(This is an excerpt from my submission to the 35<35 project: writings from Buddhist practitioners under the age of 35 on what it’s like to live the dharma every day.)

When I was about three years old, my parents took me and my sister out of the city’s July heat on a bike ride to a cherry orchard. When the four of us settled around the torn open brown bag exploding with big, juicy cherries, I insisted on eating them whole. And with that I mean whole. Despite several attempts from my parents to first convince, then threaten me into abandoning that strategy, I swallowed hands full of cherries –my way. I must have been very avant-garde, because based on my parents’ vivid description of the bike ride home, even at three I gave meaning to the expression of “having your shit popping.” Needless to say, I have been eating my cherries properly ever since.

The way I learn things hasn’t changed much since my cherry popping days. Although I grew up to be quite a nerd, devouring books and theories, a Grand Canyon separates me knowing something from actually getting it. My parents –bless them- bravely let me sink in the pool when I insisted I could swim without them holding onto me, witnessed the effects of me eating countless soap bars and once an entire strip of my mom’s birth control pills and a few years later reluctantly saw me disappear into ecstasy filled club nights. Discovering the futility of telling me what to do must have prompted them into some kind of faith in my tumultuous internal logic, because it worked. I survived my childhood.

…read the entire article on the 35<35 website

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