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Member: SirEJDruryII

CollectionsYour library (34)

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Tagsnirvana (3), monasticism (3), Buddhism (3), transcendent experience (3), spiritual experience (3), passive resistance (3), enlightenment (3), consciousness (3), contemplation (3), mysticism (3) — see all tags

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Favorite authorsJames W. Douglass, George Monbiot, James Hillman, Sir E.J. Drury II, Thomas Merton, Edward Tick, Peter Ward (Shared favorites)

About meSeverely handicapped by an alcoholic stepfather, I set off on a crusade, after high school, in search of the very soul I had lost to this ogre. Upon entering the Navy after a brief stint at the US Naval Academy, did I struggle, for two long years, both in and out of sleep, with the true enemy of mankind--the Beast.

As a sailor then, in the service of the US Navy circa 1967, did I reluctantly set off in search of she who must be obeyed if I was to overcome the beastly side of my nature and reunite myself with soul. "Whatever you do," am I forewarned by a fellow shipmate, early on, "don't let them rob you of the most precious gift you have, your humanity, for the wraiths will claw away at it until all that remains is the shadow of what was once you." And so must I, at all costs, resist the temptation of my fathers before me, to live out the visions of others rather than the one with which I had been entrusted at birth, a vision that eventually results in my expulsion from the Navy for my noncooperation and conscientious objection to the war in Vietnam.

Back in my home town of St. Louis, I join a loosely knit community of antiwar activists, vegetarians, and free-spirited thinkers who publish the city's only underground paper, The St. Louis Free Press. After a year or so of leafleting the induction center downtown and of helping disaffected GIs from the nearest army base at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, I joined another community of radical Catholics forming a Catholic Worker House on the near south side of the city. There I remained until I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with a friend, to work at an alcoholic treatment center on the south side of the city. After suffering through one of the coldest winters I had ever experienced, I moved back to St. Louis to work on a psychiatric floor of a local Lutheran hospital. Upon leaving there in protest, with other health care professionals, over the performance of a lobotomy on a 15-year-old female, I wound up working on an orthopedic floor at a Jewish hospital nearby for about eight years.

At the same time, I purchased a farm about a hundred miles south of St. Louis, where I began to experiment with and grow organic vegetables, I marketed back in St. Louis. There I built a small cabin and began to purchase the books, tools and equipment I would need to farm 10 to 15 acres of fruits and vegetables organically.

Upon leaving Jewish Hospital around 1980, I went to work for a friend and general contractor who was in dire need of a lead carpenter. Around the same time, I married and began to raise a family. As my oldest son approached the age of two, I began work on a house on the farm, only to have my well-laid plans dashed by an unfortunate but permanent injury to my back at work, thus preventing me from ever performing any kind of physical work, like farming or carpentry again.

Thrown into a quandary, I eventually went to work for the City of St. Louis as a building inspector, where I worked for two years to the day, before taking a similar position with the City of Richmond Heights. And there have I stayed, to this day.

After a series of dreams I had my second year as a building inspector, I started writing in my spare time, until I had completed my first book, Close Encounters of a Very Special Kind, a recounting of my first year in the Navy and of my encounters of soul and our eventual reunion, something I had been seeking for a long time. The book was so poorly produced, it went nowhere. Crushed but not defeated, I continued to work on the manuscript, editing and rewriting it, over and over. For twenty years did I labor, until it reached its present form, a memoir entitled A Different Kind Of Sentinel, The Strange Case of Sir Eodor and She Who Must Be Obeyed--a trek through the dark side in search of soul and the meaning of life, due out in March of '09.

About my libraryThe books in my library contain only those books which feed my soul and give her great satisfaction.

Homepagehttp://www.rivendellbooks.com

Real nameE. J. Drury II

LocationSt. Louis, MO

Account typepublic, free

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URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/SirEJDruryII (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/SirEJDruryII (library)

Common KnowledgeSeries (1), Awards (9), Characters (34), Places (10)

Member sinceJan 18, 2009