The mauve
portion of the article below was written before Yahoo cancelled their free
website service, Geocities (which they had previously bought out, but that's
another story), in Oct 2009. It is worth preserving for its historical interest
as well as a glimpse into the wheels and workings of the Wanderling. See below
for the latest on him, or read through . . .
This man is an elusive figure. There are hints of bio, background,
especially of his early association with his unnamed mentor in the fifties in
California, who had been both with Yasutani Roshi and Ramana, but solid,
no.
His site, though scattered, is huge,
with all kinds of material about almost anything in the fields of zen and
Caribbean shamanism, + lots more. He has a course of study, Awakening 101, pages on many current living
awakened ones, pages on venerable ancients, a whole section on women, mainly
Buddhist-related, an extensive guru list, and tons of pages of general guidance
on the path.
It's organic and sprawling, but intricately interlinked, linking also to outside
sites. One of the most fascinating aspects of this interconnectedness is that
his collection is not very systematic in the usual sense. Forget site map, there
is nothing for it when visiting but to wander from one page to another without
much sense of where you're going, and usually without completing the page you're
on, which you may return to only after a long garden path. In reading, you
become a wanderer.
One more tidbit is the domain structure. The Wanderling has undertaken to create
his project in free website places, assembling a myriad of apparently different
sites, but all interwoven. As the free website places fold and merge and change
their rules, he shifts accordingly, thus a migration happens on this level as
well. [Correction 2006: The Wanderling informs me that some of his material is
now hosted on paid servers. And Update 2009: The Wanderling has scratched my
back in return in his blog (June 14, 2009 entry) at MySpace.]
Some of his (sub)domains currently are:
angelfire.com/electronic/bodhidharma/
angelfire.com/electronic/awakening101/
angelfire.com/realm/bodhisattva/
angelfire.com/electronic/zennun/
angelfire.com/indie/anna_jones1/
geocities.com/the_wanderling/
geocities.com/jiji_muge/
geocities.com/upakaascetic/
geocities.com/zennun12_8/
sped2work.tripod.com/
<==> members.tripod.com/SpEd2work/
wanderling.tripod.com/
The geocities.com/zennun12_8/
area seems to be the most thematically focused, being about women and their underappreciated
role in Buddhism, but it is not the only place such pages reside.
Happy wandering!
Okay. That was
then and this is now, more or less. As of Oct 2009, he is relying more on his
own domain and eschewing the freebies, though many remain. Some will
eventually get dumped, some have already been lost in the Geocities closure and
will not be replaced, etc etc. Major site re-org. Please stay tuned, be patient,
again etc
etc.
Meanwhile, shortly(?) before all this, he had created a few new pages which
provided some previously unseen glimpses of the man himself, personal history
theretofore not divulged or -- who knows? -- only recently accessed even by
himself. For his childhood story, and its ramifications and its tendrils into
the rest of his life was in many respects lost even to himself until certain
events unfolded. He has maintained and expanded this fascinating
story in his current site, a story both as classic and as unusual as it
gets, making his quest regarding identity unparalleled in the lit of such
things. "Who am i" indeed!?!
And a Dec 2010 update (actually applies to
many who had Geocities websites, and only noticed today, but not news
to those who know): Many old Geocities pages have been preserved in
more or less their old form under various domains formed expressly for
this purpose: Oocities, Reocities, WebCites, Geociti.es and so on. Many
of The Wanderling's lost pages can be found at the first two.
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