Karma, and Choosing The Path That Brings Growth

There is a real romance attached to special forces, especially when filtered through books and movies. Discipline, brotherhood, mastery under pressure, mythic testing of the self. But that romance usually edits out the moral residue. Carrying acts that do not align with your inner compass, wars that later reveal themselves as incoherent or unjust, and the long psychic aftermath. For someone wired like me, that dissonance would not have worked for where I needed to grow. It would have been a weight. This is not a critique of the warrior path, but a way of looking at paths and trends that society puts forth. 

The artist's path does not get the same cinematic glow, but it has its own rigor. Watching Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop is not about rebellion for its own sake. It is about pushing the limits of embodiment, expression, and presence. They are not escaping discipline. They are channeling it through a different nervous system. The same is true of great guitar players, dancers, and writers. They are testing how much truth a human body and mind can carry and still stay alive.

That is the parallel with special forces that does not get named often enough. Both are about capacity. One is romanticized because it serves power structures. The other is tolerated because it does not.

Karma matters here. Karma is not about what looks noble from the outside. It is about what pulls you and what will not leave you alone. It is about what you have to do in order to become whole. A soul does not choose the path society applauds. It selects the terrain where its work actually is.

I was born to hippie parents and exposed early to art, music, and Asian philosophy. That was both a gift and a destabilization. I was not handed a single narrative and told to stay inside it. That freedom came with existential vertigo. Other kids had rails, religion, culture, and certainty. I had openness, and openness without grounding can feel like falling.

Punk rock mattered because it gave me a reset. Not truth exactly, but a refusal of false certainty. A clearing of the table. From there, it made sense to look for something older than ideology. Primitive art, early human mark-making forms that emerged from survival and meaning-making rather than doctrine.

Wood carving held that truth. The material does not care what you believe. Grain runs where it runs. Cut against it, and you pay. Follow it, and the form emerges. Every carver anywhere in the world learns the same lessons. That is an embodied truth. That is also why Tai Chi found me. The body reveals what the mind endlessly argues about.

So when I chose art because it offered the most freedom, I would adjust that slightly. It provided the most honest constraints. Freedom inside reality, not fantasy. Wood. Breath. Movement. Health. Writing. None of these lets you delude yourself for long.

Seen from that angle, my life makes a quiet, but precise sense. Carving, health promotion, Tai Chi, writing, and community work in Taos help me translate ancient nonverbal truths into modern contexts where people are profoundly disconnected from their bodies and from meaning. I did not join the army, but I still serve. I did not go to war, but I work with suffering, discipline, and repair.

The question of where the best place for me is might not be geographic at all. It might be this. Standing at the intersection of art, movement, health, and meaning, doing the work that will not leave me alone. From a karma perspective, that is not indecision. That is alignment in motion.

It isn't romantic, but it is necessary.

Changing Paths - The Struggle Between Apollo and Dionysus

 

As soon as I graduated high school, my father suddenly expected me to go to college—a word he had never once mentioned before, nor had he ever shown interest in my grades. It wasn’t surprising that I had my own plan: I wanted to become a professional boxer. That dream lasted until the night I met Rocky Graziano and Jake LaMotta. I had fought in the New York Golden Gloves and had been fighting for the past three years. My whole life was fighting. However, spending just one evening with my boxing heroes was enough to show me that boxing would waste my potential. I admired what they had done for Italian Americans, but their words and outlook turned me off. They were tough, yes, but not high-thinking men. Still, I couldn’t help noting how LaMotta lived well into his 90s in excellent shape, body, and mind.

Realizing boxing wasn’t my path left me scrambling for direction. I was finishing high school with poor grades, working at a grocery store, and feeling like my options were shrinking. But as life often does, it opened unexpected doors. I started revisiting my hippie parents’ music—The Rolling Stones, The Doors—just as punk rock was exploding in my neighborhood. At the same time, I experimented with drugs that expanded my consciousness, and once I had rejected boxing, it was as if my mind suddenly became thirsty for everything I had missed as a poor student. I read voraciously, diving into literature, art, and philosophy.

When my friends started at community college, I tagged along. One visit to the art school there hit me like lightning: this was where I belonged. I applied immediately and was accepted the next semester. In art, I discovered the part of myself I had buried while busy fighting. It was my soul yearning for expression, and I dove in without hesitation.

The lesson I took away from this was the importance of courage. In America today, we glorify Special Forces as the ultimate symbol of courage. At the same time, we’ve systematically devalued artists—sometimes justly, given the excesses of the music industry, but often unfairly. Life is always a tug-of-war between two broad paths: Apollo, the god of order, structure, discipline, and Dionysus, the god of chaos, art, and intoxication. For years, the rock star—Dionysus—was the cultural ideal, until the decadence, drugs, and self-destruction of that image pushed society to swing back toward Apollo: military fitness, warrior order, discipline. That swing isn’t necessarily bad, but America has a habit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

When times got rough in my own life, I, too, threw myself into Apollo’s camp, becoming a warrior. But eventually I realized that path was intellectually and creatively narrow. My soul kept calling me back to Dionysus. Like many people, I carry both within me—maybe too much of both—and reconciling them isn’t easy.

The punk rock movement was crucial for me. At a time when high school graduation forces you into choices, punk declared that all choices were meaningless, a liberating starting point. From there, I built a framework of meaning by looking to evolution and primitive cultures. What mattered to early humans—art, hunting, family, fighting—must be inherently human. That became my criteria for value. This perspective led me into woodcarving, tai chi, meditation, martial arts, cooking, and nutrition. These became the foundations of the life I’ve built—simple, rooted, and guided through the modern cacophony.

Society often seeks placeholders for meaning. For many, religion fills that role. In America, college has become another placeholder: a socially approved symbol that reassures others you are on the “right path.” Many people don’t want to wrestle with what’s truly valuable—they just want the security of what society values in the moment, and they project that onto you.

But ultimately, life is about balancing expectations: your own and those of others. To survive, you must demonstrate value to those who hold resources, whether in services or goods. Sometimes that’s noble, sometimes it bends toward vice. Either way, the challenge is to carve your own path between Apollo and Dionysus, between survival and expression, between order and chaos. That’s what I learned when I changed paths.