Richard Garrard

I was ten years old. It was 1965. I was standing in the living room of a tiny house on Third East in Salt Lake City, talking to my brother and my mother when it happened: my first epiphany.

The sheer fact of my own existence struck me like a thunderbolt. "I'm here," I said suddenly, gasping in wonder. "I'm really here--right now!" Everyone was amused but me. I was shaking with exhilaration, with awe. I had no language for what I had experienced, but I knew that it was powerful and real.

A few months later came the second revelation. I was in the bathtub, a favorite place for experimenting with bubbles and for meditating on the dancing reflections of the overhead light fixture and the water-puckered wrinkles of my fingers and toes. At the end of the bath I pulled out the rubber stopper and I watched the vortex of the bathwater twisting down into the drain. It hit me, then: "I'm going to die someday. Me. I'm going to die."

Everything changed. I began taking long walks in lonely places. Sometimes I walked under the stars, and I loved their cold beauty and even their lifeless, deathless inhumanity. I wanted to be like that. But I felt fear and hurt and doubt. Somehow I had to find a way to live with my awful knowledge.

At first I escaped into fantastic novels of other worlds and godlike characters, but the fantasy always came to an end and I returned to my mortal, cringing self. Then I began to read about mystics who had experienced the "timeless moment," the "peak experience" that transcended death. The mystics seemed to retreat behind subjectivity and to find refuge within religions that I could not accept.

I began to look to the philosophers, and soon discovered the existentialists. While I could appreciate their honesty in appraising the absurdity of life, I did not have the will or the confidence to construct meanings of my own. I wandered through the Eastern religions, American versions of Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, but they seemed ill-suited to modern life. And so I drifted.

At seventeen I met a lovely girl and her fascinating, creative family. There was only one catch; they were Mormons. Yet, I told myself, if you could be an intellectual and an artist and still be a Mormon, perhaps the religion was not so restrictive after all. And so I was baptized at the age of eighteen and soon left for Brigham Young University.

I was not prepared for the terrific cultural shock that enveloped me. My relationship with the girl and her family ended, but I began another one with the woman I would marry. I underestimated the power of a dominant culture with highly developed methods of persuasion and seduction. My faith in Mormonism did not survive my time at BYU, but I was still caught in a web of relationships that included the church.

For the next twenty odd years I would live on the fringes of a religion, an outsider who wanted to be accepted but who would never belong. Over the course of my marriage I became a stranger to myself. I would play a role. I would try to become the perfect father, the perfect husband. I would try to be respectable. I sought validation in the opinions of others, but never from myself.

The marriage crumbled and crashed. As the layers of my false self were stripped away, I wondered what would be left. At last, alone, in an empty house, with my children far away and my future dark, I sat down with my day planner and began a new section. It would be my "Book of Beliefs."

The first entry read, "We must choose whether or not to live or die. This is not a choice that is made once, but may have to be decided every day. Without this, nothing else matters."

Later, I added a quote from Henry Miller: "The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

After a couple of years alone I met my beloved wife. When we knew that we wanted to be together, we wanted a wedding that reflected us and the lessons we had learned in discovering our true selves. We met Flo Wineriter, and he married us on a beautiful October day almost two years ago.

It has been a long journey, and there is much more to do, much to learn. My guiding principle these days is "Passion without illusion." I think it may lead me to social and political activism, to self-expression, to a fuller and richer life.

I still recognize my fallibility and my mortality. But I also know that, "I'm really here--right now."