Lucas McCaslin

Some of my earliest memories are of looking up at the bridge that passed over my brownstone home in Brooklyn. Following its brick and steel to the skyline of Manhattan which was my constant companion. I grew up surrounded by the art of my father and his contemporaries, both at home and outside it. I visited our second home in Southold often and it was there that my love of nature really took root. Every year in those days, we would travel to Argentina to visit my mother's family as that is where she is from. I passed by unspeakable poverty there often enough that it stayed with me. As much at least, as all the great things about that country did. Some of my earliest influences through media are Calvin and Hobbes, Star Wars and Charlie Chaplin. I was an expressive and obliviously positive boy until elementary school, when the seeds of doubt and the effects of bullying came slowly onto the scene. The breakup of my parents really exacerbated problems that had already emerged. I remained bright in many ways. My inner life had become very dark by the beginning of freshman year of high school. In short, I was depressed. Around the christmas season of that year (05/06) I read the Tao te Ching. I woke up. I now believe that what happened to me with the reading of that book was a small satori. An enlightenment experience. I saw now all around me the truth of things. The cobwebs and gears of my mechanistic mind disappeared in a massive and instantaneous re-structuring of my worldview. My life improved after that and I regained a lot of that light I had lost from my early years. Fueled soon after by reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, I developed a fierce appetite for non-fiction. Whereas previously I had loved only fiction because I was using it as a crutch of escapism now I was very interested in the world I lived in. I studied Philosophy at college and re-discovered what i wanted to do with my life all along: Make the world a better and more considered place. I walk the path as best I can.