Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi! Please come in I’ve always had a close, loving family: intimately inclusive, always intensely devoted. Over time, this family became both the ballast and the mainsail of life, providing the bedrock upon which to construct an understanding of the world and the curiosity and courage to set out into it with an open mind and heart. The experience has created a psychic/emotional ocean of interconnected personal human relationships crossing all boarders, extending over far distances and enduring over time. Naturally, in childhood there formed contrasting senses of “inside” and “personal” as opposed to “outside” and "other". Perhaps this is why, here in Japan, the concepts of "uchi" (home/us/our group) and "soto" (outside/other) were so easy to understand: "Oni wa soto! Fuku wa uchi!" (Demons outside! Good fortune inside!). Yet, deeper still than feelings of separation and exclusivity, there formed an experience of humanity as a whole with its liberties and limitations, indulgences and obligations. Over the years quietly grew an understanding of the commonality of us all, waiting to ripen eventually into knowledge of something very different than popular stereotypes and fears of some vague evil: universal consciousness