Can we change? This is probably not a question that keeps you awake at night, but it has intrigued me for many years. Krishnamurti pondered the question of change with a group of brilliant colleagues during a series of discussions which were published later in Can Humanity Change?

As as a metaphor for enlightenment, “entering the stream” sounds rather bucolic doesn’t it? I Imagine a lovely meadow with a gentle mountain stream flowing nearby, as I step into its cool wetness.

The following essay has not exactly been a labor of love. In fact, it feels more like labor than love. While the entertainer in me, has always followed, as if by instinct, Emily Dickinson’s sage advice to “tell all the truth but tell it slant” (perhaps a poetic description of circumambulation), my inclination from childhood on was to “let me entertain you.”

In December 2010, I closed my psychotherapy practice and moved out of the office where I had sat with clients for twenty years.

Not one to let the grass grow beneath his feet, I had begun to prepare my clients for this moment months earlier. Thus, within two short weeks after closing my office, I was on my way to Lumbini, Nepal, where I participated in a two month Vipassana meditation retreat with U Vivekananda.

Over the years of my life, I’ve been aware of something that I always took for granted: I can write a melody almost as easily as I can write a sentence.

In 1979, I was organist and choir director at St. Edward the Martyr, a small Episcopal church in Spanish Harlem, sitting just at the north end of Central Park in New York City.