on the day of our arrival, I was thrilled with the excitement of new adventure—there were new sights to see, smells to experience, and places to explore; I’d never seen a garden.
I don’t remember anything about the walk to the garden, but I vividly remember being in the garden. It was a moment of epiphany, a doorway opening to a totally new and unexpected realm that transformed my understanding of reality. What took place in that little country garden so altered my notion of how things work that it remains with me today as a reference anchor, a centering point in my life, a navigational compass orienting me toward the miracles of nature and my need to be intimately in touch with its gifts on a regular basis for both my physical and mental health.
So what shocking, mind-blowing event happened in that rich, black earth amid bright red tomatoes, thick yellow squash and melons, green pods of string beans and peas, insects buzzing, and warm sunlight dancing lazily in the hot and humid August sun?
My mother walked me to the center of that lush and lively hotbed of growth, bent down to the ground, and pulled up a carrot. My eyes must have grown large with surprise. I don’t recall if I had any awareness of what a carrot was before then, but that didn’t matter because my mother immediately brushed the dirt off, dipped it into a bucket of water, then stuck it in her mouth and took a bite. I was shocked. Stuff comes out of the Earth and you can eat it?
I was transfixed. This was totally new for me. My only relationship with food up to this point was that it came out of our kitchen cabinet and refrigerator, so obviously those appliances were the source.
But something new and revolutionary was unfolding. The next thing I knew, my mother stood up and handed the carrot to me.

"Here, Tommy, take a bite," she said.
I hesitated at first, nervous. But it was my mother giving it to me, and she had done it first, so it must be OK. I looked at the shiny carrot, put it up to my mouth, and took a bite. A burst of energy exploded in my mouth. Fantastic! It was true! I could eat right from the Earth!