Life Arc

This is not right. You must be with me. This cannot be trusted.

The Imprint

At one point in my twenties, a deep current of feeling arose and asked for my attention. I asked Sarah to be with me while I explored it. Following that feeling inward, I was taken into a memory from just after my birth.

I knew that my mother had experienced complications requiring medical care, and that I had been isolated as a result. The memory was pre-verbal and without imagery — only sensation. Intense distress. Crying out. What could now be translated as: This is not right. You must be with me. This cannot be trusted. It was immediately clear that this imprint still lived deeply in me and had quietly shaped a personal style designed to manage such primal rupture.

None of us pass through birth untouched. No matter how gentle the conditions or attentive the parents, we move from some experience of connection into apparent separateness — absolutely vulnerable, dependent, and without any conscious sense of how we are supported.

Inheritance

My parents carried their own inherited wounds, which must have aligned in some way, as it is otherwise difficult to argue for deep compatibility in their values or natures.

My mother, Phyllis Lee Atha, was the only daughter of Fleming Atha, a prominent California politician, advisor, and fundraiser. I never met him. What I know is pieced together from accounts and records: a high-IQ man, musically gifted as a Big Band leader, trusted by figures ranging from JFK to Walt Disney, and reportedly physically abusive to my uncle and emotionally abusive to my mother. I did know my grandmother, Clymena, who lived until I was twelve. I remember that she could alternate between warmth and extreme cold and distance. All members of the Atha branch were deeply steeped in Blue America political identity.

Fleming was involved in migrant farm worker rights and appears to have made enemies. He was murdered in his apartment — clubbed and suffocated. The crime was never solved.

My father, Harry Franklin Griscom III — Bud — came to California from North Carolina. He was the middle child in a family deeply invested in its genealogy, tracing the Griscom lineage back to English arrivals in the 1600s. The family history includes many prominent figures, including Elizabeth Griscom, who married Henry Ross and became Betsy Ross, designer of the American flag. She sits eight generations back on a large handwritten family tree still in our possession.

That pride and continuity were mixed with severe loss during my father's young adulthood. His older sister, Amy — described as a singular talent and light — died of a brain hemorrhage at twenty-eight. His younger brother, Peter, engaged to be married, took his own life at twenty-eight as well. There has never been a clear explanation.

The Household

My parents were physically attractive and social. Combined with the need to be wanted, that can carry two people a long way. Each had real depth: Phyllis was artistic; Bud was sensitive and deeply attuned to plants and animals. They shared a taste for adventure. I remain impressed that they bought a cabin deep in the Santa Cruz Mountains with no running water or electricity, which became my first home. They brought me home from the hospital and used my father's sock drawer as a bassinet.

Materially, our childhood was stable. We had food, shelter, safety, education, opportunities, friends. Emotionally, tension was constant. My parents fought loudly and often. Phyllis was volatile — throwing things, hitting us, using manipulation and shame to control behavior, deflecting blame and criticism. Bud was largely unavailable, absorbed in work, absent as a consistent relational presence or guiding father.

After multiple separations, the divorce was finalized when I was twelve. Bud remained in our family home in Los Gatos. Spencer and I moved with Phyllis to Grass Valley. Living alone with her was brutal for Spencer. I managed through humor and early independence. At sixteen I left for Argentina with the American Field Service. Spencer endured until he could return to Los Gatos to live with Bud.

Spencer pushed outward into independence. I stayed entangled. With Bud absent, I slipped into a hybrid son-and-man-of-the-house role — necessary perhaps, but inappropriate. The weight of Phyllis on me became unmistakable once I married Sarah and had children. Mediating between wife and mother was chronically stressful and disorienting.

The Search

Whether I would have a family at all was once an open question. Returning from Argentina for my senior year of high school, I felt a quiet challenge: What else can you show me? In Bud's bookshelf I found two books that would shape me deeply. The Secret Life of Plants opened me to experiments suggesting awareness and responsiveness in the natural world. Autobiography of a Yogi revealed the possibility of a radically different human interior life.

Together they led me to yoga and Ayurveda. Through disciplined experimentation with body, breath, attention, and feeling, I encountered inner light, sound, vibration, and a sense of participation in larger cycles of time and space. Youthful insecurity often distorted these experiences into superiority and arrogance. As Leonard Cohen put it: the garbage and the flowers.

That same intensity expressed itself as a desire for monastic life in Yogananda's lineage. I planned to continue Ayurvedic study and yogic monasticism in India after graduating from the California College of Ayurveda. At the same time, I had met Sarah in community college classes. We became friends, then lovers during a trip through California visiting ashrams and teachers.

India

I was deeply conflicted between paths. When it came time to go to India, I accepted the possibility that we might part. The region was unstable; India and Pakistan were threatening nuclear conflict. Sarah's family opposed her travel. She came anyway. We lived for six months in Mysore, Karnataka, studying Ayurveda, yoga, and Panchakarma, seeking teachers through hospitals, ashrams, camps, caves, and temples.

When our visas were expiring, the plan was Sri Lanka. Sarah was finished. She wanted to go home. I agreed. Back in California, on Father's Day, a pregnancy test confirmed that the family path had been chosen.

Family

Ethan Oliver Griscom was born February 10, 2003. Elijah Ray Griscom followed on August 18, 2005. Family life was beautiful, demanding, and formative. We gave ten earnest years to a traditional structure — Sarah at home, me providing. Parenthood forces attention beyond oneself. It grinds and polishes. It guarantees nothing.

Sarah became increasingly depressed and stuck. I grew increasingly frustrated by the absence of intimacy, shared ambition, and movement. We separated. Our family reorganized around love, pain, confusion, support, and renewed effort. I maintained financial responsibility for everyone as costs rose and confidence collapsed. Debt followed. I borrowed from family. Bankruptcy became unavoidable. Humility arrived.

The Teacher

That vulnerability opened a new door. During that period I encountered Justin Gold.

A friend described him as an American spiritual master. The stories intrigued me. I went to hear him speak. He was unlike any teacher I had met — especially unlike the Indian gurus I had studied. His students carried an ease and depth that was unmistakable. I entered the School for Servants & Heroes and spent years in a structured exploration of awareness: tools, perspectival work, relational dynamics, service, and travel.

My boys split time between living with Sarah in town and with me on shared land and in shared houses. As they entered their teenage years, several forces converged and pulled me away from teacher and community: the final years of fatherhood before their launch into adulthood, relationship and heartbreak, selling a business and starting others, building a house, and deeply examining political identity and the forces shaping civilization.

Only after sustained work, results, and integration did I feel drawn back toward Justin's orbit — this time with greater maturity and less need. Jacob becomes Nabadi. Life grows richer and deeper, and also less personal, less separate.

This Chapter

This is the chapter I am in now: awareness and relationship as the base substrate of experience; intention and meaning lived through ordinary life; service expressed through the people and systems I touch. Jacob becomes Nabadi. Life grows richer and deeper, and also less personal, less separate. Listen to Biography — the companion piece to this story, tracing the same arc through poetry and sound.